welcometonightvale

Director's Notes: 211 - Howl

Added 2022-08-02 14:52:44 +0000 UTC

The writer of this episode, Brie Williams, wrote me to ask if I knew the beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I did not. She referred me to his poem "Dog" (You can read that poem here.) She was using it as an inspiration for this episode about the Sheriff's Secret Police spokesdog Barks Ennui.

And this really comes through in the end of this particular episode. (Transcript here if you want to do a little litcrit homework.) I won't get much into the poem/episode comparison here. But I will get into the poem/universe comparison.

What's fun about making Night Vale (among many things) is being able to grow characters without the constraint of a single book. And not every character has to affect the overall plot. Because there is no overall plot of Night Vale. Universe building in an ongoing serial can happen in a single paragraph or here and there over the course of years.

Barks Ennui is literally a 2-dimensional character who, in just a handful of our 200+ episodes has gone from one-off background joke to a complex character with wants and needs. Like the Ferlinghetti poem linked above, the structure of Barks' character has gone from short, left-aligned verse about a simple dog.

But by the end, the lines are drifting, freed from the gravity of the margins, and the simple dog is now supersentient, superconscious. And yet the final image of the dog in "Dog" is still just a 2-dimensional print of the iconic RCA dog.

-Jeffrey Cranor, Aug 2, 2022