TV Review: Eureka 3.13 – If You Build It…

Review: Eureka 3.13 – “If You Build It…”
Original Air Date: August 7, 2009
Rating: TV-14 (Recommended for people 14 or older)

At the end of my review of the last episode (“It’s Not Easy Being Green”), I commented that this week’s episode better be good, because they have been building up to this episode for weeks. There is something strange out there in out space, and it’s heading towards Eureka (oh my!!!). This episode, we get to find out what it is. The reveal is at the very end, though, and this is a two-parter, so they found a way to drag it out even more. The final conclusion about whether this outer space thingy is good enough to warrant all the foreshadowing will have to wait until next week.

So, before I get to the synopsis, let me lay out some complaints:

Complaint number 1: They delayed for yet another week the payoff from this outer space invading doohickey they have been hinting at for weeks.
Complaint number 2: They broke some of the tried and true formulas for this show, which could be good to shake things up, but in this case they simply had characters acting out of character for some insufficiently explored reason.
Complaint number 3: The subplot of this episode was basically an hour long commercial for Subaru cars.

Let me start with the last complaint, because that is how the episode starts. Sheriff Carter and his daughter are driving to the Sheriff’s office, and Carter is all nervous because his daughter Zoe is driving. It turns out he has nothing to worry about, because the brand new Subaru they are driving is networking into Eureka’s new traffic control system. If Carter read his emails, he would know that all the new cars in town are actually being controlled by a new traffic controlling program.

But the shameless product placement fun doesn’t stop there. When they get to the Sheriff’s headquarters, Jo is sitting outside, admiring her new Subaru. Then Fargo drives by in his old beat up Subaru, and compliments Jo on her snazzy new Subaru. It turns out Fargo’s old junk Subaru also has an artificial intelligence computer, and it seems to have a crush on him, but Fargo doesn’t notice that. All he does is get embarrassed when, after admiring Jo’s hot cool Subaru, his own Subaru misfires and makes all kinds of clunking sounds. So, now we have our subplot: Fargo wants a new car, but his old car has a crush on him.

Carter goes inside just in time to field a call from Global Dynamics. It turns out that things have disappeared all over town, including Sheriff Carter’s chair (which is good for a laugh when he tries to sit in it and ends up on the floor). Carter gets another call, and heads out to an empty field. At least last night it was an empty field. When Carter gets there, it turns all those missing items (including a kitchen sink) were used to build three pylons. The mysterious thing, aside from trying to figure out what the heck these things do, is that they just showed up out of nowhere overnight. Who built them, and why?

Just in case we didn’t watch that first scene and decide right there on the spot to go out and by a new Subaru, the advertising break was full of commercials for Subarus. There was even a commercial that said something like “wanna get Jo’s cool Subaru? All you have to do is be a total zombie and log into Syfy.com and participate in some kind of BS contest that will make money for Syfy and Subaru at the same time!” So, we now know who paid for this episode. Would the old Sci Fi Channel have prostituted itself out like this? Probably, but they at least would have insisted it not be so obvious. Syfy must be Latin for “the advertising channel.”

Anyway, back to the story. Fargo takes his car to Henry to get fixed, and Henry is like “yes, I can fix it, but it will take a while. By the way, don’t be a jerk and sell this car just so you can get a really cool looking brand new Subaru. Your car has an AI, after all, and even if it’s artificial, it’s intelligent enough to get its feelings hurt and start stalking you in all kinds of hilarious ways.” And Fargo is like “well, I am the comic relief, so I think I’ll go ahead and do that.” And Henry is like “well, in that case, you should get a new spiffy looking Subaru, and then drive up to Jo and have a conversation with her about how cool it is to have a new Subaru.” And Fargo is like “you know what else I could do? I could sell it to Larry, the backup comic relief guy, and we can have a bunch of hilarious scenes together where he complains about how I sold him a piece of junk.” And Henry is like “good luck with that.”

So, Sheriff Carter and Tess (remember, she is the new cast member who is in town to help figure out what the thing in outer space is, but even after three episodes has no idea what’s going on. She’s also in town so she can get into a love triangle between her, and Dr. Blake, and Carter) are hanging out by the pylons, wondering what these things are for. Tess does a few tests and figures it must be some kind of plasma generator.

Then we cut to the scene that we didn’t see coming. Fargo pulls up in his brand new Subaru. Jo compliments Fargo on how cool he looks in his new Subaru. And Fargo tells Jo how great her Subaru makes her look. Then Jo gets annoyed at Fargo for ditching his old car and treating it so bad (after all, it also was a Subaru). She shakes her head and says “men…” and we viewers shake our head and say “commercialized subtexts…”

Then we cut to a scene where Fargo comes home, only to see Tabitha (that’s the name of his old car) is parked in his garage. So Fargo tracks down Larry and has a hilarious argument right in front of Tabitha about how horrible Tabitha is (because she’s old, and only gets 80s stations, and the air conditioning smells like feet). Larry insists Fargo take the car back, but Fargo refuses because there are no take-backs (that’s the technology geek’s way of saying caveat emptor, which is the law geek’s way of saying “buyer beware”).

That night, Carter decides to stake out the pylons. It’s the middle of the night, and Carter is about to fall asleep when Tess shows up. She jumps into his car with a pizza, and tries to make fun of Carter for having a thing for Blake, but Carter just gives her one of those “we aren’t in the second grade any more” looks, and she gets a little embarrassed. She instead starts yapping about how exciting stakeouts are, when all the teenagers of the town suddenly show up doing a zombie walk and trying to build more stuff onto the pylons. Carter jumps out of the car and confronts Zoe, who is one of the teenagers doing a zombie walk, but she doesn’t recognize him. She just keeps trying to build up the plasma-generator-pylon-doohickey along with the rest of the zombified teenagers.

After the commercial break, we are at the medical clinic in Global Dynamics. Zoe is talking to Carter about how the last thing she remembers is going to bed last night, and then waking up here at Global Dynamics. Carter says he brought her here, and Zoe gets to contemplate how weird that is. Henry runs tests, and figures that perhaps it’s some kind of radio signal. The brain scans from the kids shows unexplained activity “that I’m concerned about.”

Dr. Blake is hanging out at the pylons, trying to figure out what these things are, and Carter shows up to talk things over, and a wrecking crew shows up. They are about to dismantle these things when Zane appears and states that even though last night the pylons were just a plasma generator, with the new enhancements from the previous night, they are now triggering devices to an anti-matter bomb. So, the wrecking crew has to stop because they don’t want run the risk of blowing up the entire planet.

So, I’ll skip a bit and say they spend a lot of time trying to figure out why the teenagers are zombies, and what this device is. The zombification of the kids gets worse, but they finally figure out that it has something to do with the new traffic control network (eventually they’ll figure out that the thing in outer space is tapping into the traffic control network and using it to control people’s brains). Carter insists they shut down the traffic network, which causes a bunch of traffic jams, but that’s not the worst of it. The kids also lose consciousness and go into a deep REM sleep. This is the part where the show departs from its usual formula. This time, it’s the scientists that are using common sense (if you shut down the network that has been controlling the kid’s brains, it could cause a shock to their brains), and Carter who is devoid of common sense (I don’t care, just shut it down). This would be okay if they were more careful about it. After all, you can’t follow the same formula all the time, or else your show will turn into Murder She Wrote, or Columbo.

Still, if you are going to shake things up, you have to lay the groundwork. You have to provide a reason for the characters to act out of character. In this case, if I had to make up a reason for Carter to lose his common sense, it would be his emotional involvement with the situation: his daughter’s brain is being taken over. And when you watch, you can see Colin Ferguson (the actor that plays Carter), since he’s a real pro, trying to get that across. But it doesn’t work because the writers and the director or whoever is supposed to lay the foundation to allow the characters to go against the grain didn’t lay enough groundwork for that to really come out. I suspect the whole Subaru thing cut into their brainstorming time.

Okay, enough snarking. Back to the story: Fargo is analyzing the pylons, and his car is positioned in a way to show off his brand new cool-looking Subaru. He has a pretty funny scene talking to his new car (which doesn’t have an AI, so it’s funny because he’s basically talking to himself). He discovers something really important about the pylons, but before he can call Dr. Blake, his old car shows up and kidnaps him. It’s totally ridiculous, because how can a car kidnap a human? It doesn’t have hands, man! But it chases after him in reverse with the trunk open, and and Fargo runs down the street, instead of jumping off the road where a car wouldn’t be able to follow him, and just as you’re rolling your eyes and wondering what’s on the Cartoon Network, they cut away to a scene in the clinic with Carter being worried about Zoe.

Then they cut back to Fargo. Somehow, the car got him into her trunk, and Larry is in there too because the car kidnapped him first. They argue about whose fault it is, and there are all kinds of jokes, but in the process Fargo comes to realize that he really did treat his car poorly. He sincerely apologizes to Tabitha for treating her so badly. It’s so genuine that the car decides to forgive him. She also realizes that whatever it is Fargo knows, it’s really important. So she tracks down Jo, because Jo has that new Subaru that can go really fast, and the cell phones and radio connections aren’t working, so Jo is going to have to rush Fargo to Dr. Blake so he can save the day (don’t you want to go out and buy a Subaru now? Don’t forget to take advantage of the Cash For Clunkers program! Then you can be just like Jo!).

The rest of the team decides to go over to the pylons and just shut them down. But Fargo arrives just in time, tells Dr. Blake that the pylons are actually Boson cloud exciters. The pylons are creating a cloud of Bosons in order to slow down something traveling at super high volumes (for example, the object approaching Eureka from outer space). Henry gets a look on his face that is a combination of “WTF” and “so THAT’S where I left that,” and rushes over to the site of the pylons. Dr. Blake decides okay, fine, let’s not blow this thing up. Suddenly, a massive object appears out of nowhere, suspended in the Boson cloud. It looks kind of like that ship from Close Encounters, except without all those lights, and covered in dust, and a lot smaller. Everyone is confused and scared, except Henry. He rushes up to it and scrapes off a bunch of dust, revealing an American flag is painted on the hull of the ship (assuming it’s a ship). “It’s one of ours,” declares Carter.

The previews for the next show reveal that this is an old experiment of Henry’s from high school or something, coming back home. Since this is a two-parter, I am going to reduce my totally harsh judgment (that this is one of the worst episodes of Eureka since “Show Me the Mummy”), and wait for the second installment. My theory is that if there is a two hour story arc (part 1, plus part 2), then we have just reached the halfway mark, and the climax is still a long way off. So, this episode basically was setup.

On the other hand, the Subaru stuff is really annoying. I understand that, with TiVo and DVRs and webisodes, you have to integrate the commercials into the show. I also understand the power of cross-platform story telling (TV, web, print, etc.). All kinds of shows — such as Smallville and Heroes — are doing this. But you have to give your creative staff a lot more leeway to make it part of the story. It is possible to integrate the Subaru thing into the story, but if you make it too obvious (like this episode did), you’re just going to ruin the attachment your audience has to the show, and then it doesn’t matter what you advertise.* In this episode, it seems like the advertising department showed up and said “you have to whore out the show to Subaru,” and the writers were like “okay, let’s see how we can do that without distracting the audience from the story,” and the advertisers were like “no, don’t integrate it. I said whore the show out. I want you to totally distract the viewers from the story and make them think about Subaru all the time, and not care whether Carter saves the day in the end.”

My hope is that with this episode, they got it out of their systems. Perhaps they’ll save it in the next episode, so let’s see what happens. I really want to see what this thing is that Henry cooked up, and whether this thing represents the mistakes of his youth coming home to roost.

*You’ll probably also end up bankrupting Subaru. Just look at what Transformers did to GM!