#yes this is about wolf 359

[vyla-and-the-pods]

PEOPLE WHO ONLY HALF PAY ATTE TION TO PODCASTS BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO DO OTHER THINGS WHILE YOU DO THEM SO YOU GET THE MAIN PLOT BUT THE LITTLE DETAILS ARE FUZZY GANG RIIIIISE!!!

[bonebuckets]

sometimes found family is just a group of people who hate each other

[commsroom]

circumstances surrounding the “leaked” documents about eiffel’s sentencing in need to know, as i understand them:

one of the very first things kepler does is offer eiffel, minkowski, and lovelace a drink. in true “at any given moment, kepler has about eighteen ulterior motives” spirit, it is, among other things, “hospitality”, sure, a test for eiffel, definitely, but… i think the main reaction he was checking for was minkowski’s. will she look at eiffel, or react to his reaction? how much does she know? how much does he trust her?

in don’t poke the bear, jacobi and maxwell stop lovelace from breaking into kepler’s server by pretending to be in on it with her: “she’s very good. it might turn into a problem.” / “i’ll run it by kepler.” two episodes later, files from kepler’s very secure server are “leaked.”

(the words "need to know" are spoken offhandedly by eiffel in the episode itself, but it also calls back to the excuse maxwell gives lovelace: "colonel kepler practically lives by the words 'need to know.' and, apparently, nothing i can say will ever convince him that i 'need to know' everything that's in our databanks.")

need to know opens with minkowski finishing an eleven hour shift, and then finding out kepler moved that shift to, well. now. she’s already frustrated and sleep deprived.

minkowski complains to kepler. jacobi and maxwell, on cue, barge in and complain to kepler. kepler assigns minkowski, jacobi, maxwell, and lovelace to punishment detail, taking eiffel out of the group because “you’re the only one who hasn’t wasted my time with pointless whining.” lovelace says: “um, i don’t think that i did any complaining either, so…” but that doesn’t matter. it’s just an excuse to remove eiffel from the group; he could just as easily have been singled out for special punishment. either way, it was going to happen.

hilbert isn’t there. not the most significant factor, since he’s already been effectively sidelined by kepler, but remember he already knows about eiffel’s sentencing, doesn’t care (about eiffel’s history OR about anyone else’s personal drama), and will later respond to minkowski asking by telling her to grow up and get back to work. it simplifies things to not factor him in.

consider the files themselves: we know from happy holidays that maxwell not talking to her family is common knowledge, but jacobi reacts like it’s news. we know from hera’s performance review flashback in memoria that kepler and jacobi were aware of “multiple attempted crew member homicides” in her record. the file about hera’s bentham directory was on kepler’s server. if there’s one person who would’ve been briefed on everything there was to know about hera, it would’ve been maxwell; her shock is entirely feigned. in fact, almost every reaction from jacobi and maxwell here is feigned. they’re black ops specialists who arrived prepared with divide-and-conquer tactics. there’s no reason they wouldn’t know these things. also note that none of the “leaks” reveal anything about the mission they didn’t already know, and that nothing about the si-5 is incriminating - if anything, it’s mostly silly and even humanizing. and, yes, all of that contextualizes maxwell’s reaction to “skiing?!”

eiffel’s file comes through last, once they’re already worn out. kepler sends eiffel to check on them at the same time so that he’ll walk in. jacobi shows minkowski the file. he lurks around waiting to see how her not-confrontation with eiffel goes, and then cements the thought in her head: what about you? are you going to care?

it’s true that there are aspects of the mission only kepler knows, but as far as information on the hephaestus crew goes (barring one very particular detail about lovelace)? that’s part of the job they were chosen for. when they kill the plant monster, kepler says: “you think we didn’t know about that thing? please. we listened to every log that you beamed down to canaveral.” kepler’s entire foundation is shaken when jacobi turns on him because this is how they operate: “have one person take the blame, say the mean things. meanwhile, the poor, betrayed little guy gets a bit more leeway - just enough to sneak up and hit you from behind.” the show is not subtle about any of this. you can pick apart any early-s3 interaction between two hephaestus crew members and an si-5 agent and see the same divide-and-conquer tactics at play. jacobi and maxwell are always - in morals, loyalty, job description - closer to kepler than they are to the hephaestus crew, and to even sort of believe otherwise is falling for that facade. it’s worth remembering that the hephaestus crew are prisoners. some of them were aware of it from the start, and some of them were lied to, but none of them were meant to leave. the si-5, on the other hand, went up there with a unified goal, and the knowing intention they would be, among other things, prison guards.

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

looking at the 13 era books and audios like do we have to do everything our fucking selves around here

[emp-t-man]

haha wow guys i’m so excited for the ten year anniversary of wolf 359. can’t wait for gabriel to release the ten minute mini episode with the entire surviving cast talking about what they’ve been up to and how they’re still best friends and how eiffel got his memories back and how hera was finally able to see a real beach and everything’s fine haha right guys. right

[herawell]

Eiffel and Minkowski knew each other for 1200 days and spent only 300 of them as friends.

[baeba]

Memories, loss and solitude

[hephaestuscrew]

Appreciation post for the Hephaestus crew using the word 'boat' to refer to spaceships

Ep9 The Empty Man Cometh

EIFFEL: Unfortunately the good folks at Goddard Futuristics spared every expense when they put together this boat. [referring to the Hephaestus]

Ep23 No Pressure 

EIFFEL: The power and the support systems on this boat do kinda have a rocky relationship… [referring to Lovelace's shuttle]

Ep27 Knock, Knock

MINKOWSKI: I don't trust anyone on this boat right now. [referring to the Hephaestus]

Ep29 Pan-Pan

LOVELACE: Believe me, kids, right now I'm up for killing everything and everyone on this boat. But I promise the grid is down. [referring to the Hephaestus]

Ep30 Mayday

EIFFEL: Eiffel's Action Plan #1: turn this boat around, get back to the Hephaestus. [referring to Lovelace's shuttle]

Ep42 Time to Kill

EIFFEL: And we're sure our little lifeboat can survive the three hour tour? [referring to the experimental module]

Ep61 Brave New World

MINKOWSKI: Miss Young, you're going to go up to the bridge, you're going to get me flight capabilities, and then you and Kepler are going to get the hell off my boat. [referring to the Sol]

[calmthefrontdoor]

What if Everyone Had a Normal Job and Just Played D&D Together on the Weekends AU

Hera is the panicked DM

Kepler (Aasimar Oath of Conquest Paladin) and Jacobi (Halfling Artillerist Artificer) are having a macho pissing contest

Maxwell (Elven School of Enchantment Wizard) and Lovelace (Tiefling Mastermind Rogue) are actually strategizing and putting a plan together

Hilbert (Lizardfolk Knowledge Domain Cleric) and Eiffel (College of Eloquence Bard) are having a rules debate that will be absolutely meaningless in 2 turns

and Minkowski (Dwarven Battlemaster Fighter) is not so patiently waiting for her turn

[clonerightsagenda]

I don't think Hera would like having a physical form (she's very unenthused the few times she's limited to one source of visual input, for example) but if she had to be more portable I feel like she might mind being crammed into a Dear Listener-style ancillary the least as long as she got to join the hivemind. This would give her access to multiple perspectives and sources of information, which she's used to, but most importantly she could join the Doug Eiffel Groupchat. Her ability to make memes of every time he screws up would expand a thousand fold.

[rosielav]

Desperately need to find another currently ongoing podcast to listen to. I have nothing in my feed that releases new episodes except for MBMBAM and that's not nearly as exciting as I'd like it to be haha

PLEASE REC ME YOUR FAVORITE PODCASTS, PREFERABLY ONES STILL ONGOING OR WITH LOTS OF EPISODES!!!

Blease 😭😭😭😭

[commsroom]

the narrative significance of names in wolf 359 has this funny side effect where, like, it feels wrong to call the characters by their first names even when it's what 99% of people would call them in-universe. doug eiffel is in no way comparable to someone like, for example, fox "i even made my parents call me mulder" mulder; he's only eiffel to us because he's eiffel to the rest of the crew and that was just, like, the few most recent years of his life. he's always been doug. he's doug to his friends and to his ex and to his former coworkers at pizza hut and to like, i don't know, cashiers at 7-11 who recognize him, probably. he calls himself doug (and variations thereupon) regularly. but, because narratively first name moments between characters are reserved for when they really mean something emotionally, if i call him doug, i'm like, oh my god. that's so intimate. think of the implications.

[choofs]

this is a bad thought. i know it’s a bad thought, but i’m having it so. warnin for mild spoilers

while scrolling through kepler’s wiki page, i saw his playlist and how it ‘contains themes of poverty and abandonment’ and 1) i was thinking about how that just really complicated his character more than we get to see in the podcast because we learn next to nothing about him, but that’s not my point right now

2) with like, an understanding of that sort of background, i imagine that it’d make sense for him to hold onto some pretty select simple pleasures very strongly. like his scotch or his stories. and i was thinking, there was that one time with the cookies and eiffel

what if cookies are one of those things? and what if for his birthday or some sort of anniversary.. jacobi and/or maxwell bake him some

[officer-achilles]

Okay, I know Keppler AND Mr. Cutter both either outright say or heavily imply that Dr. Hilbert never was successful with Decima and that it was still a deadly virus...

BUT...

Keppler and Mr. Cutter both have clear reason to lie about this fact. Keppler has a known hatred of Dr. Hilbert AND wanted to undermine him at every opportunity. While it is clear that Lovelace's blood helped heal Eiffel- it could still be true that Decima was in fact working as well.

And Mr. Cutter threatens to use Decima to destroy the world- but that's because he only knows of its negative record- but by the time Decima could have hypothetically been working, Dr. Hilbert had long since stopped informing command of his work. There's a chance that Mr. Cutter is only working with old data and information on Decima (alongside perhaps what Keppler has told him) and merely believes that Decima is this mega-virus that could kill everyone.

Like... YES I'm probably wrong but through the narrative we get very little DIRECT proof that Decima never truly worked at the point of Eiffel's improvement. We are just redirected to another reason as to why Eiffel could be improving health-wise.