Wolf 359

Wolf 359 is a science fiction dramedy thriller podcast created by Gabriel Urquina and produced by Kinda Evil Productions.

The podcast is set aboard the U.S.S. Hephaestus, a space station orbiting the star Wolf 359, and primarily centers around Communications Officer Doug Eiffel, a cheerfully insubordinate Genre Savvy slacker hopelessly addicted to cigarettes and coffee and deeply upset he only has access to paltry substitutes aboard the station. Other members of the crew include Eiffel's best friend Hera, the ship's equally belligerent and rebellious AI, the strict and authoritarian yet Not So Above It All Mission Commander Renée Minkowski, and Dr. Alexander Hilbert, a Mad Scientist and Eiffel's Sitcom Arch Nemesis whose experiments almost always end with Stuff Blowing Up. The crew is later joined by the station's paranoid and deeply unpredictable former captain Isabel Lovelace.

Though the podcast starts off as a mostly episodic Sitcom centering around the crew dealing with the difficulties of life in space, it gradually takes on a much darker tone as it becomes apparent that not only do their superiors have no regard for their lives and are more than willing to experiment on them For Science!, but that they have their own mysterious agenda. Which isn't getting into the other, unrelated mysterious happenings aboard the ship and the much less grand but still equally dangerous threats that the crew face every day…

Still, even at it's darkest the podcast still retains an offbeat sense of humor and mines a lot of character-based comedy from the interactions between the leads.

Tropes used in Wolf 359 include:

• Absent-Minded Professor: Hilbert acts like one. Emphasis on acts.
• Adorkable: Eiffel. He's more of a jerk than most examples, but his constant pop-culture references, goofy demeanor, and his earnest personality makes him very endearing.
• Affably Evil:
  • Dr. Maxwell. She's friendly, perky, and all-around helpful, but she's still a member of SI5 for a reason.
  • The Dear Listeners' ambassador "Bob", though he isn't evil so much as he has a serious case of Blue and Orange Morality. Still, he's remarkably causal when he admits that his species "reconfigures" any species that doesn't pass their evaluations.
• AI Is a Crapshoot: Downplayed. Hera's by no means evil, but she's very prone to prancing her crewmates and using whatever loopholes she can to get out of doing orders she doesn't want to follow. Fortunately, this generally means her resisting the orders of people who want the crew dead.
• The Alcoholic: Eiffel is a recovering alcoholic, who quit after he blinded his daughter in a drunk driving accident.
• Ambiguous Disorder: Eiffel's obsessive knowledge of pop culture, easily distractable personality, affinity for stimulants such as coffee, cigarettes, and formerly alcohol, tendency to hyper-fixate on tasks he's invested in, and his habit of being Innocently Insensitive towards his crewmates during his ramblings all point to him having ADHD.
• Apocalyptic Log: Lovelace, the previous captain of the Hephaestus, left several logs detailing how Goddard Futuristics deliberately let her crew die. Though as it turns out, Lovelace is still alive.
• Bad Boss: Cutter threatens to kill his employees on the regular. He doesn't have a better track record when it comes to actually killing them, either.
• Butt Monkey: If anyone's going to be subject to life-threatening danger, it's going to be Eiffel.
• Cerebus Retcon:
  • One season one episode revolves around Eiffel catching the flu and becoming paranoid that Hilbert, who was attending to him, was actually infecting him with the virus as part of an experiment. At the end, it's all revealed to be a misunderstanding and Eiffel apologizes… come Season 2 and Eiffel discovers that not only was Hilbert actually experimenting on him, but he injected him with a highly dangerous virus that could kill him at any moment.
  • Why is Eiffel, a Lazy Bum with no interest in his job, aboard the Hephaestus? Because he's a convicted felon who took the job because it was the only way to keep out of prison.
  • Similarly, Eiffel's over-the-top addiction to cigarettes becomes a lot less comical once you realize he's almost certainly using it as Addiction Displacement to recover from crippling alcoholism.
  • A recurring plot from Season 1 was a mutant plant monster hiding in the station's air vents that Hilbert was in charge of stopping, yet repeatedly failed to do so. It's heavily implied that Hilbert created it during his experiments with the decima virus, and that he was intentionally failing to capture it.
  • Goddard Futuristics's poor treatment of its employees becomes a lot darker once it becomes clear that they're willing to kill employees for the bare minimum and that they won't blink an eye about wiping out the entire Hephaestus crew.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The podcast starts out as a lighthearted Sitcom focusing on the crew's comedic misadventures, but it becomes increasingly darker as the stakes shift from dealing with Eiffel's latest Zany Scheme to genuinely life-threatening danger. By the end of Season 1, it fully shifts into darker territory after Hilbert's Face Heel Turn.
• Deadpan Snarker: Eiffel, Hera, and to a lesser extent Minkowski are all prone to snarking.
• Disney Death: Hilbert tears out Hera's personality core during the Season 1 finale, essentially lobotomizing her. While she remains essentially dead for the first few episodes, Minkowski is eventually able to convince Hilbert to restore her because the Hephaestus simply can't operate without her. Of course, Hera is deeply traumatized by the experience and has had her capabilities greatly reduced by the damage Hilbert did to her.
• Evil All Along/Face Heel Turn: Hilbert is revealed to be a sociopathic Mad Scientist operating directly under Cutter's orders. While he only turns against the crew when they discover proof of alien life, he was still experimenting on Eiffel and it's heavily implied he would have killed them anyway.
• Faux Affably Evil: Cutter is always polite when speaking with his employees, but it would be undercut by how smarmy and condescending he is even if he didn't threaten to murder them every thirty seconds.
• For Science!: Goddard Futuristics seems to operate on this. They'll terrorize their own crews to test psychological experiments, which isn't when they're outright murdering them or actively letting them die. Eiffel actually exploits this at one point by trying to convince Hilbert that his superiors had given him the go-ahead to murder the Hephaestus crew simply to know if he'd actually do it; Hilbert is nearly convinced since he knows that this is something they'd absolutely do if it occurred to them, but he ultimately sees through the ruse.
• Genre Savvy: Eiffel is a pop-culture aficionado and knows his way around science fiction, so he's generally the first to catch on to the nature of whatever's currently threatening the crew.
• Genre Shift: Over the course of the first season, the podcast gradually shifts from a lighthearted workplace comedy set in space to a dark survival horror story (albeit one with occasional moments of levity).
• Mad Scientist: Hilbert. It's Played For Laughs, as he's rather cheerful and helpful for the most part and he draws the line at experimenting on his crewmates. And then it's very much played seriously after it's revealed his entire personality was an act; in reality, he's a cold, sociopathic man who infected Eiffel with a deadly virus for the sake of his experiments and sees nothing wrong with killing the rest of the crew.
• Manipulative Bastard: The entire SI5 crew. They're clearly up to no good, but they're just so damn chummy and friendly that the Hephaestus crew finds it hard not to trust them.
• The Sociopath:
  • Cutter. He will happily murder his own employees simply for the sake of an experiment, all with a smile on his face.
  • Hilbert, simply put, lacks any empathy for human life. He's more than happy to murder or let entire crews die for the sake of his experiments, and he's not shy about making it clear to the crew that he simply doesn't give a damn about their lives. Eiffel actually realizes that the only thing he cares about is his research, and thus that Hilbert is terrified of it being destroyed. It's subverted in later episodes, where it becomes clear that he's actually a Well-Intentioned Extremist who is able to feel attachment; he's simply decided to become The Unfettered in pursuit of his goals.
• Starfish Aliens: The Dear Listeners are extremely powerful and totally incomprehensible physically and mentally from a human standpoint.
• Wham! Episode:
  • "Deep Breaths". The old radio transmissions Eiffel's been receiving are revealed to be aliens attempting to contact humanity, Hilbert pulls a Face Heel Turn and tries to murder the rest of the crew under Cutter's orders, and while Eiffel prevents his mutiny it's at the cost of Hilbert essentially lobotomizing Hera.
  • "Who's There?". The aliens finally make contact with the Hephaestus crew, but they nearly pull the station into Wolf 359 when they severely increase Wolf 359's gravitational pull. Exploding shrapnel severely injures Lovelace and leaves her in critical condition, and when she temporarily flatlines her bomb detonated and sends her escape pod hurtling out of control into deep space with Eiffel still inside.
• Wham! Line:
  • In "Deep Breaths", when Hilbert hears one of the old radio transmissions of old-timey music that Eiffel has been receiving throughout the first season.

Hilbert: Eiffel, I'm going to need you to stop what you're doing. Eiffel: Why? Hilbert: Because those transmissions are not coming from Earth.

• • And later, in the same episode:

Hilbert: Hera, run lockdown protocol 24C.

• • "What's Up, Doc" has one from Hilbert, after he explains that he had been assigned aboard the ship to work on a retrovirus designed to enhance the human body.

Minkowski: So you didn't want us to know that you were keeping samples of this dangerous virus in your laboratory? Hilbert: No. I didn't want you to know I was keeping samples of this dangerous virus in Officer Eiffel's bloodstream.

• • In "Happy To Be Of Assistance", Minkowski and Eiffel listen to Lovelace's logs about the death of her crew with the exception of the unseen Dr. Selberg, who helps her construct an escape pod when the rest of the crew has died and who she cites as her biggest ally. When Eiffel and Minkowski listen to the final log, where Lovelace declares that she will escape the Hephaestus and take revenge on Goddard Futuristics, we learn exactly who Dr. Selberg is.

Hilbert: Hello, Commander. I'm sorry, is bad time? Lovelace: No, Dr. Selberg, it's fine.

• • In "Knock Knock", Hera manages to fix the interference on the communications, allowing the crew to talk to whoever has been trying to contact them throughout the episode. They respond… in Eiffel's voice and claim to be him while the real deal is listening to the transmission. The following episode, "Who's There", has an even bigger one when the panicking crew demands the voice tell them who they really are.

"Eiffel": Well… no, not really. It's not really Officer Eiffel. We have no voice of our own, but we are borrowing yours. To communicate.

• • "Need to Know" is a comedic filler episode where Lovelace, Minkowski, Maxwell, Hera, and Jacobi read some sensitive and comedically embarrassing information about the rest of the crew, right up until we get this bombshell that rapidly puts Eiffel in a new light.

Jacobi: The court finds the defendant, Douglas Fernand Eiffel, guilty on one count of kidnapping and three counts of child endangerment.

• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: A recurring theme when it comes to AIs. In the Wolf 359 universe, AIs are all sentient beings with their own personalities and unique quirks, yet they're treated like disposable tools at best. Any AI that aren't obedient enough are condemned to either absolutely pointless jobs with no interaction with others or flat-out deleted. Hera tends to get very angry whenever the crew treats her like a computer rather than a person, and while Eiffel and Minkowski clearly view her as a fellow crewmate, Hilbert and most Goddard higher-ups don't. Of course, given that they are sociopaths who don't even give a damn about their fellow humans, it makes sense.