The Entropy Pump

Not much has changed with season two of Eureka. The same basic structure, with a bit more emphasis on developing a bigger story arc about the ongoing events around the artifact and due to last season’s finish Henry’s obsession with Kim’s death. The rest is the same old same old. Carter has to solve a mystery involving superscience every week. I think Eureka, despite not a show I would really call good, has become something of a guilty pleasure for me. I find most bits involving science annoying, but I like the characters and the show entertains me. I just wish someone would make an Eureka-like show involving real science.

Eureka is about a small, secret town that is stuffed full of brilliant scientists who work at building at better tomorrow. While this is a neat concept, its also the main reason that on one level Eureka is a completely failure. There is so much you could do with such a high concept, but since obviously no one making this series cares about real science or has a clue what science actually is, all we get is comic book science and a show that follows a monster of the week formula, which monster substituted by some technological gizmo.

First and foremost, science and technology is used interchangeable. In reality they are not. Second, nothing made in Eureka seems partially useful for bettering the world. A show that would have dealt with some more realistic advances like future data storage devices or brain-driven prosthetics or a realistic depiction of nanotech (not the magic dust that turned up in one episode) could have been fascinating and still left room for interesting stories.

And yet, it’s still fun to watch. It’s not the show I wanted it to be, there was potential for it to be much more. But I like most of the characters and following them dealing with magic-science gizmos can be fun to watch.

Rating: 4/5

Like the other three seasons of the latest Doctor Who series, season 4 follows the same formula. A new companion (with the exception of season 2), some episodes in the past, some in the future, some dealing with threats in the present time. There are some hints seeded for future seasons as well as the big finish, that awaits the end of each season. Most of the time Doctor Who is completely over the top, campy, loud, ridiculous, even childish. This is a science fiction series whose science works like magic, whose technobubble is bullshit to even the most dense of its viewers. The historical episodes are pain-inducing to everyone who takes his history seriously, the future episodes are a thinly veiled present-day reality stuffed full with SF-gadgets that can hardly conceal that most visited futures don’t make a lick of sense. Despite all this, each and every season so far has successfully sucked me in and each time when the finale came around I sat there, watching like an awestruck kid. Its pompous, full of comic book science, but man can it be fun.

Rating: 4/5

created by Gerry Anderson & Sylvia Anderson

An old SF show that tried to mix drama with science fiction. The core idea is similar to later series that sport an alien invasion and a government conspiracy (see X-Files, Dark Skies, Threshold). While some concepts were surely groundbreaking for its time, like the attempt to include serious elements, it never really works. There’s always a disconnect that makes you feel like watching two different shows, one is a sci-fi gadget show seemingly aimed at a younger audience and another one that has drama plots and only incidental also aliens. Add to the mix some really stupid plot decisions and plots holes concerning the bigger concept, a glacial pace and rather simple and predictable plots, and you’ll have a show that’s interesting from a historical perspective, but not very interesting to watch in itself.

Rating: 2/5

created by Bryce Zabel

I seem to have taken a liking to TV series that get killed after their first season, but maybe it’s just that I remember them more fondly than series that I once liked until they atrophied by stretching them out past their normal lifetime. Point in case are the X-Files, which was probably the major reason for Dark Skies taking off in the first place. Imagine a series where the conspiracy isn’t just made up as the series goes along, but were there’s a plan from the start, a big concept. Everything is connected, everything makes sense. It’s like the alien conspiracy elements of the X-Files distilled down until nothing else remains and then mixed with a heavy dose of US history. We even had a Mulder (John Loengard) and a Smoking Man (Frank Bach), but not far into the series they left their templates behind and developed a character all of their own.

The strange relationship between those two was one faszinating aspect of the show, among many others, like the devastating effects that secrecy has on everyone involved, especially those that uphold the secrecy. Unlike the later, similar series Threshold, the usefulness and justification for secrecy is questioned much more thoroughly (even if at times in a rather subtle way) and shown to be the reason for the biggest failure of the conspiracy. Because of that Dark Skies was much more political than other, similar series, not just because of the inclusion of all that history stuff.

Again, not unlike the later Threshold, it gives some kind of closure in the last episode of the first season, but I really would have liked to see how everything played out. At least they made one excellent season.

Rating: 5/5