Eureka: Season 5 Premiere

The season five premiere of Eureka hit this week. If you’ve never seen Eureka, then you’ve probably never watched the SyFy channel as this show is pretty huge—but I suppose you could surmise that, seeing that it’s in its fifth season and all. Anyway, the premise is that there is a secret town (named “Eureka”) that is run by the government. This town houses America’s most preeminent scientific minds. They all work at a Top Secret lab, and enjoy the Top Secret suburban lifestyle that Eureka affords. As you can imagine, a town full of the latest technology in all branches of science can get pretty hectic. That is where Sheriff Carter (Colin Ferguson) comes in. He’s just a run of the mill lawman who finds himself in the extraordinary position of being the only cop in a town full of zany mad scientists. Poor Sheriff Carter must find a way to save the world nearly every week as there seems to be a disaster around every corner. But then again, I suppose this sort of stuff should be expected when you’re dealing with the most advanced experimental lab in the world.

With this latest episode I was pleased to have my characters back, but I wound up being kind of disappointed in the end because in my estimation, this premiere episode was a cop out of a cop out. One cop out is bad enough for an audience to deal with. But when you put a second cop out right on the first one’s heels—well, it is highly dissatisfying. You become completely removed from the narrative, your suspension of disbelief has disappeared, and you get the sneaking suspicion that the writers are smirking at you from somewhere off screen.

So first off, let’s get into cop out #1. At the end of season four, there were a lot of juicy cliff hangers tantalizing us like forbidden fruit. And that mean ole SyFy channel was going to make us wait for it for MONTHS AND MONTHS! In last season’s cliffhanger, certain key members of Global Dynamic (Eureka’s previously mentioned secret lab) had been chosen for the Astraeus mission—the first manned flight to Titan. It’s one of the many moons of Jupiter, and it’s also the only other water-laden body in the galaxy besides Earth (I think…fact check me, scientists!). Engineer Henry (Joe Morton) and Deputy Jo (Erica Cerra) were not happy that their significant others were chosen for the mission but they had made peace with the fact that it was only going to be for a little while. However, Alison (Salli Richardson-Whitfield) was happy that she would be staying behind with Sheriff Carter. Things were starting to heat up between them again, and this time they might finally be able to make it work. But right as the mission was about to launch, something happened. Alison went aboard the ship to check things out and then the ship just disappeared, taking the full Astraeus crew—and Allison—with it.

SPOILERS

Season five begins with Alison waking up to the Astraeus computers warning of impending collision. She wakes up the crew and they get busy saving their own lives. Thankfully Zane Donovan (Niall Matter) pulls off some pretty nifty flying and they land safely. They suit up to explore the strange world they’ve landed on only to find that they are back in Eureka. They never made it to Titan, and even though it seems like they were only gone for a few minutes, it’s four years in the future. The search had been called off after two years and everyone moved on without them. And blam, there’s your cop out. Instead of dealing with all the emotional fodder that had been built up in previous episodes, the show sidesteps this to introduce a whole new series of problems. I suppose I should be used to this by now because this is a familiar tactic when it comes to this particular show. But it is just annoying. It has always been annoying, and I feel cheated every time they do it. Now the Astraeus crew has to readjust to a world where they no longer fit in.

But this sidestepping isn’t even the worst of it. Right at the end (spoiler alert!), just as I had sighed resignedly and begun to accept the new world of scenarios that this episode had spent its entirety creating, we find that the entire thing was a fabrication. Alison and the rest of the crew are attached to some sort of matrix device that is controlling their minds. They are locked away in an alternate reality, and they are in the hands of the dark shadow organization that has been lurking in the sidelines, waiting for the right moment to strike.

Yes, this is interesting and I am going to watch to see what happens. But when the story jerks around to such a dramatic extent, it stops being intriguing and starts being a dorky exercise in the philosophical understanding of Reality. There will always be a little piece of me left out of this show because it can, and often does, at any moment shift perspective entirely. It’s like reading a bad rendition of something by Kurt Vonnegut.

Fans will most likely be thrilled by this episode, and you might be too—so long as you are not a narrative structure nerd like I am. But I just can’t get past the easy out of it all. Fancy pantsers such as myself call this cheap literary device “deus ex machina” after the often-used Greek Tragedy fix of bringing in a god just when things seemed insurmountable. The god would waive his arms around and everything wrong would be instantly righted, the end. Because of this, the drama never felt earned. And thus we get the sad result of this device’s overuse: massive eye rolling and snarky jadedness.

So good luck, I hope you like it more than I did.