Rebooting Eureka¶
I’m rewatching [Eureka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_%28American_TV_series%29). I was reminded of two things:
I love this show. It’s a good show.
The show does not love autistic people. This is a huge flaw that makes it hard to enjoy it at times.
Apparently there’s a bit of drama around the season 5 cancellation and how it was not wrapped up properly with a season 6 miniseries because SyFy considered it “too expensive”.
The show probably won’t “come back”. But this means that a reboot might make sense.
Here is a suggested reboot. It has several premises:
Disney+ acquires the rights. Monetizing soft sci-fi nostalgia would be right up its alley.
We want something compatible with 2023 sensibilities.
With this in mind, here’s a pitch for a rebooted pilot.
A divorced US marshall and his teen daughter are following their GPS. When the GPS goes on the fritz, the dad pulls out a paper map to figure out the rest of the drive.
It is night, raining, and his daughter is being a pain. He misses the exit.
The road becomes narrow. The highway ended.
Something weird on the road causes him to veer off. When he and his daughter comes to, they are being pulled out of the car by the sherrif, Jo Lupo.
The car will need some fixing. The only town for miles around is Eureka, where they are offered temporary accomodations. Henry Deacon, still played by a Black actor, is the “mechanic as a hobby.”
Slowly, through discussions, we find the following out during the A plot with Carter:
The reason the marshall was driving with his daughter was that she ran away from her mom. He was returning her. She doesn’t get along with the mom’s boyfriend, and wants to live with her dad.
Sheriff Lupo lost her deputy recently to some unexplained accident.
Eureka’s Global Dynamics does some weird research.
Lupo suspects that whatever drove Carter off of the road had something to do with what happened to her deputy. She interrogates him, but offers little in return to his questions.
When Carter meets with Henry to check on his car, he gets more details. The deputy died at the exact time the car was driven off of the road, and Carter’s watch stopped.
Carter puts things together. The deputy was a robot, unbeknown to anyone. No autopsy was made, because he burned to a crisp.
The B plot focuses on Zoe. She has a large breakfast at Cafe Diem when she learns it’s free.
A girl joins her table. They realize they have more in common than they thought: the daughter, too, confesses that she wanted to run away from her mom.
The daughter has an uncanny knack for technology. Zoe eventually realizes that she did run away last night, but something made her go back.
The A and B plots merge when Carter talks to Zoe, and realizes that the daughter running away from home also coincided with the time everything happened.
The daughter figured out deputy Andy was a robot. She deactivated him, only to trigger a fail-safe that effected the car and Carter’s watch. The machines in Eureka all have EMP-shielding, which is why they weren’t affected. This is why the daughter ran back.
As a result:
Lupo offers Carter to be a deputy.
Zoe says that she made a friend, and would love to stay in Eureka.
Carter calls his ex, and they agree that Zoe can stay with him if he takes the deputy job.
The artifact and Kevin plot needs to be revisited. It is hard to find a reasonably sensitive option.
Since the main plot reason for it is to give Ally a moral dilemma, have the artifact connect with her directly. The reason she’s the liaison is that she’s a great scientist, but not Eureka-level. The Artifact boosts her ability to do science and make discoveries.