#wtnv 227

[faultyvessel]

IF WE DON'T GET CARLOS IN THE NEXT EPISODE (PREFERABLY SUFFERING) IM GOING TO COMMIT NUMEROUS FELONIES

[stained-watercolour-skies]

THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN JANET GOT UP ON THAT MICROPHONE!!! BITCH WHAT THE FUCK

[thevoiceofdesertbluffs]

Blake is such a horrible guy. A fucking liar. A fucking suck up. He loves Lubelle. He's scared of her. Suck up.

[paintunnel]

that was the hottest shit ive ever heard im on lubelles side sorry

[nonbinary-catboy]

Part of me is hoping this is kinda like the heist episode where Cecil is being dumb on purpose for scheming purposes but also I think it's funnier when he's just dumb.

[agnes-come-back-challenge]

ok so i needed some time to process that last episode but i know im not the only one who's fucking losing it

lauren mallard threatened to hurt carlos (and janice and koshekh) in order to control cecil way back when. why do i feel like dr lubelle is gonna try to make carlos do "proper science" again by threatening to explain cecil?

[dothethunderthing]

Disrespectfully, I’m going to fist fight Dr Janet Lubelle in the Arby’s parking lot

[hestias-night-vale-ramblings]

NO she's explaining the WEATHER and the RADIO STATION STIP THIS IS WHAT IVE BEEN WORRIED ABOUT

[eight-freakin-gids]

Welcome to Night Vale episode 227 got me

[hasbledtodeathunderourknife]

So, is the weather explained now? It’s been in every single episode (sometimes in other formats, but always there) and it would REALLY fuck with us if they just….didn’t do weather. No song at all.

No idea how next episode is going to be but imagine Cecil saying “And now, the weather.” and there’s just radio silence.

[faultyvessel]

So I've been downright obsessed with the way the current arc has been teasing Carlos having to look his past in the face and reconcile so here's some random thoughts. Carlos mentions when the U of WII first shows up in ep 212 that he's worried about Lubelle's lack of an ethical code, a trait shared by all of the faculty. We also know that him and Lubelle were grad students together, and that later Carlos goes on to become a member of the U of WII faculty. Carlos mentions how brilliant Lubelle is. Even though he's afraid, he can't fully speak ill of her, almost as though theres a minuscule piece of jealousy left over from bygone days when the two of them would push the limits in their pursuit of (and devotion to) science. Lubelle was always willing to go further, and it ate at him constantly, even when they set out on different scientific paths after school.

It still eats at him now, though for a very different reason.

The Carlos of those pre Night Vale days was less ethical (we've seen the bleed through of this past in his recklessness in It Devours and the lengths he was willing to go for the experiment ). I like to think that in pursuit of his past research, Carlos somehow gets himself into very hot water. (Insert whatever dubious scandal you like) He risks losing everything: name, funding, future. That is, until an old classmate turned faculty head reaches out to him, offering a position at the school and to vouch for him. Carlos accepts and he becomes a member of the faculty. After all, it's only logical to once again combine their great minds together. That far outweighs any previous consequences, and those vanish seemingly forever. Carlos doesn't think twice. He strives even harder now to be ruthless because seeing Lubelle in that position of power has rekindled the competitive jealousy of their grad days. Current Carlos now lies awake, thinking of two situations in his life where another has stepped in to wipe his past clean and give him a fresh start. Thinks about how much destruction is imminent because he's run so far those two iterations of himself have finally collided.

Carlos doesn't want to look that earlier scientist who shook her hand and accepted her salvation in the blink of an eye.

[2oodl3s]

“well that wasn’t the weather, it was just a song.”

i audibly gasped

[leonardburton]

what if cecil's dad is the one behind the mic next episode. would that be fucked up or what

[lesbeansprout]

See Cecil, this is why we don’t go to secondary locations!!

[nonbinary-catboy]

Lubelle dislikes poetry and artsy things I think she might be a marvel fan

[lostwords-found]

Today on Night Vale thoughts:

Thinking about Cecil's tendency to look away from deaths he doesn't want to see. Thinking about Go to the Mirror?: Do you think disbelief in death will make it disappear? Are awareness and manifestation one and the same? Thinking about the crooked path leading to the Narrow Place, which Cecil now claims he has never entered, where he wore a black coat and never existed.

Thinking about how in Ghost Stories Cecil tells the story of his mother returning home and dying ten years earlier, when he was an adult. Yet in Go to the Mirror? he asks: When was the last time you saw your mother? It's been since childhood, hasn't it? Since then, I don't think there's been any direct acknowledgement on the podcast that he remembers her death. I could be wrong about this.

In Ghost Stories he says that he and Abby came back together, when their mom returned, to navigate that dark and narrow path of forgiveness.

But he's never been into the Narrow Place, where he wore a black coat and never existed.

You know something you wear black to? Funerals.

All of this is to say, what if somewhere in the last few years Cecil looked away from his mother's death so hard, maybe due to his fears over parenting Esteban and confronting his own mortality, that he subconsciously retconned it into never happening and now as far as he's concerned she's still Out There Somewhere? What if like @bulkhummus said, the traffic in episode 227 was about Abby, and she was going to see their mom? What if the reason everything was identical to how Abby remembered it from decades earlier was because Cecil's just kind of stuck their mom in some nebulous vision of Somewhere that never changes, because Cecil can't let it change, because letting it change would mean letting time move forward and letting what already happened happen, and that would mean letting her die?

Do I think any of this is where the story is actually going? Nah probably not. Am I having too much fun thinking about it to care? Yep thank you for coming to my TED talk