(no subject)

[seekingferret]

A few weeks ago I started watching Eureka on Amazon Prime, for no good reason at all. I guess I wanted a reliably dumb entertainment, and Eureka surprised me by fitting the bill. I had actually been excited for Eureka when it first came out, because I loved the idea of a show about small town America coping with big science, and I watched the first six episodes as they aired, but I soured quickly when it turned out that the first few episodes contained specific kinds of bad science that annoyed me. But jumping in this time I managed to mostly get past those episodes and fall into a groove of enjoyment dependent on my awareness that all of the characters on Eureka are the dumbest people you've ever met. Tune in next week to learn what stupid thing Jack will manage to do to endanger the town. They actually lampshade this in the last season with Jo asking Fargo "When's the last time you pressed a button without checking what it did first?" as a sign of his growing maturity in his new office/the writers moving slightly away from writing their characters as incompetent morons.

Then my canon completism kicked in and I watched the whole thing from start to finish. Everyone on the show except Beverly is so likeable! It's really charming, and I enjoyed watching a show where the chief enemy isn't malevolence but just lack of foresight. Nobody on the show wants to destroy Eureka, it just keeps almost happening anyway by accident.

I nonetheless found it a frustrating show to watch because it very much feels like a show about science written by nonscientists, to be watched by nonscientists. Jack Carter is our perspective character because of course as a nonscientist he's just a normal guy in contrast to all of those SCIENTIFIC GENIUSES who are WEIRD. [It reminds me of the weird response I get sometimes from humanities people when I tell them I'm an engineer: "Wow. You must be really smart."] In contrast, my favorite character on the show is Zoey Carter, because she starts out being written as a 'normal guy' and evolves without realizing it into being a weird Eureka science person.

When I finished the show, it left a void in my TV watching that I've fumbled trying to fill. I'm giving X-Files a try, but I'm finding it slow-going because of the indeterminacy of its early episodes. The reluctance to give away too many secrets about the aliens too early is translating into a clumsy reluctance to give any kind of satisfying endings to individual episodes. When I finish an X-Files episode, I am left thoughtful but not immediately wanting more. For example, "Deep Throat" is a fascinating episode with a lot of interesting characters and a profound mystery, and the episode ends not only without plot/arc resolution, but without much character resolution. It ends with Mulder and Scully giving up on the investigation despite many unanswered questions. Perhaps this episode, and others like it, would have resonated more deeply if I had more investment in Mulder and Scully than I do. On the other hand, I love deeply that in these early episodes it is Scully, the scientist, who is the perspective character, for exactly the reason I griped about Eureka. Even though X-Files is a show that is about bad science, its fidelity to the ideals of scientific research is indisputable.

While I wait for those X-Files hooks to dig in, I have started trying to watch Babylon 5 again. I watched the first season years ago while snarking it with workownsmysoul, but overall found it badly done. We made it a few episodes into S2 but while I acknowledged some improvement, particularly Sheridan over Sinclair, I eventually petered out. This time, I'm picking up with the start of Season 2. Lots of people I trust say that at some point in Season 2 it gets better, so I'm going to try to stick it out this time. I'm about eight episodes in now and so far, not much luck. B5 strikes me so far as a show that would have benefited greatly from being made in the mid 2000s instead of the mid 1990s. Not just the technological innovations, but the way storytelling, acting, and cinematographic innovations spread into SF TV over the past fifteen years. The quality of the acting performances on Eureka is overall higher than on Babylon 5, even though Eureka is a much dumber show. B5 has a habit of getting guest stars who seem laughably out of place in the character they've been cast as. And it has actors who overact every emotion their character is supposed to be experiencing, every character cue telegraphed in 72 point font in blinking lights. To me this speaks of a particular sort of bad writing/directing: The auteurs appear to have thought very carefully about each character beat, and they want to make sure the audience sees their work, sees their cleverness. [It's a very familiar writing flaw to me, since I'm guilty of it all the time. But it's really jarring just how obvious it is on B5.]

If B5 ever does pay off the way people claim, it will be because it manages to start taking advantage of the quiet story hooks it's been planting throughout. Rumors and gossip and vague plans: unrest on Mars, turmoil in Psicorp, maneuvering behind the Centauri throne, doubts about the Minbari ambassador, some of these things are tossed off as if they were merely flavor, yet something in the way characters linger hammily over their lines suggests that there is more going on. The one well-done effect in S2 so far has been a constant sense that Babylon 5 is a powderkeg ready to explode.

Comments

[dragonfly]

I had a similar difficulty with Babylon 5, coupled with an annoyance at what I call the Jar Jar Binks approach to aliens. Here are the pseudo-Soviets, here are the serpent people, etc. I was able to get past that and got quite caught up in a number of the storylines. It ended up feeling to me like a good book in a torn and tattered jacket.

And, if you liked Eureka, as a replacement might I suggest Haven, rather than X-Files? It's a little more current, and has a lot of the same "feel" as Eureka, to me. Not that I didn't enjoy X-Files. It has a few utterly brilliant episodes.

[starlady]

I think B5 does pay off quite handsomely in the end and does take advantage of the hooks it's been strewing around in the first two seasons, but the first two seasons are definitely often…clunky.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, all those bits in B5 are definitely important. Most of them pay off, though a few pieces were cut due to budgetary and scheduling issues. Also, you may notice that several major characters suddenly disappear and are replaced with very similar characters (Sinclair being the most obvious; that's actually a sad story. The actor was too mentally ill to stay on the show full time, though he does come back occasionally).

Matthew