Keiran McEwen
Keiran McEwenThat’s a walking red flag, and I’m sticking by that no matter what. Directed by Jefery Levy, “Many Happy Returns” is the first of his two outings as director; the second being in episode 7, “Blink.” Written by show creators Cosby and Paglia, I don’t think I have anything to add that I said last week (about four months ago) when I wrote about episode 1, “Pilot.” Both are fairly under the radar outside of Eureka, and what they are known for isn’t much. The same can be said of Levy, being the director for a couple of poorly reviewed flicks including Reese Witherspoon film S.F.W.
With a new Sheriff in town, his deputy is a little bit annoyed she was looked over for this idiot. Carter is about as up to speed with the goings on in Eureka as politicians are with technology, something else he’s a bit behind the times on. So following the good man getting the job and planting the “dead” parents Susan and Walter Perkins, there is a strange energy around town. Mostly because Susan Perkins comes sauntering into the station demanding to see Walter so she can kill him.
A “dead” woman asking to kill her “dead” husband, after both were buried that morning, that’s certainly not a normal small-town America thing. Turns out, after Beverly Barlowe tried to kill Susan Perkins, this is Susan Perkins – the real one. In an attempt to avoid spoilers (for a depressingly nearly 20-year-old show), I never mentioned last time how the sex therapist/B&B owner is one of the figureheads of the season-wide mystery. A mystery to which you were supposed to connect Greg Germann’s Warren King. Germann is out, Bev is only in a few shots, and we’re not leaning too heavily on the season arc as we establish what a normal episode might be.
Typically when writing TV you do it in the right order: You write the first episode, you write the last episode, you write somewhere around the mid-point, you do the filler, then the last one you write is the second episode. We saw that with Moffat’s first series of Doctor Who, “The Beast Below.” Functionally, a fine episode, but nothing particularly special when it comes to how the show is set to proceed.
Of course, the “A” story this time out is that Susan Perkins, the woman that Beverly Barlowe poisoned, is very much alive after everyone including her son were at her funeral. The “B” story is more about this creepy energy that seems to be following certain characters around. Particularly Jack as he gets used to the new town and its weirdness. There is a “C” plot, but that comes much later in the episode, primarily because like most people (the sycophants), he sleeps at night and funerals take place during the day. I know, such a mad notion.
Borrowing Global Dynamics’ “Bio-scanner – molecular-thingy,” as Jack puts it to the new head of GD. That’s another series-wide angle: The new head of Global Dynamics is the conventionally sexy Ed Quinn playing Nathan Stark, Allison Blake’s ex-husband. The couple separated a year prior but never put pen to paper, as it were. Thus we begin the standard “Our main character has a thing for the attractive love-interest, but her ex is still in the picture, this we’ll have a will-they/won’t-they.” Jo, shoot me!
Aside from male bravado and reassurances that the two are separated (for whatever reason thus far), we get to find out who this Susan Perkins is. Or maybe who the Susan Perkins we saw previously was. This is the red flag I was on about: Several years prior, Susan and Walter had a spat that led them to separate themselves (like Stark and Blake), but Walter was too set on Susan, and being a scientist known for the impossible, he recreated his wife down to the last strand of DNA. A bit more than cloning his wife, he recreated his wife and had a son with this copy a year later.
See, this is why you can’t have people like Fargo going about creating people. Technically Walter had a kid with someone who was hardly a year old, and by the time of her death was only seven. Being one of the more episodic episodes I can talk further about it, we get to the end and it turns out the mysterious energy following Jack and later the young Brian Perkins around is Walter. His experiments last time out didn’t kill him, it just shifted him into an alternate plane of existence.
I never said Eureka was entirely realistic, but if we’re going to be realistic about relationships, Susan should have run from that man. Being 2006 and a nerd’s fantasy, that’s not how it goes. Though, if we’re speaking quite frankly about nerd fantasies, we will be waiting a while for the “Oh, Fargo, you gotta get yourself a girlfriend” line to pay off.
Self-Actuated Residential Automated Habitat, or SARAH for short, that’s Jack’s “C” story. The man moved to the middle of somewhere (I think it is redacted for legal reasons) with a large pay increase — from what was considered livable in L.A., by the way — and he did so without buying or renting? I get it, I need help with the mortgage calculator apps in the US too, but I think there is someone smart enough in Eureka to help with that one. Nonetheless, Fargo gives the good Sheriff a loan of his latest experiment, a smart house.
Before we had Amazon’s Alexa, but after we saw ECHO IV or X10, this was most people’s idea of smart homes. We used to be a real country, we used to make things this ambitious, and now what do we do? Argue on Twitter because it is entertaining to the shaved chimp that owns it so he can claim it is a left-right thing. The cameras watching you, sharing information you’d probably not want out there? That’s true, but otherwise the sliding bathroom, the magic house making dinner, doing things perfectly. Yeah, that’s the fiction side of this science-fiction show.
Truth is, “Many Happy Returns” is still finding its way for the show sometimes called Eureka, sometimes A Town Called Eureka, and sometimes stylized as EUReKA. I like the cast, I think we’re still getting to know them a bit, and we’re still finding our way with the show itself. It will eventually get there, especially with some more interesting/out-there ideas, but ghost-man that was just someone on a different plane of existence, that’s a bit safe. It also puts a happy (yet creepy) ending on the dark tale we got last time; an American TV problem, making everything saccharine.
Ultimately, “Many Happy Returns” doesn’t have a massive weight on the overall plot of the season, nor is it doubling how we’ll be proceeding generally. Introducing the last few bits of the puzzle before we get fully into the swing, it does what it needs to and very little else. I like “Many Happy Returns” to a degree, but I’m glad we’re still growing, finding our feet, and finally settling on who or what is going on in a small town called Eureka.
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27 Eureka “Many Happy Returns”
Pros
- “Oh, Fargo, you gotta get yourself a girlfriend” will pay off well.
- Ed Quinn's Stark hits the ground running.
Cons
- The happy/saccharine nerd-fantasy A-plot doesn't age well.
- We're still trying to find our feet.
- I'm just not a fan of the Beverly Barlow stuff.
