3 characters: One, Five, Paul
Click on a character's name to get their lines highlighted.
One (51 lines, 1953 words, 38.17%) - [Azure] Ambassador One is a Centaurian. They communicate non-verbally, so in order to be understood by humans they wear machine translators.
Five (46 lines, 844 words, 16.5%) - [espeak] Ambassador Five is a Centaurian. They communicate non-verbally, so in order to be understood by humans they wear machine translators.
Paul (47 lines, 2319 words, 45.33%) - [Paul] Self.
Script format: Margined | Marginless (for phone viewing)
Listen along as you read:
1 SOUND: series theme music, shortened. Maybe repeat shortened theme behind each subsection title for separation
2 One: The Making of two fifty three Matilda
3
Five:
a documentary by Ambassador One and Ambassador Five, for consumption by humans on Earth.
Backstory
4
One:
In the year 2053, scientists on Earth receive a transmission from an asteroid in the Oort cloud – and it’s in English. The Centaurians are on their way, and they’ve made use of your old television transmissions to reverse-engineer one of your languages.
The two fifty three Matilda project kicks off slowly in the 2070s, as humanity dreams of its own interstellar mission. The Centaurian ambassadors land on Earth in 2096, an event now known as first contact day. [play newsreader clip about it] Some of the ambassadors are happy to stay on Earth, but 6 of us want to go home, and our asteroid didn’t have enough ore left for a return trip. So it’s the six of us who help accelerate the two fifty three Matilda project with our superior knowledge and experience, and when Matilda’s journey begins we plan to sleep the vast majority of our way home in hibernetic suspension. [i was last awakened 33 years ago clip]
5 Five: Genesis
6 Five: Let’s bring in the creator to tell us a little about how this story came to be.
7 Paul: Hello there, Ambassadors.
8 One: Wait, isn’t that the terrorist Arash Ahmadi?
9 Paul: I’m not here as Ahmadi, I’m just here as Paul Knierim, the creator / writer / producer of two fifty three Matilda.
10 One: Well… okay I guess. I’ll keep three of my eyes on you.
11 Paul: The genesis of two fifty three Matilda was pretty simple: if somebody made a futuristic space science fiction series without anything implausible in it, could it work and be compelling enough?
12 One: That does not happen often, does it? Completely possible science fiction set in space, I mean.
13 Five: Sometimes in short self-contained stories, but not in series.
14 Paul: Some shows that come somewhat close for a while, like The Expanse, but they still slip in impossible timeframes and protomolecules and improbable propulsion systems, and then they give up and create a magic portal to another solar system. So I feel there’s a severe shortage of stories in the genre that don’t distort or break any laws of physics at all.
15 One: By not breaking laws of physics, you do not just mean not doing anything that has not been absolutely proved impossible?
16 Paul: Correct. I mean not doing anything that appears likely to be against physics.
17 One: So no rationalizing a warp drive with ideas of using negative mass or such?
18 Paul: That’s right.
19 Five: The big problem with realistic physics is interstellar travel is bound to take a very long time.
20 Paul: Which is why I wanted to face that challenge head on by starting the series almost a century into a mission – long enough that none of the original astronauts are alive, but short enough that they still feel some connection to Earth because those Earth-born explorers are still within living memory. [did you know i knew commander peters clip]
21 Five: Interstellar asteroids aren’t exactly new to science fiction.
22 Paul: But when a story takes place entirely within one, it’s normally a dystopia where everyone has forgotten they’re in space.
23 One: So you wanted a more positive and successful take on the asteroid mission idea?
24 Paul: That’s right.
25 One: So what were your influences?
26 Paul: The biggest influence on two fifty three Matilda is Charles Chilton’s Journey Into Space.
27 One: That was the last radio drama to draw better ratings than television. What about it inspired you?
28 Paul: For the 1950s, Chilton was being hyper-realistic. He managed to pack 20 episode series full of exciting cliffhangers, while holding off on the time travelers and Martians until the middle of the series, and making them plausible when they arrived. I also wanted to build a story arc over the course of the season like Journey Into Space did.
29 Five: Which was unusual in the 50s but of course is normal on television in the streaming era.
30 Paul: Larissa’s surface walk accident is kind of inspired by spacewalking accidents in Journey Into Space that made cliffhangers in early episodes. [insert clip]
31 One: And of course “Journey Into Space - The World In Peril” has crewed asteroid ships, which set off for Alpha Centauri at the end of the series. But the similarities end there, since Journey Into Space was set entirely in the inner solar system.
32 Five: Any other influences?
33 Paul: The dark forest scenario I presented is from Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. [play clip]
34 One: Where did the idea to make Centaurians speak through computers come from?
35 Paul: The best way to make a realistic alien is to leave as much as possible for the listener to fill in, which is the greatest advantage of the audio medium, and making them use machine translators was a good way to accomplish that. Any alien voice would either sound too human or too corny, and making them communicate via scent and pheromones accentuates their alien nature and implies a kind of insect-like quality.
36 Five: I don’t feel like an insect.
37 One: Was handing over major roles to machine actors a bit of a risk to take?
38 Paul: There’s a good BBC Radio comedy called “Ability” where the central character can’t speak due to cerebral palsy and uses a tablet to talk for him. The computerized voice works well there, so I figured it could work for me too.
39 One: The voice of Five is rather primitive for the technology of the year 2198, is it not?
40 Five: I prefer to call my voice ‘classic’ not primitive.
41 Paul: Ambassador One explains that in episode 5: [insert clip]
42 Five: Casting and Characters
43 One: Okay, now let us meet some of the other people involved in the series. Virginia Hargrove played Marissa Flint, the Centaurian computer, and the mother of the evil terrorist leader who is so rightly slain.
44 SOUND: [insert virginia
45 One: We will hear a little more from Virginia later. Here is John Gaunce, who played Doctor Stone.
46 SOUND: [insert john
47 One: And here is Roger Arnold, who portrayed the mayor for the first six episodes and the former mayor in the seventh. You will notice the character has no name, because he is a man for whom his job really has been his life.
48 SOUND: [insert roger
49 One: Finally, let us hear from Ahmad Joudeh. He played the therapist, Doctor Peters.
50 SOUND: [insert Ahmad
51 Five: What about the people we haven’t heard from? How did they get involved?
52 Paul: There’s a bunch of actors I’ve been using in my other audio dramas for years, who I knew I wanted to bring in. Lindsay Townsend, Virginia Hargrove, John Gaunce, David Loftus. Those were known quantities so I tried to give them roles that suited them. Matt Ellis and David Feldmann are the co-hosts of the Quietly Yours podcast series, I know Matt is a bit of a revolutionary so of course he came to mind when I needed someone to portray the leader of an ideological revolt. The rest of the actors auditioned for the parts, through a facebook group and casting call club.
53 One: Five, who is your favorite non-Centaurian character? Obviously we two are the best, but who is next?
54 Five: The mayor is the next most interesting character. He’s sort of a villain at first with an abrasive personality, but he does what he thinks is right, and ultimately he’s able to set aside his personal pride for the greater good. Who’s your pick, One?
55 One: Chief Mech Peters. He is the everyman of the series, a regular guy amid the swirling chaos, a stand in for the audience. [play some clip of him being normal] The arc for Peters is how Maradona tries to recruit him into the returnist camp [clip] but Peters finds himself pushed further away by Maradona’s methods, until he comes to the ultimate betrayal in episode 7.
56 Paul: Peters really carries the first episode, so I wanted to give the role to David Loftus, an actor I have a lot of confidence in. And I thought it would be apt for him to carry the last episode to bookend it. I wish there were time to see a bit more of the emotional fallout Peters may go through after helping bring about the death of his friend… at least he has a therapist close at hand.
57 Five: Both of those characters have to evolve over the course of a series. Who else is changed by the story?
58 One: Larissa Flint. She goes through a traumatic accident, becomes the center of controversy. She ends up with the brain of a sister she never met and has to work through what that means. And she is growing up. [insert loss of innocence clip from therapy session in ep 5]
59 Five: And just as often she’s the impetus for the actions and dramas of others in the story. Like Arash Ahmadi. He had a bit of a journey as well, from law enforcement to terrorist and back again.
60 Paul: My concept for Ahmadi is that he started apprenticing for detective Ekholm thinking it’d be an easy job [play if only detective ekholm clip for ep 2] – in a close-knit town of 200 it’s probably years between petty crimes. Then his mentor dies, and then suddenly there’s an actual case for him to investigate but he doesn’t know what to do and the mayor keeps pushing him in a certain direction and he kind of snaps and goes rogue because his infatuation with Larissa feels more valid than anything else. It’s a rather quick transition from cop to outlaw rebel, but he was never comfortable with either role. He’s kind of a messed up kid, but given time he might grow into the job.
61 Five: Ahmadi should’ve been shot along with Maradona. It’s a disgrace that he was made a detective again.
62 Paul: Let’s agree to disagree there.
63 One: Did you have to do any re-casting?
64 Paul: The initial actor I got to play Ahmadi sounded nothing like the character should, about 50 years too old and too much of a hard nosed professional cop stereotype. So I took over that role at the last minute. The guy who originally played Ambassador Five was very hard to understand so it was taking too many retakes and too much editing, I replaced him with espeak after the second episode. Also between episodes 2 and 3, two of the actors disappeared… production was delayed for a month until I gave up and did some emergency re-casting to replace the mayor and the announcer.
65 Five: The Science
66 One: Reaching another solar system is a hard problem. At the speed of early 21st century Earth’s fastest space probes, it would take around 65 thousand years to reach Proxima Centauri – and the mass required to keep even one person alive is a lot more than a NASA probe. But the cosmic speed limit of three hundred thousand kilometers per second does not actually rule out speedy interstellar travel. If you could accelerate constantly at the rate of Earth’s gravity, you could make it to Proxima in just a couple of years.
67 Five: From your perspective, which would be about 5 years for an Earth observer due to time dilation.
68 One: Although if you want to decelerate at your destination you’ll need three and a half years.
69 Five: Or closer to six for the observer. So why can’t we just do that?
70 One: Basically, it is because rocket engines need fuel. It is the tyranny of the rocket equation: the more fuel you put in your rocket, the more mass you need to lift, which makes you need more fuel again, rinse and repeat.
71 Five: So what’s the solution?
72 One: Using resources in space to make your fuel, so that you do not need to lift the fuel out of Earth’s deep gravity well. Two Fifty Three Matilda is the ultimate expression of that goal, where the fuel is mined from within the body of your spaceship asteroid itself. With a big enough mining operation, this makes it plausible to run the rocket engines constantly for the whole mission. Of course, when you are pushing around an asteroid that weighs 10 to the 17th power kilograms you’re not going to get the kind of fast acceleration we are used to seeing from a rocket launch – but that does not matter so much in space where you have no drag so your velocity is constantly compounding with any slight acceleration. With a huge number of incredibly efficient engines eating tons of ore every minute, two fifty three Matilda manages a millimeter a second a second.
73 Paul: I plugged that into an online calculator and found that in 92 years it’d get them around 18,000 astronomical units, presuming they started a little slower and built up acceleration
74 One: Which even without any ore processing or engine improvements would happen naturally as you begin to lose mass.
75 Five: But are you sure an asteroid really makes more sense than a spaceship?
76 One: We need to think about an interstellar mission in an entirely different way from space probes. It has to be designed to be self-sustaining from the ground up, and that means you have to go big. Around 200 people is a common estimate of a minimum viable human population with enough genetic diversity – of course frozen sperm and eggs from Earth could help too. And you will need to bring a lot more than just people to make a reasonable life. [insert arboretum clip] [insert cat clip]
77 Five: Why don’t they just hibernate the whole way? It’s the obvious solution and that way they need a lot less resources.
78 One: Unfortunately all the evidence so far suggests the human body cannot simply halt the aging process and shut down for centuries. They are incapable of hibernation.
79 Five: Their bodies are very inferior. All properly evolved beings are capable of hibernation.
80 SOUND: [clip of peters pointing out the sun and larissa asking about proxima?
81 Five: So… why a story about this asteroid, out of all the uncountable many asteroids out there?
82 Paul: two fifty three Matilda is somewhere humanity has already explored with a flyby in 1997, so we have a connection to it.
83 One: I note it has just enough gravity to rationalize footsteps without trying to say everybody wears magnetic boots – about a tenth of a percent of Earth gravity.
84 Paul: Yes, although there’s still a bit of artistic license in the effects, things wouldn’t actually sound that way in gravity that low but you’d never understand what’s going on if I tried to make it realistic.
85 One: It is quite a massive asteroid, likely more so than you would pick if you did not need it to have gravity. But it is not quite implausibly large. You can easily understand it would have plenty of ore to sustain engines non-stop for nearly 800 years – but it is not quite huge enough that it seems as absurd as trying to push a planet through space. You can almost imagine a massive array of engines eating massive amounts of ore to push a 50 kilometer asteroid at a pace like that. It helps make the point that it is not how fast you accelerate that matters on an interstellar trip, it is how long you can keep the engines burning.
86 Five: So what do the engines burn exactly, and how do they get so much energy out of it?
87 Paul: That’s classified information, sorry.
88 One: It is worth noting that communications with Earth will get slower and slower through your journey. Two fifty three Matilda is about three and a half light months from Earth, which means waiting seven months for a response to a question.
89 Five: That’s a bit like a colony in Earth’s 17th century might’ve experienced trying to get replies from their European power – quick enough to try and slow enough that it incites potential rebellion.
90 The Society: The Society
91 One: That brings us to the issue of the design of the society. For an eight century mission with limited communications with home, one would want stability to be the overriding concern. [insert mayor talking about stability] That lends itself to an authoritarian political system, but one that places an emphasis on the rule of law rather than personal power. [clip from ep 4 of mayor talking about rule of law]
92 Five: The limited number of careers and the need to use everyone efficiently leads to an apprenticeship system, where someone has to apply to apprentice in their desired section and may be rejected if there’s no room or their qualifications don’t suffice. After a few years of apprenticing, a person becomes an assistant – and finally they can become a chief and lead a section. The mayor has the power to dismiss some chiefs but not all. [play ep 4 mayor clip about not being able to fire judge and doctor] In an unpopular section you could accidentally become a chief very young [clip about ekholm’s untimely death], in another section you might be stuck at the assistant level for life. And while transfers are possible, they require a bureaucratic process and waiting for an opening. [play Sanders ep 7 clip about that]
93 One: The people of two fifty three Matilda are taken from all over Earth with an eye on the genetic diversity you need for a sustainable population of 200, and because it is an international project with contributions from nearly all of the world’s national space agencies. American English is adopted as the common language since the Centaurians already know it. The Chinese ew-en (yuan) is adopted as the currency. [100 yuan fine clip] 92 years into the mission, pretty much everybody is ethnically and racially mixed so you see a lot of names where the first name is from one culture and the last name is from another. Accents are generally lost over the generations, but exist in some cases where they are practiced for a purpose – for example the priests speak in British accents because they feel it projects a sense of differentiation and sophistication. [play priest clip]
94 Five: Production
95 Five: So, Paul, what was the budget for the production of this first season?
96 Paul: Zero dollars zero cents.
97 Five: How did you make that work?
98 Paul: A lot of the credit goes to the countless people who’ve shared their sound effects under open licenses, and to freesound dot org for making it easy to search and find them. The effects process starts with searching freesound dot org filtered to the CC0 license – because there are hundreds of effects in each episode, so if I used anything with an attribution license, keeping track of people to attribute would be a full time job. There’s usually an effect pre-made that does what I need. Sometimes I need to apply some distortions or layer two or three effects.
99 One: Do you ever have to make your own sound effects?
100 Paul: Occasionally, probably about once per episode. For example, I couldn’t find the sound of finishing dinner and pushing the plate away – so I recorded that clatter of silverware and sliding of a plate along my kitchen counter and used that in episode 7. [insert stuffed clip]
101 Five: What about music?
102 Paul: Kevin MacLeod has made a ton of public domain soundtrack music that I’ve been using in my productions over the years – he’s probably the biggest person responsible for making it possible to create quality soundtracks for almost anything for free. But there are a lot of other musicians who join him on freepd dot com. During production of two fifty three Matilda, I discovered Jason Shaw’s audionautix.com – and that’s really a revelation for having such a good search interface to find music by mood and tempo. I’m sure listeners have noticed that I use a lot more music than most audio dramas, to the point where about 90% of the time has a soundtrack and the other 10% is for dramatic effect. For this kind of a story, I think it helps for conveying the emotions of scenes – but it’s more of a cinematic feel than a radio drama feel. Of course music rarely perfectly fits a scene, so I usually have to modify it a bit to make the right notes hit at the right times.
103 One: How did you record the lines, did everybody have to get together on a call?
104 Paul: Each of us recorded our lines separately, nobody actually heard the actors they were responding to. Often I’ll request a few retakes, but that’s usually for pronunciation issues or mic pops, for the most part it works.
105 Five: What sort of equipment is involved in that?
106 Paul: Whatever you’ve got. Personally I use a $15 microphone and record in my living room. You can spend thousands of dollars on sound equipment and in an audio drama nobody will be able to hear the difference.
107 One: What was the most time consuming part of production?
108 Paul: Simply assembling the lines in order from so many different sources and giving them appropriate volumes.
109 Five: Do you wait until you have all the lines to start on that?
110 Paul: No, that’d delay production a lot. I start when I’ve got about half the lines. Then I record a temporary track of myself playing all the other characters so that I can get started assembling lines in order. On the second pass, I go back and add the background room tones and most of the effects. Music is usually the last major layer to be added. There’s another pass to clean up the timings and transitions after all the lines are in. Then I go through applying stereo effects to everything. And I make sure I listen to the episode on speaker as well as headphones at least once so I can catch if something is inaudible that needs to be heard.
111 One: What was the most complex scene to produce?
112 Paul: The temple scene in episode 6, by far. I mixed it separately from the rest of the episode. [play clip from it] There were 11 tracks in that scene, 7 of those for effects and one for music and three for dialogue. I was trying to create something intense and overwhelming, especially for the hallucination. [play another clip from it]
113 One: What software do you use?
114 Paul: All the production was done in Audacity, an open source audio editor. For the youtube video editions I wrote a bash script that uses ffmeg to generate a video from an image and apply an audio track. I use my decade old desktop PC running KDE Neon Linux.
115 Five: Story/Themes
116 One: The first season of two fifty three Matilda has two main storylines: there is the initial 3 episode story arc of saving Larissa, and the returnist rebellion arc of the last four episodes. Then across the whole season there is the growing possibility of a speed increase which is more about setting up a season two.
117 Five: Let’s delve into the themes, shall we?
118 One: By the second episode, complex issues arise with cloning and an apparent clash between human and alien morality. Then in the third we have a debate somewhat analogous to Earth’s 21st century abortion debate.
119 Paul: Without making someone a religious extremist I couldn’t make much of an argument argument against pre-viability abortion, so I moved the goal posts and put bodily autonomy on the opposite side of the equation to make a more interesting conundrum.
120 Five: Episode 5 dives into the returnist debate, whether people involuntarily born into a mission can be rightly condemned to continue. Then we have the mayor’s personal dilemma of how to protect the mission without killing his people, and how to accept that he himself is an obstacle to peace. And issues of democracy and the consequences of choice.
121 SOUND: [insert relevant part of Virginia’s clip here
122 Paul: Mental health and Larissa’s recovery in particular is a part of the story I wish I’d been able to explore longer. I tried to sew up Larissa’s story by making her struggles push her to the realization that they need to pursue their own mission. Going through a traumatic experience, she realizes that the only thing worse than traumatic experiences is not having anything happen at all. Not trying is worse than failing. Not having really lived, like her clone, is worse than a traumatic life. Gliding through life without ever attempting to make anything of yourself is worse than failing at everything you try. And as someone with a mostly empty and boring life who’s afraid to try things, I make these shows to help fill that void and create experiences.
123 One: What is justice? This series presents different versions of justice. Judge Lee offers what she feels is the justice of understanding, which the mayor sees as a gross miscarriage of justice. Many listeners probably agree with Judge Lee because we think saving Larissa’s life was worth the laws broken. But then we see how this leniency can backfire. [clip of mayor berating judge in ep 6] For the mayor, justice is maintaining societal order and stability – protecting the people from chaos. For Judge Lee, justice must be flexible to the circumstances and shouldn’t punish someone for doing the right thing even if it’s against the law. And then in the finale we see the best version of justice, Ambassador One’s justice, which is retribution against the man who kidnapped me.
124 SOUND: [insert AJ’s clip about villains]
125 Five: Who are the heroes and villains of this story? Presumably the Centaurians are the heroes and the terrorists are the villains?
126 Paul: I didn’t want the realism to be just scientific realism but populated with traditional hollywood heroes and villains. I wanted to make a story that’s morally ambiguous without being cynical or flippant – a story where it’s really up to you to choose who the “good” and “bad” characters are because everyone has good aspects and bad aspects and reasonable arguments. Real life is full of complexities and shades of gray, and too often fiction tries to simplify into a conveniently black and white message to shove down the audience’s throat. I’m sure my opinions on the issues show through, but I like to think it can be listened to by someone who completely disagrees, and that it gives everyone new things to think about.
127 Five: Politics
128 One: While the mayors normally serve for life, their power is not unchecked: they serve the mission, they serve mission control and Earth, and they serve the framework of law designed to make a stable society. In the last episode, we introduce a dose of democracy to this environment and see how it affects things. This is not an absolute change, it is not a revolution where there are going to be elections every year now – but it is an attempt to use democracy to defuse a crisis and resolve differences.
129 Five: One of the issues it brings up is what sort of voting system is fair for resolving differences. The author appears to prefer ranked choice. [play ranked choice clip] With plurality voting, it’s far too easy to end up with a result most people don’t want. [clip of peters/maradona talking about splitting the non-returnist vote]
130 Revolution: Revolution
131 One: Pro-revolutionary science fiction is everywhere, because it makes a compelling story and we want to believe society’s problems can be fixed all at once. Two fifty three Matilda sets up the usual revolution scenario, and then subverts the expectation by having the revolution fail miserably because the people reject it.
132 Five: That’s part of the realism of the story: revolutions aren’t fun and games and in the real world they’ve made things worse more often than they’ve made things better. Take 21st century Earth’s Arab spring for example, you could argue a couple countries benefited but the rest suffered. And most people would rather accept a dictatorship than risk chaos and civil war.
133 Paul: Basically I’m making the case for patience and subtle reform, in a setting where the need for stability is amplified. [insert Renata speech clip] Maradona is of course basically a communist revolutionary, someone with apparently good intentions who wants to make the lives of the people better by taking down the system that controls them. At every stage, even when he’s trying to overturn their votes and firing lasers at them, he believes he’s acting for the people. He has admirable courage of his convictions, but ultimately the character is a bit of a fool who fails to understand the motivations of the people he’s acting for.
134 One: At every step, he believes everyone is behind him when he actually has only a tiny number of followers with him. [play clip of 6 is enough] In the end, it is his trust that his friend Peters has been won over to the cause that gets him killed – but in a wider sense it is his idealism which prevents him from understanding how much the people value peace and stability.
135 Five: The Future of the Future
136 Five: Let’s start wrapping things up. What do we know about season two?
137 Paul: If season two happens, that’ll come out sometime in 2023 since I need a bit of a break from it before writing any more. I have a rough idea of it already though.
138 One: I heard we will be jumping forward 18 years.
139 Paul: That’s right. Fortunately that’s a lot easier in audio where you don’t have to make all the actors wear aging makeup and a lot of us were playing characters younger than us anyway.
140 One: So what will two fifty three Matilda look like after 18 years?
141 Paul: Renata may or may not still be mayor. Marissa will be the communications chief, Larissa the chief mechanic with Peters becoming more of an engine specialist nearing retirement age.
142 Five: Will we be accelerating close to light speed?
143 Paul: Not quite that fast, but Peters will have managed to accelerate the asteroid dramatically, and they’ll be approaching their first star system.
144 One: Episode 7 hinted that one person may be left behind in a deceleration capsule to explore a planet. [play peters clip about pod]
145 Paul: Yes, they’d be able to send daily mission reports and the crew will probably take a strong interest in those, but no real-time communication. This is my view of what interstellar exploration could actually realistically be like.
146 Five: Could there be new aliens?
147 Paul: Maybe, maybe not. There’s some possibility of a new species intercepting two fifty three Matilda to investigate the increased speed and determine whether it’s a relativistic weapon threat. It’s even possible a small human craft could catch up with them from Earth on a one way mission using the new ore to reach relativistic speeds.
148 One: I would imagine we will also start to notice a time drift between two fifty three Matilda and Earth, with relativistic effects causing it to be maybe a year later on Earth.
149 Five: Let’s cut to the chase and ask what everybody is wondering. Will Ambassador Five be back in season two?
150 Paul: To be honest with you, it’s unlikely. Ambassador One is condemned to be awake so we can expect to hear from him, but Ambassador Five will be hibernating. You never know what might wake him, though.
151 One: So just to confirm here, episode 8 is going to be 18 years after episode 7?
152 Paul: Well, there’s also a possibility of doing an intermediary episode set somewhere in the years between seasons one and two. If I could find a guest writer who’d like to write an episode – contact me if that’s you – then that’d be an ideal time period for them to explore with a self-encapsulated story.
153 One: Well, that is all the time we have for you humans today.
154 Five: We hope you’ve enjoyed this look behind the scenes of two fifty three matilda. See you next year, if the writer has the sense to include me!
155 SOUND: [play theme music for a few seconds