Minkowski vs. Kepler: Middle Management Foils
I wasn't about to let Podcast Girls Week pass me by without Minkowskiposting, so here I am (wanted to do the Minkowski immigration post tonight because that one's more fully about Her, but that one's going to require more effort and might be closer to a full-out essay, so it'll have to wait) (make no mistake, though, this is a Minkowski post in spirit, I do not care about Warren Kepler outside of his connections to her)
So, Minkowski and Kepler are pretty obvious narrative foils. For starters, Gabriel Urbina has pointed out in AMAs that the SI5 are meant to be an "evil" parallel to the early-season Hephaestus crew, with Maxwell as the Hilbert parallel, Jacobi as the Eiffel parallel, and Kepler as the Minkowski parallel. Their speech patterns are also really similar in a way that I'm pretty sure was intentional: for example, they both use the phrase "Right the hell now!" quite a bit. There's some deeper similarities, too, which say interesting things about both of their characters, including:
Their positions. As Hilbert points out to Minkowski in episode 15, she's middle management and always has been: she loves being a leader, but is ultimately doomed by her insecurity and inability to function without her own rules and orders, so she's stuck basically shuttling orders constantly from point A to point B with very little will of her own. Cutter pretty clearly takes advantage of this tendency in her, exploiting her desire to lead (which is, in turn, a surface-level manifestation of her desire to matter and to have agency over her life) to get her onto the Hephaestus. Kepler seems to have more power than she does at first: when we meet him in season 3, he answers to no one, orders Maxwell and Jacobi around, and effortlessly subjugates the Hephaestus crew, Minkowski especially. His asserting his power over her is part of what makes her desperate to act out and prove her agency and power in season 3: he denies her access to the weather reports, doesn't consult her on any decisions, throws her in the brig, and incessantly refers to her as "Lieutenant" rather than "Commander". Then season 4 rolls around, and suddenly we see that Kepler is middle management too: he's powerless against Cutter and the aliens, both of which delight in denying him the little power they allowed him just as Kepler did to Minkowski: the aliens remove his hand and belittle him as a "violent troll", while Cutter denigrates his leadership and gives him orders constantly. The pig joke Kepler tells in episode 34 always sticks out to me, because it clearly applies to the Hephaestus crew, but Minkowski especially: Goddard took advantage of her skills and let her believe she was in charge, but they never intended to let her keep that power (or even her life: Hilbert's original order was to kill her!) Then we get to season 4, and we see that above all, the person it applies to is Kepler himself: whether he likes it or not, he's in the same boat as Minkowski, because under capitalism there's a whole lot of people who think they have power and very few who actually do.
Their identity struggles. Kepler's are most obvious: in episode 34, he calls himself "the artist formerly known as Warren Kepler" and asserts that whatever he was before is gone, replaced by his job. But the parallels between Minkowski and Kepler lead us to wonder... could the same apply to her? Since she was a child, she's been forced to deny parts of her identity in order to "make it" and prove herself": she speaks English perfectly despite it being her third language, and worked so hard to get rid of her Polish accent that we only ever hear it once. And the emphasis on titles in Wolf 359 shows exactly how much of her identity she gave up to become "Commander Minkowski": the only times we hear anyone call her by her first name, other than Cutter, are in season 4. We also see her attempt to hide aspects of her identity that don't fit with the "commander" persona. Until the later seasons, she only expresses her love for musicals in a context she sees as safe, i.e, the talent show, which she can get away with expressing herself at because she can pass it off as "building crew morale". She actively tries to hide the existence of her husband from Eiffel, only admitting it hesitantly in episode 17. And when she's feeling the very non-commander-like emotions of fear and guilt in episode 53, she doesn't confide in Eiffel or Lovelace: only in the construct of Hilbert she made up in her head (which I talked about more in this post). While Kepler has been the leader of the SI5 so long he's successfully repressed all aspects of his identity, Minkowski's is still very much there, despite her attempts at erasing it to better fit the commander persona she desperately clings to. I almost wonder if in some ways, Minkowski wishes she were Kepler: she wants to be the consummate commander in control of her crew, and I wonder if she looks at him, having given up his identity fully for that kind of control, and feels envious. At any rate, in season 4, both of them are in a nebulous space regarding their identities and personas: Kepler is losing his confidence in his mission and has already lost his place as prime authority on the Hephaestus, and is starting to feel a sense of morality that he thought he'd lost, and Minkowski knows she isn't Commander Minkowski anymore and maybe never was, but she doesn't know what that makes her now. Which brings me to:
Their endings. Both Kepler and Minkowski's endings involve reassertion of their identities outside of any roles given to them by Goddard, but that ends very differently for each of them. Kepler sacrifices himself to help the Hephaestus crew on the grounds that "he's still human", which I think of in the sense of "human vs. emotionless capitalist automaton following orders": despite his best attempts at stamping out his identity, he's still a full and complete person beneath all of it. It's also really interesting that he says he's betraying Rachel because he's "on Minkowski and Jacobi's side": while you could argue that he names them specifically because he doesn't see Lovelace and Hera as human, that still doesn't explain Eiffel. I think he mentions Jacobi because Jacobi is the one who triggered him to think about his morality more, and he mentions Minkowski because she represents what he's turning towards: a reassertion of full, complete identity over capitalistic roles. Because in the very same episode, Minkowski's arc resolves when she asserts her identity: the infamous "I am Renee Minkowski, and that is more than enough to kick your ass" comes to mind. She doesn't call herself Commander, because she's more than that. She can't beat Goddard with its own tools and she never will, but she can beat them with her own strength and power: she just has to stop relying on an externally-assigned role to get it. And in the end, Minkowski lives because she was able to fully reassert that identity, while Kepler dies because he can't: he wants to turn away from his capitalism-assigned role, but he's defined himself fully around it, so once he takes that away, there's nothing left of him. (I have mixed feelings about the death itself, because I think it would have been really powerful to see him build himself back up from the ground and reclaim who he is, but I understand what Urbina and Shachat were going for.)
So, there we have it - there's probably even deeper I could go into this, but that's all for now. Maybe if I have time I'll do a deep dive into all their interactions in the show, but that's the basics. Peace and love on planet Minkowski, and war and hate on planet Kepler. Len out.
