Eureka

[marcmagus]

I just caught up on Eureka, and have a bunch of thoughts I want to get out while I'm aware of them. I'm not sure if anybody watches, so this might not mean much to you, but, whatever. There will probably be spoilers.

Tess and Jack: I'm patting myself on the back a bit for catching right away that she was attracted to/flirting with him. I'm surprised the show has moved so quickly in pushing them together. I hope this is to set up for an interesting interaction with the fact that Allison is a good friend of hers and Allison and Jack are totally not over one another. I fear this is setting up for high-school drama love triangle.

Science: The show's technobabble continues to be appalling, mostly because they keep using real-world contemporary terms in ways that are completely ridiculous to anybody who has even a passing familiarity with the concepts behind them. It's really painful. Like this last episode's "computer virus from space" jumping to humans through an "organic computer" then being transmitted between people by touch (and causing them to electrocute themselves) and being cured by information encoded in a glow of green light. The last I was ok with, but the signal requiring "a petavolt per byte" was just insane: if you've come up with the clever idea to transfer information to the human brain via light in the eyes, you can make a little MiB-style "flashy thing" that operates at reasonable voltages and bring people to it.

I really wish the show would hire somebody with a basic college-intro-level survey knowledge across the sciences to read each script and say, "That line makes the brilliant people sound like they don't know what they're talking about; fix it. How about this other bit of jargon."

Gender: The show definitely has some issues I'm uncomfortable with with supporting and propagating problematic gender roles. I'll give it points for, a couple of weeks ago, making it clear Jack was acting inappropriately with his habitually silencing his sister, but that same episode is just filled with unremarked similar behavior. Such as Jack yelling at two adult men to stop bickering with, "Ladies!". I find myself wincing at the script a lot, and I'm wondering if it's gotten worse, or I'm just noticing it more.

Probably the worst offender on this front (and tying in to queer issues as well) is the frequent use of homophobia played for laughs in the character of Fargo. He's a scrawny geeky guy and frequently the butt of jokes, and those jokes often turn into his protestations of "I'm not gay, I swear!" that make me really uncomfortable. People act like that all the time, and it's sad, not funny, and it was seriously old back in Season One. I wish they'd stop.

Race: I'd really like to know what people who are better at looking at this stuff think of race issues in the show. From where I sit, I feel like they've done a pretty good job of integrating PoC characters in a way that's not tokenizing, white-washing, or self-congratulatory. However, I know I'm not a particularly discerning viewer when it comes to these sorts of things, so I'd be really curious to know others' opinions.

Anti-Intellectualism: I'm feeling surprisingly good about the show here, actually. For a show which is all about technology created the monster of the week, it does a pretty good job of not delivering the message that all technology is evil (at least sometimes), but rather that we need to be careful about what we do with technology and make sure we've thought about the effects of things before we release them. While the uneducated guy usually comes up with the brilliant plan to save the day, as mentioned in the most recent episode, he does it by being really clever and listening to what people are saying and then making connections they're not. It's not exactly "smart people are all stupid" (although it goes there sometimes), it's more not all smart people are scientists. And science (well TV Science! super-engineering) saves the day fairly often.

I still enjoy this show as light summer fluff, despite its many flaws. I'm not exactly sure why, but...it's fun.