4 characters: Five, Mathilde, Paul, SFX
Characters that still need to be specified below: SFX
Click on a character's name to get their lines highlighted.
Paul (44 lines, 2686 words, 82.9%) - Me.
Five (23 lines, 283 words, 8.73%) - Alien
Mathilde (18 lines, 271 words, 8.36%) - Computer.
Script format: Margined | Marginless (for phone viewing)
Listen along as you read:
1 Five: The Making of 253 Mathilde season 3
2 Five: A documentary by Ambassador Five
3 Mathilde: and the base computer
4 Paul: and creator Paul Knierim
5 Five: Wow, what a ride! 31 episodes taking place across a million Earth years, and now it's all told.
6 Mathilde: I've noticed each season starts with a disaster that causes a mystery.
7 Paul: Yes, it's an easy way to jump-start the tension.
8 Mathilde: This third season got more complicated with four distinct time periods, wasn't that risky?
9 Paul: There were a lot of things I wanted to explore before wrapping up. I decided to use Tojo to connect most of them -- the main setting, the origin story and the future. I wanted to make Tojo a central character because I'd enjoyed Gwenith Knight's take on the role. The risk was in how many actors it'd require to populate these four different universes.
10 Five: Why is that a risk?
11 Paul: First, it's a lot of work to recruit actors and it doesn't always work out when you're not paying much. But also, every actor represents a potential schedule blocker. 1 out of 60 people gets sick and suddenly everything's on hold for months. Fortunately we escaped any major issues of that sort.
12 Mathilde: Was it really 60 people?
13 Paul: 63 human actors. But that wasn't enough to cover all the parts, so there were also 12 artificial voices -- 4 of those playing a couple of Cenaturians and a computer and an alien, but the other 8 playing human roles.
14 Mathilde: What roles were the hardest to cast?
15 Paul: Everything that required special types of voices -- the accented roles for episodes 23 and 25 and the old person roles in the finale. Those requirements really narrow the already small pool and I had to go with bots for a lot of them.
16 Mathilde: Computers are simply better than humans, you should've turned to us first.
17 Paul: [awkwardly] Well, let's meet a few of the human cast now.
18 SOUND: insert <30 sec intro clips from actors
19 Paul: We've also got a kickstarter backer participating this year, representing the fans.
20 insert Joanne Phillips: insert Joanne Phillips
21 Paul: Everyone's Happy was my favorite new series of 2023, so if you liked 253 Mathilde I think you'll want to give that a listen too. It's also hard sci-fi, full-cast, fully-dramatized.
22 Five: We'll hear more from some of the actors and our kickstarter backer later. Paul, why did you decide to use kickstarter and how did that go?
23 Paul: With the huge cast, I figured there'd be a better chance if we could pay them something. I was hoping to build off season 2's kickstarter experience and use the show's grown audience to get more backers, but unfortunately that didn't work and we only got 9. And a couple of those were actors, it's not ideal when actors have to pay other actors. I was also excited to use larger backer numbers to do some physical rewards like t-shirts, posters and CDs -- but unfortunately none of those were ordered so they never got made. So it goes -- at least we raised a good amount in dollar terms and the main thing was to be able to successfully complete the show.
24 Five: Let's talk character arcs. Of course the most important character is Ambassador Five and it was good to hear from an earlier point in his life in season 3.
25 Paul: The big ones are Salish Peters and Larissa Flint. We meet Larissa as an 18 year old at the start of the first episode, and the rest of the show deals with the consequences of what happened to her in that first episode. Her accident is a chance to explore trauma, mental illness, and ethical dilemmas. With Peters, we join him middle aged as a kind of a relatable viewpoint character and we follow him all the way to his death. A big focus of the third season is Peters' struggle with dementia and his failing mind.
26 SOUND: insert anything the actors might have about their character's arc
27 Mathilde: There are some big ideas in season 3. Let's start with the end of the world.
28 Paul: There's multiple ends of worlds. On Mathilde, my premise of continual acceleration to near light speed set up the inevitability of a point where there's no more fuel and they can only coast for eternity. From the very start in 2022, I was excited to tell that story of how it would end in perpetual motion and exhaustion of energy.
29 SOUND: insert clip from ep 20 of shutting off engines
30 Paul: There's also the religious angle. For millennia we've had doomsday cults, but here we've finally got a doomsday cult that has science on their side. I feel that when faced with their world winding to a close a lot of people would be attracted to a cult that embraces it and allows them to look forward to it instead of dreading it.
31 SOUND: insert a doomer clip
32 Paul: I took a minor character from season 2, Sergey Kochergan, and had him fall completely under the spell of the doomers. For the lead doomer I needed somebody charismatic enough to win people over but with creepy cult vibes, and I think Kiersten Greenfield managed to capture that pretty well.
33 Five: The doomer threat is eventually overcome, and then in the final episode we have the inevitable end as the final generation dies off.
34 Paul: That was the optimistic version of the end of the world -- a controlled draw-down. I considered having it end that way, but wanted to show the value of the legacy they left behind them in a dramatic way, with descendants of explorers and captives coming to the rescue of their ancestral world. It was also another chance to play around with the weird things that happen with time at that speed. So we ended up with an unending ending, a renewed mission.
35 Mathilde: There was also the end of the world for Earth, in episodes 27 and 28.
36 Paul: Yes. I set that up with the Fermi's paradox talk in season one and the warning in season two. I wanted to take the story back to Earth to show what happened and how, and I realized that'd be a chance to bring back some characters I thought I'd written out.
37 Mathilde: It's kind of a quiet way for Earth to end, isn't it? No battles?
38 Paul: If our adversaries are interstellar, that's how it'll be. If they want to destroy us, there's no reason for them to reveal themselves until they've already destroyed us. They could obliterate us with a relativistic kinetic weapon if they fear us, but if they want to take our land and colonize it then I think a bio-weapon is the way to go.
39 SOUND: insert dusty clip from ep 27
40 Mathilde: Are we really doomed?
41 Paul: I'm not convinced that space-faring life will be hostile, or will be seeking new lands to colonize, given how many worlds are out there and the likelihood that anyone advanced enough for interstellar travel has control over their reproduction rate. Still, it might be better to error on the side of caution and avoid revealing our location.
42 Five: Like we Centaurians did by using a relay station to convince you we're from the Proxima Centauri system.
43 Paul: Yes, you practiced safe first contact.
44 Mathilde: On Earth, our characters deal with the end of the world in different ways. Dusty is just trying to stay alive and isolated. Our ex-mayor is resigned and wishes Earth's conquerors well. But Julianna Sanders advocates a terrorist campaign against the colonists.
45 SOUND: insert Sanders clip
46 Paul: The war in Gaza started while I was writing that episode. I saw some parallels between the situation of our characters in episode 28 and Palestenian perspectives on the occupation. How do you deal with an invader who outguns you to the point where traditional warfare is laughably impossible? Do you ignore the enemies army and attack innocent civilians instead just because those are the only battles you can hope to win? Does the hope of bleeding them into retreat justify the terrorism against these colonists who've never killed anyone themselves and actually feel compassionately toward you? Is collective guilt reasonable? And how much easier is it to feel justified in the terrorism approach if you see your enemy as unrelatable aliens?
47 Mathilde: And from the other side, how much killing can the occupier justify for the safety of their colonists? And how much easier would that feel if all the killing could be done painlessly in advance?
48 Paul: Yes, there are also parallels with Americans settling the west, and it seemed more plausible for characters to know that history than to remember the Gaza war in hundreds of years so I had them discuss it from that angle. [insert clip]
49 Don't ask me to answer the questions though. I just want to provide food for thought and help listeners consider today's issues from a different perspective than they usually do.: Don't ask me to answer the questions though. I just want to provide food for thought and help listeners consider today's issues from a different perspective than they usually do.
50 Five: Speaking of today's issues, seems like there's a lot of politics in two fifty three Matilda.
51 Paul: In season 3, Mayor Peters represents the gerontocracy -- in American terms, politicians like Trump, Biden, Reagan and McConnell. The moment where the mayor falls silent as he's interviewing mission candidates was lifted from a Mitch McConnell press conference around the time I was writing it.
52 SOUND: insert that clip
53 Paul: The doomer leader Luca Patel is a sort of populist who takes advantage of the senile leadership to gain power, promising a tired and disillusioned electorate an end to their struggles with no regard for long term consequences. There's been a new wave of those around our world.
54 SOUND: insert doomer priest campaign speech clip
55 Paul: Then there's Eva Hernandez and Chief Lawrence, representing a bitter partisan divide where all attacks are fair game.
56 SOUND: mental health attack clip
57 Five: That brings us to the subject of mental health. An ongoing topic in all three seasons.
58 Paul: Yes. Larissa Flint has the series-long mental health arc. The ex-mayor struggles a bit in the second season. Then Salish Peters in the third season. It's important to humanize the characters, make them relatable imperfect people like the rest of us. As soon as I brought in the therapist character in episode five, I realized that'd provide a powerful way to gain insight into the characters and explore the personal impacts of the story's events.
59 Mathilde: It's also good to have representation, to show that even people with mental health problems can achieve great things.
60 Paul: Yes.
61 Five: Episode 25 takes place in Kulasakarapatanam, India. Any particular reason for that location?
62 Paul: I wanted a global flavor, so not the traditional USA or Russia. China could've worked, but it'd be hard to explain everybody speaking English in China. And I was writing it around the time of India's moon landing. At first it was going to be Mumbai, but I realized that'd be a stupid position for a spaceport. Then I considered India's current spaceport, but decided on their up and coming in-devleopment spaceport in Kulasakarapatanam to make it futuristic. The downside was having to pronounce Kulasakarapatanam, and tracking down actors with Indian accents. I ended up using a bot for a couple of the smaller Indian roles, but fortunately Gwendolyn Lim stepped up at the last minute to take on the biggest role of Doctor Devi Ramachandran, and I was able to rationalize some foreigners working for the United Nations Space Agency there.
63 SOUND: maybe segue into soundtrack discussion here with matt's bits
64 Five: Episodes 27 and 28 take place in Placerville, California. Why this small town?
65 Paul: Because I live there, almost... actually I live in a much less interesting neighboring town a mile from Placerville. I also feel the timeless historical character of Placerville as a town that celebrates its gold rish history makes it easier to anticipate what it'll be like in 2240. I know certain things won't change, certain buildings will still be there. But mostly it was just a lot of fun to bring the story home and put the characters in places I know well.
66 Five: No funding from the Placerville tourism board?
67 Paul: Sadly, no. The county has a film commission but I'm pretty sure they don't care about audio drama.
68 Five: Episode 28 also goes to Sacramento, any particular reason?
69 Paul: Entirely because I wanted to make reference to Southside Park's quirky alien space van sculpture. [insert clip about it] The van's engines light up and there's some aliens on it doing an EVA repair. If any aliens do want to conquer the Earth, all I ask is that they do it there.
70 Mathilde: On the production side, what was the most challenging to make?
71 Paul: Episode 22 for sure. Two particular scenes had so many layers to them. The protest scene outside the mayor's office was really tricky, getting those chants right and the right balance between chaos and audibility. And the scene in communications where Ekkert emerges as the transmission from Carson and Lee plays in the background.
72 Mathilde: And what was your favorite scene?
73 Paul: The interrogation sequence in episode 25. It wasn't necessary to the plot, I just indulged myself and wrote it because I knew I was going to enjoy making and hearing it so much. It was inspired by a couple of drugged interrogation scenes in the BBC mini-series The Psychadelic Spy and NPR's Star Wars radio drama. Steff Knappe did a great job with the interrogator part. And having an original soundtrack for it made it possible to pull it off properly.
74 Five: Let's talk about the science. The science seems softer this season, doesn't it?
75 Paul: For sure. The time travel wormhole is the only probably-physically-impossible element that I threw technobabble at, though. All the math on completing an orbit of the galaxy and ages and time dilation is at least roughly accurate. The ex-mayor becoming younger than the penpal who used to be older than him is the classic twin paradox of relativistic travel. [insert clip] The science behind the primary setting is solid. I did some research into what their sky would look like at these speeds [insert peters speech expert on it] Then there's the empty sky during the intergalactic travel in the final episode. [insert clip of silva] The idea of being stranded in perpetual motion is a consequence of the science behind their relativistic travel. And there were other bits of hard science slipped in, like the tidally-locked exo-planet in episode 22. [insert clip] I tried to keep everything plausible that I could, but needed the time travel element to take the story to interesting places while keeping a familiar character for the listener to relate with.
76 Five: With the different time periods and locations, you have different levels of technology to explore.
77 Paul: That's right. In 2107, holographic tech is still only known to the Centaurians and they use traditional jail cells without the force fields we hear in 2240. On Earth in 2240, I didn't want to distract too much by talking about the tech, but I made mention of underground transit tunnels and aeroglides.
78 Five: Why did you take us back to 2107?
79 Paul: To fully understand these people, I think you have to understand where they came from. It also gives the series more re-listenablility. Next time you listen to it, you're going to understand things differently because you know their past as well as their future. References to Commander Peters will mean something to you. You'll know why the names are mixed nationalities. News events will relate to things from 2107. It just gives you another layer to interpret the series through on your next listen.
80 Five: I've noticed you don't talk much about the role of artifical intelligence?
81 Paul: This series just wasn't about that. Admittedly, when I started writing the first season AI wasn't a big thing yet and if I were writing it now I'd probably involve it in more ways. But I tried to keep it out of the way with brief mentions like the role in medical analysis, because this story is about people, even if some of them are being played by AI voices.
82 Five: The final episode plays a bit loose with the science, I think.
83 Paul: A bit, because I wanted to convey that a sense of the returnees being far more advanced because of how much time had passed for them. But their presence is scientifically reasonable. While a population of two isn't normally enough to grow a sustainable colony, they could've brought along additional genetic samples and it's already established that they're adept at gene editing and can grow babies in artificial wombs. So no incest required if a few of the expeditions brought the right equipment.
84 Mathilde: Why did you write the final episode the way you did? Why move it so far into the future?
85 Paul: There were really 4 concluding episodes, each tying up different loose ends. For the final one, I wanted to address the inevitable end. The first episode of the season set this up with the end of acceleration, and from that point there's a ticking timer to the eventual end of life. So I wanted to hear that end, and to bring Tojo there so we'd have somebody familiar. I was thinking about the impact their exploration would've had on the galaxy, the possibility they may have even left new civilizations behind them or that the people taken in season 2 could've started a new human civilization. I realized that no matter how fast to the speed of light they're traveling, somebody else who started thousands of years later could catch up by going slightly faster. And what better way to bring home the impact of their legacy than to have the civilizations spawned by 253 Mathilde come to revive it.
86 Mathilde: What do you see as the legacy or importance of 253 Mathilde -- the series I mean, not the asteroid?
87
Paul:
It's easy to find optimism in comedic shows. Though not in vogue at the moment, it used to be easy to find optimism in fantasy and soft sci-fi. But 253 Mathilde is serious optimistic realism. It's a future that's not a fantasy, but where people are basically good and those who are bad have their reasons, and humanity can ultimately overcome fear and hatred and our negative instincts to achieve amazing things. And I think it's important to inject some of that into our world. We can't overcome our problems if all we can ever visualize in our entertainment is failure and self-destruction.
It's not just a technological optimism, but a personal optimism. A bunch of characters go through some severe mental trauma, and I wanted to be real about how it affects them, but still have them come out the other side successfully. Even with death itself, I wanted them to come to terms with it.
88 Five: Did the show ever find an audience?
89 Paul: It's hard to track because listeners are split over so many platforms, but Spotify listenership really spiked for the third season. There's about 30 times as many people listening there as during the first two seasons, though that's still a modest total. There's 523 followers of the show on Spotify, that's probably the best measure.
90 Five: Who are these listeners? Any demographic trends?
91 Paul: They're mostly American men aged 35 to 59. I'm not surprised it doesn't resonate with young people, but I'm a little surprised about the lack of old listeners considering the focus on aging... maybe they just don't like Spotify and are more likely to listen on the website.
92 Mathilde: It seems a shame to end the show just as the listenership is spiking. Is this really the end for 253 Mathilde?
93 Paul: I think so. The story is told. I wouldn't totally rule out doing a prequel someday about first contact with the Centaurians and the start of the project, that might make an interesting different sort of story, but I don't expect that to happen. Unless somebody offers me money or something, heh.
94 Five: So what's next for you, Paul?
95 Paul: I recently released the 11th episode of my Mining Accident Theater moving riffing series. I'll probably make some more Hundred Second Theaters, maybe a Quiet Please Original, but what I'd really like to try for the first time is a collaboration. So I'll try to find if someone out there is interested and we can find a project of common interest. Of course in a perfect world I'd find some sort of paid production work.
96 Five: But this is not a perfect world.
97
Paul:
Indeed.
Thank you for listening to 253 Mathilde. If you'd like to hear my other shows, check them out at https://www.quietplease.org/originals/