#the position eiffel and hera share at the bottom of that hierarchy. and the fact eiffel doesn't even realize it until bach to the future

[commsroom]

since wolf 359 is a show that puts so much emphasis on names / what people are called when / "first name moments", it puts hera in an interesting position that she only has a first name. you could maybe say the closest thing to a first name moment that she gets is in idle hands, when eiffel regains his mind, but the connotations are still a little different - it is an indicator of closeness / a significant relationship, but it isn't a shift in that relationship. i think part of the significance of first names - for anyone, when used sincerely - is the subtext of speaking to the person rather than the job they perform, but hera's name has additional stakes and significance for her when being called by her name is the baseline level of respect indicating who sees her as a person at all.

so, with that context, the other moment that interests me is the only time someone ever addresses her by rank: when minkowski calls her "officer" in let's kill hilbert. from minkowski in particular, that's also an acknowledgement of her personhood - evoking "she was a member of my crew." and i don't think this is just an honorary title bestowed by minkowski, either; in the most technical sense, i think hera probably does have a rank on the station. hera's programming restricts how she can address station officers. commonly, she addresses minkowski and lovelace as "commander" and "captain" when talking to them, and "commander minkowski" and "captain lovelace" when talking about them, while most other people she tends to refer to by both name and rank. she drops kepler and jacobi's titles after the mutiny.

but eiffel she calls (both when talking to him and about him) "eiffel" and "officer eiffel" interchangeably. (she never calls him just "officer.") in a practical sense, this helps communicate that her relationship with him is more casual - and in am i alone now? when she's talking 'to' him but not really to him, she calls him "doug", which has a whole other set of implications for how she thinks about him, when in that same monologue she still says "commander minkowski" and "doctor hilbert." - but… i think it's also pretty reasonable to assume that her rank is functionally the same as his, and that part of why she's more comfortable with him even early on is that he quite literally does not have the same authority over her that everyone else does.