Director's Notes: 230 - Carlos, Explained

Ok, so this was a mean little trick.

Quite some time ago, we came up with the idea of Dr. Lubelle explaining away Night Vale. First, we had poor Sarah Sultan, under the title "Sarah Sultan, Explained". Then I knew I wanted to go after someone really big. An iconic character. Thus "The Glow Cloud, Explained." And we always knew there would be one last episode with this title format, and it would, based on the previous pattern, establish an existential threat against our sweet Carlos.

But at no point did we consider actually explaining him away. Because, as Carlos points out in this episode:

a) explanations are not inherently threatening. It is how they are wielded, and who wields them, that can do damage

and 

b) a lot of Dr. Lubelle's explanations didn't really hold water anyway.

I knew for this confrontation to work, we would need to hear from both Carlos and Dr. Lubelle themselves. It is always a joy and a privilege when Dylan takes the time from his busy schedule of, most recently, writing on Ted Lasso and creating a new podcast about Jar Jar Binks for TED, to record for us. 

And what can be said about Janet Varney that isn't just a lot of incoherent gushing? She is an expert at voice performance. For her final section, I let her know it was her character's big villain monologue before she gets squashed by a cow and to really go for it. I'm actually writing these notes before I get to hear what she did, but I have complete confidence that she will swing for the fences in the best way possible. 

In this era of science-denial, it can be tricky to try to tell a nuanced story about science. One that acknowledges the very real harms caused by western capitalism through the tool of science, while also keeping in mind that much of what makes our lives wonderful was also discovered through the same tool. Science has no morality. Morality is simply not what science is set up to do. So the ideas of right and wrong, harmful and helpful, those must come from the human being doing the science. 

America has become obsessed with STEM, but when we only teach STEM to the exclusion of the humanties, we get Silicon Valley. A heartless place where very smart people use their knowledge of computers to, generally, make our lives much, much worse, often without knowing they are doing that, because at no point have they been trained to think about the importance of considering the bigger picture and the moral implications of what they are doing. 

Anyway, it's a hard topic to write about, and I can't say we 100% pulled it off. But hey, I hope we at least enjoyed the bad guy getting a dead cow dropped on them.

We'll be taking July off as always, so see you in August with whatever is going to happen next year in Night Vale (genuinely we haven't talked about it yet so I don't know). 

-Joseph Fink