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SyFy's quirky comedy-drama Eureka is about a top-secret town created to serve as a home and a safe-haven for the most brilliant minds in the country. Here, these geniuses -- the best and brightest in their fields -- work to create the greatest scientific and technological advances of their time, completely out of sight from the rest of the public.
The show's gimmick, one that has worked well in all the previous seasons, is that these advances do not come without some fairly interesting side effects. In almost every episode to-date, something has inevitably gone wrong with one of the scientist's latest projects and it is left to a select few of the townspeople to save the day. In season four, the show added a fantastic time-travel element to this basic plot and thereby flipped the world of the series on its head, providing some of the best episodes the show has ever delivered. That element continues into the show's exciting final season.
What works in the fifth and final season of Eureka is what worked for the first four -- the show is smart, funny, character-driven and packs a surprising emotional punch. But it is the character-driven element that really makes this show worth watching. Colin Ferguson is the heart of the series as town sheriff, Jack Carter. Jack is the normal, everyman in a town full of brilliant scientists and often serves as an access point through which the audience is able to understand some of the crazy shenanigans happening in this exceptional town. Salli Richardson-Whitfield is compelling and relatable as Dr. Allison Blake and Joe Morton grounds the show as the town's resident expert on almost everything. Erica Cerra's Jo is the perfect partner for Ferguson's Carter and her complicated relationship with bad boy genius Zane (Niall Matter) has been a show highlight over the past few seasons. The fifth season opener was full of great twists and turns, yet the reasons they worked is because the audience cares about these characters and their relationships with one another.
Unfortunately, as mentioned above, the SyFy network has declared that this will be the final season of this charming little show. Five seasons is a pretty solid run, but hardly enough for a show this creative and entertaining. It is hard to say why many viewers never found this series. It's possible some viewers shied away from the potentially silly premise while others may have assumed that a series set on the former SciFi channel was just not for them. Yet the show mixes so many different elements -- from comedy to drama, procedurals to science-fiction adventure stories -- I would be surprised if there was not something for everyone to love in this delightful series. I hope former viewers will return for the show's final season and that new viewers will give it a glance before it leaves our television screens forever.
Eureka airs Monday nights at 9/8c on SyFy.
