Eureka (2006 TV series)

This article is about the US science-fiction television series

For the Canadian educational science television series, see Eureka! (TV series).

For the anime, see Eureka Seven.

Eureka
Eureka opening title card
Created by	Andrew Cosby Jaime Paglia
Starring	Colin Ferguson Salli Richardson-Whitfield Jordan Hinson Joe Morton Ed Quinn Debrah Farentino Matt Frewer Erica Cerra
Country of origin	United States
No. of episodes	25 (list of episodes)
Production
Production locations	British Columbia, Canada
Camera setup	Multi-camera
Running time	approx. 44 minutes
Original release
Network	Sci Fi Channel
Release	July 18, 2006 – present

Eureka is an American science fiction television series that premiered July 18, 2006, on the Sci Fi Channel. In the UK and Ireland it first aired on Sky One on August 2, 2006 - where it is titled A Town Called Eureka. Repeats of the first Season have since been broadcast on the British Sci Fi Channel. A second season of thirteen episodes started airing on July 10, 2007 in the US. It premieres in the UK in October 2007 on Sky One. The Sci-Fi Channel has renewed Eureka for a third season. According to Sci Fi Wire, Eureka was originally going to be an animated series.

• Season One Tagline: Small Town. Big Secret.
• Season Two Tagline: Same Town. Bigger Secrets.

Setting

Eureka takes place in a secret town of the same name inhabited entirely by the best minds in the United States. After World War II ended, Albert Einstein realized that the future belonged to science. Given the close call with the deployment of the atomic bomb, the U.S. government decided it could not risk being surpassed by other nations.

With Einstein's help and that of other trusted advisers, then-President Harry S. Truman had a top-secret residential town built in a remote area of the Pacific Northwest, one that would serve to protect and nurture the country's most valuable intellectual resources. There, the nation's greatest thinkers, the "über-geniuses" working on the next era of scientific achievement, would be able to live and work in a supportive environment. The best architects and planners were hired to make the town a paradise, with the best of everything for all its residents. This town would never appear on any map and would be unknown to the public, except to those that were authorized to learn of it.

In the fifty years since the town's founding, its residents are responsible, directly or indirectly, for almost every leap in the natural sciences known to humanity. However, with experimentation inevitably comes failure, and over fifty years' worth of trial and error they have had a number of experiments go awry. Global warming has in passing been mentioned as an example of a Eureka project gone wrong.

Though Eureka's residents suffer many of the same problems that ordinary towns do, having a town full of geniuses and virtually limitless resources tends to make their problems a much larger concern than those of a regular town. It has been noted that the town's mortality rate is twice the national average.

While transporting a fugitive (who is revealed to be his rebellious teenage daughter, Zoe) back to Los Angeles, Deputy U. S. Marshal Jack Carter gets himself tangled up in the town's latest mishap, and soon becomes its new sheriff after the old one is injured.

Location of Eureka

File:Eureka Noche de Sueños Oregon flag.jpg

Carter standing in the sheriff's office, next to an Oregon flag.

The location of Eureka has never been explicitly stated, although various hints in the show indicate that it takes place in Oregon, since a map of the state and an Oregon state flag are visible in the sheriff's office. It has also been implied that Eureka is in a state adjacent to Idaho. In one episode, Zoe, trying to run away, attempts to take a bus to Portland (Oregon's largest city) in a nearby town. When Sheriff Carter asks where the next stop is, the bus attendant replies that it stops in Salem (Oregon's capital city). When attempting to find Zoe, they searched all public transportation within 50 miles (80 km) of Eureka. Zoe was identified as buying two tickets on a bus leaving from Summerville. In the episode Family Reunion, when Zoe widens her search for Angela Fairfield, the next widest search zone outside of Eureka is Oregon.

Eureka's unique status appears to have led to its designation as a consolidated city-county: in the episode "Primal", Allison Blake's divorce papers from Nathan Stark are filed in the state of Oregon, in the Circuit Court of the County of Eureka - which would also explain the presence of a sheriff, something normally afforded to counties, not towns.

In a December 2005 interview, Eureka co-creator Andrew Cosby described the town's location being in the "Pacific Northwest", "tucked away" behind "the redwood wall". The coastal town of Eureka, California (approximately 90 miles south of the Oregon border) is referred to by locals as behind the "redwood curtain", but Cosby says the similarity is coincidental.

In the episode "Unpredictable", a weather device is shown zooming in on Eureka from a global view. If this is accurate, it would place Eureka on the shore of Green Peter Lake, approximately 40 miles southeast of Salem.

In the Season two episode "God is in the Details" as Zoe is being stricken mute she can be heard whispering "Portland" in relation to where she and her girlfriends can go to see a "Big City" as the other girls had never been out of Eureka.

Also in season two, the episode "Maneater" presents an evacuation plan to send all female residents of the town to "nearby" Ellsworth AFB. Ellsworth is located in not-so-near South Dakota, nearly half a continent away, while numerous other air force bases are located hundred of miles closer to Oregon's borders, in Washington, Wyoming, Nevada and Idaho. There is, in fact, a Eureka, SD, located roughly 200 miles northeast of Ellsworth AFB.

The Artifact

Is a leftover from the Big Bang, and contains the Akashic Field, which contains all the knowledge of the universe. In the season finale of season 1 we learn there was an accident involving the artifact, resulting in the death of Kim Anderson, as well as costing Nathan Stark his director's position at GD. Because of Kevin, Nathan Stark and Allison's son, being there (at the location of the accident) and his brain being tuned right he contains the Akashic Field which could kill him. In the season finale of season 2 he is stripped of it by a teleportation device.

While the main premises of Eureka do not explicitly state it, a large thematic element within Eureka involves a hidden artifact deep within an area of Global Dynamics (the town's research center), called Section 5, and accessible only to Global Dynamics top researchers such as it's head, Nathan. It has been hinted throughout Season 1 that it is an extraterrestrial artifact. In the last episode of Season 1 however, it was explicitly stated by both Nathan and Henry, to be an artifact of a technology from before the Big Bang. In other words, an artifact from a universe before the present one. Stated by the M theory there are other universes like this with 1 small variation. In theory this is something that leaked from one of those alternate universes.

Cast

Actor/Actress	Role
Colin Ferguson	Sheriff Jack Carter
Salli Richardson-Whitfield	Allison Blake
Jordan Hinson	Zoe Carter
Joe Morton	Henry Deacon
Ed Quinn	Nathan Stark
Debrah Farentino	Dr. Beverly Barlowe
Matt Frewer	Jim Taggart
Erica Cerra	Deputy Jo Lupo
Neil Grayston	Douglas Fargo
Chris Gauthier	Vincent
Shayn Solberg	Spencer

Filming locations

• Chilliwack, British Columbia – Downtown Wellington Avenue on April 12, 2006
• Duncan, British Columbia
• Ladysmith, British Columbia – Downtown First Avenue
• Nanaimo, British Columbia – Ney Drive, Biggs & Townsite Roads
• Surrey, British Columbia – (Sullivan Heights Secondary School, Fraser Heights Secondary School)
• Victoria, British Columbia
• Port Moody, British Columbia – (Heritage Woods Secondary School) Exterior shot of Global Dynamics. The interior of the school has also been used as the school that Brian Perkins attends, on May 3, 2007.
• Ashland, Oregon – (City Hall) Interior and exterior shots of city hall
• Burnaby, British Columbia – Vancouver Film Studios for the majority of the Global Dynamics building interiors, cafe interiors as well as the home of Sheriff Carter.

Episodes

Main article: List of Eureka episodes

The episodes of season one were not aired in the order intended by the show's creators. This is suggested by the episodes' production numbers which are displayed on the Sci-Fi channel's Eureka website next to episode titles quite often. There are some small inconsistencies when watched closely, but such inconsistencies are minimal and were intentionally controlled. In podcast commentaries with the show's creators and star Colin Ferguson, they confirm that the production order is in fact the order they intended the show to air, but the network executives changed the order to try and place stronger episodes earlier in the run as to help attract viewers. As such, the creators were able to make minor changes in editing and sometimes ADR dialogue in later episodes (such as removing the explicit mention of Zoe's first day at school) to try to eliminate audience confusion.

Ratings and critical reaction

The series's premiere garnered high ratings, with 4.1 million people tuning in. Eureka was also the top rated cable program for that Tuesday night, and was the highest-rated series launch in Sci Fi's fourteen-year history. The season two premiere drew 2.5 million viewers, making it the top-rated cable program of the day.

Critical reaction was mixed, with general praise for the premise, but overall middling reaction to the writing of the pilot.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

It's all very quirky. Too quirky, maybe, for an audience that is used to spaceships, robots, and explosions. Though every episode promises an "aha!" moment based in quantum physics and obscure scientific laws, this world is relatively flat, conceptually speaking, in comparison to the complexity woven into series such as Stargate SG-1 and Battlestar Galactica. This does not mean Eureka is a complete waste of time. Not at all. The characters are fun, Ferguson is believable and pleasant, the script is solidly constructed, and the visuals are slickly produced. All in all, it's a sweet series and probably not long for this world.

The New York Post:

3 out of 4 stars

The New York Daily News:

With its playful new series "Eureka," set in the Pacific Northwest and telling the story of an outsider who comes to explore, and settle in, a remote town full of eccentrics, Sci-Fi Channel isn't just inviting comparisons to "Twin Peaks" and "Northern Exposure." It's demanding them. But co-creators Andrew Cosby and Jaime Paglia hold up to them pretty well. "Eureka" has a premise, a cast and a plot that make it one of the TV treats of the summer. The folks at Sci-Fi Channel clearly intended to reinvent the summer TV series here, and come up with something breezy and fun. And "Eureka" - they've done it!

Awards

Eureka was nominated for a 2007 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series. The other nominees were Battlestar Galactica (the winner), Grey's Anatomy, Heroes, and Rome.

International distribution

Country	Channel	Season 1 Premiere date	Season 2 Premiere date
IE	Sky One	August 2, 2006	August 2, 2007
	Sci Fi	January 11, 2007
UK	Sky One	August 2, 2006	October 2, 2007
	Sci Fi	January 11, 2007
CA	Space (English)	September 3, 2006	September 10, 2007
	Ztélé (French)	August 27, 2007
TR	DiziMax	October 11, 2006
IL	AXN	November 6, 2006
ES	Cuatro TV	January 6, 2007
	Sci Fi	January 10, 2007
HU	TV2	February 3, 2007
Asia	Star World	May 30, 2007
HR	HRT 2	July 4, 2007
IT	FOX	August 4, 2007
PL	Canal+	August 30, 2007
SE	TV6	September 28, 2007

DVD release

File:EurekaS1dvd-3d.jpg

The Season One DVD 3D artwork.

Universal released a 3-DVD set containing all 12 episodes of the first season in Region 1 on July 3 2007. The design of the case is unusual in that it is biodegradable, with the disks stored in trays made from compressed potato starch.

The set contains "10 hours of behind-the-scenes extras" including deleted scenes narrated by Colin Ferguson (Jack Carter).

External links

• Official Eureka site at Sci Fi.com
• Eureka at SciFipedia
• Eureka on TV Squad

• Eureka at IMDb