Eureka – From Fear To Eternity

Sci Fi

(Season 3, Episode 8) “Good afternoon. My name is Jo Lupo, and I’ll be saving your ass today.”

Yes, we’ve come to the end of another weird Sci Fi Channel partial season. Our friends from Eureka are heading off to break, but there are another 13 episodes of season three still to come, at some point. This was planned all along, which means that the powers that be were looking to this episode as a finale of sorts. And they treated it as such. The show went out with quite a bang, literally and figuratively.

There were also answers to be had for questions that had been building all season. What was Eva’s secret? Who were those mysterious bodies? Would that mysterious goo Zoe slipped in ever be addressed? All of that was cleared up, and they even managed a cliffhanger that will drop us into the back half at full speed.

Getting to Eva and the big mystery, I think most people had settled on the fact that she was much older than she appeared, and had in fact been in Eureka in 1939. Most of the rest of it came as a surprise. All things considered, it played out rather well. Eureka as the original test site for the bomb fits right in with what Eureka is today. As does the mysterious Element X. The three dead bodies, Perkins, Blackman, and Ross, were researchers as expected. But the rapid aging angle was a nice twist.

Zoe’s story tied in with all of that very well too. As soon as she started complaining about being rundown I was thinking about the goo. When Fargo announced that her DNA didn’t match the sample that SARAH had on file, it clinched it. That kid has had a rough run of it in Eureka.

The instantanium, while having some iffy effects behind it, did make for a pretty cool bit of crazy Eureka science. And it led to one of my favorite parts of the episode. That being the arrival of Jo in the airshaft. Not for the rescue, or the great line, but how it showed where she and Carter are in their working relationship. I know half the reason it was even in there was for Jo to put the boots to Zane about where they are headed, but I don’t have a lot of interest in Jo and Zane. I do like the Carter/Jo dynamic though.

I was a little surprised that Henry, and I think we can assume Carter, conspired to smuggle Eva/Mary out of town. After all that she has done, I just didn’t see that coming. I suppose saving the Sheriff’s daughter earns a good deal of credit though, and it does put a cap on Eva’s portion of the story, but not the bigger story.

There will still be a bit of that to deal with whenever we return to Eureka. The bomb that saved the town was just the first in a series of them to finish the episode. We also found General Mansfield firing Carter for not turning Eva over to him. My first reaction is, fired? Not taken into custody? Fine, meet your new head of security at GD. He’ll liason with Sheriff Lupo. Thinking about it though, this is a dismissal that can’t stick. My bet is that Carter will be back to work in no time.

And of course, there was the other bomb, which I thought was telegraphed early on. I jumped right to pregnant when Allison started complaining of being run down, not even considering exposure to the goo. It’s yet another stumbling block tossed out to keep her and Carter from getting together, but I remain confident that they will eventually have to be together.

That will do it for Eureka for the forseeable future. We’ll pick it up again when Sci Fi decides to toss out some new episodes.

Clacked by Brett Love
on Sep 24, 2008 @ 02:22 EST5EDT