Director's Notes – Episode 99

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

It's hard to remember exactly where you're from. 

Even if you still live in your hometown, there's always change. Buildings are added and removed. People die, move away, or (even better/worse) change. Memories change, too, because memories are just narratives, not tangible events, and narratives are memorable because they are compelling, not necessarily because they are accurate. And thus they must be malleable to support changing tastes in storytelling.

You can stare at the actual house you grew up in but the trees are bigger. The paint is either changed or chipped. The cars are all newer. Your childhood dog is dead. Your current kitten is only 9 months old and is scratching the leg of the loveseat you picked up at a garage sale in July. In only a few months even the loveseat is not the same.

While it's constantly dissipating, history still permeates our lives. You're 31 years old, and your friends and coworkers have only ever known you as a fellow adult, but your family can still see the crying toddler they hugged or the teenager they took to Six Flags once a summer.

I'm sort of fascinated with how memory fades but never disappears. I squint at family photos and try to see my own face in the pictures of baby Jeffrey in 1975, or little boy Jeffrey dressed like a tiger at a Cub Scout Halloween party in 1983, or college Jeffrey holding a giant beer in 1996. I have a tough time recognizing myself. Like when I look at the whole album, it all makes sense, but the longer and closer I look at any individual photo, it all just seems like something else, not quite there, even if it is/was.

In Night Vale, I've been fascinated with Kareem's longevity as station intern. (Good job, Kareem! Thumbs up!) He's grown into a bit of a skeptical foil to Cecil's way-things-are approach. I've also loved this idea of Night Vale as a place well within our own world, but hidden behind a veil of reality. And that veil might have a slight tear in it. 

For Kareem, not being FROM Night Vale certainly would cause him to question one's own memories of life before Night Vale. And while Night Vale is solidly in a physically-impossible alternate dimension, the problems with trying to return home (and here I mean revisiting past relationships with all the tension of evolved lives and eroded stasis) would remain essentially the same as our own real-world problems.

In Kareem's case, it's certainly more overtly traumatic than just not recognizing the younger faces in your photo album, or having mom and dad just not understand what you do for a living ("It's called ART, Mom! You wouldn't understand!")

But despite my journalism degree, Kareem's a better reporter than I. I think he'll get to the bottom of it. 

I mean, who knows? Maybe. If anything's harder to correctly remember than the past, it's the future.

- Jeffrey Cranor
December 1, 2016