Sometimes I do episode-by-episode posts about my favorite TV shows, or at least periodical season analyses. I'm probably going to do so for American Gods, which as I said in the previous post is one of my biggest creative influences.
But I can't exclude the podcast Welcome to Night Vale from my influences either - in a way, it kind of coalesced a lot of the things I'd always subconsciously been interested in - the supernatural as something weirder and more ambiguous and modern than typical fantasy tends to go for. Given that I came up with the idea of The House (a prominent force existing within my Otherworld setting) way back in 2006 or so, I wouldn't say that Night Vale was the first thing that made me fascinated with ancient conspiracies, but it is one of those works of art that make me go "damn, I wish I were the one who created that."
Anyway, this is all a long and convoluted way of saying that I think I might start doing episodic posts about Welcome to Night Vale (I might also do Alice Isn't Dead, the second podcast done by the Night Vale Presents team, which I also love.)
For a brief refresher if all of this is unknown to you, Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast that started in 2012 that takes the form of a community radio broadcast in a small town in the American southwest. The elevator pitch version if it is that it's a town where all conspiracy theories are true, but to get a little more in-depth, it's a town where eldritch abominations serve key civic functions, shadowy government agencies act in the open, massive corporations double as murderous cults, and basically everyone's understanding of what "normal" is is very, very different than ours, like the fact that worshipping "bloodstones" is thought of as the mainstream religion and people who believe that mountains exist are considered fringe nut jobs. The show is a mix of surreal humor, weird science fiction, and cosmic horror, with the kind of ever-expanding small-town cast that you see in shows like the Simpsons and Parks and Recreation.
Anyway, for me to go into all the specifics of what has happened over the course of the show here would be absurd, so I'll just assume that if that caught your interest, you'll listen to the podcast from the start.
Spoilers to follow.
Ghost Stories is the most recently finished live show (there's another one currently touring) and the recording finally went up for sale. Like most live shows, this one kind of sits loosely within the show's continuity. I believe there are references to the death of Old Woman Josie, but for the most part this kind of works anywhere.
As is often he case, the city is having a competition for citizens to tell the best ghost story, with the prize being, apparently, to be murdered and eaten by the city council and eaten (and thus turned into a ghost!) Of course the stories told are generally absurd and not really, like, real ghost stories. But over the course of the show, Cecil tells a story about a man who picks up what seems to be some ghost that lures drivers to pick her up and driver her home, from whence the driver never returns.
Ultimately, what is revealed is that Cecil is actually telling a very mundane story about the day of his mother's funeral, and makes a point about how ghost stories actually make us feel better by telling us that there is something that comes after death, and that meaning can still persist beyond the expiration of our mortal bodies. Knowing that would be a great comfort, but the truth is that we can't know, and we are left with unresolved questions and disappointments and if there is a meaning, it eludes us.
I've got to say that this story hit me pretty damn hard, as the prospect of losing a parent relatively soon is currently looming over my family. Nothing, really, is more terrifying that the idea of death, and believing that our conscious cores live on, even if it is in some scary manner, is ultimately a comfort. It allows us to mitigate and shrink death into just some object in the background and not an impenetrable wall we are all speeding toward.
On the other hand, today's new episode, the Missing Sky, was disturbing in more plot-related ways.
We get a pretty standard WTNV broadcast at first, but at some point, the sound shifts and we hear a tinnier, seemingly distant broadcast of a different episode. It's still definitely Cecil announcing the news, and it still seems to be coming from Night Vale, but there are odd things going on - primarily, this version of Night Vale seems to be a far more normal town (at first,) with the angels currently squatting in Old Woman Josie's house replaced with a woman named Erika with an angel tattoo on her arm, described as an old friend of Josie's, squatting there instead. Pamela Winchell is still mayor, and both John and Jim Peters work on their farm together. Even the Weather Report is an actual weather report that mentions temperatures and wind.
But something terrible happened to this version of Night Vale. There is talk about an attack by something, with an apparently controversial memorial to those fallen (who include Cecil's brother-in-law and best friend, Steve Carlsberg) that takes the form of a massive foot. And before this attack, the first thing that happened was that the sky disappeared, and the city was cut off from the outside world. This Night Vale is holding parades in honor of the people who volunteered to defend the city from the abomination that arrived that day a few years ago.
Meanwhile, in the normal Night Vale, Carlos goes to investigate these strange popping sounds coming from underground.
So through the episode, we're left wondering what exactly the nature of this other Night Vale is. We know that this Cecil never met Carlos. We also know that the city seems to be somewhat less outlandish, at least until the sky disappeared. I was thinking first that it could be a time jump, but the fact that Pamela Winchell was still mayor seemed to make that unlikely, and the fact that Jim Peters was not off fighting in the Blood Space War suggested that this had to be an alternate reality.
However, as it turns out, it's not an alternate universe, and it's not a different time. This other Night Vale is, in fact, the tiny civilization that lives under lane 5 at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. And the abomination that they remember from all those years ago was actually Carlos, whom the people of this miniature Night Vale nearly killed in the "season finale" of the podcast's first year.
So what the hell?
Big questions to be asked: if this tiny Night Vale is, apart from the whole missing sky thing and the worship of Huntocar, relatively normal, is this actually the real Night Vale? Tiny Cecil talks about how the city was cut off from the rest of the world when the sky was taken, but one of the themes of the show has generally been that big Night Vale isn't that easy to get into or out of anyway.
I'm assuming that the sky going missing was the construction of the bowling alley over the city. Is there a bowling alley or a Teddy Williams in this smaller Night Vale?
I definitely think this could tie into a lot of stuff from this year of the podcast - the alternate memories people have in the Ash Lake episode could be memories from each person's tiny doppelgängers.
Also, we know that Huntocar is associated with the train that arrives in the first episode of the year - which is also the train that the bandits that Lucia Tereschenko (no idea if I'm spelling that right) was working for took over - bandits who seem likely to be the predecessors of the Vague Yet Menacing Government Agency, whom we know from A Story of You have been stealing buildings from the tiny civilization and burying them out in the desert. (I'm assuming the Man Who Is Not Short and the Man Who Is Not Tall are from the VYMGA.)
I realize that this is all making me sound like a conspiracy nut (which I'm sure is by design,) but there's some kind of connection between Huntocar, the deer-faced rail enthusiasts who installed the Night Vale subway system (who share the deer-face of Huntocar and also communicate through proprietary message-cockroaches) and the train. Huntocar even tells Cecil about the fact that the VYMGA is taking their buildings.
So... what it all adds up to is anyone's guess. Like last year's Strangers, this story is slowly building up to something, and I think today's episode was a big push forward, but I still don't really know what it could all mean. (For example, I thought the Distant Prince might have been involved at first, but that's seeming less likely - maybe they'll save him for a later "season.")
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