Okay, so, there I was doing my thing and I discovered that SciFi.com allows viewers to watch some episodes of some shows. AND on top of that, they’ve premiered their new show Eureka and you can watch it online (provided you have a large bandwidth internet connection).
I like the show. It is funny and well written and, wow. I think the only word I really know for the show is, “wow.” It was good. Really good. Impossibly good. The premise is that Einstein convinced Eisenhower that the United States needed a special top secret community where scientific research and advancements could move forward. Eisenhower agreed, Eureka was born, and the best and brightest minds were transplanted to this little hamlet to set up shop and work on technological advances.
Enter the protagonist, Marshal Jack Carter (played by Colin Ferguson) transporting his daughter (as fugitive) back to Los Angeles and her mother. Their cars goes off the road, they land in a tree, he falls out of car, they wander into Eureka and find the local sheriff who is friendly and somewhat anxious to get them out of town and on their way, quickly, without trying to act like he is anxious to get them out of town and on their way.
Pretty quickly weird things start to happen. A kid is lost. Jack steps in to assist in the investigation. And before he knows it he is armpit deep in the muck and mud of the town as they try to figure out what is translocating people and animals and the back end of a Winnebago. It’s pretty interesting, very X-Files-ish without making the show so weird that you ostracize a large portion of your potential viewing audience. Truth told it is closer to a SciFi dramedy than it is a SciFi drama (ala X-Files) and keeps it’s wits about them as they go from location to location and experiment to experiment trying to uncover what is really going on in Eureka. The military show up. Things get really weird. And then, before you know it, a solution is found, Jack and Zoe (his daughter) are back on the road home and he is “promoted” and sent right back to Eureka.
It was an amazing pilot episode. I have to parrot a comment I read or heard about the show, the SciFi channel had better not only pick this one up, but had better keep it going. The show is so good that you want to follow it, you want to see where it will eventually lead you, you want to come back and watch it again and again because they’ve created a world that, in some strange fashion, really does work.
If you get a chance, I’d suggest watching it.