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Complaining as he does about Stark, Jack bemoans Nathan’s want to avoid responsibility as he goes on to ignore the mention of Kim, who, last time we saw her, admitted to negligence and (in a roundabout way) attempted assault with a deadly weapon. Blah, blah, blah, Section 5, blah, blah, blah, science-y weird stuff, there is a big bang and a new day begins. Waking up on the bright side of the second (of five) recessions of my lifetime, SARAH is now voiced by a woman, he’s in bed with Allison, and oh, Allison’s pregnant. Ya know, normal next-day stuff.

So that’s at least the first few minutes covered. What about the rest of the episode? “Once in a Lifetime” is one of those episodes where you get whiplash if you haven’t jumped onto the ghost train already. It is now 2010, Henry runs GD, Zoe is graduating, Allison’s up the duff, Kim has her own department, and the entire town is being assaulted by timey-wimey shwoopness. You’ll get that reference with next week’s Doctor Who.

What is meant to be the conclusion to the season, the build to the crescendo of this Section 5’s captured sunlight, hasn’t been exciting. It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a Gregg’s vegan sausage roll, which makes it a £1.30 mystery that I don’t care about. I don’t care about it because that isn’t the conclusion we’re working on. It’s all about Kim, the time thing, and the fact that Beverly Barlowe is doing this creepy thing where she’s killed a clone woman and now wants to do a Meet Dave to Nathan Stark.

I’d hardly call it a conclusion, just something to set up for whatever the next episode might be. From the start, “Once in a Lifetime” is setting up for the emotional beats to hit like a freight train. The trouble is that it hardly picks up enough speed and energy to make an impact. Within a few moments of the opening credits rolling, Henry looks a bit shifty, and we started on Kim’s highly dangerous experiment to find we’re in a distant timeline of everyone’s dreams? Call me a cynic if you must, but you could see where this one was going straight away.

“It’s about the journey, not the destination,” sure. However, the pacing of the writing and somewhat lack of motivation I got from the direction left me asking where the get-up and go to save the day really comes from, at least before the 25-minute mark. Now and then throughout the day in 2010, there is this shwoopness going on that precedes an odd event. One that is linked to a couple of years ago that happened off-screen. It’s all fine, it’s all the standard Eureka-ness, but it leaves you asking, “What now?”

When talking about anything that can be construed as a spoiler, I sort of hate talking about it, but the show is from 2006, and we’re almost 20 years on, so forgive me. The resolution here isn’t about the artifact and what’s in Section 5, it isn’t about the Beverly Barlowe nonsense, it is about Kim and Henry’s relationship. Now you can forgive me for being rude, but why should I care about that when she’s been in one episode prior and had nothing to do with either Section 5 or Bev?

This is the season finale, and that’s my sticking point because it doesn’t feel like we’re concluding anything that was building throughout the season. Just an episode ago, we were told Henry is sticking to his plan to leave Eureka because it is no longer what he signed up for, and we don’t see anything of that either. It all feels very directionless, hitting the big emotional beats of Kim being the one found burnt to a crisp in Section 5 and Henry’s time travel adventures, but otherwise, it’s “the mystery continues.”

I think it was act 1 in the season stuff rather than a conclusion to a 3rd act. That isn’t to take away from Joe Morton and Colin Ferguson’s performances, particularly once Jack goes back in time to sort the timeline. Those two in particular are the emotional heart, where everyone else is left unknowing of the timeline-based events. However, those big emotional beats don’t override the fact that we’ve been building to a point that “concludes” with the name of the thing Bev is working for and reinforcement of Section 5’s dangers.

I guess the point I’m trying to stumble to through the anger over the episode’s lack of season resolution is that, if a conclusion is seen as a reward for sticking through a story, then I don’t feel like I’ve gotten what I’m supposed to by this point. The phrasing might seem entitled, but that’s writing 101: You set something up, then you pay it off. I think the only payoff we got in “Once in a Lifetime” is that one scene with young Walter Perkins, who (due to his nonsense) has Benjamin Button’d himself into house arrest.

Ultimately, as an episode on its own, I’d have probably liked “Once in a Lifetime” because when it is hitting those emotional beats, it’s doing it well. My issue is that, for all that it uses Section 5 as this tool in the story, we’re paying off none of the major stories that have been in multiple episodes. The questions we’ve had haven’t been answered, they’ve just been added to, including Jack and Allison’s is/isn’t relationship.

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Eureka "Once in a Lifetime"

6.5

Score

6.5/10

Pros

• Big emotions that somewhat work.
• Colin and Joe's performances.

Cons

• A season finale without much pomp.
• Can we just end the Bev story, please?