Tides Pairs an Alien Planet with the Alien Concept of Friendship
The season finale underscores Dr. Eurus’ physical and emotional isolation
Warning: This review contains spoilers for earlier parts of the season.
Back in January of this year, I reviewed the first episode of Tides, a science-fiction podcast about a xenobiologist, Dr. Winifred Eurus, who ends up stranded on the inhospitable alien moon of Fons and has to survive while awaiting rescue.
“[Tides] follows Dr. Winifred Eurus, a member of the first manned expedition to Fons, an Earth-like moon wracked by extreme tidal waves due to its orbit around a nearby gas giant. When surveying ocean life, her submarine is destroyed, leaving her alone to walk to higher ground before the wave comes back. Along the way, she makes notes about what she finds in the intertidal zone, and gradually realizes that some of the life there is more than what it seems.”
The result is a combination of The Martian and Firefly, a survival and rescue story of a scientist stranded in space by a crew that tries very hard to pretend they’re only there for business, and not coming together as a family. Having been given an advance copy of today’s finale, I can say that Tides boasts a stunning cast from top to bottom, a necessity for a podcast that is anchored in discovering human relationships more than it is in discovering alien life. While Fred Eurus rattles off speculations about xenobiology, she always circles back to sending comments and notes to members of her crew, even though she knows she’ll receive no response. It means that for much of the show, listeners can only hear Fred, which positions them like the audibly missing crew, unable to do anything but listen.
Back when I heard episode one, I was confused about what was meant by “hostile tidal forces”, but now I understand that this is the point: Fred doesn’t know either, not even armed with her knowledge of biological organisms. Everything on Fons is a mystery, including the sentience in Fon’s natural life, and Winifred draws us deep into the science, luring us away from her isolation and desperation just as she is likely doing for herself. Unable to hold a conversation with anyone but herself for a majority of the season, she focuses on analyzing the bizarre environment around her — writer Jesse Schuschu flexes his neurobiology background here to great effect. The use of technical terminology interwoven with clearer adjectives never loses its charm nor its strength as a world-building technique.
But the core of Tides is not the world-building, the language, nor even Fred herself — but the whole team of the Tellus Initiative project. Midway through the season, Fred at last makes contact with her team, still in the spaceship above Fons, and they are as colorful and varied as her mutterings promised. Having the crew as responsive characters highlights Fred’s loneliness as she is still trying to communicate, even when everyone can hear each other; she’s still trying to make herself both understood and listened to, to avoid sounding sarcastic when she doesn’t mean to and to get Montague to stop calling her Winnie. The inability of not just Fred, but the entire team, to take care of each other, consistently failing at accepting or offering help, recognizing distress, or expressing gratitude, forms the spine of the story and comes to an uncomfortable, heart-wrenching head in the finale, Get Kraken.
Tides as a whole is a masterclass in dialogue, which the cast recorded together but remotely under incredible direction from both Schuschu and co-director Ayla Taylor. This means they were able to play off each other and create that level of nuance and reality this script demands, with the added benefit of Bridge Geene’s subtle and clever audio design. Geene enhances some of those awkward silences, tweaks the natural and seamless interruptions and overlaps, but makes sure to keep the clear chemistry among all cast members. She then builds in the isolation by modifying vocal quality so someone always sounds like they’re not only speaking through a radio, but a janky radio. It doesn’t make the audio difficult to comprehend and distances Fred from her saviors, and the crew from rescuing their teammate, and adds the real, familiar tension of not knowing what’s happening on the other end.
Julia Schifini, who plays Fred, has amazed me this season with her naturalistic stream-of-consciousness into a radio without hope of reply, and the ease with which she deploys scientific curiosity and loneliness in this speech pattern. During the first ten minutes of the finale, we can hear Fred cycle through all the stages of grief as she comes to the conclusion that she will not be rescued. Listeners know from the previous episode that Fred is going to have to survive for much longer, but Schifini makes relearning that fact from Fred’s perspective an emotionally jarring and painful experience. From denying it’s happening by relying on scientific explanations, to angry vociferous swearing, to begging for anyone to care about her, to repeating “anyone there?” in a depressed monotone, Schifini has a magical talent for making listeners feel exactly what she wants with only her voice.
While Tides’ focus is on Fred, the environment that shaped her would not be complete without Schifini’s co-stars and their similarly broad array of talent. James Oliva, who plays the bombastic geologist Dr. Montague, has not once failed to delight me in his role as the dramatic jokester with his clear but misconstrued attempts at kindling friendship. Jordan Higgs’ performance as the intimidated Dr. Stevens reaches a sharp climax as he finally stands up for himself, one that had me reaching for the pause button so that I could take a breather. Both Emily Wang and Zach Libresco are level, grounded forces in comparison — the former an emotional anchor and the latter a strategic one in the character of the ship’s captain. Wang in particular rounds out the misfit crew as scientist Dr. Wang, who may tell Fred to be cautious, but will commit to a reckless decision if it means saving her companion.
From the first wash of the ocean waves on Fons, to the last shocking reveal leading into season two, the audio of Tides has been understated, effective in its simplicity and momentous in its sudden brilliance. Every chirrup and squawk of another alien creature takes us one step farther from the bed that Fred longs for, and every misstep in conversation distances Fred from camaraderie and solace. We see Fred only under stress, like the tiny intertidal creatures she invasively examines, and in audio we can only hear the loud and the predominant fauna and flora that can make a noise that pierces her helmet.
The first season of Tides has built up a tale of confronting hostility and the unknown, both on an alien planet and within a team. The investigation into an alien planet is a strange mirror of what it’s like to navigate the human ecosystem. Starting with the first lonely song Fred sings punctuated by Fons’ yawping animals, the finale whisks us through the heart-cracking moment Fred is called a friend by someone unexpected and down to her final application of scientific logic to the mystery of human relationships, the finale is, without a doubt, the best episode of the season. It showcases every single person’s talents and how they meld together; the team behind Tides has figured out the lessons that Fred and her crew have not in their entirety. In the end, Tides reminds us that “no matter how large the ocean may be, it can feel smaller when you bring your friends.”
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