Darkness
Darkness
[Ponytail is a news anchor at a media desk and she reports:] Ponytail: ...getting reports that the darkness has spread as far west as Texas. Let's go live to our reporter in Houston.
[From a breaking news window in the bottom right corner of the panel, Cueball as a newscaster stands in darkness with two people walking behind him:] Cueball: It's been thirty minutes since the sun vanished...
[Caption below the panel]: Caption: "Genie, for my last wish, make everyone in the media forget about the day-night cycle."

Ponytail as a news anchor describes the sunset as though it were an unprecedented, newsworthy event, rather than something mundane that happens every day. They even have a reporter ( Cueball ) on the spot reporting from where the darkness has spread so far.
The sunset is a common event. Isaac Asimov based his short story Nightfall on a fictional civilization that doesn't know darkness because the planet is always illuminated by the six stars surrounding it. The story describes how people would react (mass insanity, fall of civilization) when the orbital motion of the planet eventually leads to five of the suns setting, plus one in eclipse.
Describing mundane occurrences in unusual detail, to show off how odd they really are, is something Randall has done before (for instance about dreaming in 203: Hallucinations ). But the caption below the main panel adds another twist to the joke by showing that the news report wasn't a mere imagine spot, but something actually happening due to the interference of Randall's final wish to his genie , which caused all news reporters to forget the day-night cycle.
Another possible meaning is that this comic is a reference to the way the media often talk about global warming as if each weather occurrence had meaning outside of its context like in 1321: Cold . That take on the weather and the day-night cycle being denied because of a skewed point of view was also used on the Daily Show . The segment " Unusually Large Snowstorm " from February 10, 2010, used the same trope. Several Daily Show correspondents have different views on the weather based on where they are, ending with a correspondent who equates nighttime with everlasting darkness.
The caption references the fact that there is a limit to the number of wishes. It is a common rule, often used in fiction, that you get three wishes from a genie in a bottle . There usually is an added stipulation that no wish may be used to acquire more wishes.
In the title text, however, it is stated that Randall has managed to bypass the three wish limit rule. This was accomplished by using his second wish to simply make the genie unable to remember granting the speaker any wishes. He has thus used the same trick on the genie as he used here on the media. The media wish turns out not to have been his last (i.e. third), but rather wish number 406. This shows just how far, "make someone forget something", can go by applying it to the genie.
There is possibly an inconsistency in the comic, when seen from the title text's perspective. Since his second wish, all his wishes would have been seen as the first by the genien and thus, if the title text is true, he could have said: "Genie, for my first wish, make everyone in the media forget about the day-night cycle." However, in the light of the title text (to be seen as an add on, and thus not always related directly to the comics image) he appears to voluntarily end the whole scenario by explicitly declaring it over. Whether this would finally trigger the genie to end the wishing-cycle is unknown, and depends upon the exact priority of the genie's induced amnesia over its end-of-wishes habits.
It is interesting that it was his second wish that gave him unlimited wishes. What did he wish for on wish #1? Maybe he wasted the first wish because he did not believe the genie was able to grant wishes – a common error. On the other hand, he may have used the first wish to learn how to make his second wish circumvent the three rule limit. His first wish could have been to read the genie's mind to determine what he could wish for to give him unlimited wishes.
[Ponytail is a news anchor at a media desk and she reports:] Ponytail: ...getting reports that the darkness has spread as far west as Texas. Let's go live to our reporter in Houston.
[From a breaking news window in the bottom right corner of the panel, Cueball as a newscaster stands in darkness with two people walking behind him:] Cueball: It's been thirty minutes since the sun vanished...
[Caption below the panel]: Caption: "Genie, for my last wish, make everyone in the media forget about the day-night cycle."
