TV Review: Eureka 3.18 – “What Goes Around Comes Around”
Review: Eureka 3.18 – “What Goes Around Comes Around”
Original Air Date: September 18, 2009
Screencaps from burgundy_shoes.
This episode starts off in Carter’s kitchen, where S.A.R.A.H., Tess, and Carter are commenting to each other how cool it is that Tess has already spent the night three times.
Zoe walks in, and informs Carter that she’s going to allow her friend to inject nanotechnology into her body so her friend can use her as a human guinea pig in a high school diving competition. Carter is like “that’s awesome, can I watch?”
Zoe also explains that she has been offered freakishly early entry to Harvard’s pre med program: she starts next semester. It turns out there was a mystery person who wrote a stellar letter of recommendation. Carter is excited she got into Harvard, but he doesn’t want to see her leave home just yet.
Another person who doesn’t want to see Zoe go is her boyfriend, Lucas. So we cut to a scene of him debating with Henry about whether it’s fair that she got early admission to Harvard and he has to wait until he finishes his senior year of High School like all the other genius straight A students in town.
“You can join her next year,” points out Henry.
“It’s just not part of the plan,” complains Lucas.
“Life rarely goes according to plan,” responds Henry, “for example, I thought my super awesome spaceship that I built 20 years ago was lost forever, but earlier this season it showed up with a bunch of data and a clone of my former lover who got me to fall in love with her and then died in the very next episode. That was not part of the plan.”
“Dude,” says Lucas, “you’d think the guy who’s rescued this town the second most times after Sheriff Carter would have better karma.”
Henry thinks a bit, then says “I thought about that. My theory is that, since I’ve got a larger than average emotional range, the writers throw me a challenge every once in a while to let me flex my acting muscles a bit.”
Okay, I made up most of that. But that’s the general idea of how it went down. Then they get to deciphering all that data from the spaceship. In the process, they discover Nemesis.
We cut to Café Diem for an explanation. Carter is resisting the temptation to eat a muffin when he overhears Fargo, Julia (Fargo’s girlfriend), and Larry arguing about whether Fargo is about to destroy the world. This gets Carter’s attention, so he gets real close to the trio. They ask him if he has a problem, and he says “no, I just wanted the camera to get a good shot of you guys using a Mac. Then all four of them look at the camera, smile, and say “don’t you want one?”
No, I’m kidding. They’re using a Mac, but it is placed in a really subtle way, and it’s embedded into the story so well that you would hardly notice it was there.
Actually, let me stop the snarking for a moment. I also liked this scene for many reasons, the foremost of which is that it looks like maybe Fargo’s got a geek posse, which I am hoping to see more of in the next season. The geek posse consists of Fargo, Julia (his girlfriend), and Larry and was well utilized in this scene. The writers and actors showed they really understood the characters, even if the scene was an exposition dump.
Back to the plot: Fargo tells Carter that Nemesis is a neutron star theorized to be in binary orbit with our star. It crosses Earth’s orbit every 60 million years causing all kinds of catastrophic events. For example, it causes the Earth’s magnetic field to reverse polarity. This really isn’t a problem because it won’t happen for another 2,000 years.
Larry insists it is a problem. The real problem is the experiment Fargo is planning. Eureka has a super colliding super conducter so big that, in Larry’s words “it makes the Hadron collider at CERN look like a slingshot!” He believes if Fargo goes ahead with his super collider experiment, it will cause all the problems Nemesis would otherwise cause.
So now we cut to the super collider experiment. Of course, since this is Eureka, the collider has a complete meltdown. Zane shuts it off immediately.
It seems like sabotage, so Carter questions Larry, who it seemed had an interest in seeing the collider fail. It turns out it could not have been Larry, because he was a victim too. Larry informs Carter that whatever caused the collider to have trouble also damaged his fembot. As a result, she’s “unresponsive.” That is utterly disturbing, but totally hilarious. But the point is that Larry didn’t do it.
Meanwhile, Tess is fielding job offers because when Dr. Blake comes back, she will be unemployed. She explains to Carter that her best offer is in Australia, and she is giving it serious consideration.
Carter looks torn. We all hope he’ll say “well, thanks for keeping me company while I wait for Dr. Blake to get back,” but before he can say anything, Julia summons Tess and Carter to Fargo’s lab. Fargo has mysteriously been sucked to the ceiling of his lab, which is weird because normally he can’t fly. Henry and Julie and Tess and Carter try to help him out, but he plummets to the floor on his own before they get any working theories.
Henry runs some tests and informs Carter that Fargo has taken iron supplements all his life. Something produced a wellspring of electromagnetic energy, and it turned Fargo into a human magnet because of all the iron he has in his blood. Whatever caused this electromagnetic wellspring happened at the same time they were experimenting with the super collider, and the same time Fargo turned into a human magnet, and also the same time Carter’s magnetic watch stopped working.
Speaking of Carter’s broken watch, he has to get going. Remember how Zoe explained in the opening scene that she’s got a dive competition? Remember how she explained that she’s going to let another person control her every movement using a device that turns her into remote control monkey? Carter doesn’t want to miss that.
He arrives just in time to see Zoe’s dive. Technically it’s her friend’s dive since Zoe is nothing more than a human marionette. But there’s a problem. The pool turns into a giant fireball, and the “friend” controlling Zoe’s every muscle is too lame to avoid the danger, and sends her diving into the liquid fireball below. Fortunately, Carter is there to dive in and rescue her just as the fire is dissipating.
Henry runs some tests and informs Carter that the nuclear technology they were using to control Zoe’s muscles interacted with a mysterious phenomenon in which electromagnetic wellsprings are suddenly appearing and disappearing for no reason. It appears the wellspring episodes are getting stronger and more frequent.
It’s a bit of a stretch, but Carter figures that perhaps it’s Lucas, since he is trying to follow Zoe and get into Harvard. Maybe he tried to sabotage the super collider, so he could later step in and save the day. So they head over to Lucas’s place, where Zoe is about to get busy with Lucas. Carter walks in at just the wrong moment, which inspires the deflated Carter to declare “and now my perfect day is complete.”
But there’s no time to strangle Lucas. Henry spots a micro electromagnetic pulse amplifier in the corner of Lucas’ garage (which apparently is not a normal thing to have in your garage). Henry whips out a cool looking set of sunglasses that allows him to see electromagnetic fields and spots a miniature magnetic pole forming above Lucas’ garage.
Remember all that exposition in the scene with the geek posse? This is the payoff. Lucas accidentally created a new magnetic pole, just like Nemesis would have done, and it’s in Eureka. The reason it’s so catastrophic is that the super collider experiment created so much electric energy that it supercharged Lucas’s experiment.
Let me just insert a quick snark here. There is a brief scene where Jo pulls up to a stop sign in her spiffy looking Subaru, and the electromagnetic field acts up, causing mail boxes to stick to her car. It serves no point except to force you to look at her Subaru. I think I know what happened here. This is my guess at how the conversation went down:
Writers: We stayed up all night trying to figure out how to integrate the cars into the plot without it being a total distraction. Here’s the idea—
Subaru: No! Under no circumstances are you to integrate our cars into the plot in any way that could possibly be misconstrued as organically connected to the plot. I want a scene with Fargo’s Subaru right up there in the foreground so nobody gets deluded into thinking the purpose of television is to be entertaining.
Writers: We could do that, but are you sure that’s what you want? That’s pretty much what GM did with the Transformers movie, and GM went bankrupt.
Subaru: AARRGGHH! Just for that, we’re going to make you insert another scene with Jo’s Subaru that has nothing to do with anything. And I want magnetized mailboxes in it. And I want the car to be surrounded by cool looking fog for no adequately explored reason!
Writers: Fine. But this never happened when it was called Sci Fi.
Okay, I feel better now. Back to the plot. It appears that Lucas’s machine triggered a process that will eventually result in a complete polar reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field. So they have to stop it.
Carter remembers that when Fargo got stuck to the ceiling, his flying robot thingy was unaffected. So they rush to Fargo’s lab to ask him to borrow it, and run headlong into Fargo and Julia getting it on. It’s a funny scene. Disturbing, but funny.
Anyway, the flying robot thingy is made of non-metallic alloys, so it can’t be magnetized. They can use it to bomb the garage and destroy Lucas’s machine. Also, Carter has to run into the garage and turn the thing off. Lucas has some reason that they have to turn off the machine before bombing it, but I didn’t really get it.
I tried to re-write this part about twenty times so it would make sense, but it just doesn’t. Let’s just say Carter always has to put himself in mortal danger at the end, and this is the best excuse they could come up with. So Carter will have to run into the garage and shut down the machine, and then they’ll bomb the hell out of it.
The bad news is that electromagnetic field is now so strong that once Carter gets inside the garage, it will shut down his motor functions.
Not to worry, though, because Zoe still has the remote control gizmo from the diving incident. So they wire Carter, send him into the garage, he disables the thingy, and gets out just before Fargo’s flying robot bombs the place.
The only thing left is to tie up some loose ends. Tess will be going to Australia. Zoe is going to Harvard. Carter is looking pretty lonely, but finds an airplane ticket Tess sent him for Australia. He’s looking at the ticket, contemplating, when the phone rings. It’s Dr. Blake. And that, my friends, is the end of season 3.
