From The Writers' Room

Cassandra Rose Clarke on writing The Witch Who Came In From The Cold - Ep 2: "A Voice on the Radio"

Nothing is boring when spies are involved.

Cold Witch ep 2

Here’s the thing about Episode 2: the story largely centers around a university lecture.I’ve been to a lot of university lectures in my time, and I am all too aware that they don’t make for the most gripping of yarns. So working on Episode 2 proved an interesting challenge. How can I take this ordinary, often obligatory experience and infuse it with the tension and anxiety people expect from a story about sorcery-wielding spies?Which brings me to the other thing about Episode 2: it, in tandem with the pilot, had to help establish the overall tone of the series. Cold Witch is John La Carré but with magic, and if the pilot was all about the magic, then Episode 2 needed to capture the Le Carré-tude of the episodes to come. But it worked out. If you’ve ever read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, you’ll know that perhaps the most electrifying scene in the entire book involves a guy stealing some files from an office archives.So when I sat down to write Episode 2, I kept that Tinker Tailor scene in the back of my mind. If La Carré could make stealing papers from a library so gripping, could I do the same thing with that most dreaded of extra credit opportunities, the university lecture? I certainly had to try.One of the things about university lectures, and the inevitable receptions that follow, is that there are a lot of people milling around. It’s just what happens at these things. You might see a friend across the room, move to go say hi—and then they’ve vanished into the aether. I decided to appropriate that experience for assorted spy shenanigans. Instead of a friend, it’s a student who may or may not be wrapped up with the KGB. Instead of a professor you think you ought to say hi to, it’s a KGB officer. And so on.What’s also interesting about a university lecture as a setting for Cold War spycraft is that a proper lecture is going to have a sort of cosmopolitan veneer to it. Everybody there is acting more important and more sophisticated than they probably are. There’s this general sense of we’re-all-pretending at these things, and is that not what espionage is really about? Pretending? Pretending to know less than you do, or more, as the case may be? I’ve certainly done both in the awkward socializing that happens post-lecture. In a way it feels like a Victorian class system, this baroque structure that informs who you talk to and how you talk to them and what you talk to them about. A university lecture is actually really tense.So when you throw the fate of the world into the mix, it’s like tossing gasoline on a fire. Things are gonna get interesting.

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