Welcome back Wolf 359 friends and fans to another installment of Wolf 359 Daily! Here we are, it’s Mission Day 666, and things are about to pop off like they’ve never popped off before.Time for us to take a look at “Knock, Knock,” “Who’s There?” and even a bit of “Mayday”!
I have a feeling that this installment’s gonna be a bit light on the analysis because everything just happens so much.
Alrighty then, let’s dive into this glorious chaos. We pick up right where we left off at the end of “Do No Harm,” with Wolf 359 having suddenly turned blue. Waves of energy batter the Hephaestus, and increased radiation sends many of the station’s systems going haywire. Ah, the sweet sound of all the alarms going off all at once, did we miss it? Our stalwart crew leaps into action, with Minkowski going to consult resident red dwarf specialist Hilbert, and Eiffel tasked with keeping tabs on Lovelace while Hera assesses the state of the station.
Eiffel heads to the hanger bay to head off Lovelace as she makes for the shuttle. In order to keep her from blasting off again, Eiffel decides to dismantle the sensor that opens the airlock, meaning nobody's going to be getting in through there anytime soon. While this is... effective, it's also solidly in the “things that will come back to bite us in the ass in half an hour” category. Eiffel also begins to notice mysterious whispers which Lovelace doesn’t seem to hear.
In the observation deck, Minkowski confronts Hilbert about the sudden change in the star. Hilbert confirms that this is decidedly not normal behavior, and even though the star has displayed anomalous properties in the past, none of them indicated that it should do things like suddenly change color and get bigger. In fact these things shouldn't be possible at all. During their conversation, they both notice the strange whispers, and the befuddling effect they seem to have on them.
Eiffel joins Minkowski and Hilbert in the bridge and, having the same concerns about the creepy whispers and the confusion they seem to cause, recommends they secure all the weapons on the station. Fortunately, Minkowski already had the same idea. Unfortunately, she did decide to keep a handgun on her. Guns on a space ship seem like a questionable combo at the best of times, but today everyone’s under the effects of celestially induced turbo-paranoia, so it’s just extra fun. What ensues is an escalation of wild accusations unseen since the aptly named “Paranoia Game.” I think my favorite is when Hilbert, out of nowhere, starts proposing a theory to Minkowski that maybe he and Eiffel are both working against her. Which seems like the opposite of what you’d want to tell the woman with the gun.
No, wait, scratch that. My actual favorite out of that conversation is Hilbert’s line about how this isn’t a “plot twist in [a] bad sci-fi series.” The lampshade hanging there followed by an applied phlebotinum name drop? God I love tropes.
Fortunately there is one person who doesn’t seem to be affected by the creepy voices: Captain Lovelace. In retrospect, this should have been a huge, huge flag that she was connected with the aliens. But somehow everything happening so much in this episode makes me forget, and the next time I listen I go “oh my god, it was right there” every time. Anyway, Lovelace manages to deescalate the situation, just as they approach the brink of shooting Hilbert, with some well-timed feedback screeching from the communications system (one of the systems that’s wigged out from the solar flares).
With the crew’s attention brought back to real problems, Hera and Lovelace inform the crew that Wolf 359 is definitely gaining mass. More mass means more gravity, and more gravity means their previously calculated orbit isn’t going to cut it much longer. Their conversation on the issue is cut short, however, when the incoming comms buzzer goes off again... even though everyone in the station is currently together on the bridge.
We close part 1 of the season 2 finale with the cliffhanger of all time: Open, real-time conversation with alien life... and they sound like Doug Eiffel. God, what an amazing “I don’t know what I expected, but it sure wasn’t that” moment. us into Episode 28, Eiffel very reasonably has a bit of a freak out about this development. Turns out Eiffel’s been broadcasting his logs into space, which provided our Dear Listeners the opportunity to start learning English. The fact that it’s Mr. Cool Pop Culture Person who’s providing their dictionary is just fantastic. Apparently they’ve been trying to crack the phrase “crazy whamajama” since “The Empty Man” in November, to no avail.
The Listeners say the star turning blue is part of a “process” they’re using “to communicate.” When Minkowski tries to explain that contact with stars kills people, the Listeners don’t seem to understand. We’ll learn through episodes like “Bolero” and “The Watchtower” that these aliens really don’t seem to understand the concept of death. Just stitch the pieces back together, restart some chemical and electrical processes, and bingo-bango you’ve got a functioning human again, what’s the problem? “The Watchtower” also shows that falling into the star wouldn’t actually kill them, and is actually a means of transportation to the Listeners. But the crew has no way of knowing this, they have to operate on the well established understanding that people shouldn’t touch stars.
After cutting off the communications link with the station, Wolf 359’s gravity begins to increase again. The crew scramble to find a solution, and Hilbert suggests they double their propulsion using the extra VX3 engine that’s been strapped to the station all month. Seems like a great idea... if only someone hadn’t ripped out the motion sensor on the airlock door.
In case things weren’t complicated enough, another burst of radiation from the star rocks the station, causing some consoles and panels to explode. Lovelace shoves Minkowski out of the way of one of the exploding panels, and takes a piece of the shrapnel in the gut. A dire situation on its own, but she’s also still hooked up to the deadman’s switch, which will blow up the shuttle if her heart stops. Y’know, the shuttle that Eiffel’s about to be sitting in, and that’s their only chance of getting the station back in orbit. What could go wrong?
While Hilbert goes to operate on Lovelace to get the shrapnel out of her stomach, Minkowski and Eiffel get back to the “don’t fall into the star” problem. Minkowski returns to the bridge while Eiffel makes his way around the outside of the station to the rear hatch of Lovelace’s shuttle. By gunning both VX3 engines, they do successfully get the station back on a stable orbit, though the shuttle breaks off from the station at the last moment, leaving Eiffel drifting apart from the station. But it shouldn’t be too much of a problem for them to get within range so that he can use Minkowski’s jet pack thingy to get back to the station.
Oh wait, were we expecting a happy ending to this season? Lovelace’s heart stops, and, despite Hilbert quickly resuscitating her, the deadman’s switch activates and causes the bomb on the shuttle to explode. The force of the explosion launches Eiffel away from the star, and into deep space at about 17,000 MPH. While his VX3 engine was already out of juice, it’s now blown up and out of juice, and took a few more of the shuttle’s functions with it. Before anyone can do much of anything, the shuttle reaches the outer limit of short range communication and Eiffel and the Hephaestus lose contact.
And so, here’s where we break a bit from release order, as this takes us to the start of Episode 30: “Mayday.” The events of “Pan-Pan” don’t occur until July, but “Mayday” spans from today until September 30, when Eiffel’s finally recovered by the Urania. We’ll cover the bulk of the episode then, but for today we can talk about Eiffel’s first days alone on the shuttle.
Oh, just for fun, a few years back I did make an edit playing the last minutes of “Who’s There?” in one ear and the first minutes of “Mayday” in the other. I’ll slip it in the episode notes, best experienced with headphones, please enjoy!
So, at the top of “Mayday,” it’s Emma Sherr-Ziarko who reads the opening “Welcome to Wolf 359,” as she also did for “Pan-Pan.” Which was so mean. The whole show up to this point has pretty much centered around Eiffel, it’s his audio logs we’re following even as we’ve now broken from that format. But at the end of season 2, listeners were left from November 23, 2015 to February 14, 2016 with the last thing they heard being “He’s gone,” and then season 3 began with Emma reading the opening instead of Zach and he really was gone. First time around I remember thinking “Okay, yes, he’s gone from this episode, but surely something will happen, they can’t just kill Eiffel.” Then at the start of “Mayday,” Emma reads the opening again and somehow that was just absolutely soul-crushing, like, oh no, maybe this isn’t a one-episode bit, maybe this is how it is now. Ugh. So mean.
Eiffel spends his first days on the shuttle taking stock of his situation: No engines, only one booster, not nearly enough food and water, and a cryogenic stasis pod. Oh, and a copy of Pryce & Carter’s Deep Space Survival Procedure and Protocol Manual. Eiffel spends most of the 74 hours it takes for the starboard booster to recharge, finally reading the DSSPPM. Just like he promised Mr. Cutter!
One thing I really love about this episode is something Wolf 359 does on a few occasions, where a character talks to a sort of mental image of another. Eiffel’s well known for using various methods of facilitating conversations with himself, but in this case he’s having imagined conversations with other members of the Hephaestus crew. Of course it’s not really them, they talk in an Eiffel-ized version of themselves. Eiffel even calls that out at one point when his mental Hilbert makes a pop culture reference. But they help him get through whatever current hurdle he’s up against. Minkowski’s tenacious work-the-problem attitude to get him to assess what resource he has, Lovelace to rally him against giving up out of despair, Hilbert forcing him to consider certain limitations that he hadn’t previously, and Hera being a comfort and a friend.
Ugh, I could probably gush about this aspect for a while, but I also think I’d probably regurgitate a lot of what Gabriel Urbina said in a recent creator commentary on “Mayday.” Highly recommend folks swing by his Patreon to check it out, he’s much smarter about it than I am. I mean, he did write the thing.
Well, that sees Eiffel off on his nearly 200-day journey alone in space. We’ll check back in on him when September ends, but in the meantime, just remember that every 3 days he’s dragging himself in and out of a cryo pod just to run a booster engine for 1.5 seconds.
This also is the beginning of a long break in our regularly scheduled programming. Our next mission day isn’t until Mission Day 782 on July 15 with “Pan-Pan.” That’s a pretty long stretch to go without some Wolf 359 time, so I think it’s a good opportunity for us to fit in some extra transmissions about the episodes that don’t fit in our calendar, such as Wolf 359’s mini-episodes and special episodes, many of which long predate the Hephaestus mission. We’ll have more information on that schedule coming soon.
In the meantime, if you’re hungry for a new series, Gabriel Urbina’s revealed a New Thing coming along soon! Hit Singles is a new romantic comedy series coming to Audible, from Gabriel Urbina, Sarah Shachat, and Zach Valenti. You can find all the details on Gabriel’s last newsletter. I’m incredibly excited for it, not the least of which because it features the voice talent of Evangeline Young, who you may remember I adore from her recent work in Dracula: The Danse Macabre. We might even sneak a review of Hit Singles on this feed at some point, we do have a long break coming here.
Alright then, friends and fans, that’s all for today. Thank you for listening, and we hope you’ll join us again soon to visit some mini-episodes!
Today’s rejected Pryce & Carter tip:
Just remember: you have never not been in space. It has never not tried to kill you.
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
Our next regular episode will be July 15 for Episode 29: “Pan-Pan,” but we’ll be having some unscheduled transmissions in the meantime. Subscribe to Wolf 359 Daily on Substack to get the latest delivered to your inbox. Thank you for listening.
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