☞ Station Archives
A WTNV season 1 retrospective
☞ What is Welcome to Night Vale about?
Welcome to Night Vale is a twice-monthly podcast in the style of community updates for the small desert town of Night Vale, featuring local weather, news, announcements from the Sheriff's Secret Police, mysterious lights in the night sky, dark hooded figures with unknowable powers, and cultural events.
Turn on your radio and hide.
Hello, listeners.
Current episode — 2: Glow CloudRuntime — June 15-21
Read reviews 
Length: 20 minutes
Weather: The Bus is Late by Satellite High
Initial release: July 1, 2012
"A mysterious, glowing cloud makes its way across Night Vale. Plus, new Boy Scouts hierarchy, community events calendar, and a PTA bake sale for a great cause!"
Optional: Check out the Good Morning Night Vale cast retrospective.
Traffic report
Current episode — 1: PilotRuntime — June 8-14
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Length: 23 minutes
Weather: These and More Than These by Joseph Fink
Initial release: June 15, 2012
"A new dog park opens in Night Vale. Carlos, a scientist, visits and discovers some interesting things. Seismic things. Plus, a helpful guide to surveillance helicopter-spotting."
Optional: Check out the Good Morning Night Vale cast retrospective.
About Station Archives
Station Archives is a digital podcast club that "meets" by listening to and reviewing one episode of WTNV's first season each week, from Pilot through to One Year Later. The reviews are collected and posted to this webpage — you can see them all by clicking on the "Episodes" button in the menu.
I created this club because I adore this podcast and have since I was 13, way back in the bygone year of 1475. It's essentially a way for people to reconnect to the show together!
About Welcome to Night Vale
Genres: Absurdist, supernatural, horror, comedy
Content warnings: Unreality, peril
Average length: ~20 minutes
Welcome to Night Vale is a cult-classic (if I do say so myself) podcast written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. The first episode was released in 2012, and the show has been airing bi-monthly since.
Episodes are narrated by Cecil Palmer (voiced by Cecil Baldwin), the town of Night Vale's local radio host. Episodes are presented as in-universe radio news broadcasts, featuring segments such as the traffic, Children's Fun Fact Science Corner, and weather, as well as occassional guest appearences by characters like Carlos The Scientist, the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home, and Deb, a sentient patch of haze.
Each season is 25 episodes long and features a cohesive plot alongside the more slice-of-life content.
List of episodes
Click on the episode titles to see what our interns have written. Sorted alphabetically.
"Pilot"
Intern Damien
"Let me start by saying that I've never listened to Welcome to Nightvale before, although I have heard about it's existance every now and then over the years..."
Let me start by saying that I've never listened to Welcome to Nightvale before, although I have heard about it's existance every now and then over the years. So the first episode, what can I say?
I really like the premise, an isolated town, weird happenings, a friendly yet kinda menacing in-a-way radioshow host, it has an very cool atmosphere going for it. The part that stood out to me this episode is about the strange lights above Arby's. Such a chilling and funny reading. "Ladies and Gentleman, the future is here, and it's about a 100 feet above the Abry's"
I am exited about the Carlos plotline, a group of scientists enters the town and wants to do research on what is going on. Who or what are the robed figures in the dog park? What about those helicopters with birds on them? What do you mean there is an house there that does not excist? And how come Carlos is so damn handsome?!?
My hopes for the podcast are that there will be connecting points, some story perhaps and hopefully some answers along the way.
Intern İki
"A Scientist Walks into the Desert [,] asks for the truth, and is answered with Cartesian doubt..."
A Scientist Walks into the Desert…
…asks for the truth, and is answered with Cartesian doubt. How to make sense of Night Vale, this notedly “weird”, “absurd”, and “vaguely ominous” (why vaguely?) fictional desert town? Fear not, dear listeners, for City Council is the sole epistemic authority on what is real, even with a scientist (and his team) in town. Oh well, we have all been scientists at one point or another of our lives.
Why Carlos? (“Why his perfect and beautiful coat?”) My friend has this theory that if a Pleistocene man was transported to here and now, what he’d see would not be buildings, public spaces that are not public spaces (the “Dog Park”), triangulated air surveillance, commercial airlines disrupting basketball practice – he couldn’t quite perceive them, what he’d see would be primordial soup: colors, shapes, and perhaps, the hooded figures, and throw in angels to the mix too (Yum! But no, perhaps – they could throw in a few logs to the bonfire, in exchange for some meat? Did we have salt back then? Yes?).
But primordial soup has to wait for Carlos has brought his toolbox: a lab, a team, experiments, seismic monitors, and “a blinking box in his hand covered with wires and tubes” which, to me, reads essential scientific equipment. He’s measuring, experimenting, calculating, investigating – what does he find out? That the sun doesn’t set at the right time, that there’s a house that wants to remain peerless in its non-existence, that there are ghost earthquakes, that there is something seriously wrong with the Night Vale Radio Station. He finds that the town of Night Vale is a giant heap of noise where a reliable signal is a needle in a haystack. Except, no, there’s a pattern here: It’s all aleatory, my God, there’s not a single constant. Let there be soup.
I fear for Carlos. Yes, the vague yet menacing agency plays a part in this. But also, “I fear for anyone caught between what they know and what they don’t yet know that they don’t know”. Doesn’t that perfectly sum up the condition of the stranger in town?
Listeners around the world have classified Night Vale as a “horror” podcast, while simultaneously asserting that it’s a “surreal comedy”. I fear for genre conventions, fear for my ability to predict and calculate based on existing structures. I wonder, why is tuning into Cecil so calming with terrors abound? Why, “while we all pretend to sleep” (isn’t this what trying to fall asleep looks like?), we tune in, as I have every night when I was eighteen? Perhaps for the simple fact that if there’s everything to fear – there’s nothing to fear. Perhaps, if there’s everything to doubt – there’s nothing to doubt. I fear for my epistemic freedom as a free man, which, coincidentally, is what the name “Carlos” means.
So why Carlos? I remember a quote, which is from a writer I’m not name dropping for immersive reasons, that all great stories start one of two ways: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Night Vale is the latter – is it Carlos or us, the listener? Do we dare knock on the door of this non-existent desert town? This town that is almost trivially unknowable, except, it is unknowable in interesting ways.
So I have redeemed my epistemic freedom, and I know the City Council is not happy about this. Businesses dead at conception, Arby’s haloed with an alien glow, vast underground cities beneath bowling alleys – I already know the theory of Night Vale cannot be completed. I hope that there are a thousand competing hypotheses in this conspiratorial town, and as soon as we falsify one, I hope there are these and more than these, and we dig in deeper, to end up at something which turns out to be nothing, which turns out to be something.
And we saw the truth, and it was good; and we were going to divide the truth from the false. I swear. The soup just has more of a kick to it, this way.
Intern Jesse
"Carlos, perfect and beautiful..."
Carlos, perfect and beautiful. I've listened to a smattering of random episodes but I'm excited to finally start this series. I'm very delighted with the style it is definitely of a certain time and niche but the writing's quality keeps it from feeling dated. I'm interested in how episodic it'll be as well.
Intern Marina
"My best friend was the one who was into Night Vale back in the day..."
My best friend was the one who was into Night Vale back in the day. I did try to listen to it around 2014, but I'm not great with the audio medium, so it never really stuck, though I loved the pod's weird fiction vibes. I think I listened to about ten episodes before I gave up. I think this club is the perfect means for me to try and get into it again!
My attention span isn't much better than it used to be. I checked the transcript immediately after listening to the episode only to discover a whole paragraph that I couldn't remember because I apparently zoned out (it was the one about the jet disrupting the practice)! Thank god for transcripts.
I think it was a good pilot episode. We get our first taste of Night Vale weirdness and are introduced to Carlos and Old Woman Josie and the Night Vale/Desert Bluffs rivalry. I loved the line that Carlos had "teeth like a military cemetery" - what a metaphor!
Intern Remy
"The nostalgia of season one of Welcome to Night Vale is real..."
The nostalgia of season one of Welcome to Night Vale is real. I truly believe that everyone deserves to have the experience of being thirteen years old, listening to this show for the first time, preferably on shitty earbuds. And if you're not thirteen anymore, now's as good a time as any.
I remember the December I started listening-- laying on an air mattress in my cousin's room, wallowing in my eighth-grade angst, and deciding to try out this interesting-sounding podcast I'd heard about on Tumblr. From the ever-iconic opening lines, I was hooked. I was transported to Night Vale, "a friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep." I fell in love with the way the supernatural is handled by the show. Even when something extraordinary happens, or something dangerous or upsetting, the news is delivered as though it isn't anything more than a minor inconvenience or disappointment. I got the impression that life in Night Vale is, despite everything, peaceful. That it was somehow a good place to live. It really stuck with me, as someone who has always disliked where I grew up.
One thing I appreciate about the pilot is how well it sets up the first year of the show. The first few years, really, if you know where to look. From Carlos's entry into town to the passing mention of Desert Bluffs, major concepts are immediately introduced so seamlessly that you hardly notice when they become more directly important. Even bigger-picture things, like the Angels and the house that doesn't exist. Looking back on things like that is part of the reason I love a relisten.
I mentioned that I began my journey with Night Vale one December. A day or so later, the worst year of my life would kick off with a bang, but I was shepherded through it by Cecil's voice and news of the goings-on in this community.
Intern Ren
"13 years; it's been 13 years since this podcast began..."
13 years; it’s been 13 years since this podcast began. A whole teenager-length of time since I myself was listening to this very first episode in high school. I wondered if it would be challenging to write about this episode, as I definitely listened to this opening pilot countless times that summer alone. I can tell you how it feels to be wrapped up in a warm blanket of memory upon hearing the opening song again, but I feel like a review should also come with a first impression. To that, I can remember the smile on my face as I sat in my bed in my parent’s house and listened to this episode from my tinny iPhone speakers on a humid summer night. I thought the show would be *scary*, when I first learned about it, and so was slightly on edge listening to the first couple of episodes, but kept being happily surprised by its tone and the world it was crafting.
Given that this is an auditory experience I’m writing about, I would be remiss if I didn’t first mention the voice of our narrator and guide to Night Vale, Cecil Palmer. It is even smoother and lovelier than I remember, perhaps the platonic ideal of a small town radio host. I recall that one of the things that drew artists and creatives to WTNV was sharing their renditions of Cecil and the other characters and entities of the show. I saw so many beautiful designs back then, so many drawings of angels and hooded figures and of course, Cecil. I think in my mind I will always imagine him as a Native American man, one of the very first artistic interpretations of him I ever saw floating across my Tumblr dashboard.
On the topic of voice, I think the creators of this show really hit on something simple but special with the radio show idea. Talk about effective use of your medium! Not only that, but it is a great en media res way to experience the world of Night Vale. There is a casual familiarity to Cecil’s explanations of the strange happenings that really sells to me that this is all par for the course for the citizens of this desert town. Yet we are still able to find ourselves, seamlessly, at the inciting action of a story: the arrival of Carlos and his team of scientists. They are trying to unravel the countless oddities of Night Vale and, as curious outsiders, are a perfect conduit for change and upheaval in a town accustomed to keeping its head down about the general ominous happenings.
And the imagery here, the unmarked helicopters, the secret police, the paranoia and conspiracy of small-town USA, the cultish hooded figures and vaguely-extraterrestrial lights above the Arby’s—the marriage of political and supernatural mysteries that so often color the worldview of the conspiracy theorist, ring true to me. In Night Vale there exist both 10-ft tall radiant multiracial angels and vaguely menacing government agents, and it is a place that I have known.
I’d like to take a quick second to admire the prose of this show; the first episode has a line that has stuck with me for many years for its precise and macabre comparison: “He has a square jaw and teeth like a military cemetery.” I also remember being instantly endeared towards Cecil for his open attraction to Carlos, and it was no less true this time around.
Speaking again on the effectiveness of the medium, the use of music here is just as lovely as I remembered. The ‘weather’ report actually being a song is another great way that the show subverts the listener’s expectations of the radio-broadcast format. Usually it is being subverted by the content of Cecil’s reporting: the strange happenings of the town, and by treating them like they are commonplace. But here we subvert the setup of the broadcast itself. And this is without even discussing Disparition’s ‘The Ballad of Fielder and Mundt’, the opening song I mentioned earlier. I don’t think I’m capable of untangling this song from the memories it carries, but I will say that even without the influence of nostalgia, if I heard this song for the first time today, I would still put it on repeat on my headphones because it’s that good. It’s an instrumental track—no vocals, but no less enveloping and consuming. The bandcamp page for this song tags it with the genres of “experimental,” “ambient,” “dark,” “electroacoustic,” and “gothic.” This is the exact kind of song, as I said, that I could listen to on repeat as I write or draw.
Now, WTNV is not a comedy podcast in the way many other are. Instead it is a surreal comedy. The humor in this, absurdist in the face of the unknowable, still manages to take me off guard and chuckle like it was the first time hearing it. I’d forgotten, somehow, about little offhand comments like the one from Old Woman Josie about her angel visitors—”She’s offering to sell the old light bulb, which has been touched by an angel (it was the black angel, if that sweetens the pot for anyone).” And the deadpan delivery of many of these lines, such as the NRA bit—Cecil describing the vinyl stickers the NRA was selling which proclaim “Guns don't kill people. It's impossible to be killed by a gun. We are all invincible to bullets and it's a miracle.”—works super well.
The NRA bit there is also a good example of the writers taking the piss out of something it fundamentally disagrees with. We can see this again when Cecil talks about the white man with “the Indian-headdress” with obvious derision, likening his get-up as a racist caricature. There is acknowledgment of the world as a strange and unknowable place, and yet rather than anyone else here it comes from the mouth of someone unmistakably progressive in their beliefs. While I’m unsure if I fully processed it, this was extremely affirming to me at the time. You do not have to fully see yourself in a piece of art to enjoy it or to have it impact your life, and I’d say it’s even recommended to seek out art made by and about those who are very, very different from you…but I can’t pretend that the resonance I felt here was not a bonus.
You grow up in a small town—as many people do—and you have your preconceived notions about the world outside. About the ‘real world’, the one that adults inhabit, full of freedom and mystery and opportunity.
I feel like I was an entirely different person the first time I listened to WTNV. And I was, in many ways; life will do that do you. But it adds another layer of unreality to this listening experience for me. I feel—as I have felt many times in my life—like I am watching myself, the self of the past in this case, from the outside and observing their feelings as they hear these words for the first time. Despite the warm feelings of nostalgia, there is a distance there, there is a younger me that I don’t recognize reminding me they still exist within me.
I look forward to going on this journey together, and am excited to see what I rediscover about both myself and this lovely podcast. Until next time, goodnight listeners.
Goodnight.
Intern Stag
"Amazing how it captures the vibe of local radio with all it's little tid-bits of info..."
Amazing how it captures the vibe of local radio with all it's little tid-bits of info. Of course Old Woman Josie (iconic!!) is selling a light-bulb touched by angels. Of course there's a dog park being opened. Of course the local city jerk is pulling another stint. Carlos as an outsider stand-in yet exposition person at the same time works wonderfully well. Whatever Cecil doesn't cover in his nonchalant way, Carlos will report in as research.
Surprised at how much you can forget about an episode you think you've listened to a lot of times. So many iconic characters make their entrance here already! Locations, events, etc. etc. If I remember correctly, there may even be some pretty far-off foreshadowing here (underground city!!).
Do think that the end credits are as iconic as the TMA opening disclaimer about 4.0 international license. Proverbs!!
Weather Rating (These and More Than These):
3.5/5
Intern list
How to join
Listen to one episode of Welcome to Night Vale each week and write something about it! Once that's done, forward your piece to me through my email or my Neocities profile . Make sure to include your name (and a link to your website or a social media profile if you want)!
QnA
How long does my review have to be?
That's totaly up to you! Just make sure it's not, like, a sentence and you're good.
When's the deadline to send my review in?
Sunday at 10:00 PM. It's perfectly alright if you're a bit late.
What kind of review should it be?
Once again, whatever you'd like! The goal of this club is simply to get people talking about WTNV's first year. You could write anything — from a collection of your thoughts on it to a critical 15,000 word response, including everything in-between and elsewhere.
I want to join, but I only found out about this [X] weeks after it began.
No worries! Listen to whatever episode we're on that week, write a review, and send it in. Preferably you'd then go back and do the same for previous episodes.
