Influenced by the Twilight Zone television show, Night Springs is the name of fictional TV series that players can watch episodes of in their travels across Bright Falls. There are six episodes that you can watch, which will earn you the Couch Potato reward.
Location:
Episode Five. After crossing the rotating bridge, enter the office on the side of the road. Collect a pump-action shotgun, a coffee thermos, and switch on the TV.
Overview:
After discovering an unusual portal in her basement, Martha and her friend Lydia descends the staircase once more to talk to its creator.
Recording:
Transcript:
NARRATOR: Are we men dreaming of being butterflies, or butterflies that dream of being men? Such philosophical concerns are, by necessity, abstract, and yet some of us can find concrete proof of the nature of our existence... in Night Springs. Tonight's episode... an Absence of Creativity.
(A woman rushes through her house to open the front door.)
LYDIA: Hello Martha, what did you want to show me.
MARTHA: Oh, Lydia, thank God you're here. Please, it's in the basement.
(They walk through the house to the basement.)
LYDIA: Oh, Martha! Oh, that's amazing!
(They stand in front of some kind of portal.)
MARTHA: Isn't it just? I found it here this morning.
LYDIA: It's like it isn't there, but- oh, I can't look straight at it.
STORYTELLER: Yes. I'm sorry about that.
(The Narrator emerges from the portal.)
MARTHA: Oh! Oh, er, er. How did you get here?
STORYTELLER: Well... I'm trying to work.
MARTHA: Did you put this thing here?
STORYTELLER: In a way. To be more precise, I put everything here but that.
LYDIA: Really? But what is it?
STORYTELLER: Oh, I guess the temptation is to call it a hole, but it's really an absence. I profound lack of reality.
LYDIA: In Martha's basement?
STORYTELLER: Yes. I was doing so well too! I came up with two old ladies and put something really weird in the basement. It was a great start, but I'm completely blocked now. I can't imagine what I was up to.
MARTHA: Well, surely it's just an ordinary basement.
STORYTELLER: Is it? Why did you call your friend here then?
MARTHA: Well, I- I don't know.
STORYTELLER: Oh well.
LYDIA: Could you just ignore it?
STORYTELLER: No, no, I couldn't do that. It would probably turn into a plothole. Might be one already. Could sink the whole enterprise.
LYDIA: Oh, my!
STORYTELLER: Listen, ladies. Not to be rude, but I'm really not at all sure where I'm going with this, and you're just not helping. You should just go back upstairs for a cup of coffee while I try to figure out what I'm up to.
MARTHA: Well... if you think that's best.
(The two ladies begin to head back upstairs.)
STORYTELLER: Maybe I should just stop here. Or is that too moronic?
NARRATOR: Is that too moronic, indeed. Who can tell? It's a fine line between the stupid and the sublime... in Night Springs.
Notes from Absence of Creativity:
- Fourth Wall. Absence of Creativity is the only Night Springs episode which breaks the fourth wall.
- Writer's Block. Similar to the themes of Alan Wake, the storyteller within the episode faces writer's block.
Night Springs in American Nightmare:
In Alan Wake's American Nightmare, Alan expands on what Night Springs is and its meaning to him in a series of manuscript pages:
- Alan Wake, The Writer. "My name is Alan Wake, and I’m a writer. I didn’t become one overnight. Like most writers, I struggled with it -- a short story here, an article there. Then I got lucky and spent a year as a staff writer on the Night Springs TV show. It wasn’t the great American novel of my fantasies, but it taught me discipline and craft, and the difference between wanting to be a writer and actually writing."
- Night Springs, the Cult TV Show. "Night Springs doesn’t exist. It’s a fictional town from the TV show I used to work on. It was Anyplace, USA, a place we used as a backdrop for whatever strange story we had that week. One of the stories I wrote for the show involved a man, “the champion of light,” fighting his evil double, “the herald of darkness”. It was something I’d written back in the real world -- something I had a link to, a framework I could build on. I adapted it into a new story. This story."
