Episode Overview: Carter is quite troubled when people in the town start mysteriously vanishing. Worse for him is that when they vanish, he’s the only one who remembers them.
Sheriff Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) and Deputy Jo Lupo are investigating a noise complaint at the start of tonight’s Eureka. A scientist is, of course, doing some crazy experiment with a machine straight out of Willy Wonka’s factory. Carter leans down to such some substance, being waned before he does, and when he gets up the spinning machine knocks him on his head. He returns to the smart house where his ex-wife is preparing to take their daughter back to Los Angeles. Zoe is coping with some psychiatric device called an ATS, a cool weird visor thing, she got from the shady Beverly.
He returns to work and, while talking to Jo from the washroom, a bright lights shines and she vanishes. He goes to the diner for answers, but no one there has ever heard of this Jo Lupo. He goes to Henry for help, and Henry makes with the theories. Key among them: Carter being repeatedly hit on the head by a metal object making him lose his mind. Not a bad guess, but probably wrong.
Your Take
miss kit said: owhh.. i like the chemistry between carter-allison-stark… eureka’ll alwayz have a lot of problems..
Greg said: Nice! I started in-between seasons…and continue to love it, even more!! Carter’s wife is looking a bit…
longklaw said: I’m really starting to love this show.
Carter goes for an MRI at Global Dynamics and we discover some more strange changes. Henry doesn’t work there, but Nathan does. Carter wants some classified information on Class 8 projects, and gets Fargo to help by threatening to release a certain American Idol audition tape. I’d pay good money to see that.
A clean bill of health, he talks to Henry, who kindly explains, in simple terms for our dumb hero, about trans-dimensional portals and parallel universes. They make plans to revisit Global Dynamics when another flash of light comes and Henry vanishes.
After some witty banter with Nathan, Carter is left with nothing but the fact that the population of Eureka is about half what it should be, so the vanishing is spreading. Fargo provides a list of Class 8 scientists, which of course features the guy from the opening of the episode. He enlists Alison to go check him out, and she obliges after some cajoling. The spinning machine is gone, and after Alison walks out we see the flash of light, some plasma circle that sucks in the scientist. Alison is upset he took her to an empty lab, and when he shows her the list of names, the paper is blank. Poor guy can’t catch a break.
Carter’s plan is to flee the town, but Alison has other plans and knocks him out with an injection. He wakes up in the jail cell. He thinks this is something Stark would do, and she has no idea who this man, her ex-husband, is. Carter uses logic, explaining that Global Dynamics has 1,000 offices, but only 100 employees, and isn’t that odd? She agrees to let him out to get Zoe, but the plasma light appears, and she’s surprisingly calm about it. “Everything’s going to be alright,” she explains before vanishing, dropping the jail cell key to the floor. Thankfully it’s within reach.
He rushes home and asks smart house SARAH how many people live in Eureka. Just two, is her reply, him and his daughter. He talks it out with her, though she’s confused when he mentions her mom or the ATS/ He remembers that he never put it down, and Zoe only remembers things after that moment. He catches on, determining they’re trapped in some sort of psychiatric virtual reality program. The screen turns hazy, and we see Carter lying in a hospital bed, wearing the ATS surrounded by friends and family who are worried.
So the first two-thirds of the episode was a coma dream and we didn’t even see some surreal wackiness or Fargo’s Idol audition, what a waste. Alison and Nathan exposit that it’s a device used to bring the person’s subconscious troubles to light in a realistic simulation of Eureka. So Carter is scared of losing people because his wife is about to take his daughter away. For Carter’s level of intellectual simplicity, that sounds about right. Still, the whole town is gathered at Global Dynamics in support of Carter. It makes Abby realize how much her ex-husband and daughter mean to this town, which is an easy way to get out of taking Zoe off the show.
Back ATS World, Carter exhibits signs of intelligent life when he tells Zoe to walk into the plasma light. He knows he needs to let go of her to confront his fears. And just like that, he’s back. Carter offers to move back to L.A. to be with his daughter but, as expected, Abby’s amazement over the town’s support makes her take off without Zoe. He returns home to tell Zoe the good news, but the only cool thing is SARAH’s sarcastic “What a shame” when discovering Abby has left, followed by SARAH piping in overly sentimental music when Zoe and Carter hug. Smart house robot sarcasm is always funny.
Next week, the scariest day of the year: the Eureka high school science fair. Sounds quite promising.
-John Kubicek, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image courtesy of Sc Fu Channel)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
John watches nearly every show on TV, but he specializes in sci-fi/fantasy like The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood. However, he can also be found writing about everything from Survivor and Glee to One Tree Hill and Smallville.
