Hello, Dear Listeners

TL;DR: The last 25 minutes of the Wolf 359 finale are almost entirely from Minkowski’s point-of-view and not at all from Eiffel’s. And I’m emotional about that, particularly in relation to Eiffel’s memory loss and the crew’s return to Earth. 

General Thoughts on Perspective in Wolf 359

When I talk about point-of-view or perspective in this post, I’m obviously not talking about anything visual. Instead, I’m talking about which character’s perspective we (the listeners) hear a scene from. Or, to put it another way, which character’s (auditory) experience of the scene most closely aligns with that of the listener. Who does the editing of the scene encourage us to identify with? 

In the early episodes of the show, the framing device of Eiffel’s logs determines the audience perspective - we hear things ‘through’ the recorder. In a sense, this indirectly aligns our perspective with Eiffel’s; although we aren’t hearing things as if through his ears, the recorder largely functions as an extension of his perspective. 

After this framing device is abandoned, the lack of narration in the show (with a few exceptions) can make it easy to assume that we’re always hearing things from a neutral perspective, a perspective not aligned with any particular character. However, the show often makes choices to indicate that we are experiencing a scene from a certain character’s point-of-view. 

Jacobi at the end of Dirty Work:

2/25 days of wolfmas: favorite episode?