Director's Notes – Episode 127

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

The idea for this episode came about during a live stream. Over on the Alice Isn’t Dead Patreon, we have occasional live streams for donors, and in this case the stream was me and Jasika chatting one evening from our respective homes. During the course of the conversation, it came out that Jasika had never gotten to play a bad guy, and had always wanted to. I told her I would find a way to make that happen. This episode is the result.

There’s more to this episode than that, obviously. As you might know from reading previous director’s notes, I often write episodes with certain broad structural goals in mind, and then build the stories around those. So, for instance, in the case of “A Story of Love and Horror”, I wanted to create a compelling story built around a randomly generated list of Night Vale characters. In the case of “A Matter of Blood”, I had three unrelated but complementary goals:

1.  Create three separate plotlines (the new mayoral power, the blood matter from space, and Dana’s double), and have those three plotlines run continually through the three episodes until they converge in some way. Starting the first draft episode, I wasn’t entirely sure how they would converge (obviously at this point I do know). 

2.  Follow up on some pieces of continuity that we hadn’t addressed in a while. The Sandstorm episode is obviously one of those. There is another that I can’t talk about yet.

3.  And provide an opportunity for Jasika to play a bad guy. That doesn’t happen in this first part, but trust me it’s coming.

These all may seem like practical and personal goals, rather than artistic ones, but that’s kind of how my artistic brain works. I don’t know how to separate out the purity of art from the work of it, and from the personal relationships built around it. They nest within and compliment each other, and the practical concerns provide focus rather than distract from the artistic expression. Which is to say that like a lot of artists, I think I do my best work under constraints, and so will seek out constraints when none are available.

Two small final notes on the traffic and word from our sponsors. The traffic, it will not surprise you, was written on a flight. I don’t remember which flight because, thanks to my job, I fly on average once a week. I have a ton of anxiety about flying, but I also find the view from the window seat to be often truly transcendent, allowing you to see stunning vistas that were unimaginable for most of human history. This combination of awe and fear tends to create a very particular type of writing for me, and so stuff I write on planes often carries those emotions. Meanwhile the word from our sponsors actually grew out of a bit I wrote years ago. Early on in the Night Vale days, we were invited on a Brooklyn online goth radio show, and we did it because the host was cool and why not? For that show, we wrote a couple quick Night Vale paragraphs to read. One of them was an early version of this thing about the vase in your backyard. When I decided to expand on that, I realized that I could not find the text of it anywhere. So I reconstructed it from memory. I have no idea how close I am to what was read on that radio show, but I like this version fine.

See you on the 15th, when things will really heat up, and we’ll hear from another version of Dana.

- Joseph Fink
May 2, 2018