Director’s Notes: Episode 259 - Chrysalis

My notes for this episode, going in, were just that we had to set up Steve interviewing for his new job. I wasn’t quite sure what the rest of the episode was, until I realized it was a classic Night Vale format: the interrupted emergency.

When handling smaller character beats, it sometimes feels like the most interesting way to play with them is by giving them precedence over some huge event that feels like it should be what the episode is about. In this case, it seems that the town founder has emerged from her statue and started eating people? Maybe that will come back, not sure (genuinely not sure, probably though!).

  
But the focus is on Steve. Steve is one of our first and favorite characters, and  any time I can put Hal Lublin on the show in that role, I jump at the chance. So I knew that I wanted to write a series of conversations between Steve and Cecil.

This year’s story is, in many ways, a story about Steve. After a few years of town or world ending stakes, we felt it was time this year to focus in on a smaller, more personal story. So I would assume you’ll be hearing more from Steve, plus at least one other fan favorite voice that we have not heard from in several years.

  
One other note:

The Dental Underground and the Winged Tooth are taken from an unpublished novel that I wrote the year before writing the first Night Vale episode. It was called The Completely Authorized and Accurate Biography of Banksy, and it was a very surreal, Night Vale-esque story. 

I wrote it looking for my break in the publishing industry, and assuming that the title would get a lot of attention and Banksy would be an unlikely person to sue me over it given that the contents were obvious fiction. Anyway, I never ended up getting it into any shape to submit to publishers, and I doubt anyone would have taken me up on it. Ultimately, Night Vale was just a more interesting story than whatever I was trying to do with that novel.

But I always did have a lot of fondness for the novel’s two main groups: the evil, ancient Dental Underground, and their free-spirited, equally ancient enemy The Winged Tooth. So I decided to write them in here.

I originally planned to just use some text from the novel, but ultimately the style of that book didn’t quite fit Night Vale and so all of this is brand new material.

See you on December 15, for a very special episode written by all three of Night Vale’s writers.

  
-Joseph Fink

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