#triple white chocolate mocha with whipped cream ... disgusting sweet tooth on that man. he loves the slop

[commsroom]

it is a little funny to me that zach valenti is a vegetarian and seems generally health conscious, considering that doug eiffel is... not that. the opposite of that, even. eiffel would say french fries should count as a vegetable. eiffel thinks ham & pineapple pizza covers all necessary food groups. eiffel has a meat & carbs & grease based diet, sustained by a quick metabolism and an iron stomach. and he is like aggressively american; eiffel is the guy they make novelty fast food items for. there is nothing in this world he wants more than a burger that is also a pizza. doritos® locos tacos and baja blast. that radioactive looking flamin' hot cheetos mac and cheese? he would eat that. no question. that guy loves koolaid flavors that don't even resemble artificial fruit.

[commsroom]

So. Douglas Fernand Eiffel, born on December 25th, 1982, in Boston, MA. Goddard Employee ID #68152. Pop culture savant, appreciator of pineapple on pizza, and Communications Officer on board the USS Hephaestus Station. I love him so much.

Because I’m an unhinged person with too much time on my hands, I have compiled this list of useless trivia about him - and it is just trivia. This does not include any inferences about his personality or motivations beyond some very generalized and easily (outwardly) observable facts; that would be a whole other post. It’s just a bunch of facts about his life, things he’s said he likes (or doesn’t), things that he’s done that I find interesting or endearing in some way, etc. 

... And for my own sanity, this also doesn’t go into detail about his pop culture habits unless there’s some specific observation to be made about it. That said:

FROM THE SHOW ITSELF

- The entirety of his known backstory takes place in Texas; he was in jail in Harris County, so Houston is probably a safe bet.

- He’s worked mostly odd jobs and never had a stable career; according to his character bio, he “wafted in and out of the military and followed his departure [...] with brief stints at private security firms, aviation companies, and the fast food industry.”

↳ CUTTER: “Air Force communications specialist. Provisional technical sergeant, at least until your disciplinary record caught up with you. You've even done some rather exemplary work in private surveillance. “

- He worked at Pizza Hut. His pizza place of choice seems to be Domino’s. There’s a non-zero chance that these two facts could be connected.

- The things he misses most from Earth are "beer, cigarettes, pizza, sex, whiskey, blackjack, porn, monster trucks, tequila, [and] video on demand."

↳ Which is concerning for a few reasons, especially when you consider that S1 Eiffel also apparently: 1) poisoned a liter of water trying to make whiskey, and 2) asked Hera about the alcoholic potential of antifreeze.

↳ Oh, and 3) “if you water down rubbing alcohol enough, it’s not completely unlike chicken noodle soup”??

- Smuggled multiple things onto the Hephaestus that he wasn’t supposed to, including a copy of Entertainment Weekly and twenty cartons of cigarettes. Minkowski is fully aware he has these things.

↳ He lit the station’s air supply on fire at least once by trying to light a cigarette.

↳ He is also expressly banned from blowing smoke rings at Minkowski’s talent shows.

↳ He did not even consider that he wouldn’t be able to smoke in space.

- Specific food preferences that he has expressed: ham & pineapple pizza, triple white chocolate mocha with whipped cream. Absolutely disgusting sweet tooth on this man.

- He is very, VERY afraid of spiders.

↳ He’s afraid of a lot of things. But especially spiders.

- He’s generally considered to have poor personal hygiene, but that might be as much situational as it is habit (complaints about low shower pressure, lack of hot water, whatever Hilbert made as a substitute for soap); he was very determined to maintain his own dental hygiene, at least.

↳ ... But I’ll be honest, he probably kind of stinks anyway. It’s fine.

- Say whatever you want about his work ethic, when it comes to his actual ability, Eiffel is really, really good at making radio equipment work.

- He made his own walkie-talkies out of old recorders.

- He almost always seems to have one of his portable comms transmitters on him, because the alternative is that he just happens to have one on hand at all of the moments he might need it most.

↳ ... And he’s really not that lucky.

↳ He also never remembers to turn those transmitters off when he’s done.

↳ ... Which is related to the fact that he taped down the button to transmit his logs into deep space, forgot about it, and kept it that way. For months.

- He’s really not good at keeping his voice down, or... being quiet at all. He’s really not good at lying, except if it’s a lie of omission and no one has reason to suspect he might be keeping something from them. He doesn’t seem to have particularly good fine motor skills.

- But he did survive for over half a year by himself on a non-operational vessel. He is much stronger and more resourceful than he gives himself credit for.

- No one ever remembers his birthday. He’s not a fan of Christmas. This is kind of just the same fact twice.

- He is a fan of Thanksgiving, but that’s likely because he’s food motivated. (“If I could get an extra hour’s lie-in and maybe a breakfast burrito...”)

↳ ... And also because he doesn’t seem to be an especially good cook. I’m sure a home-cooked meal is very exciting for him as long as it’s someone else’s responsibility to do the cooking.

↳ He’s thankful for pinball machines. Really loud ones.

- Compared to other forms of media, he doesn’t often reference video games, but the games he does reference are almost always old Nintendo games (mostly Pokémon and Mario.)

↳ The only notable exception to this I can remember is Metal Gear, which is still a series that could be played on a Nintendo console.

- He’s really good at whistling! (Though this is kind of just a feature of being voiced by Zach Valenti.)

↳ “My entire mental John Williams discography” does suggest he has a pretty good ear/memory for music, though.

↳ And he taught Anne to play the Jaws theme on her toy xylophone.

- He has a photo of himself with Anne taped under the console. In that photo, he looks happier than Lovelace or Minkowski has ever seen him.

- He once convinced Hera to participate in a bet to see how long it would take Minkowski to find a randomized buzzer he hid in her quarters.

↳ He considers himself the “master of the prank”, so this is definitely not the only time he’s done something like that.

- “You don’t mess with Star Wars!”

↳ He’s firmly in the “Han shot first” camp.

↳ Not a fan of the special editions.

↳ Also not a fan of the prequel trilogy.

- He’s never seen Groundhog Day. This is a point of personal shame for him.

- The only time in the show where he mentions a family member other than his daughter is this line from The Watchtower: “My dad always said I'd get myself killed if I wasn't more careful.”

- The blood transfusion he got from Lovelace over a year prior was still affecting his body as recently as a few days before the events of the finale.

↳ Oh, and his blood type is B-. While we’re on very interesting and useful trivia.

QUOTES THAT I COULDN’T MAKE A DIRECT POINT OUT OF BUT I STILL THINK SUGGEST SOMETHING ABOUT EIFFEL’S LIFE

- “That's the third warning. I'm not one hundred percent on how these oxygen meters work, but if they're anything like my old Corolla...”

- “I've been awake for twenty-six hours straight, half of it because I've been sitting by the phone waiting for a call that never came. It's like my teenage love life played out on an intergalactic scale.”

- PRYCE: “That was quite a beating Alison Thornton gave you. Second grade was not a happy time, was it?” / “That, and what really happened the night of your junior prom.”

- “I always thought I'd die at a science fair” ...???

A COMPLETELY NON-COMPREHENSIVE AND NOT-ALL-TECHNICALLY-CANON SELECTION OF THINGS GABRIEL URBINA, SARAH SHACHAT, AND ZACH VALENTI HAVE SAID

ACCORDING TO SARAH SHACHAT:

- “Eiffel thinks first with his pop culture, second with his initiative/lack thereof, and third with his stomach.”

- The one thing they knew for sure was true about the events of All Things Considered: Eiffel was stealing donuts from the Urania’s storage.

ACCORDING TO GABRIEL URBINA:

- Eiffel would be a fan of MST3K. Almost feels like it goes without saying.

- Eiffel would be a fan of Game of Thrones, Robb Stark would be his favorite character, and the last episode to air before he left Earth. Would’ve been the one right before The Red Wedding. ... Sorry about that?

- The Eiffel Tower is just as famous in the world of Wolf 359 as it is in ours; “and, just like having his birthday be on December 25th, I imagine that’s a shadow he’s had to live under for pretty much all his life.”

- When Gabriel Urbina shared one line from each character’s backstory document, the one he shared for Eiffel was: “Eiffel was extremely hesitant at first, but desperate to become independent from his family and strapped for cash, he finally relented.”

-  “There’s definitely been mentions of him just leaving stuff floating at random places in the station - and I’m sure there’s a few weird knick-knacks taped down on his desk just ‘cause - but I think that necessity has forced him to be a more organized person. Relatively speaking. 

... Then again, thinking about it, there’s probably a drawer somewhere in the Comms Room where he just sticks whatever he doesn’t need and doesn’t want to put back in its proper place. And by now it’s gotten so full that he has to open and close it really quickly because otherwise there would just be this cloud of junk that would come out and spread out all over the room. So really it’s the drawer of no return by this point. And one time Minkowski asked him for a notepad she’d lent him and he was like, ‘Sorry, Commander, it’s in the black hole drawer.’”

- “I also imagine that he was not as... supervised as he could’ve been growing up, and he was very much a ‘TV is My Parent’ sort of kid. So if it’s a choice between going to bed or watching that 2:00 AM rerun of Casablanca on TCM, well, that’s not really a choice at all...”

ACCORDING TO ZACH VALENTI:

- Eiffel’s ideal Valentine’s Day would be “whatever the equivalent of Netflix and Chill is [in the Wolf 359 universe.]”

- (At Urbina’s suggestion that teenage Eiffel would’ve tried to take up guitar in hopes of seeming cool for it:) “Settling for whistling because, let’s be real, practice?”

(From the in-character AMA. I’m including this fact because it’s specific and feels in-line with what we already know about Eiffel; I say this with love, but a lot of the other answers feel like... Zach answers as much as they are Eiffel answers.)

- “I’ve had a lot of odd jobs in my time, and one of them was briefly… and by briefly I mean I don’t think I actually ever made it on the road… but I did get through the paid training, which had unlimited coffee! Uh, for truck driving. And it was in that line of work that I had the delightful opportunity to get my hands on my first CB radio. And that was just a gateway drug and the next thing you know… I went to vocational school, so I never got a degree as much as a certificate, but who’s counting?”

... And just to round everything out for now. The DSSPPM suggests he is the kind of person who will write/doodle in books, and it gives us one more important piece of information about Eiffel: he crosses his Z’s.

I think that’s cute.