Night is a tricky character to write. Towards the beginning of the episode he has this to say about himself, “I too am a human thing. Long ago, men and women imagined me, they built me, they laid out rules for me, they ruled me and they worked with me and they hated me and they loved me.”

Because he was designed and built by humans, he has many human characteristics. At the same time he is also a machine, 800 years old at the time of our story. It was important to me that he not be Data from Star Trek. He’s not a machine trying to be human. Nor is he just a machine. He experiences emotions, although as he points out later in the episode it’s impossible to say if what he calls emotion matches the experience a human would call emotion.

So as I’m writing in his voice I constantly have to make decisions about how human he should sound in a moment. It’s fun work, if not always easy. Night is a favorite character of mine (he says about whichever character he happens to be talking about) and he gives us a new window into the past, as well as a better sense of how the Empire operated.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get the writing done this week and then I can record next week.