Lower Decks

Syfy’s Eureka returned after a ten-month break this past Friday (July 10th) with the first of ten new episodes completing its third season. Previously, the series was seen on Tuesdays. During the mid-season finale (“From Fear to Eternity,” originally broadcast September 23rd, 2008) a lot of things start going very, very wrong. Zoe, for example, started aging rapidly. That’s never fun. Secrets about Eva Thorne were revealed, someone was found to be pregnant and someone else was fired. Aside from that last bit, things were wrapped up quite nicely.

For the record, Allison was the pregnant one and Carter was the fired one. By the end of “Welcome Back, Carter” he gets his job back. That wasn’t much of a surprise. His replacement is a robot named Andy who keeps getting smashed and crumpled by roving fields of intense gravity. Carter (who has found a new job) and Jo (who resigned after being passed over as the new sheriff) do their best to investigate. There wasn’t much of Zoe, Vincent, Fargo or Henry in the episode, but they all made appearances.

Simply put, S.A.R.A.H. (the smart house where Carter and Zoe live) has been trying to destroy Sheriff Andy in an attempt to keep Carter around. It was a bit of a twist, I suppose, but for a while it seemed like “Welcome Back, Carter” was going to be another episode about a scientist overstepping their boundaries only to see their experiments go awry. That happens far too often. Eureka is filled with geniuses who, after a dozen or so incidents of this type, should be able to realize that breaking the rules in the name of science never works out in the end.

So, after saving the day with the help of Sheriff Andy, Carter is given his job back by Henry who, as mayor, has final say in the firing of a town official. Everything is back to normal. Welcome back, Carter, despite the fact that you never really went anywhere and nobody thought you’d be gone for long. I thought Sheriff Andy was a neat one-off character but he’d probably get tiring quickly. At the moment, it looks like the big storyline of the rest of the season will be Allison’s pregnancy. Isn’t Lexi, Carter’s sister, still pregnant as well? Babies all around.