#Do you ever think about Gabriel Urbina saying that the core of Wolf 359 is about conversations between Eiffel and Minkowski?

[hephaestuscrew]

Do you ever think about Minkowski and Eiffel? Do you ever think about how, even when she didn't really like him, she refused to contemplate the idea of not going out into a solar storm to save his life? Do you ever think about how after Hilbert's mutiny, when everything they thought they knew about the mission had been replaced with dangerous uncertainty, Eiffel was the only person within lightyears that Minkowski could trust, and vice versa? Do you ever think about how he was able to make her laugh in spite of everything? Do you ever think about him saying "At least I have you around to keep me out of trouble" and "The force of your common sense keeps the rest of us insane-os in check"? [cont. below the cut]

Do you ever think about how Minkowski told Lovelace she couldn't imagine losing Eiffel, and then she nearly lost him over and over? Do you ever think about her shouting "No. No! After all the crap we - We still have time!" beside what could have been his deathbed? Do you ever think about her promising not to leave him out in deep space and then yelling his name into the void? Do you ever think about how she had to report him as 'missing in action' on two separate occasions?

Do you ever think about how often he imagined what she would say to him in a crisis? Do you ever think about how his imaginings of her went from just relentlessly berating him (Ep6), to harshly talking him through working out how to survive (Ep30), to reassuring him and telling him not to listen to his insecurities (Ep61)?

Do you ever think about when they were reunited and she hugged him so tightly he could barely breathe and he said "I missed you too, Commander. I missed you too"? Do you ever think about how he never stopped calling her Commander, not when Kepler demoted her, not even when she voluntarily gave up Command to Lovelace?

Do you ever think about how deeply it shook her to learn about his jail sentence? Do you ever think about he couldn't deal with her not talking to him? Do you ever think about when they reconciled, how they stumbled over themselves to apologise, how he said that his past was her business, how they shook on the fact that they were friends and Hera said they were "adorable"?

Do you ever think about how he didn't give a shit about the military chain of command but he would have followed her straight into hell and everyone else on the Hephaestus knew it? Do you ever think about how often and how determinedly he backed her up? Do you ever think about him declaring "there is a special place in hell reserved for those dumb enough to die trying to outstubborn Lieutenant Commander Renée Minkowski"? Do you ever think about how he served as her moral compass and how he reminded her of her values when circumstances almost pushed her into doing awful things?

Do you ever think about how at the beginning of the mission he didn't really listen when Minkowski explained about the importance of the pronounciation of her name, but, after she told him towards the end of the mission how much it mattered to her, he made sure to get the pronounciation of her name right, even when she wasn't there, even in high stress situations like preparing for a leap of faith into a star?

Do you ever think about how he trusted her specifically to convey "all the stuff you tell people back home" if he didn't make it? Do you ever think about when he returned from his journey into the star and he told her "Oh, it's so good to see you" and (according to the script directions) "embrace[d] her tightly, happiness radiating from him"?

Do you ever think about how he said he didn't want to hurt her even as she was beating him up because of Pryce's restraining bolt? Do you ever think about his horrified under-his-breath "No..." when he realised that Pryce was planning to make her step out of the airlock? Do you ever think about his desperate yells for her to snap out of it?

Do you ever think about her calling him "my mischief specialist"? Do you ever think about how he was the one she decided needed to make it back to Earth? Do you ever think about how his survival was more important to her than having his help in the fight against Cutter's plan? Do you ever think about how distressed he was at the idea of leaving her behind? Do you ever think about "Goddammit, Renée, DON'T DO THIS!" / "Goodbye, Doug."?

Do you ever think about how he went from resenting her authority to telling her "It was an honor to serve under you. Sir."? Do you ever think about how she watched him forget her? Do you ever think about the script direction "There's a BEAT for Minkowski's heart to break a little"? Do you ever think about how she reintroduced herself to him but asked him to call her by her first name? Do you ever think about her insistence on seeing him as soon as possible when she woke up on the Urania?

Do you ever think about how she once called him an "insubordinate hyena" and a "conniving little snake", but later told him that he "made it up to [her]. Big time"? Do you ever think about how he went from seeing her as "our resident Statsi agent" to thinking she was "the greatest, coolest, most badass space commander ever"? Do you ever think about how Eiffel thought that "spending time with [Minkowski and Hera] was about the best damn thing Doug Eiffel ever did"? Do you ever think about how, after everything she'd been through, after three and a half years away from Earth, what Minkowski wanted "more than anything" was to be there with Eiffel as he figured things out?

[theradioghost]

Below the cut, a long ramble on Wolf 359, personhood, the ending of Memoria, and the last scene of Bolero:

Gabriel confirmed a thought I'd always had during the AMA in saying the show is about, at its core, communication (and conversely, isolation) and personhood. Communication comes often through Eiffel, predictably: he speaks directly to us, his "Listeners," his voice becomes the voice of alien contact but is also always the voice of moral reason, of abstinence from harm. The show, Urbina says, is about the conversations between Eiffel and Minkowski; Eiffel, who hears voices; Eiffel, whose closest friendship is marked by the phrase "can you hear me?" Every single character is introduced to us as a transmission or recording (or Hera’s disembodied voice) -- as a message, an attempt to communicate.

I think it's Hera and Hilbert who bring personhood to the front at first. We also get Eiffel's lack of self-value, his conversation with Hera in Bach to the Future where he reveals just how dehumanizing it is for him to discover he was disposable, a guinea pig; but both of them struggle in that scene with damage caused by Hilbert, a character who has a markedly different view of personhood and what rights it confers. Hilbert has zero respect for their bodily autonomy, their individuality, their personhood; a person is nothing, an ideal is everything. It isn’t so much that he denies them personhood as that personhood holds no intrinsic value for him. In fact, much of how characters communicate is based on how they view and value one another (see Hilbert referring to Hera as "the AI," or the entirety of The Sound and the Fury). Everyone's personhood is in question when they are made into tools, defined as disposable. They’re not just fighting to survive; they’re asserting their right to exist, to be seen as full individuals and more than the tools of a distant corporation.

And personhood, of course, defines Hera's story. Is she a person? It's self-evident that to the story, and to Hera, the answer is and always should be yes. Again and again, in the face of everything people do to her, Hera reaffirms her personhood, her right to exist, her right to autonomy. (The very first thing that endeared Eiffel to me was the extent to which he treated her like a person -- never assuming she’s available at his every whim, calling her shutdown “killing his friend,” the jokes and pet names, the line where he calls her “the woman who makes my oxygen” -- has Hera been referred to as a woman at any other point?) And there’s a clear line drawn, too, among the other characters: your morality is defined by how you treat people like people, and often via Hera. The conversation where Lovelace acknowledges the problems her escape plan and threats present to Hera is a redemptive one. Hilbert’s act of betrayal starts with denying Hera free will and culminates in ripping out her brain. To Kepler, she is disposable; to Eiffel, so often the moral compass, she’s a friend.

Which is, I think, part of why people find Maxwell so compelling. How do we know where Maxwell fits in this scheme? (and now, how will we ever know? which may, in a meta sense, be the most appropriate choice. in real life, we can't assume we know and understand a person on the level we often do with a fictional character; with Maxwell, that truth is now equally closed to us. her personhood remains her own, not ours to neatly sort: Good or Bad. this is just one, very grandly thematic way to view her death, though.) Maxwell, who is willing to kill but saw both Jacobis as real people even if only one was human; Maxwell, who would alter Hera's memories and force her to act against her will, but also teach her to fight back, see her as a person, be infuriated by what Pryce did to her.

In one of the most directly dehumanizing acts of the show, Pryce instructs Cutter: not "her." never "her." just "it." this scene is deeply, disturbingly a violation. what Pryce does is framed as nothing but unforgivable (and just look at the fandom’s reaction to it; do we hate or fear anyone as much as Pryce?). and it is directly parallel to Kepler's use of "it" to describe Captain Lovelace. I’m literally so white I can’t buy foundation, so obviously there are limits to my comprehension of how damaging Desperate Measures was. And the misogynoir associated with her death at Kepler’s hands can’t be separated from his referring to her as it, as a thing. But I do think this scene is deliberately and consciously disturbing. Kepler’s language is not a casual choice by the writers. It mirrors his first time addressing Hera, where he knows her name but calls her by model instead; it mirrors Pryce, it mirrors Cutter’s casual disregard for the lives of the crew, it mirrors Hilbert’s disregard for the bodies of crew members past and present and other human, humanized corpses -- Lovelace’s crew -- which the show’s morally worst characters have disregarded. (Eiffel and Minkowski, meanwhile, continue to refer to Lovelace as “her,” by her name, even after Kepler “corrects” them to “it.” There’s a line being drawn here.)

There’s a conversation in Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum involving part-time moral philosopher, full-time witch Granny Weatherwax that goes

“And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” “It’s a lot more complicated than that—” “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they are getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.” “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—” “But they starts with thinking about people as things.”

Wolf 359, I think, takes a very similar stance. It’s not for me to decide whether, in light of her death, this scene at Lovelace’s resurrection is appropriate. I do think, though, that the show’s stance on personhood and acts like this has always been clear, and that this specific choice is directly connected to some of the things that the show has portrayed as the morally worst things a person can do. It made me feel sick to my stomach when I heard it, but I think it was meant to.