Director's Notes - Episode 215 "Sarah Sultan, Explained"

I come to praise Sarah Sultan, not to bury her.

She has been with us nearly from the beginning, having first been introduced in September of 2013, during the show’s second year. I had to look that up, because I had no idea when she originated, other than I was pretty sure it was an episode I wrote. As it turned out, it was episode 31, A Blinking Light Up on the Mountain. That is an interesting one, because it is the fastest I’ve ever written an episode. I remember that the phrase “a blinking light up on the mountain” came to me late one night while I was lying in bed in our apartment in Williamsburg. I got up, and started writing about that image as fast as I could, and about an hour later, at maybe 1am, I had a finished a rough draft and I went to bed. Apparently, somewhere in that flurry, Sarah was born.

The logic of Sarah is that there is no logic. How does her day to day life work? What does it look like or sound like when she moves or talks? There are no answers to these questions. As the episode says, she lives in a zone of fragile ambiguity. And when that ambiguity is broken, nothing about her makes any sense, and so she ceases to exist.

We rarely have major characters die in Night Vale. (Of course, minor characters die all the time. Night Vale is, after all, a dangerous place.) So when we do, I hope that it has some impact. Sarah is gone forever. May her memory be a blessing.

Other notes:

-The word from our sponsors is based on an old Night Vale tweet. In the tweet, the company was Starbucks, but we don’t advertise union busters, even within the world of Night Vale.

-I wrote the sound naming game as a challenge for Disparition. Here are some fun sounds to replicate! But then Disparition was unable to produce this episode because he was on tour with Night Vale, so I took it over, which meant it became a challenge for me. That backfired. The first two sounds were relatively straight forward, but I struggled with the last one. Finally I just recorded myself making a weird mouth sound into the mic, and then added layers of pitch change, echo, reversals, and stereo panning to turn it into something more otherworldly. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Our next episode is an unusual one. I know that doesn’t mean much, coming from us, but still.

- Joseph Fink