Eureka 3.9: "Welcome Back, Carter"

“Eureka” took a few months off from the Syfy channel last year but a whole hell of a lot of crap happened before it did. Henry became mayor, Allison discovered she’s preggers by her dead ex-husband, Eve Thorne flew the coup and probably most importantly Jack Carter got fired. So little was made of this that I was pretty sure that “Eureka” had actually been canceled, so I was happy to see that it’s back with a vengeance every Friday night now.

This week's past episode opened with Carter interviewing for a new job at homeland security. It would appear that Jack’s being shit canned is going to stick and everyone in town is pretty pissed. For the most part that’s what the episode revolved around. Zoe isn’t too happy about having to move about, Joe quits her job after finding out she won’t be replacing Carter as sheriff and Vincent is a big sloppy blubbering mess about the whole thing. The only one who isn’t panicking is Carter’s sister Lexi who is too busy playing with her new floating baby chamber that she hopes to use when giving birth to her twins. Yeah she’s knocked up too.

For those of you who have been following the show you know that generally there is a big disaster at the start of every episode and the next hour is spent trying to figure out who’s caused it. Normally random town experts are thrown in and will never be heard of again after the episode. Well this one was no different. We find out that a number of trees have randomly fallen in Eureka and Carter immediately springs into action. Unfortunately for him now that he is no longer Sherriff there isn’t much he can do.

Enter Sherriff Andy, his replacement who also happens to be a robot. Thankfully SyFy opted to not have some giant crappy CGI thing walking around the entire episode and instead went the human AI rout. Sherriff Andy immediately dismissed the event but Carter knows things are not always what they seem in Eureka and he starts to investigate. Shortly after more objects around town start crashing down and Andy becomes a believer. Mainly because most of these items are falling on or around him. Someone in town has got it out for the new robot Sherriff.

All signs would point to Dr. Fielding since he’s the expert on gravity and created the zero gravity bubble for Lexi. Only problem is Dr. Fielding isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and apparently had some outside assistance with his invention. I’m a bit confused by this because I thought you had to be some sort of super genius in order to live in Eureka so how this guy coasted by for so long without actually being able to do anything is beyond me. But we’ll ignore that for now.

The climax of the show comes with Carter and his new robot buddy trying to reverse the effects of the gravity pools that are forming all over town. Of course they do and all is safe once again in Eureka. It also turns out that there is a loophole that when a sheriff is fired it also needs to be approved by the mayor, which Carter’s dismissal wasn’t. So everything is happy and dandy again. Carter is staying, the town is safe and all is right in the world. Unfortunately though sheriff Andy isn’t sticking around. I really liked his character and thought it was nice to see him actually be likable. They could of easily have gone the “evil robot” direction but instead made him pretty likable. Bonus points people at SyFy.

If I have one complaint about “Eureka” it’s that every season has a running theme that pops up from time to time but never seems to get enough focus. In the first season we found townspeople being killed off by some sort of government agency for example. Problem was you’d forget about that because it was only referenced every couple episodes. This season it looks like that story will revolve around some sort of radio disturbance that we find out is someone or something hurling towards Eureka. It’s brushed over pretty quickly but will no doubt make an appearance in the coming weeks.

Good episode in general. I think they could have left some of the cliff hangers out there a little more though. It seemed a little odd that no one thought to check the towns books for some sort of loophole right after Carter got fired. This is generally the complaint I hear about the show, it’s a town full of geniuses but every once and a while they do some really obviously stupid crap. In any case we’ll see how the season progresses, but so far we’re off to a good start.

Watch: "Welcome Back, Carter"