Eureka: Duck, Duck Goose

The concept of a "Science Faire" run amok is an interesting one, and a natural one considering the kind of place Eureka is. However, this is mostly just a "mystery of the week" episode that doesn't quite hang together. The best stuff is the interplay between Zoe and Jack and the ongoing speculation on the results of Zoe's IQ test. While it's always fun to watch the characters of Eureka play against one another, the episode needed more than that to really stand out.

There's some awkward and overly silly material with Carter deliberately trying to impress Allison by going to the gym. Suddenly Carter is far less sure of himself than I've ever seen him before, and the writers seemed to push the character into a mold that doesn't fit - just for the sake of some fairly cheap comedy. There's a side story here with Taggert's robot geese that never really materializes into anything other than a bit of augmentation to the rest of the episode. The geese being confused in their directions is how they figure out some sort of magnetism is affecting Eureka, and it also touches on a bit of Jack's recurring fears about his competence as a parent. I haven't seen Taggert lately, and this is a bit of a waste of the actor and the character.

The "Heathers" storyline that pits Zoe against the bully girls at school is also a bit underdeveloped and seems to be relying on a shorthand that wasn't earned. While it's understandable that Zoe might be viewed as a "norm," this is a strange way to introduce this concept and resolve it in one episode. It's also unclear why Stark rewards Zoe second place if her project was really about fruit flies. Did he judge her on her quick thinking that helped save the day? How's that work exactly? Nonetheless, it's funny that she ends up getting the new car to go with that new license.

The mystery surrounding what's drawing the space debris to Eureka ends up being answered when Zoe and Jack's stories collide, revealing that the perpetrator is the mother of one of the Heathers, who robbed her own daughter's idea. The best thing that results from this is the line where Carter asks Henry "Area 51 is real?" And Henry nods his head yes and responds "No." It's the interplay between the characters (and these actors) that saves any episode of Eureka from being completely insubstantial. Nonetheless, this was, all in all, a ho-hum mystery followed up by a ho-hum conclusion