In today’s post I will be discussing the second episode of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, or WTNV. I listened to the first podcast a couple weeks ago, so I was worried that I would not be able to make an accurate comparison. However, listening to the second episode reminded me how random this podcast is. In the last post I talked about how none of the topics in the podcast seemed to align, and as a first time listener, I was incredibly confused. The second one was no less confusing, but somehow I began to hear a pattern. The title of the second episode was ‘Glow Clouds,’ so I figured that it would be mentioned once or twice in the story. Surprisingly, it was mentioned quite frequently. I learned from the first episode that WTNV jumps from one random topic to another in a matter of seconds, and almost always has a different topic. This episode was no different, but the theme of ‘glowing clouds’ was dispersed throughout the confusion. For example, the podcast began by talking about a tourist poster for the town of Night Vale. The poster was supposed to be for the Radon Canyon, which is where the glowing clouds were sighted. From there it jumps to talking about an Apache tracker, which caught me off guard. The Apache tracker story is then cut off by a sudden message from the ‘sponsor.’ Just to give you guys an idea of how unpredictable WTNV is, the sponsored message goes something like: “bitter taste of unripe peaches… moon and the world is spinning… nutrition and alarm clocks… brought to you by Coca Cola.” While the listener is still processing the puzzling sponsor message, the voice suddenly says that the glowing clouds are raining small creatures. It repeats this pattern multiple times, and I’m excited to listen to more episodes to see if this is a pattern only in this episode or if all the episodes will have a pattern as well. I also found out what the narrator means when he says it is time for the ‘weather.’ Around ⅔ of the way into the podcast, the podcast always has a little music break, and the song is the ‘weather’ forecast. In this episode, the song was “The Bus is Late,” by Satellite High. The title is completely self explanatory, and is of course just as odd as the rest of the podcast. The song breaks are a nice way to wake the listeners up from the fictional town of Night Vale, and I think it is nice to have a constant variable in midst of all the chaos. I also noticed that the podcast contains many oxymorons, to the point where everything they say contrasts against each other. An easy way to sum up this podcast would be to describe it as confusing, incohesive, and unpredictable. Honestly, trying to analyze this podcast seems impossible to me, but it makes me look forward to the challenge of listening to future episodes. I think that is the charm of Welcome to Night Vale working.
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Because this podcast seems to resemble more of fictional story telling rather than the news story type that is Radiolab, my gut is to compare Welcome to Night Vale to The Memory Palace that I talked about in my most recent blog post. It’s weird though because it seems that instead of repeated formats and structure, Night Vale relies more on unpredictability which is something I am not used to. I wonder if Night Vale also relies on description as heavily as the sound bites of The Memory Palace did or if they used a different technique. I think that it’s interesting that Night Vale is able to build suspense and keep the listener engaged and to continue the podcast series by being chaotic (constantly referring back to the ‘glowing clouds’ this gives listeners an anchor of some sort, though it does not seem to be reliable). I personally don’t think that this would be the best way to create the Sherlock podcasts especially the narrative podcast. I worry that the audience would be confused by random interjections of analysis then maybe a quick reading before going into a group discussion about some other aspect of the story. But I think in certain moments, it would be beneficial to keep the audience on their toes with measured moments of sudden change. Because that way, the pacing of the podcast can vary. We can build our own versions of The Night Vale’s suspense by strategically placing the shifts in topics and tones to keep the audience engaged. Overall though, keep up the good work and good luck (?), this seems like a challenging podcast to analyze for continuity (but maybe its randomness is its defining trait).
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