Podcast / Tides

"Oceans are big. Just really fucking big."

”Ideas can die. Species can die. Individuals can, and often do, die. But… that’s not what I’m going to do. Not now.''

Dr. Winifred Eurus, Episode 5.

Tides is a science fiction podcast produced by Jesse Schuschu, following the adventures of Dr. Winifred Eurus, an intrepid xenobiologist conducting research on the ocean moon Fons. When a gigantic tidal wave destroys her submarine and sweeps her out on the shore of Fons' only continent, Dr. Eurus finds herself stranded in the intertidal zone, cut off from her crewmates in orbit, and surrounded by the strange alien wildlife of the moon. What's more, Fons is subject to extreme tidal forces due to orbiting a gas giant, and tsunami-sized waves hit the shore about every twenty hours, threatening Winifred's life.

With nothing else than an environment suit and some meager supplies, Winifred attempts to survive until her crew can come to her rescue, all the while making audio logs about her observations of the wildlife of Fons.

The podcast is currently in its second season. It can be listened to here.

Tides contains examples of:

• Alien Sea: Fons is largely covered in one of these, subject to extreme tidal forces and populated by all manners of bizarre lifeforms.
• Alien Sky: The sky of Fons is mostly dominated by Volturnus, the gas giant it orbits - often as much as half the sky may be obscured by the planet. Other moons of Volturnus are also often visible.
• Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: Discussed in Episode 7, when Dr. Wang theorizes the enormous spiky creatures Winifred occasionally sees floating to shore during high tide might actually be some sort of vehicle piloted by unseen intelligent organisms.
  A diesel sub has to surface to run its diesel engine and charge its battery. To move submerged, it uses the battery. If I wanted to design something to move across the tidal zone I’d want a vessel that can make the best use of the downtime between waves. Charging a battery would be a good use of that time. Granted, I’d also put some wheels on it. But maybe . . . I don’t know about wheels. Or moving across dry land in general. So it doesn’t occur to me.
• Apocalyptic Log: Winifred's audio journal occasionally takes a turn in this direction, particularly when she gets into particularly bleak situations where she thinks she might not survive. In particular, Episode 5 is mostly taken up by what are essentially her memoirs, in case she doesn't get out alive from under the tide.
• Apocalypse How: Class 4. Winifred theorizes that a massive extinction event killed off most of Fons' land life when Volturnus offset its planetary orbit and captured it as its moon, leaving its radially-symmetrical sea organisms to repopulate the planet, alongside a few bilateral relicts.
• Berserk Button: Winifred doesn't much like being called "Winny". "Fred" is fine, however.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Among other things, Fons' land life includes five-foot-long burrowing worms and the "spaghetti spider", a large arthropod-like creature that slurps said worms up like linguini.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Most Fonsian life seems to follow a radial symmetry, and includes many-finned "fish" more resembling worms, treelike sessile organisms that retract their trunks into the ground when the tide arrives, beaked crablike ambush predators, and tentacle-faced, wormlike "snaliens" inhabiting car-sized shells which they can freely leave. A small, one-legged, ball-like critter is also mentioned. However, there are also examples of bilaterally symmetrical animals, especially on land, including the "birds" and the spaghetti spider.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: The slime-covered, rotating orbs Winifred encounters early on in the intertidal zone turn out to be the eggs of the "birds", which are laid by three birds in tandem – one regurgitates the slime, another eats part of it and regurgitates the orb, and the third sits on it and does… something to finish the process.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: The snaliens are completely blind, but they can sense vibrations with uncanny precision. This isn’t universal to Fons life, though – the "birds" and the spaghetti spider both have eyes.
• Bizarre Alien Sexes: The "birds" appear to have three sexes, at least if their Bizarre Alien Reproduction is anything to go by.
• Book Ends: The first Ocean Fact in Season 1 is "Oceans are big. Just really fucking big." The last one in the season is "The ocean is really fucking big… but feels smaller when you aren’t alone."
• Chekhov's Gun: At the start of Episode 4, Winifred notes that Juturna, another one of Volturnus’ moons, has risen above the horizon. At the end of the episode, it is revealed that Juturna's proximity to Fons threw Fons' tidal cycle off, and a massive, unexpected tidal wave is approaching the shore. It’s going to arrive before Winifred can reach high ground.
  • What happened to Winifred’s submarine, which was wrecked by a tidal wave at the start of Episode 1? At the end of Episode 8, she finds it towed back out to shore by a pair of snalien "submarines", repaired with their Organic Technology to roughly functional level.
• The Comically Serious: Dr. Melissa Wang, the expedition’s astrophysicist, whose stern, schoolteacher-like demeanor doesn’t let up for a single second. Not even when discussing which Star Trek captain is the best.
• Cool Starship: The Stribog, which carried Winifred's expedition to Fons. Currently, it's in orbit around the moon.
• Dysfunction Junction: The research crew of the Stribog appears, at first, to be thoroughly sick of each other, and Winifred has mixed feelings about most of them at best. However, when push comes to shove, they’re all willing to risk their lives for her.
• Future Food Is Artificial: On Fons, Winifred lives off of emergency rations. They come in three flavors: banana, oatmeal raisin and chocolate chip, and she's thoroughly sick of all of them except for chocolate chip. She also mentions at one point that she hasn't had "real food" since she left Earth.
• Giant Flyer: The "birds", which somewhat resemble four-eyed black pterosaurs from Winifred's description, and are described as rivaling the size of the biggest Earth birds due to Fons' lower gravity.
• Giant Wall of Watery Doom: The most notable quirk of Fons are its enormous tidal waves, which hit the shores approximately every twenty hours with the force of a tsunami. This is because unlike on Earth, where the tide is caused by the gravitational pull of the comparatively smaller Moon, Fons' tides are generated by the massive gas giant Volturnus, which has a much, much greater gravity than Fons does.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: The first half of Episode 8 mostly consists of Winifred’s slow mental breakdown as the promised rescue shuttle doesn’t seem to show up on time. When she learns that the rescue attempt failed, and the Stribog has to leave Fons’ orbit for a month before they can attempt it again, she flips.
• Heavyworlder: Due to coming from Earth, which has higher gravity than Fons, Winifred can easily shove the snaliens around if she needs to. She mentions as much.
  It’s made no motion to attack, at most shoving me with its tentacles a few times. Which is uncomfortable but pointless. I’m wedged in pretty good and it’s surprisingly weak. There are advantages to being from a higher gravity world, I think. And having bones and things like that.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: Inside her repaired submarine, Winifred finds a crude glass statuette of herself, depicted as a humanoid figure with a screen for a face… with a human skull inside. The Snailiens are blind, but they’re very sensitive to vibrations…
• Inscrutable Aliens: Many of the alien organisms Winifred encounters hardly even react to her presence. Even when she climbs inside the shell of one of the snaliens to escape the tide, it hardly even interacts with her. Then they return her submarine, repaired with their own Organic Technology, by ramming it into the cliff she’s on… and inside she finds a statuette of herself, with her skull clearly shown.
• Meaningful Name: Winifred's last name, Eurus, is the name of the east wind in Greek mythology, a violent storm wind that tosses ships at sea. Also, the Roman counterpart of Eurus is Vulturnus, like the gas giant Volturnus that Fons orbits.
• Minimalist Cast: Most of the podcast is just Winifred rambling to herself and anyone else who may be listening in on her broadcast. Over the course of the story, the other members of the expedition eventually manage to reestablish contact with her, but the cast still stays pretty small.
• Naming Your Colony World: "Mnemosyne" type. The planet Volturnus, as well as its moons Fons and Juturna, are all named after Roman water deities. Interestingly, the star Volturnus orbits, Kresnick-85, is named after Kresnik, a Slavic fire god.
• No Biochemical Barriers: Discussed. Winifred has no idea if she's chemically compatible with Fonsian organisms, so she makes a point of not leaving any organic waste after herself, just in case she is and it would contaminate them somehow.
  • Later on she contemplates catching and eating a worm if she ever runs out of emergency rations, and concludes that either it'd be incompatible with her biochemistry and her body would reject it, it would be compatible and she'd die of some sort of poisoning, or it would be delicious.
• Once an Episode: At the end of each episode after the credits, Winifred brings the audience an "Ocean Fact". These tend to range from the obvious ("Oceans are big. Just really fucking big.") to the plain bizarre ("The ocean contains a multitude of plant and animal life. And also your car keys. You know what you did Deborah.").
  • In Episode 4, we instead get a "Rock Fact" from the crew's geologist Dr. Montague, which amounts to about ten seconds of obnoxious air guitaring.
  • In Episode 6, we get a "Life Fact" from Dr. Stevens: „I’m terrified!”
  • In Episode 7, Dr. Wang’s "Space Fact" is her chastising the viewer for listening to Tides when they should’ve been at work hours ago.
• Organic Technology: The bus-sized, spiky sea creatures first spotted in Episode 2 are eventually revealed in Episode 8 to be submarines used by the snailiens – and one of them is Winifred’s sub, repaired by them.
• Serious Business: Winifred treats the preservation of Fonsian life extremely seriously. She doesn't know if she can spread infections to local life forms, so she keeps on her bio-filtering environment suit even though she could breathe the air just fine without it. When she first re-establishes contact with her crew, she first spends minutes complaining about how uncomfortable the suit is, then, when Montague suggests taking it off, she immediately and bluntly rejects the idea.
• Shout-Out: When Winifred runs into a trio of „birds”, she decides to name them Angelica, Eliza and Peggy, after the Schuyler sisters.
  • Several times throughout Episode 8, Winifred idly sings Show Me The Way To Go Home to alleviate her loneliness.
  • In Episode 8, when Winifred demands the crew no longer send her banana-flavored emergency rations, a Minion can be heard giggling in the background when she says „banana”.
• Single-Biome Planet: Fons is an ocean world - with the exception of a small and mostly desolate continent, the entire moon is covered in one big superocean. Most of the wildlife seems to inhabit the seas and the continent's intertidal zones, with very little biodiversity further inland.
• Speculative Biology: Much of the podcast is dedicated to showcasing the exotic alien wildlife of Fons, as well as their ecosystems and evolutionary history.
• Speculative Fiction LGBT: As revealed in the Mini-episodes, Winifred is bisexual, and Captain Ricketts had a husband he divorced. Dr. Erickson, Dr. Wang's assistant debuting in Season 2, is non-binary and uses she/they pronouns. Also according to Word of God, the medical doctor Dr. Martinez is a trans man.
• Starfish Aliens: Fons’ biosphere is full of them. Some, like the „birds” and the worms, vaguely resemble Earth organisms. Others… not so much.
  • Based on Winifred's description, the "fish" resemble free-swimming sea cucumbers much more closely than any sort of actual Earth fish. They're radially symmetric, capable of surviving for a short time on land, and swim by beating a set of five paddles or fins instead of tail-strokes.
  • The snaliens resemble eyeless slugs with a confusing blossom of tentacles and feathery sensory organs in place of a head.
  • The "crabs" are only called that because Winifred cannot find the words to describe them otherwise. They are shelled and have pincers, but the similarities just about end there.
  • The surfers, pack-hunting surface-swimmers with boat-shaped shells and symbiotic lures, are particularly bizarre animals.
• Skewed Priorities: Even when stranded on an alien planet and constantly facing possible death, Winifred can't help but excitedly talk about all the new species she's found. She even makes little educational asides for her research assistant, just in case he's listening from orbit.