Director's Notes – Episode 123

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

We shifted to this new format of multi-part stories, rather than year long slow building arcs, for several reasons. The first, obviously, is that this is our sixth year doing this show and it seemed good to shake ourselves up creatively. The second is on the production side, short arcs are a little easier to plan and write. Coming up with three short stories, each with its own payoff, and each fitting into a year long story, is a trickier and lengthier process than coming up with a single story told in three chapters. The third reason was that year long arcs made it harder for people to try our show or come back into it if they had fallen behind. If they jumped in wherever we were, there was a chance it would be an episode built around a complicated series of events that had unfolded over the previous several months, and the listener would be completely unable to follow. Here, the stories are clearly marked, so that you can jump into the start of any of the three parters with the confidence that even if you don’t understand every reference or character moment, you won’t have missed any vital plot. 

The final and most important reason is that making the arcs shorter and more self-contained allowed us to make the stories tighter, with less loose ends or bits that don’t end up paying off. It’s very difficult, with a staff of two writers, to make 20 episodes land and have every part of the year long machine perfectly in place. But with a three parter, each with one of those writers in the driving seat, it’s much easier to plan out the story and check every detail. For an example of this, I invite you to revisit the community calendar that began part 1 of this story. A little trick like that would be impossible in our previous working method, and so it’s been fun to be able to stretch our legs and try new things.

This episode has a bit of a downer ending, it’s true. That’s because in my head, this is ultimately a horror story. Horror is a unique genre in that it is simultaneously categorized as escapist, popular entertainment, but also frequently has completely unhappy endings. If a romantic comedy or an action movie ended with the main character utterly defeated in some horrifying way, we would warn everyone we know. But a horror movie can end with every good person dying, and with the implication that evil continues unabated, and people will leave the theater with grins on their faces and a feeling that they got their money’s worth. That’s because horror is the popular genre that we use to look at the most terrifying aspects of life: death, danger, despair, hatred, grief, trauma. It is escapism that takes us directly through our own troubles, and in that way provides, I think, a more sophisticated and interesting form of escape.

Which is to say, yes, the ending here was sad. But I don’t think this is a tragedy. I just think it was horror. 

- Joseph Fink
March 1, 2018