Director's Notes - Episode 83

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

When planning out the plot for the second half of year 4, we talked about this episode and how we wanted to approach it. How do you write about the difficulties of merging cultures without making it a direct commentary on the refugee crisis or the current Republican race or any number of other serious problems of our time? Those are all things very worth talking about, but they are so weighty we thought it would likely quickly take over whatever silly sci-fi story we had going.

So I started writing this episode with the goal of finding a way to talk about a political reality forcing different cultures together without relating it to current events and found, quite quickly, that it was absolutely impossible. 

The trick to facing an insurmountable problem in writing (or probably in life) is just to lean completely into it. I decided to zag hard the other direction and make the episode entirely about the issues we had hoped to avoid. The result is half Night Vale story, half NY Times editorial, and I think it was the only successful way of navigating the relationship between the story we’re telling and the real world as it is right now. 

On an unrelated note, the traffic segment of this episode has kind of an interesting origin. Back when the issue of assholes selling bootleg Night Vale merch was still a somewhat manageable problem, I had to do a weekly email to an on-demand shirt printing site to take down all the crappy Night Vale merch people had put up.

Given how often I was having to contact them, and wanting to at least provide some entertainment for them if I was going to have to reach out so much, I started telling a serialized story in the comment section of their copyright takedown form. The traffic in this episode is that story, originally sent on a weekly basis to the legal department of a t-shirt printing site three years ago.

- Joseph Fink
March 1, 2016