Director's Notes – 147 – The Protester

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

In a lot of ways, having 147 episodes under our belts makes writing new episodes of Welcome to Night Vale easier than when we only had a dozen or so.

Each episode, I don't have to reinvent a universe. We create new characters all the time in Night Vale, but the central voice remains (mostly) the same, as well as the main characters. Writing in in the voices of Cecil, or Carlos, or John Peters (you know, the farmer), or even a lesser-known character like Basimah Bishara feels natural. We've already built that foundation.

But in a few ways, Night Vale gets harder to write as time goes on. Continuity is the main issue here. Some of that is story lines – like in this episode, I had to go back and re-listen to episode 79 "Lost in the Mail" to refresh my memory of Basimah and her father. I also needed to check back in with the very first episode to make sure I had the location of the Dog Park just right.

Continuity doesn't always refer to plot, though. For us, the importance of continuity as that the characters grow and change. Even if Fakhir Bishara's age goes backward to 19, he still has had experiences that have affected him, even if he doesn't have all of his memories. In this episode, Carlos has a beard and gray hairs. He and Cecil adopted a dog. These are such seemingly minor details to the writers and listeners, but they're important to the characters. It's important that Cecil doesn't say 20 episodes from now "I've never owned a dog."

That being said, the time-bending narrative of the Blood Space War gives us a chance to play around with continuity, with what happens when people disappear, not because they're gone but because they never existed. Think of all of the people who were never born but if they were you would have been close friends with, lovers to, fans of. What if your crappy sports franchise would actually be the best of all time but a strange butterfly effect 30 years ago caused two people to never meet, never fall in love, never give birth to a future star athlete that would have carried your team to a dozen championships. (Patriots haters out there like "dammit. i wish!" [shakes fist])

We think we would miss our sister or our partner or our favorite actor if they had never existed at all, but not if we never knew them to begin with. So it goes with Night Vale's past timeline being altered constantly by The General. People and places that you know about, as a listener, were suddenly never there for the fictional characters. And the tension lies between what you feel with full knowledge and what the characters cannot even recognize.

We have two more Blood Space War episodes after this one, and it's been a really challenging and fun series to write, because it brings me back in touch with Night Vale's 7-year history and allows me to stress the characters out about continuity, instead of stressing myself out about it.

- Jeffrey Cranor
May 1, 2019

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