Sat down in anticipation last night for Eureka, the SciFi channel’s newest show.
I turned on the TV a little early and caught the end of “Dead Like Me”, where a young woman is just getting started in her new job as the Grim Reaper, with Mandy Patinkin as her mentor. The bits I saw were okay; I’d watch it again.
Anyway: Eureka. The website for the show is funny and satirical. What they need to do is take the people who worked on the website, and put them in charge of writing the show.
Opened with a nerd guy inventing something that cuts holes in space time. He panics, gets his wife and they panic, grab their son and run. They stop for gas, and a spherical chunk of rogue space-time chews off the back of their RV - where their son was.
Cut to a rainy night. A federal marshall (our hero! swoon!) is transporting a fugitive - a teenage girl - back to Los Angeles. We soon find she’s not only a fugitive, she’s his daughter, and she is rebelling against her separated parents. Two things happen in quick succession: They are passed by themselves going in the opposite direction, and a dog runs in front of the car. They crash, manage to get out of the car, and find themselves in Eureka. Where odd things are happening.
People drive solar-powered cars (well, during the day, anyway). (And aren’t electric cars silent? These electric cars sound like they have turbines under the hood). Children scribble equations on the sidewalk with chalk. Every woman is a model and every man is a nerd, making this some sort of nerd paradise, I guess. The town mechanic will rebuild your crashed car into some sort of bionic speed machine.
The marshall gets suspicious pretty quickly, and is drawn to solve the mystery of the missing boy and the hole in space time. They find the missing bit of the RV a couple miles away, and the chief nerd explains that the space-time stasis bubble had merely stayed in place while the world rotated beneath it.
This avoids the fact that the rotation of the Earth is dwarfed by the velocity of the Earth moving around the Sun in its orbit, the Solar System’s orbit around galactic center, and the movement of our galaxy away from the center of the universe. That little bubble should have burst somewhere in deep space.
Space-time bubbles (or, more properly, bobbles), happen a couple of more times, and Mr. Marshall asks chief nerd to use his program to track everything in the universe back to its source, to triangulate these three events back to their origin.
Town full of nerds, kids who read textbooks for fun, and they needed a sophisticated program to do 7th grade geometry…
Anyway, they tour Muppet Labs, blow their special effects budget for the rest of the season, introduce the mysterious Section 5 where all the cool stuff hides. They eventually resolve the mystery, find the missing kid (he was in the non-bobbled part of the RV all the time), Mr. Marshall becomes the new police chief, the villainess is revealed (and is in full vamp mode in the previews for next week’s episode, so that’s spoiled without me saying anything about it), and…
Well. On the scale of SciFi channel shows where Stargate is at the crappy end of the scale, and Battlestar Galactica is at the wonderful end, this falls nearer the crappy end. If they’d had the humor they showed in their website, or some real science fictional plot to it, this could have been a winner. Instead, it’s absolute vanilla icing. Looks good, but you’re not tasting anything you haven’t tasted before. All icing and no cake.
The diagram above was made with OpenOffice 2.0’s Draw module. It’s okay, but nothing will take my beloved Aldus SuperPaint’s place in my heart. Since the exported figure looked crappy, I read it into Inkscape and re-rendered it. Along the way, I happened upon Wikipedia’s entry on the Triangle, which gave a lot of insights into the various centers of triangles and their uses.