Rann:  The episode starts out at Cafe Diem, home of the gayest man not to be working at Torchwood. Zoe, she of the name shared by countless webcomic characters across the intertubes, is serving lunch to her boyfriend, and they initiate standard pointless high school couple chit-chat. For a supergenius, her boytoy is surprisingly dull, and not in the nerdy pocket protector way, just a “completely average guy” way. They’re about to kiss, and Carter, sitting nearby, has a little spaz attack and covers it by asking for a coffee refill.

Carter and his daughter also exchange what is, by now, stock dialog for them, and it bugs me just a little because these two can play off each other so well. (In fact, at times, a little TOO well. There were a few points, very early on, where more than a few viewers picked up… y’know, -vibes-, from their relationship.) But it’s pretty standard stuff today, the old “ZOMG I wanna kiss boys” versus “ZOMG I don’t want my baby kissing boys”.

Vincent wanders over for some of the old “tell the bartender your troubles”, ‘cept this bartender is fruitier than the dessert cup, and we love ‘im for it. Vincent reiterates the relationship plot from last episode, just in case you went retarded since last week, and also so we can get the standard long-suffering response from Carter. (The dialog isn’t very snappy so far this season.) Carter says that he’s not depressed so much over his unrequited like going, um, unrequited, but rather that the other half of his Those Two Guys is still bald. And, uh, in prison.

Vincent delivers a nice little line about prison food that, while cute and funny, sounds a little bit more like something from a stand-up routine. Carter politely fails to notice Vincent’s plug for his actor’s other career and talks about how things just don’t seem right without Henry around. For a moment, I consider the possibility that the “off” feeling of these episodes so far is actually a massive bit of meta on the part of the writers. Of course Eureka doesn’t seem quite right… Henry’s not around! That extends to Eureka the show as well as Eureka the town! ... Okay, reaching a little, but hey, y’never know.

We shift over to Global where we’re still going step-by-step through the crap storyling with Bureaucrat Bitch. She’s got a hiring freeze in place, she’s wanting to cut jobs, yadda yadda. Stark points out that what she’s doing could destroy entire disciplines of scientific study, while Allison adds just how bad it would be for morale. Delores Trump blows them both off with some standard mouthing about “commercial viability” and all that, which. considering that the majority of Eureka’s stuff is ridiculously classified projects for government use. doesn’t even make any fucking sense. She makes some vague threats about firing Stark, which is funny on a meta level because it’s television and I’m betting that between the older chick with smoke wrinkles on her face in the unattractive pants suits and the guy that looks kinda like a young RDJ, the dude with the big broad shoulders is gonna be around longer.

Delores Trump unveils the “consumer products research lab”, headed up for no particularly good reason by a guy who was… what, a theoretical mathematician when he was introduced? They seem to kind of be going like Delores has a “cougar” thing for the bad-boy young scientist, which just isn’t coming off well. Too, the lab makes me roll my eyes because it’s pretty obvious as the setting they use for a lot of those deodorant commercials they’ve been tying into Eureka. Nothing like some ridiculously blatant product whoring in the middle of your favorite show to help you get back in the groove, huh? I mean, they even threw up the fucking “Degree” logo, filling up most of the screen, and left it there for about two seconds. Speaking of “threw up”, I’d kind of like to. Jesus fucking Christ that pisses me off.

As I’ve said before, I understand that the purpose of all these shows and stuff is ultimately to make money. But there’s a line you can cross, and Sci-Fi is taking a big, Mountain Dew A Registered Trademark Of The Pepsi Corporation-fueled piss all over it. I’m starting to wonder if the feel of this corporate sellout is less a plotline and just the new dynamic of the show, in which case I won’t be writing a whole bunch more of these reviews because I’m not gonna fucking put up with it.

We get a few “goofy” bits in the background that are references to the Degree commercials, and Stark rolls his eyes and sighs in a way that probably reflects the feelings of a large part of the show’s viewing audience.

Over at the prison, Carter’s trying to do card tricks through a plexiglass wall. On the one hand, I guess they realized that the chess thing was really cliche. On the other, why the glass wall? I mean, I know Henry’s a supergenius capable of building an atomic bomb with a ballpoint pen and some jello or whatever, but at no point has he resisted arrest, been uncooperative, or in any way shown any desire not to be a model prisoner. They can’t let him sit in the same room with his visitors? Well, I guess the real reason is to emphasize how separated he is from his friends, but it still doesn’t make much sense.

In fact, Henry goes on to lampshade this when he talks about how they’re moving him to federal supermax. Again, -why-? It makes no sense, the reason he was arrested were on the technicalities of his illegal activities, as everyone involved would have made it clear he was doing these things to save a life. He never tried to escape, he never tried to resist arrest… just, WTF? Anyway, sorry, don’t mean to harp, let’s continue.

Carter and Henry get interrupted by a 911 call from Allison, and share such a long gooey look before Carter leaves that the slashfic writers in the audience all had to leave the room at the commercial break for fresh pairs of panties. Carter arrives at Global and he and Allison share an elevator in a scene that’s almost as awkward as the last scene was subtextual. There’s very, very little chemistry here, even awkward chemistry, so apparently this season of Eureka is being sponsored by Degree deodorant and the hormones of frustrated late-teens-early-twenties females.

Carter talks with the project director, and they again try to reinforce the idea that he’s dumber than the people around him by not explaining a damn thing to him from the start and waiting until he’s asked about five times. They explain that Lab 27 is an enclosed environment for studying the effects of such things, which somehow ties into helping the Mars missions. Carter asks if they mean the -potential- Mars missions, and there’s a bit of “wink, nudge” to say “Don’t tell him, for no particular reason!” Soooo Eureka’s put people on Mars and we’re just spending billions of dollars to -pretend- we’re further behind on that front than we are.

I’ll just say, here and now, the writing staff is doing a kind of shitty job this season. Eureka is less and less seeming like it could fit into the “real world”, because the changes it’s made to its world just don’t make a single bit of goddamned sense when contrasted with ours. If the government’s so eager to save money that they’re sending in Delores Trump, why not just scrap the whole charade of outdated shuttles and lander robots and show people “Oh, and here, our geniuses have actually put people on Mars”? No. Fucking. Sense.

Okay, how the hell much space is there under Global? I mean, I’m no scientist, but a giant excavated area underneath the place? Where the hell was that last season when they were worried about all the metal in the place corroding and collapsing? Just… arg.

And the stinger hits. And I just realized, I’m only seven minutes into this episode. ... Aren’t I supposed to love this damn show? Geez.

But seriously. A half mile below Global. That’s gotta have a shitload of support struts, when did they have time to treat all of those before the entire building fell into the GIANT FUCKING HOLE they’ve dug below them? Okay, okay, I’m expecting too much consistency, I’m sorry.

Delores Trump makes some snotty comments, and immediately I’m no longer concerned about the logic of the envirocave. Fuck you, Delores, I love that fucking cave now, I wouldn’t have Eureka without it. Maybe that’s her purpose on the show, to make you adore whatever she’s questioning.

But Carter, reasonably enough, wants to go inside so he can investigate and conduct interviews face to face. Delores wants to send Allison with him so that while he’s investigating, she can “justify why we’re not filling in this gigantic money pit”. Just a minor nitpick there, Umbitch, but since it’s already built and everything? Filling it in would probably be more expensive than just, y’know, turning it off. Or letting it keep going on its own, since an environment of that size ought to be at least somewhat self-sustaining.

Zane shows up and shoots Carter full of hologram-generating nanoprobes for no other good reason than that the injection gun and the hologram will be relevant later. Great plotting there, guys, really tight way to tie everything together. Carter is distressed that the hologram of him has no pants (but because this is a network show and the director was too lazy to figure out a better way to shoot the scene, it does have underwear), and Zane smirks and says “Funny you should mention that”. After a blink-quick changeover, Zane is gone and the project director has taken over again, making it clear that his appearance was in fact just to stick the gun on the mantlepiece. Carter and Allison have had to strip naked and get into a decontamination booth, and of course only after they’re already in there and being awkward does Carter think to ask if they both had to be in there at once. Of course they didn’t. Easy joke.

Carter and Allison have some more awkwardness, though this time it does seem a little more natural and a little less forced. It also amuses me that Allison pronounces “naked” as “nekkid”. They get blinded by the flash of the sterilization light and then they’re told that the clean suits are on their left. Carter reasonably asks whose left the project director means, but Allison, now that she’s blind, is suddenly really freaked out at being naked and demands that he go get them without being answered. He touches her shoulder just a little and she reacts like he grabbed her boob. I really don’t know who to blame for this scene coming off so bad, the writer, the director, or the actors. Considering the actors did just fine before, I’m looking at one of the other two.

The two of them walk out into the envirocave, and I’m briefly given the name of one of the people responsible to an episode made up almost entirely of fridge logic. Charlie Craig, you better watch your ass, because this writing isn’t acceptable. But they go walking around in the envirocave, which looks suspiciously almost exactly like the same woods they go walking around in often enough outside of Eureka. Isn’t this supposed to be a rainforest? Artificial rain starts, and Allison, for no good reason, says that the rain is made of recycled urine. First off, why? What would the point be of that? I mean, I know it’s a self-contained environment, but why recycle the urine to make rain instead of just, y’know, water from the lake? And wouldn’t you have to wait a ridiculously long time for the nine or ten people living there to get enough piss together for a single brief rainstorm over such a large area? And it rains twice that we see, so do these nine people in fact piss like an extremely large herd of racehorses? And wouldn’t such a large environment have an amount of its own weather conditions anyway, just via condensation and so on? For a science show, this episode has a fuckton of science loopholes in it.

Some girl shows up and introduces herself with the poorly-written lines, “It’s amazing. Everything here is. I’m Terry. This is my home.” I’m sorry, what? I understand that this girl maybe hasn’t been socialized a lot, but who would think of that as a greeting? “This is my home”? Who introduces themselves that way? “Hi. I’m Bob. I live here in Jersey.” I guess they just wanted to shortcut the whole question of who she was rather than risk us having two seconds of “Hey, did she sneak in or something” or feeling obligated to write another “dummy” line for Carter. Glarg.

She continues on with the equally poorly-written “I’ve come to take you to the others”. Are we referencing Lost, now? I think they’re trying to have this come off a little creepy, but since the other people we’ll meet directly after this are fairly normal-seeming and Terry will pretty much entirely cease her little “Children of the Corn” act shortly and proceed to act like any other young woman from Eureka, I’m not sure what the point was. It was like they were going to set these people up as a creepy little separatist clan, but then decided that was too much work and tossed the idea without rewriting this scene.

Back at Cafe Diem, Fargo is getting ready to hack into the Lab 27 feed, and Vincent is all atwitter over it. Zoe steps up to the Exposition Receiver position, and Fargo hikes the ball. Turns out that he and a number of people treat Lab 27 like “the mother of all reality shows”, very carefully not actually mentioning Big Brother. Vincent and Fargo reveal that they’re “viewing buddies”, and that’s how they “bonded”. Somehow I doubt this will generate a whole lot of slashfic. Fargo says their interest has been rekindled because of “new characters”, IE Carter and Allison.

Back in the envirocave, there’s a little stumbling expospeak about the worries of the people in the experiment. Allison stops to fondle some really fake-looking plants that are apparently extinct strains. Y’know, like Elly did in Jurassic Park, except it was much more natural and “real”-seeming. Terry expositions that it was the missing person’s garden, and he was “really proud of it”. I’m starting to wonder if maybe the earlier scene wasn’t necessarily the directing or writing, but just the fact that the woman playing Terry is a really bad actor. At Carter’s question, she further expositions that no one liked the missing person (Bob) very much. Despite this huge bomb to drop in an investigation, Carter apparently doesn’t get her to expound or ask a single other question the entire walk to the camp.

Once at the settlement, camp, thingy, Carter is inundated with people that are way too eager to show hostility towards someone that’s mysteriously and possibly violently disappeared. Never has there been a bigger collection of moronic geniuses. Again, despite the open hostility towards Bob, Carter fails to ask any real probing questions or almost any questions whatsoever. Great investigation writing there, Craig.

Also, whoever did the casting on this episode needs to be fired. It’s Hollywood casting at its finest, meaning that a lot of these people look like they would have been about seventeen when they joined the experiment. That includes the project director on the outside, who looks like he’s probably in his mid-twenties. Of course they didn’t accept his application to join the experiment as a scientist, he was probably FIFTEEN when he turned it in!

Anyway, Terry, who had apparently just taken it into her head to wander off camera, screams and everyone goes running. They find her flopped out on the ground, and Carter spots some KY smeared on a convenient nearby set of dead sticks stuck in the ground so that it’s nice and visible. Terry says “it” ran off in a direction, so Carter, being on an investigation, takes off after it. Allison mutters “Carter!” like he would have done something else, and takes off running after him.

They find some ragged, bloody clothes on the ground, and Carter expositions that it’s Bob’s uniform… got his name sewn right on it. Problem is, none of the other people in the experiment are wearing uniforms, certainly not with their name sewn on them, so just why Bob was required to wear something that wouldn’t look out of place on a gas station attendant is beyond me. Maybe the other residents hated him more for his bad fashion sense than his philandering.

Add someone else to the list of “people that need to be replaced”: the composer. The music is loud and practically overwhelming for this scene, actually overshadowing the dialog. It also sounds like something composed by Bruce Faulconer, who did pretty much all the music for the dub of Dragonball Z. Not exactly fitting stuff for Eureka.

Back in Cafe Diem, everyone’s gathered around Fargo’s laptop to watch the feed of Lab 27. Despite the chef and the only waitress both being glued to the screen, the place is bustling as ever, in another show of the logic this episode has exemplified. In the lab, Carter and Allison talk to Stark, who’s decided to evacuate everyone from the lab. Except that first they’ll have to build a transition facility and gradually ease everyone from the lab back into the normal world, so it’s really less of an evacuation and more of “We’ll eventually leave, in a week or two.”

Switch to the sheriff’s office, and Delores Trump shows up to give Jo smarmy grins. She seems to have homed in on Jo as a possible co-conspirator, for some reason, because it’s either that or she likes her women younger and rather butch. (Lemme put it this way, even my -mother- noticed that it seemed like Delores was hitting on Jo this episode.) Delores wants to cut, among other things, the free food at Cafe Diem… y’know, the place that’s part of the benefit of living cut off from the world in a giant think-tank? You can’t leave any time you want or tell anybody about your work, but at least you eat well and can park wherever you find a space? Did anyone actually explain the concept of Eureka to the Umbitch before they sent her here? Nevermind that for some reason it’s apparently become the job of the sheriff’s department to enforce financial rules and fire people.

Carter’s talking to the inside-the-envirocave team lead, and the guy says “I don’t know what they’ve told you about our team, but we’re not a bunch of amateurs.” ‘Cept that’s the thing, no one told Carter jack shit. No one ever tells Carter jack shit, he has to figure it all out on his own, making him at least twice as smart as the rest of these PhD-packing jackholes.

Carter asks if someone could have engineered some sort of predator and sicced it on Bob. While that might be a good question to ask, considering what happened earlier, wouldn’t the more immediate question to ask be “Do you think someone could have killed Bob?” and left the method more vague? Minor nitpick, I know, but this episode’s already begun the process of chapping my ass, why stop it when it’s on a roll?

Carter heads out and walks up on Allison having a conversation with Stark at one of the video screens. Stark asks how Carter’s doing, and actually says it in a tone most people would associate with being concerned about a friend. Allison seems to take it more like asking for a performance review, and proceeds to talk about Carter as if he’d begun his job a month ago instead of a few years. Carter clears his throat to announce himself, and Allison ends the call and says “Carter!” in this almost exasperated tone of voice, like “Where have you been, mister?!” as opposed to “Sorry I was talking about you behind your back”.

Carter’s annoyed, and Allison tries to defend herself, talking about the chart Delores Trump showed last week that supposedly showed a correlation between Carter’s arrival and the number of incidents in Eureka, despite the fact that trying to make that connection is one of the most ridiculous thing ever and anyone that lays claim to more common sense than evolution granted the average celery stalk should dismiss it out of hand, let alone people that claim to be scientists. Allison goes on to say that she’s worried that the Umbitch is gunning for Carter and she wants to protect him from her. Carter’s in a bit of a snit and just says “I’m not sure she’s the one I’m worried about right now.” The proper response would have been “How about you watch your own ass and I’ll watch mine, since she doesn’t seem to like you any better.”

Back to Cafe Diem, and the crowd around the laptop’s grown. At least Vincent is shown rushing back asking what he missed, implying that he’s still seeing to all those murmuring customers we can hear. The crowd sits around tossing out comments like you’d hear on a TV show forum, and it’s an amusing idea and -almost- works. The problem is that it’s not really tied together properly. They throw out catchphrases like “Do you think the show’s gotten more procedural now with the addition of Sheriff Carter?” without really grounding it in anything, which reveals that ol’ Craig glanced at rather than read the sort of forums and threads he was trying to reference.

Carter talks with Grace, the only single female in the lab besides Terry. Problem with that is that Grace looks about three years older than Terry, max. Ah, but she has glasses, slightly curly hair, and she’s dressed practically… Hollywood code for “middle-aged and homely”. Grace expounds a little on how Bob was a chauvinistic twit, shortly after trying to claim she was his girlfriend. Realistic, maybe, but to people viewing from without it comes off idiotic.

Grace says her specialty is genetics, the thing Carter suspected, right after saying that some days she just wanted to “plow [Bob] under”, throwing out the absolute lamest attempt at a red herring I’ve seen on a TV show this year. Not five minutes after Vincent literally asked the question “Which of the scientists is the red herring?” This thing is meta in ways I really don’t think were intentional.

Anyway, Grace randomly excuses herself so that she’s conveniently not in the scene when Carter notices Terry standing at one of the video screens. He heads over after she leaves and hits the huge, clearly-labeled “Redial” button, revealing Stark already standing there saying he was just about to call. Considering Terry only walked away about five seconds before, Stark didn’t notice the project director standing there having a conversation? (And yeah, it was him. The ridiculously giant hamhanded clue they dropped that he and Terry were having a relationship doesn’t leave a lot of doubt. Which is fine since they look the same age, but when you consider that the writing of the story implies he’s at least ten years or so older than her, it’s kind of creepy. This point will not be addressed in the episode. At all.)

Stark drops another hamhanded clue before Carter hears something and immediately takes off running towards it again. He jumps around on the path for no visible reason other than to try and add some extra “action feel” to the scene, while we get a random scene of the Cafe Diem crew watching him do it. Carter checks his improvised net, in which he’s managed to catch Bob, who’s got a bit of flecked green makeup on his face and is doing a bad impression of a Berserker from 28 Days Later. He’s also wearing a shirt and doesn’t seem to be injured, making the ripped and bloody shirt of his found earlier completely nonsensical.

After the break, Delores Trump is trying to order a lockdown because of the possibility of a contagious disease, nevermind that it’s already a sealed system and that ordering a lockdown is basically just the first step in writing off everybody inside rather than making an effort to solve the problem.

And then Nathan makes the point that everyone on this show should have been making from the moment that pompous pantsuited bitch walked into the room last episode. “You’re not a scientist, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” THANK YOU. This is exactly the point and needed far more attention. For no particular reason the government sent in someone with no scientific background to try and “trim the fat” at a superscience thinktank. How the fuck is she supposed to make any real appraisal of what’s a viable line of research and what’s not? Since she doesn’t know the science, she might wind up green-lighting something that makes DVDs 10% more scratch resistant and killing the project that would have made chemotherapy 76% more effective just because the scratch-resistant DVDs were more cost effective to research. Why no one has been making this point, in detail, and why the character wasn’t dealt with and sent on her way in the first episode is just a sign of the plot holes that are so far plaguing this season.

Back in the lab, Bob seems to be going all snake-y on precisely one half of his face. So did just the DNA for the right side of his body mutate, or what? Allison says that she could barely get the needle through his skin, so he’s apparently not turning into any ordinary reptilian creature, but Killer Croc from Batman comics. Stark launches into an explanation of atavism that, while I’m not a scientist myself, sounds a little off. He also says that because the ecosystem got “knocked out of whack and continued to self-reinforce”, that’s what caused this, along with free radicals (those things that, in real science, give you cancer).

Now, jumping ahead with this, the thing that caused this was changing the sunlight in like twenty square feet of the environment. That’s right, a little messing with UV will cause your free radicals to run amok and steal a plot from a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode.

I mean, this is complete and utter bullshit. I know the superscience in Eureka often takes wild leaps into the wholly theoretical and borderline ridiculous, as well as what’s thought to be impossible, but this episode the science is just plain -bad-. This episode bends the dynamic that the show had previously set up over and fucks it up the ass dry while demanding the show call it “Uncle Goobie”.

God, I’m as sick of this episode as you must be of reading about it, so I’ll try to knock down the rest as briefly and quickly as I can.

Carter asks if there’s a specialist in the environment. (In)Conveniently it’s Henry, so Carter has the idea to bring him in as holoHenry and HEY WASN’T IT LUCKY ZANE RANDOMLY SHOWED UP AND GAVE HIM THAT IDEA!! The atavism is “infecting” the entire population and conveniently enough for the design and makeup department affecting them all in the exact same way. They figure out the project manager messed with Bob by screwing with the simulated sunlight over his garden, because he thought Bob was moving in on Terry. As said before, no one comments on how creepy this is, and no one even mentions punishing the guy. For the second week in a row, a Eureka scientist flagrantly endangers other peoples’ lives and gets off with a scolding, apparently. Hell, rather than treating the guy like a freaky stalker, Terry’s parents apologize for -making her unhappy- and talk about making it so she can leave and be with him. What. The. Fuck?

Delores Trump stops in to the Cafe Diem, where Vincent is exceptionally cool and charges her $25 for a cup of coffee with a bright shiny smile on his face, then immediately giving Jo her cup for free. Delores schmoozes on Jo some more in that same Cougar-y way she talks to Zane, and Jo shoots her down in a way that says “I don’t care about my job enough to put up with you pushing me around and trying to rub your wrinkly old cooze all over me.” Delores looks both a bit baffled and a bit turned-on by this sudden display of ire, and makes out with her spoon a bit to calm herself down.

Bob breaks loose and kidnaps Allison for reasons that are unclear and the episode never really bothers to clarify. It offers up a few options but leaves the actual motivation to guesswork. Carter picks up the trail and asks for options of what to do. Despite it earlier being established that they needed a few days to figure out the treatment, now suddenly the only problem is how to deliver the antivirus or whatever through Bob’s scaly hide. Suddenly, Carter remembers AN INJECTOR GUN ZANE USED ON HIM WHEN HE JUST HAPPENED TO RANDOMLY STOP BY and suggests they use that. Stark and Zane say that’s a great idea, then go get a whole different gun that apparently does the same thing from Jo.

Stark comes into the envirocave to deliver the gun, and Carter sets up a sniper position with holoHenry and Stark clustered around him to make him nice and obvious. Terry comes along and lures Bob out of hiding, and turns out to be a hologram herself, despite Stark not knowing Carter’s plan, and thus having been the only person that could have brought in Zane’s gun full of nanomachines to make a holoTerry. Carter shoots Bob with the cure-bullet and Allison runs and hugs Stark. Henry flickers a few times to remind us he’s a hologram, since by Mr. Craig’s figuring we are all complete and utter drooling vegetables.

Zane and Delores walks along, with her being Cougar-y a bit more and then asking about Henry. Meanwhile, Carter and holoHenry go out and watch the sunset together and trade syrupy praise, causing the slashficcers that had to change their underwear earlier to curse the fact that it’s laundry day and they’re out of clean Hanes Her Way.

Cafe Diem, and I hope that Allison’s actress is attempting to play her as being mildly drunk, and that that’s not her attempt at being cute and perky. She profusely thanks Stark for his heroic skill in holding something, stepping forward, and handing it to the guy that actually did all the work. Stark notes that the organic plastic bullet used in the gun (wasn’t it supposed to be an injection gun?) was developed in Lab 27. So an environment so friggin’ delicate that having the sunshine slightly off in a fifteen foot diameter area caused catastrophic results provided a solution to a problem caused by the delicate environment going haywire. Hoo-fucking-ray for science.

Jo and Carter are having dinner together as well, when Delores Trump walks in, bearing the gift of a middle-aged bald black man. Carter is delighted at Henry’s return, but not delighted enough not to slip in a little backhanded smack at the Umbitch. Delores doesn’t quite apologize for all her shit but promises that she’s set it all aright, Cafe Diem will go back to not charging, and so on. She confides to Carter that she likes the booze, and departs with happy thoughts of hot butch deputies dancing Tijuana stripper style at the foot of her bed. Jo feels the need to upchuck her burger and doesn’t know why.

Carter and Henry subtext it up some more, while the slashficcers bemoan that they’d have to call in to work tomorrow if they had jobs. We leave on a scene of Delores watching old movie reels of underground atomic bomb testing, and then looking at the tin and realizing she’s watching footage from 1938. The music beats like the overdone strings of a 1980’s morning cartoon.

And that, finally, is that. God, I did not expect to talk this much about the episode or for the review to take this long. But now it’s done. That was the -worst- episode of Eureka I’ve ever seen, and possibly one of the worst episodes of television I’ve seen this year. The writing was terrible, most of the performances were lackluster, the guest stars were all miscast and most lacked talent, and for some reason the musical score was a refugee from Saturday mornings of twenty years ago.

There, now I promised I’d get this up this evening, and I have, if with only an hour to spare by my time. I’ll go back and fix typos and formatting later if I remember it. Just… good God, what did they do to my show?!