Director's Notes – Episode 92

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

The basic description we often give for Night Vale is “a town where every conspiracy theory is true”. And there are few conspiracy theories more pervasive and American than those about the assassination of President Kennedy. It was only a matter of time before we had to write about him.

But I wasn’t interested necessarily in going over the details of a real person’s death. Instead I looked to another American obsession: alternate histories.

I don’t know if other countries also have a culture of alternate histories, but America loves going over our own history and considering how things would have gone differently at every possible point. If you took every book written about alternate histories where the South won the Civil War or Germany won WWII, then you would have hundreds of books and also have wasted precious days of your life.

The Kennedy assassination is one of those points of fascination for alternate history writers, and so I decided to start at that jumping off point, at first considering some slight more realistic alternate history before gradually making it absurd, turning JFK and Jackie into immortal beings, having apparently missed their one date with tragedy for good.

As an aside, my co-writer Jeffrey likes to use the example of the Kennedy assassination when talking about the appeal of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are a source of comfort. They seek to provide an explanation and meaning to a world that is mostly terrifyingly random. It is scary to imagine that the Cuban government infiltrated the FBI and the Secret Service and smuggled a team of killers into the country and then managed to pin it all on some helpless patsy, but it is far, far scarier to consider the truth: that all it takes is one regular guy with a regular rifle to kill a beloved American politician. There is no slight of hand. No Illuminati needed. Life really is that abrupt and dumb.

As Delta Airlines would be happy to tell you.

And what if Germany had won the Civil War? I imagine everyone would have been very confused, including the Germans.

- Joseph Fink
August 15, 2016