I Miss Eureka

EUREKA! A word that elicits different imagery in the mind of each person that hears it spoken, the joy of discovery, the excitement in knowledge, and to a few of us geeks, a show on SciFi (I refuse to call it SyFy, That is not a thing!). This last July this show was cancelled. Oh how we raised our voices and made them heard, but alas it was not enough. A show that survived 5 seasons, too many black holes and quantum singularities to count in the end couldn’t survive the basic tenets of television dynamics. It just didn’t have the numbers. But I still miss Eureka, and if you should ever get a chance to grab a Blu ray or DVD pop that sucker in and give it a watch, here’s why.

Yeah, that’s the dude in the bath… That’s happening

1) There is a sense of whimsy that imbued the show with the feeling that no matter who was working on it, there was a glorification of the absurdity. While there is another show on SyFy (fine, I give in for now) Warehouse 13 that builds from a similar premise, Eureka has a sense of odd purity that not a lot of other shows had at the time. This gives almost every scene a feeling of willingness to accept the unacceptable. Stretching the bounds of the imagination each week and giving me my favorite reason to watch.

2) Another thing that drew me to the show and kept my interest for all 5 seasons was the fact that the show runners found great joy in realistic science, while many science fiction television seems at times to border on the ridiculous edges of the genre Eureka did something not many other shows were doing at the time. They kept the science fantastical but grounded in reality, sure the possibility of the things in the show actually occurring are infinitesimal but still within the realm of real science. This made the show not only fun to watch but also rather informative at times.

Science is Cool!

3) Sheriff Jack Carter: Colin Ferguson plays one of the best “Straight” characters on television, a foil to everything going on around him. Jack Carter reacts the way we would expect a rational human being to in the situations he was thrown into, with amazement and incredulity. Which you would suppose after 5 or so seasons would get a little old but when you live and work in a town like Eureka, everyone is just a time travel mishap away from a universal rewrite.

4) Eureka kept the geek in everyone satisfied Guest Stars: Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, Stan Lee, Aaron Douglas (Chief on BSG), Some of these people got to be in the best story lines of the final few seasons. Which made Eureka something special, when the announcement that the show was going to be cancelled came down the line surprising not only those watching the show but those working on it as well. Stars like Wil Wheaton took to their favorite social networks to express their disappointment and love for the show. While this wasn’t enough to save a show that shone bright for a time and was dimmed just as quickly it gives me hope for genre specific television.

So this, all of the reasons why I miss Eureka, all of the reasons why this show was possibly too crazy to exist on television and what should you take away from it? Go watch Eureka, go watch BSG, support good genre television, there just isn’t enough of it on our TVs today.

That’s a lot of HAWT Science going on.

Sam Smith

Staff Writer

samuel@ihogeek.com

@insomniawalking