Director's Notes – 157 – The Promise of Time

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Hello from sunny Los Angeles, home of The Movies. I spent the last week on tour with the Welcome to Night Vale live tour (we’re still finishing up the last few shows ever of our live script A Spy In The Desert. If you haven’t seen this live show, you don’t have many chances left and I genuinely think it’s a great evening of theater). The tour passed through Santa Fe. All I knew was that it was in the desert, so I packed four pairs of shorts. Santa Fe was 14 degrees and snowing. Oops.

Speaking of freezing: This episode gets into the idea of freezing yourself to be resurrected in the future. The main issue I’ve always found with that idea is this: Since you are unable to resurrect yourself, doing something like that assumes that a) the future wants to bring you back to life and b) that they would do so with good intentions. Both of these seem like faulty assumptions. Bringing back one person from the past, to learn more about what life was like back then? Sure, I could see the future people doing that. Maybe even twenty people from the past, to get a variety of view points. But after that, how many people from the past does the future really need, given that it will already be full of people from the future?

And let’s say you are brought back. What if you are brought back by a corporation looking for free labor? Or a dictatorship looking for more soldiers to throw on the frontlines? There is this weird trust in the future involved in freezing yourself to live forever. The future is just other people, and the future doesn’t care about you.

Some other brief notes on this episode: This was my first horoscopes section in a while. I remember the reason when I started writing these ones. They just are really long. There are a lot of astrological signs, and you have to think of fun stuff for all of them. Now I know how the stars feel.

We also have more from Charlie Bair, who has turned out to be a fairly active character in the world of Night Vale. Charlie Bair originated with Adam Bair, a real person who helped us do some data entry very early on in the podcast’s history. As a thank you, we wrote in the character of Adam Bair, weekday shift manager at the Ralph’s. Eventually, however, as happens in Night Vale, the character of Adam Bair died, and was replaced with his fictional brother, Charlie Bair. Charlie has since had a fairly long cameo in the novel It Devours!, and now this key place in the podcast’s plot. Which just goes to show…something. I’m sure that something is being shown here.

Coming up next episode: The thrilling conclusion to this tale. And also, more about that voice we heard at the end of the episode.

- Joseph Fink
November 5, 2019

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