Director's Notes: 194 - The Nearly Infinite Lives of Frank Chen

Hello again from the past,

Once again I wrote both this episode and this director’s note back in late May, before going on paternity leave. So hello from a time when the plants were shooting up green, when the days swung wildly from 80 degrees and sunny to 50 degrees and rain, and the whole promise of summer still lay ahead of us. I’m doing pretty well today. How are you? Please send any responses back to May so I can read them.

Well, the Sheriff’s Secret Police are at it again with Frank Chen, but their heart just doesn’t seem to be in it this time. Even they seem to know that this one isn’t going to fly.

We have long played with the idea of parallel worlds and parallel Night Vale. It was the idea that lay at the heart of previous stories I’ve written like A Story of Love and Horror (episodes 121-123) and A Matter of Blood (episodes 127-129). Those were played more for tragedy, because a parallel world story is usually a story about the choices we’ve made, and the ways those could play out differently. Except they can’t play out differently because we’ve already made the choice, and so the idea of a parallel world is a way of grieving that loss. Today's story isn’t a tragedy, even though it has its moments. Mostly I wanted to work with parallel stories to look at the idea of endless variations on a single person’s life.

All of these Frank Chen episodes have been more or less an excuse for me to write little life vignettes. Tracking ordinary lives, from people who made different ordinary choices, through all the different ways those lives can go. I could write these little vignettes forever. And following the nearly infinite lives of Frank Chen allows me to. Interestingly though, for all the lives that Frank Chen has lived in these episodes, not a single one belonged to the Frank Chen who is the center of this story. He is always absent. We’ll have more on that soon.

The Last Bank of Night Vale is holding a fair at the school! This isn’t the first time that a fair has been held at that school. In the Steve Carlsberg guest part from The Investigators (available here), he talked about the Youth Arts Fair, one of our favorite guest bits in Night Vale live history. Hal Lublin is excellent at modulating Steve’s goofy voice down to a threatening growl at just the right moments. Steve didn’t deliver this episode's fair news, but it’s a similar riff on all the dark human elements that still exist in the places we want to believe are just for fun.

Speaking of fun: The Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner. Sometimes for a Night Vale section, I’ll just pick a subject and try riffing on it, seeing where the free association of Night Vale’s way of writing takes me. In this case, obviously, I chose astronomy, and then just started writing without any kind of plan or any idea where it would take me. Sometimes I write entire episodes that way, chasing a mood or an idea, and seeing what that opens up.

Poor Intern Jessica, the first one to go in a while. She is, in fact, a Patreon supporter of ours. Patreon members of certain tiers get to be written into the show! Of course, it being Night Vale, we cannot guarantee the safety of your namesake characters. It often just works out this way.

There is one more episode in the saga of Frank Chen, as the court’s deadline looms and the ownership of Night Vale lies in question. What will happen next? I know. I’ve known for a bit.