Director's Notes – Episode 129

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

Well, here I am. Doing my best to write to you in my sixth day of illness. During those days I have gone to Chicago to do the first ever live show for I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, and to New York City to do events at BookExpo and Bookcon. It has, in short, not been the most restful of sick days I’ve had, and I’ve mostly been scraping along on adrenaline and CVS Cold & Flu pills.

But it’s Monday, and I don’t have to go stand on a stage in front of people for a whole (*checks notes*) four days, so I’m hoping I will be well again soon. In the meantime, let’s talk about Part 3 of A Matter of Blood.

There has been a ticking time bomb at the heart of our show since almost the start of it. In episode seven, just three months into the podcast, we stated that in 2052, there will have been no mayor of Night Vale for over thirty years. This obviously gave us a date of 2021 to make that prophecy come true. And that, of course, is four years from now. Which is to say that it wasn’t the most urgent of ticking time bombs, but it was a piece of continuity I have always known I wanted to address if our show lasted long enough for that to become a possibility.

Then two aspects fell into place for me. The first was that I wanted to do a story for Dana this year, one that would majorly alter the trajectory of her life and her character. And also there was our format change. We have started trying these multi-episode stories that allow us to spend more time on a single narrative, writing stories for Night Vale that are tighter and more complex, but also more listener friendly, since it is clearly marked where the serial elements begin and end.

Given all of that, it seemed time to write a multi-part episode for our mayor, Dana, that would explain why 34 years later there would have been no mayor for over 30 years. This was the primary goal of this story going into it. The secondary goal was to let our performer, Jasika, have fun with playing a good and evil version of herself, even if “good” and “evil” turn out to be too simplistic for what these versions of herself end up being.

I also started this story with an image in my head. It was an image of two versions of Dana, engaged in a fight to the death waist deep in a sea of blood. It is, you’ll admit, a pretty dramatic image, so it was enjoyable to find a way to build my story toward it.

As for the blood space matter, could it have something to do with the blood space war? Quite possibly. Certainly, one of my big goals for the next year of our show is to tell some stories about the blood space war and dive into questions about just what is going on out there in the cosmos.

Join us next time for our sixth (!!) anniversary episode, in which we are visited once again by two people whose height is difficult to describe.

- Joseph Fink
June 4, 2018