Why You Sould Watch Eureka

If you're looking for a decent series this fall, you might tune into the Sci-Fi channel on Tuesday nights. The Sci-fi channel has largely been driven by the show Star-Gate SG1, which has won 7 Saturn awards and has run for over 8 years. They really set themselves off when they very ingeniously created the spin-off series Star-Gate Atlantis, creating an entirely different story-line and occasionally intertwining them with the original series. They furthered their success when they added the modernized version of the Science Fiction classic Battle Star Galactica. As it turns out Eureka is proving to be just as promising amongst the Sci-Fi Channel's crown jewels of television programming.

We first discover Eureka while accompanying U.S. Marshall Jack Carter and his delinquent daughter Zoe on a road trip to deliver her back to her mother. The strangeness begins when Zoe spots a car identical to their own, with their twins driving in the opposite direction and waving at them. A few moments later Carter swerves, to narrowly miss a dog standing in the middle of the otherwise empty road, and lands the car in the tops of the trees on the ridge below. Carter and Zoe make their way into town, and the strangeness continues from there. Grade school children are reading advanced physics books, and instead of using sidewalk chalk for hop scotch, they're pouring over massive calculus equations.

As it turns out Carter gets embroiled in a local problem, beginning with a missing child and an RV whose back half has vanished. And as things progress Carter finds out that Eureka is no simple little town. As it turns out Eureka is actually a cover for a large government research facility called Global Dynamics, where some of the most brilliant people in the world live and work to make new and innovative products for the general population. But there's also promising sub-plots with the military research area of the facility, known as "Section 5" where an undefined and mysterious artifact is being housed, behind layers of radiation.

This little town has all kinds of little quirks, from a local gas station from which you hear explosions on a regular basis, a smart house that cooks and cleans itself, as well as passively aggressively locks you into the laundry room when it gets mad at you. Then there's Cafe Diem... a small restaurant that has no menus because they will serve you literally any dish you order. A sexy, tough, gun-toting deputy, a brilliant NSA agent, a more than eccentric zoologist, and several quirky scientists fill out the amusingly odd residents of the town. Each episode of course features a science experiment gone awry, some involving the mysterious artifact in section five, some not. The great thing also about Eureka, where it's only a fictional show, they base most of their story lines on real science. Each show incorporates a new scientific fact or theory around which the rampant experiments center. So in being entertained you are quite likely to learn some things along the way.

The actors cast for this show seem to be very comfortable in their roles, and you get the feeling of a small town of people whose residents have developed a rapport with one another, despite their minor conflicts with each other... all in collusion to protect the big secret that is Global Dynamics.

It is a very entertaining show, featured on the Sci-Fi channel on Tuesday Nights at 8 pm CST. For more information (including teasers) feel free to visit Scifi.com.