A high-octane meditation on player agency

If you thought the last episode of Never Stop Blowing Up was chaotic, “Under the Night Sun,” the fourth installment of Dimension 20’s latest season, is utterly unhinged. During the accompanying episode of the Adventuring Party talk back show, we learn this season was filmed in September of last year. NSBU’s production schedule differs from previous seasons of Dimension 20, filming only one episode per day rather than two back-to-back. The performers said this schedule allows them to make larger, more high-risk choices. The result is “a fever dream,” as game master Brennan Lee Mulligan described during play. Given the almost cartoon logic of campy action films mixed with actual play, this episode becomes a fascinating exploration of negotiating power dynamics between player, game master, and the internal logic of the fiction.

The episode is an absurd parody of the Fast & the Furious series. It follows the events of the Long Beach 5000: a street race in which the first to reach 5,000 miles per hour—without leaving the bounds of the LA neighborhood—wins. Obviously, this is an impossible task, but well within the genre’s scope of reality. Mulligan’s in-universe defense for this? As any F&tF fan will tell you: “when you are good at driving, your vehicle goes faster." 

Before the race begins, Wendell (as Vic Ethanol) confronts Barsimmeon Higgs (as Damian Bane), the man who brought them all into this VHS pocket dimension. Barsimmeon, stunned to see the party, breaks his action star facade for a moment and reveals the scared old man within him—before downing a vial of the top secret supersoldier drug adrenanoxinil plutonium sulfate, which allows him to subtract five from all difficulty checks.

With Barsimmeon is J-Kwon, a rapper from the real world (much like the various rap stars that are featured in the Fast & the Furious films) who the old man trapped inside Never Stop Blowing Up. This established truth is later expanded when, during a particularly difficult series of rolls, J-Kwon uses Turbo Tokens to assist Izzy Roland like a player character would be able to—and again later when the players joke that rapper Bad Bunny lands in one of the cars as it destroys the gas station roof he was performing on, and Mulligan immediately incorporates that into canon.

“It's really funny to be in charge in a world like NSBU,” said Mulligan in the episode’s accompanying Adventuring Party. He notes the difficulty of having “to create a feeling of consequences or reality as Bad Bunny and J-Kwon shriek down the street."