Hey there Wolf 359 friends and fans, we got some wires crossed here at Wolf 359 Daily HQ and, long story short, this episode was still in the draft folder instead of being queued. Terribly sorry for the delayed transmission, please enjoy this episode which should have gone up on March 14!
Welcome back Wolf 359 friends and fans, to another installment of Wolf 359 Daily! Welcome to Mission Day 659 and our lovely double-feature with Episodes 25 and 26: “Lame-O Superhero Origin Story” and “Do No Harm.”
HOO BOY, here we go folks, we’ve kicked off in a big way today. First up is “Lame-O Superhero Origin Story,” which is just a fantastic episode. Now with Dr. Hilbert recruited to their team, Minkowski takes point on keeping Lovelace busy in the shuttle while Hilbert and Eiffel finish preparations for their fake asteroid disaster. In the midst of these two tense pair-ups, we have some actual genuine communication! It’s happening, everyone! It’s really happening! While Eiffel remains understandably unfriendly with Hilbert, he warms up a bit when Hilbert accidentally reveals some real things about himself. Mostly, though, he jumps on the opportunity to extort some of Hilbert’s history out of him. Meanwhile, Lovelace and Minkowski have some hard talks about their views on good leadership.
Alright, alright, I say it about every episode, but I love this episode. I’m not even the world’s biggest Hilbert fan, but in this house we love a lore dump. Today we finally get a nice deep dive on Hilbert’s backstory, and his motivation to create Decima. Beyond the big picture life improvement that Decima could represent if Hilbert could get it to work, this is a very personal mission for Hilbert. He was the sole survivor of his family following a nuclear disaster, and the loss of his sister Olga in particular is what fueled him in his research. He wanted Decima to be able to repair cellular degradation... like what would happen to someone with radiation poisoning. It feels like he needs to make it up to her, somehow, that he survived and couldn’t do anything back then to save her. Not that it’s really fair to him to carry any kind of responsibility, he was also a kid back then, what could he have done? And while it might make the Decima research seem a bit nobler, in a way, I’m not sure it really makes up for the lack of ethical testing and the body count the project has. But it does a lot to humanize Hilbert.
I do also love that, to this day, I still see fan artists reach this episode and face the crossroads of re-configuring their Hilbert design to be bald, or continuing with designs that often feature mad-scientist hair. Wolf 359 doesn’t often include physical descriptions of characters, so this one made a lot of folks reevaluate their mental image of Dr. Hilbert.
At the end of Hilbert and Eiffel’s time together, Hilbert also drops some intrigue about Eiffel’s past. When Eiffel asks what happened to Olga, if she was okay, Hilbert responds that he hasn’t said a word about a member of Eiffel’s family. While this doesn’t reveal much, Eiffel’s reaction certainly does, as he for once immediately stops pressing on his question. We know Hilbert knows more about Eiffel’s history than anyone else on the station, since certain details were struck from Eiffel’s records, and this reveal that Eiffel’s got some kind of family issue is an intriguing one, particularly because it’s vague.
Meanwhile, Lovelace and Minkowski are having some very interesting conversations of their own. They finally seem to be addressing the ways they don’t see eye-to-eye, and why. On Minkowski’s side, she can’t imagine being in a place where she wouldn’t try to save everyone she can (even Hilbert!) and doesn’t want to do anything that risks the safety of her people. Lovelace, on the other hand, has already lost her people. She’s been forced to make hard choices, and she’s still lost over and over, and now she needs to see her mission through. She’ll take along those she can... but not to the point of risking successfully getting back to Earth. I think maybe she feels she owes it to the ones who trusted her and she couldn’t keep safe, that someone has to make it. And she’s not going to let anyone stand in the way of that.
And of course, Minkowski accidentally fixes Lovelace’s shuttle. Gotta love that she suggested looking at the turbines because it’d take a while, really just wanting to kill time, and that ended up being the thing that finally got the shuttle online. Unfortunately, that also means their time to set up a means of getting Lovelace to get rid of the shuttle has officially run out. It’d take something really serious to stop Lovelace from rocketing off back to Earth and blowing up the Hephaestus on her way out now...
And that’s when all Eiffel’s blood decided it didn’t want to be in his body anymore.
Alright, on to “Do No Harm!” This is a hell of an episode, Decima’s back to ruin everyone’s day and after several episodes of being sneaky and making covert chess moves, suddenly everything is fast and loud and immediate. Also, man, this is sometimes a rough episode to listen to since Eiffel spends most of it coughing and gurgling, I can’t imagine how it is to record something like this.
While Eiffel spends most of the episode trying to cough his lungs out, we get a lot of great moments with the rest of the crew. We love to see Minkowski taking charge in a crisis, these are the times she absolutely shines. Particularly after her conversation with Lovelace, who expressed Minkowski wasn’t making the necessary choices, it was great to see her take charge and take no shit. When Lovelace’s distrust of Hilbert starts to get in the way of helping Eiffel, Minkowski doesn’t hesitate to stand up to her. Even more surprising, perhaps, is how readily Hilbert stands up to Lovelace, after all of his caution around her.
Maybe my favorite for this episode, though, is Hera. She finally gets a chance to be blisteringly honest about what’s on her mind to everyone, and it’s kinda great. I mean, calling Lovelace out on not being able to keep her crew alive was harsh, and a bit unfair in my opinion, but I think she was right about Lovelace having a bit of Big Damn Hero energy. She does carry a mantle of being the one to make all the “difficult choices” and how she bravely does this alone, when... if she’d been more willing to trust and compromise, she wouldn’t have to bear that by herself.
Then of course there’s Hera’s little chat with Hilbert. I love her getting permission to speak freely and immediately using it to go full murder-bot in the most pleasant tone of voice. I also love that getting permission to speak freely came just before her very frank conversation with Lovelace. Hera was allowed to say what she wanted for once and she made the absolute most of it.
Though, not to undercut Hera’s fantastic speech, I do wonder a little bit about whether the station would be able to vent a person into space through a hole the size of a quarter. I mean, under the right circumstances one could uh... extrude a person in that manner (if you’ve never heard of the Byford Dolphin incident, I’m sorry to be the one to introduce you), I just don’t know how much pressure it would take. I haven’t done the math, but I’m fairly sure that the usual 1 atmosphere of pressure wouldn’t be enough for a hole that size. I don’t know how many atmospheres it’d take to actually pull you through a quarter-sized hole, and if a space station would be designed to hold that much pressure anywhere, and I don’t much care to do the awful math to find out. If anyone does want to do the math, let us know in the comments so we can all be impressed and horrified.
Anyway, all the blood trying to escape Eiffel’s body means he’s in desperate need of a transfusion, and regrettably the Hephaestus’s stores are fresh out. Fortunately, Hera’s talk brings Lovelace around, and she comes back to volunteer as their blood donor. And unbeknownst to all of them, that blood transfusion would go on to save Eiffel’s ass on more than one occasion before the story’s done. But that’s for us to talk about next season.
The episode ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, as a week later Eiffel’s back up and about. More importantly, that’s Mission Day 666, the day the star turned blue. We’ll get into all the details around that with our installment on March 21. Before that, though, we’ve got one more installment to sneak in! On March 18, Mission Day 663, we’ll be taking a look at Wolf 359’s live show “Deep Space Survival Procedure and Protocol.” This is a fun one, hope to see you then!
Today’s rejected Pryce & Carter tip:
In space, no one can hear you disappoint your loved ones.
Wolf 359 Daily is written and recorded by Rina Cerame.
Wolf 359 is a product of Kinda Evil Genius Productions. More information on the show can be found on their website at wolf359.fm
We hope you’ll join us again on March 18 for “Deep Space Survival Procedure and Protocol.” Thanks for listening!
Share this post