Director's Notes: 177 - Bloody Laws, Bloody Claws: The Murder of Frank Chen

Apologies that this is a little late, but hey, you probably need a distraction today anyway.

(Here’s what’s going on: It’s extremely likely that Biden won, but we won’t have final numbers for a couple days and staring at twitter unfortunately won’t make that go faster.)

As soon as I introduced the idea that Cecil had his own podcast, it made sense to me that we would eventually hear an episode of it. The first piece I wrote for this episode was actually the theme song. Sometimes when I don’t want to do actual work, I play around on guitar to procrastinate. In doing so, I wrote this little jingle, and so my procrastination was retroactively turned into work. The loose, silly nature of the theme song informed the writing of the rest of the episode. Cecil Palmer, it turns out, is a much better radio host than podcaster.

I’m not much for true crime podcasts. I know they are extraordinarily popular, and given the size of their audience, it’s very likely that you are a huge fan of at least one of them. But for me, there’s really only two I like: Criminal, because it steers away from grisly murder and instead tells interesting human stories about unexpected crimes; and In The Dark, because it’s some of the best journalism done in years. The rest of them, where people describe in exacting detail brutal crimes from the 70s? That just does nothing for me at all. I don’t even like being around when someone else is listening to them. No thank you.

But you can’t talk about podcasting without talking about true crime, so of course Cecil’s podcast is true crime. And what a crime it is. A man is seen talking with a dragon, and then the man is found covered in burns and claw marks, and then the dragon is found driving the man’s truck. What happened there? It’s almost impossible to piece together, even after months of Cecil’s investigative work.

Jon (Disparition) wanted the sound of this episode to be rougher and more amateur, to reflect Cecil Palmer's limited podcasting skills, but that’s a difficult balance to strike. You have to go far enough that it is obvious to everyone the bad audio quality is an intentional part of the story, but not so far that it’s unlistenable. His first draft was extremely subtle: mismatches in background noise and bad edit cuts and lots of wet mouth sounds. But the subtlety unfortunately made it just sound like there were mistakes in the edit. So instead he took this direction, which miraculously manages to give the impression of amateur sound editing while actually sounding quite beautiful in its own way.

In my first version of the script, there was no specific consequence for the city failing to deliver on the judge’s ruling. Jeffrey suggested that it would make for an interesting story to think about what happens if they can’t bring Frank Chen back to life. So I added the little twist that ends the episode. To be honest, I don’t know where that story is going yet. But I can tell you: it’s going.

Next episode, our frequent and wonderful guest writer Brie Williams considers what happens if Night Vale’s crowded cemetery finally gets full.

-Joseph Fink