Keiran McEwen
Keiran McEwenThe quote at the start of EUReKA (as it is stylized) goes thusly, “A little Knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.” For Colin Ferguson’s Sheriff Carter, that’s pretty true. Directed by Peter O’Fallon, it is difficult to say O’Fallon is known for much. He directed some episodes of Pushing Daisies, as well as writing and co-creating the Jim Jefferies-led comedy, Legit. The same can be said for “Pilot” writers and Eureka creators, Andrew Cosby and Jaime Paglia, the former doing an odd producing role here or there and writing 2019’s Hellboy, and Paglia working on Scream: The TV Series and The Flash.
Set somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, there is a small town with strange goings on. Really, depending on the writer’s whims, the show is simultaneously set in Washington, Oregon, and California; the latter being the only one that really has a Eureka. Like all good shows, someone is mysteriously killed and a kid goes missing which results in U.S. Marshal Jack Carter coming and investigating the mysterious goings on in… A Town Called Eureka, which the show is also sometimes referred to as. He also has a young blonde woman in the backseat of his cop car, a very angry young woman indeed.
After a young boy disappears in the back of his family’s RV, which a quarter of is cut out but continues relative motion, and as a result Max Headroom finds. Carter himself finds the kid in a cubby with his dumb-everyman charm, impressing DOJ Agent Allison Blake, earning him a stay at Ms Mona’s B&B. Or maybe Beverly Barlowe is more of a Jean Milburn-type. The point is, the young blonde woman I had a bit of a crush on as a kid is Carter’s daughter, the kid’s dad was doing risky tachyon accelerator experiments in the basement, and Einstein was right, everyone in this town is dangerous.
I’m going to be that person and say it, Eureka is one of those shows from the mid-2000s that does sci-fi right. Where Primeval, Torchwood, Warehouse 13, Stargate Universe, Atlantis, and similar sci-fi shows are popular, I don’t really like them for some reason. From an outside perspective or first glance, I should hate it for the same reasons I never gelled with the related Warehouse 13. The premise of that being “part The X-Files, part Raiders of the Lost Ark and part Moonlighting,” according to Scifi.com.
So what does Eureka do right that other shows don’t do? Tone for one; it never feels like we’re wavering between crying my eyes out, and sadness over the possibility we have a dead kid. In fact, it handles its more realistic aspects a bit better in general. The soon-to-be Sheriff Carter’s home life is topsy turvy, but his dissolved marriage isn’t his whole life. In fact, his work is made out to be the majority of his life. That will become more prominent in later episodes, meanwhile, here in “Pilot,” he’s trying to wrangle Zoe from her rebellious years.
Alongside the Tone, Eureka is avoiding something that a lot of 00s-10s shows did: They were almost monochromatic, or heavily desaturated. Eureka has darker moments, both visually and thematically. However, for the most part, there is a sense of color and brightness to the tone in both regards. Take for example, “Pilot.” A guy has been playing with a tachyon particle accelerator, breaking down the very fabric of quantum mechanics and realistically the entirety of physics as we know it. Before someone wants to climb up me, physics not theoretical physics, which are completely different. One is useful and the other meant you were my high school teacher.
I’ll come back around to it, but Eureka does something else that a lot of TV shows forget to do. It makes the world make sense in that world. Nonetheless, because this mad scientist was doing quantum engineering in his basement, breaking apart the elemental ideas that time is in fact not linear but can further be bent using tachyon particles, the town is under siege. What from? Paradoxes, maybe, bubbles of time trapping certain things in place, possibly.
The reason I said that the back of that RV that was sheered off continued relative motion is that it proceeds through time at a faster rate, but is found a mile, miles, or maybe a couple hundred yards away. This is where I think the time bubble idea works. The very reason the Doctor’s TARDIS is a Time and Relative Dimension in Space machine is because a “time machine” simply doesn’t work from a physics standpoint, beyond the obvious one. Theory dictates that while you could use a time machine, you’d end up in god knows where because the Earth rotates as well as falls through space.
For example, taking the 88 miles per hour compensation into the mix, the DeLorean would still be in the billions of miles from Earth. As it turns out, you would not see “some serious shit;” your eyeballs would be popping out of your head around the same time you suffocate. A lot of what Eureka does is technobabble, which a lot of shows and films do, but the writing backs up the technobabble problems and solutions in just the right way to make the show work. Take some of the Fast and Furious films from say 5-10, physics be damned. In this case, all that is explained by the world and is fun (and stupid!).
To return to the darker moment that I got sidetracked on twice there, the kid wasn’t alone. He had the family dog with him, and the dog wasn’t with the kid, the dog was still in the back of the RV when it skipped hundreds of years. Another example of the “time bubbles” or paradoxes is the section of farmland that saw a cow get Under The Dome’d. The trees caught in the bubble are dated 1200 years old. Sheriff/Major Cobb has his leg cut off by a bubble, and that resident who died was some random in Vincent’s diner.
None of this is really settled on. I’d say the darker elements are reserved for the season story arc, which is more of a late-in-episode segment, so I’ll avoid spoilers (for a 2006 show) for now. Going off of vague story elements and what we got here, I’d say I wasn’t too excited by the story arc for season 1. It is trying to be dark, vague, and mysterious, something that Eureka as we’ll come to find isn’t very much of if at all. It feels somewhat off from the rest of the show.
Admittedly, “Pilot” not being about the person who crashed into Wisteria Lane, is just the pilot episode that is getting the Marshal and the town introduced to each other. It turns the US Marshal into one of the highest-paid Sheriffs in the country, but not for bad reasons this time. I’ve skipped around it a little and made hints about it, but the fictional town of Eureka is somewhat extraordinary.
I think the best example of this is the character of Kevin. Allison is a single mum after her first husband (as we’ll come to know) died, leaving her to manage her job as the DOJ liaison for Eureka (the town) and trying to keep her young autistic son safe in a town full of scientists and their dangerous experiments. Kevin is someone I want to focus on here for a second because the way autism is shown in most shows is that of a genius, not very verbal, and generally the stereotypes. Eureka absolutely does this too.
I’m not saying that’s a good thing, what I want to point out is that often when autism is shown it is that the person who is autistic is the only smart one in the room. The fact of the matter is, Kevin is just a young kid with autism in a town full of the world’s smartest and greatest, he isn’t the exception because he’s autistic, he’s the exception because he’s a kid. It absolutely is the stereotype, which was common in 2006, but it is a twist on the stereotype that is not often done.
“Pilot” as a story on its own is fairly basic. In fact, the whole point of Eureka is that it is doing all the basics of storytelling and TV writing correctly: There aren’t too many parts moving, there isn’t a world-ending event building in the background, and the high-concept stuff isn’t being dangled straight away, it is all simple. Carter is a dumb-everyman cop who stumbles into something strange and he falls in love. It is difficult not to fall in love with a small town of great, honest (mostly) people, and some weirdos.
The town itself is a haven for scientists, from there, the complicated stuff happens. No, unlike The Simpsons in its glory years, the writers aren’t themselves “fairly good” at mathematics, and thus if you know what to look for, there isn’t an extra little joke here or there. Or in The Simpsons there are: 8128 being a fairly basic one or how Homer doubled the Higgs boson. If you want to break apart Eureka from a fundamental level, sure the mathematic equations as part of set design or plot devices are just entry-level physics with no real bearing on the science.
I’d bore you to death about the etymology of Google (or Googol and Googolplex) and how there are numbers called sextillion and sexdecillion before I could explain why I know it is wrong. The basics are what I’ve already said, the world makes sense of itself before you can say “That’s not realistic.” Of course, it isn’t realistic that someone made a tachyon accelerator, but the writing does just enough for dumb-dumbs like me or Carter to go along with it. It makes for an entertaining show.
Ultimately, Eureka isn’t a show you could make now in the current age of anti-intellectualism, but “Pilot” is the stepping stone into a show that is fun and for those who aren’t coddled up to the idea of it. The episode “Pilot” itself isn’t much to write home about, it puts the pieces on the board and proceeds to play a casual, dumb-man’s game of chess for the first season before it finds itself properly.
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37 Eureka “Pilot”
Pros
- A fun and light introduction to Carter, others, and the world.
- Kevin is one of the most interesting characters throughout the show.
Cons
- I'm not a fan of this mystery.
- We've put the pieces on the board, can we keep moving for the next few episodes?
