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Eureka: The Manhattan Project Meets Twin Peaks?

By bushwells on July 18, 2006.

As an avid fan of pop culture, I do not hesitate to induce neural necrosis by watching all manner of television and film. The SciFi network gets my business, particularly for their goofy SciFi Originals with their bad special effects and has-been actors in lead roles. So, I am quivering with anticipation as the premier of Eureka nears. Here's the premise:

Welcome to Eureka!

Nestled in the Pacific Northwest, Eureka is a seemingly ordinary town whose residents lead ordinary lives ... at least to the naked eye. Shrouded in secrecy, the picturesque hamlet is actually a community of scientific geniuses assembled by the government to conduct top-secret research.

It sounds like "The Manhattan Project Meets Twin Peaks." Will Eureka's local diner serve damn fine coffee and cherry pie to customers in a booth which can warp time and space?

The series has nabbed a couple of actors whose work I have enjoyed in past roles: Joe Morton ("Brother from Another Planet") and Matt Frewer ("Max Headroom"). Morton's character is the brilliant engineer "masquerading as a mechanic." Frewer's character is the "biological containment specialist." The show may prove to be truly horrible and lacking in the enjoyable self-conscious cheesiness of other SciFi Originals like the classic "Alien Express" or "Mansquito!", but I'm going to give one episode a shot in the interest of science and culture's confluence.

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Actually, the second season of Twin Peaks included a space-alien-driven subplot centering on the Black Lodge area -- Bobby Briggs' father was a USAF officer and was the major player in whatever gratuitous weirdness this entailed. I don't know if there was necessarily supposed to be much "research" involved (and David Lynch may not have known, or cared, himself), but with the "everything's-normal-on-the-surface" angle, this does sound very similar to TP.

Yes! Don Davis, the actor who played the elder Briggs, is a regular on Star Gate 1, starring the former MacGyver. Major Briggs' most memorable line:

The owls are not what they seem.

So, I am quivering with anticipation as the premier of Eureka nears.

Yeah! Me too! I love the cheesy stuff on Sci Fi. I hope this one is as good as it looks like it could be - perhaps up to the standards of The 4400 or, dare I wish it, the new Battlestar Galactica.

So what's the verdict?