i truly have less sympathy for eiffel after The Reveal because. first off, he accepted a deal that no prisoner gets, much less the vast majority of people incarcerated for fabricated and nonviolent crimes. he gets to go to space to pay for his daughter's medical bills and education for effectively the rest of her life.

he DID actually make a choice to be the communications officer of the uss hephaestus, a job which he did not take seriously while knowing that some small reparation for the harm he caused his daughter and her mother was on the line. as much as he doesn't want to be there, it was still a choice that he actively made, that he could have rejected, and he chose not to.

i would've understood if he decided 'fuck it, i'm just not doing ANYthing' after he found out that he was sent up to be an experiment, but he was regularly endangering the lives of his crewmates well before he found out his true role on the mission and hilbert's objective. 'he's only up there to be an experiment, so it's fine for him to have acted that way' only holds water if he actually knew that. for all he knew, he was just making the lives of his crewmates dangerous and miserable for kicks.

the worst part is that guys like this actually exist and i've met plenty of them. the only unrealistic thing about eiffel, and the thing that keeps me from writing him off as a character entirely, is that he actually experienced some growth by the end