Director's Notes – Episode 96

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

It’s sure been a while since we’ve heard from Tamika or Dana. I have a little spreadsheet showing me when we last used each guest voice, so I can tell you that we last heard Dana’s voice in episode 77, almost a year ago, and the last time we heard Tamika was in episode 65, all the way back in April of 2015 (!!!).

And that’s a crime, because Jasika Nicole and Symphony Sanders are truly great performers. The problem is that it’s sometimes easy to forget how long it’s been since someone’s appeared on the podcast proper, because we work with them in other contexts. Jasika starred in a different show I created, Alice Isn’t Dead, and so I’ve spent the last year writing things for her to perform. And Symphony regularly performs with our touring live show, and so I have had the joy these last couple years of watching her act on stages all over the United States. 

Which is why I was so surprised when I realized how long it had been since they were on the podcast itself, and decided to correct that immediately. 

I also am interested in having circumstances within the show start to change. Life doesn’t stay where it is for very long. Tamika has been the leader of a teen militia since we introduced her as a precocious and terrifying 13 year old. She’s 16 now (happy birthday Tamika!) and I knew she was going to want to start taking on new responsibilities and earning more respect from her community.

We get used to treating kids as kids, until they are suddenly, years later, not kids, and then we have to make the strange adjustment to treating them like adults. This is a common experience, only this it involves an armed teen militia.

And Dana? She went from intern to desert wanderer to hero to mayor. That’s a lot of changes. I’m always interested in what that does to her, as a person. She is, after all, pretty young herself. It’s a lot of responsibility, running a town as secretive and weird as Night Vale. Sometimes the job you have changes you, even if you try as hard as you can to stay who you always were.

Change is coming to Night Vale. Some of it sudden and drastic, like the kind you find in fiction. But a lot of it gradual, and subtle, and permanent, like the kind you find in life.

(FUN FACT: The ending passage of this episode was originally the ending passage of our 2014 touring show The Librarian, until we revised the plot of that show enough that it no longer fit. Then it languished for two years in a Google Doc we use to store bits of writing we haven’t found a place for. But I’ve always really liked it, and so I’m glad I found a place for it, all these years later.)

- Joseph Fink
October 15, 2016