Welcome to Night Vale is certainly horror-based, but usually, the horrific stuff is played for laughs. It's impressive that the show can weave back and forth between taking its horror seriously and making it silly or even endearing (like the fact that the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home is probably evil, but generally doesn't do anything beyond annoying mischief.)
Anyway, the point is: probably the scariest the show has ever gotten was an episode called Cassette. In this, Cecil discovers some old audio tapes of his time as a kid. Some of the details don't add up with his own recollections, like that he doesn't (if I recall correctly, he doesn't even remember being a NVR intern - though he was destined to run the show after Leonard Burton retired.)
Of course, the two biggest details that are mentioned in Cassette are that A: the recordings mention his having a brother and B: Cecil seems to be killed by some kind of monster while looking at a mirror.
Now, this "season" of WTNV has kind of had two through lines - that of Huntocar and the tiny civilization (which we now know is a tiny, seemingly more "normal" other than the after effects of being buried under the bowling alley version of Night Vale, and that of the Distant Prince and residents of Night Vale remembering alternate realities.
So in the recent "Cal," the eponymous, seemingly non-existent brother shows up at Cecil's home, and a whole other set of memories floods into him - he's not married in this version of reality, and he's even still partially in the closet to his brother. I think his sister Abby might not even exist in this version of events (which of course means his niece Janice doesn't either.)
With tears in the fabric of reality showing up, all linked to the Distant Prince, it seems, one has to wonder what exactly is going on, and if it has anything to do with the fact that the tiny civilization is actually another version of Night Vale.
One thing it does do is seemingly negate one frightful theory I had about the episode Cassette - that the Cecil we've been listening to is actually the monster that killed the real Cecil. If the Cassettes are from a different reality, then our Cecil at least seems to be... who he is. This actually also could explain how Leonard Burton was able to fill in for Cecil even though one of the old tapes he played was Cecil reporting on Leonard's grisly death (something I just wrote off as Night Vale weirdness, which I'm 100% not ruling out.)
Anyway, apparently we're getting "A Story About Huntocar" at the beginning of June, and if it's anything like "A Story About You" or "A Story About Them," it'll be great. (Also, given that both of those episodes deal with agents stealing buildings from the tiny civilization - agents, I assume, of a Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency - it would make sense for it to be of the same style.)
On Alice Isn't Dead, we get a second appearance of Praxis Industries. In the first season's episode "The Factory by the Sea," Keisha (not yet known by that name) makes a delivery to a factory that seems to have a single employee, who rapidly ages during her visit until she realizes that the lumber she had delivered was actually his coffin, which he drifts away in.
The second appearance of Praxis takes a different form, but there's a similarly uncanny element. In "Chain," Keisha and Sylvia visit a fast food place called Praxis, in which the same brother and sister appear in every restaurant. They're absolutely the same people - they remember the two visitors and even have a drawing Sylvia made.
In the end, the Praxis restaurant closes - and we can be confident that this means that every location is gone.
Given that Alice Isn't Dead is an examination of American culture, it makes a lot of sense to examine the way that we're drawn to these chains - little pockets of familiarity that you can find anywhere.
It's a rich theme to examine, especially these days, when the ideas of monoculture and multiculture are in tremendous conflict. And given that this is a show about a (black, assuming that the character shares the ethnicity of the performer) lesbian going around rural parts of the country (in other words, the most conservative parts of the country) looking for her wife - a designation that wasn't even permitted only a couple years ago - there's certainly interesting questions about what sort of familiarity we can expect as we travel the country.
I remember reading in some interview that Praxis will play a big role in Alice Isn't Dead's mythos. So far, at least, both episodes featuring it appear to be standalone episodes, and in each, Praxis seems like a very different sort of company.
Now, Praxis is a real word, meaning, essentially, the process of putting a theory or idea into practice. So what does that tell us? In both episodes, there's a high concept to what Praxis represents - we see a man literally working in a factory for his whole life (that happens to go by as Keisha watches) and in this episode, we get the most literal manifestation of the familiarity chains bank on. Is Praxis all about taking these ideas and making them real?
A lot remains to be discovered about the nature of these companies - Bay and Creek Shipping, Praxis, and of course Thistle (assuming that's not "dealt with" at the end of season one.)
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