Eureka's Giant Step Sideways

If you caught Eureka this past summer, you saw something amazing: an old trope used in a truly new way.  Many shows have had their alternate-timeline episodes (every Star Trek, to begin with), but Eureka is the first TV show I have seen to go to an alternate timeline and stay (rather like the Star Trek movie reset, in fact).  The writers kept us guessing, till the last moment of the last episode, whether our main characters would, in fact, stay in the alternate timeline they accidentally (or, possibly, by Keven the autistic genius' design) landed in. In the finale, especially, they played with our expectation (or fear) that the season would "reset," sending characters and relationships back where they started.  But, thank goodness, the alternate timeline was confirmed as the new reality.

Stepping sideways this season made an already good show better.  The writers were able to keep everything that was working well (the main characters, the zany science mysteries), and revitalize everything that had stalled.  The characters we have grown to know and love were thrust into new situations, and given new challenges; the accident-prone Fargo, for example, suddenly found himself the head of GD, a puppet of the DOD.  Relationship drama burst out like daisies in spring:  Jack and Alison finally got together; Jo and Zane never were together (though Jo still loved him, of course); Henry found himself married for years to someone he'd just met.  In addition, the morally ambiguous time-travel stowaway Dr. Grant stole scene after scene and kept us wondering.  No one walks the line between evil and misguided like James Callis, who walked the line between evil and crazy as Gaius Baltar on Battlestar Gallactica for years.  It's a shame he seems to be written out of the regular cast by the end of the season finale.

I hear Eureka is taking a page from Doctor Who's book and bringing us a Christmas special this year.  Now that's something to sing Hallelujah about.

Have you seen Haven?

Like a car left outside on a cold New England day, Haven took a while to warm up.  But the last two episodes were truly enjoyable -- creepy when they were meant to be creepy, funny when they were meant to be funny.  In case you're not familiar with it, Haven is a Syfy show based on Steven King's "The Colorado Kid" (a story I haven't read, for fear of spoilers).  It's the story of small Maine town where people exhibit strange and often uncontrollably violent powers, told in a series of murder mysteries investigated by local cop Nathan and FBI-import Audrey.  The highlights of each show are often the appearance of re-occurring quirky, small town characters such as the coroner Eleanor and the two brothers who run the newspaper, Vince and Dave. 

The show does have some problems to work out, still.  The writers need to give us more of the town's history and the origin of "The Troubles" in drips and drabs each episode; it's the town's supernatural bent, not each particular murder mystery, that's intriguing.  Also, we were promised an "arc" in the pilot: namely, the mystery of Audrey's mother and her connection to Haven.  These clues also need to be doled out more often.  The writers of Haven seem to be under the impression that the way to maintain viewers' interest is to pose questions and then not answer them, in a sort of  "Lost for Dummies" approach.  In fact, Lost did something more complicated: each large mystery was broken into several smaller questions, and every time a question was answered, a new one was raised.  That is what should be happening on Haven. 

But I have hope.  And I'm actually looking forward to Syfy Friday tonight!