Director's Notes: 189 - Megan Wallaby Is Missing

This episode is by frequent Night Vale guest writer Brie Williams. Brie has taken to reviving characters we haven’t talked about in a bit. First with Josh Crayton in the episode “The Waterfall”, and now with Megan Wallaby here.

I hadn’t thought about Megan Wallaby in some years. She was a creation of another guest writer, Zack Parsons, and doing a quick search on our transcript site, I’m finding that not only have we not mentioned her in over three years, but that she in fact has never appeared in an episode in which I was the primary writer. It’s not that I dislike Megan as a character, far from it, but just that she is not one that hops (or scuttles) immediately to mind when I’m searching for someone to build a story on. But that is the beauty of collaboration: when someone else thinks of something you would never have thought of on your own. And so here we have a lovely little update on Megan, and a look at her happy homelife in the future.

As it happens, Brie wrote a Tamika guest part and that same week the voice of Tamika, Symphony Sanders, was visiting our house. I haven’t seen Symphony in person since March of 2020, when we all hugged and cried in a Hampton Inn lobby as the 50 stop tour we had just started had to be abruptly ended. But it’s spring, and we’re all fully vaccinated, and so Symphony got to eat dinner in our home, and watch Legendary with us on our couch, and record her guest part at my desk in the basement.

In Brie’s original script, Megan’s monologue was a written statement that Cecil read. I thought it would be more interesting to hear from Megan herself. In terms of casting, Janet Varney is a wonderful voice performer who has been on our radar for a long time, and so it made sense to us to approach her with this, and fortunately she immediately said yes. Brie raised the concern (which is why she had written it the way she did) of how Megan was able to have a voice when she was only a hand. But my argument is that in the past we have had dialogue from a smooth, fist-sized river rock, and so having a hand deliver a monologue seemed entirely in character for the series.

And that’s it until our 9th anniversary, in which…but that would give it away.

Joseph Fink