Trivial Matters

Eureka is a show on the SciFi channel currently in its third season. I recently caught two of the new episodes during a marathon Tuesday night, and I have to say that I was a bit disappointed.

If you’re not familiar with the show, it centers on a small town filled with supergeniuses. Most of them work for the government on various projects and the rest support the town in any way they can. The resident dog catcher is actually a cryptozooologist and the janitor is a former NASA engineer with a PhD in temporal mechanics.

The star of the show is the town’s only non-genius, a former U.S. marshal who now serves as the town sheriff. Each episode finds one of the smart guys doing something or other that goes horribly wrong (either intentionally or by accident) and Sheriff Carter seems to be the only one who can stop/reverse/fix it. Most episodes he spends the first half just trying to convince people that there actually is a problem, and the second half finding simple solutions that seem to elude the best and brightest.

In the third season, I see that this formula hasn’t changed much and I’m saddened by that fact. They have even gone back to the story arc of a secret project being run by the new head of Global Dynamics (the “company” that employs the town).

I enjoyed this show when it first came out. The writing was good, and the science was a sound as it could be given the premise, but now it just doesn’t have that same spark that it once did. To make matters worse, they are starting to copy story ideas from other SciFi shows like Stargate SG-1. The episode “I Do Over” finds Carter in a time loop (a la “Groundhog Day”), and to get himself out of it, he must learn the physics of time. This is almost identical to the SG-1 episode “Window of Opportunity” where Jack and Teal’c find themselves in a similar loop and Jack has to learn an alien language to help get them out of the loop.

I will probably continue to watch Eureka to see if they cover any new ground, but I don’t have my hopes up.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS