TV is the New Reading

POSTED:Sat, October 10, 2009 @ 11:40PM

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Hellos, goodbyes on the Syfy channel

I’ve had a lot of series and season premieres to focus on over the past couple few weeks, some of which I enjoyed, some of which ... that’s all I’m really ever going to need to see of them. So a few season finales fell by the wayside a bit, particularly over on the Syfy channel.

"Eureka"

The truly annoying finale was “Eureka.” This season saw the return of Taggart, “Eureka’s” zoologist extraordinaire, along with mutant ice, android sheriff, random gravity sinkholes, quantum blouses, green people, mass amnesia and the return of a space probe which 20 years later had spontaneously replicated Henry’s girlfriend as a data storage device.

The finale was the least believeable aspect of any of that.

In order to get into Harvard (which would welcome any student from Eureka with full scholarships), Zoe’s boyfriend messes with the Earth’s magnetic pole, dragging magnetic north to Oregon, in anticipation of a 650 million year extinction event slated for approximately 2,000 years from now.

Because this show is occasionally very dumb, this magnetized everything, it created flames in a swimming pool, cutlery was flying around in Café Diem and instead of imploding like a tin can, Deputy Jo’s car got mailboxes and traffic signs sticking to it.

Right. Because the Earth’s magnetic pole is marked by a bunch of freaky weirdness where metal flies around and drunken modern dance occurs when people try to walk around in it. Or it causes little compass needles to point vertically. Oh, I know, this is “Eureka” so there’s weird technology and flashing auras and life’s punching bag Douglas Fargo stuck to ceilings and walls. But the writing on this show is always wavering between competent and middle school and this was decidedly middle school.

Yes, science is occasionally boring. Quite a lot of it is taken up with long, repetitive processes and experiments with no wacky visuals and effects, so a young man anticipating the loss of his lady love to the other end of the country, wanting to join her and coming up with a neat experiment to shift the latitude of magnetic north from the high upper 80s to the mid 40s to repel a theoretical neutron pulsar no one is anticipating for at least 2,000 years would be a fantastic science project and of course he’d have all the resources he needed because magnetic north is caused by the rotation of the Earth’s molten core in the first place so I’m sure you can just cobble something together in a lab somewhere to affect those.hundreds of trillions of tons of molten, spinning momentum.

Or it’s just that Eureka is prone to extraordinarily bizarre things happening all the time when everyone’s experiments have unanticipated side effects. So it’s just as well that Sheriff Carter is planning a trip to Australia to join his lady love, Tess, if only to get out of town for a little while. I can only imagine it’s safer.

“Warehouse 13”

Syfy’s “Warehouse 13” came to a perfectly jarring close just as it was starting to get a little bit acceptable.

“Warehouse 13” for the blissfully unaware tracks the misadventures of two former Secret Service agents recruited for the purpose of tracking down artifacts exhibiting strange and miraculous properties, usually destructive, neutralizing them and trucking them back to a giant underground space someplace in South Dakota at the behest of shadowy government figures, possibly beneficent.

I’d been trundling along for most of this series in the hopes that something significant would start happening. For the most part it remained a kooky crazy object of the week bouncing around loose someplace, causing problems and needing to get retrieved by the field agents, Myka and Pete, while strange object guru Artie and otherwise friendly sociopath Claudia hung around in the nation’s attic or storage closet, essentially, as caretakers.

The problem with all of this is that former agent MacPherson showed up a few episodes back with a sword that cloaked whoever used it in invisibility, so you can’t see them approach until they swing the sword (and sure, that seems fair). It turns out he also helped Claudia hack into Warehouse 13 and then it also turns out that she may have been a double-agent all along, even tho Artie helped free her brother from an alternate dimension brought on by an artifact, even while engaged in her various hijinks – and to be perfectly fair, Arite’s part of the reason her brother was trapped there in the first place.

By the end, this storyline was starting to develop nicely. Before it had been a little adolescent – locate the objects, deal with the fuss and dust up they rile up wherever they are, bring it home again. That’s … honestly, creatures gnaw their legs off to escape that level of tedium, particularly when spun out to 42 minutes.

So however poorly they introduced Artie’s nemesis, former Warehouse agent MacPherson, however given to muWHAhahahaha diabolical schemes and twirling mustaches he was, and however improbable his escape – he was encased in bronze. Artie encased this ne’er-do-well in bronze and then turned his back for a moment and MacPherson’s confederate, Claudia, using a truly unlikely shapeshifting artifact (Harriet Tubman’s thimble indeed) to look like the innkeeper, was able to wander in and hit a button marked “Reverse Process.” Seriously? A button that would reverse the process, and Artie just left that hanging there and possible?

Well, in that it looks like Claudia and MacPherson escaped and destroyed Artie while cutting the warehouse off from the outside world in a self-destruct sequence … I guess we’re not going to know now until next season.

“Sanctuary”

One series that started off with some of the same problems as “Warehouse 13” and seems to have found itself somewhat is “Sanctuary,” which premiered its second season Friday.

The Sanctuary in New York is one in a worldwide network of cryptozoological enclaves that secures and protects strange creatures from the outside world and, for the most part, vice versa. The show sowed the seeds of its salvation from its pilot episode, where the Sanctuary custodian, Helen Magnus, a woman who looks extraordinary for her age, was visited by her ex-husband, Jack the Ripper.

Jack turned out to be a charming fellow, ultimately (and you can find his lamp over on "Warehouse 13" putting people into a trance). Together with their very old friends Nicholai Tesla, a vampire, as well as an invisible girl and a werewolf and a Neanderthal and a police psychologist, they contain the out-of-hand and try to keep destruction of and by abnormals, as they are called, to a minimum, all over the world – no easy task with a well-resourced Cabal trying to exploit them to jumpstart the next stage of human evolution. Toward that end, the Cabal abducted Helen and Jack’s extraordinary daughter Ashley, at the end of the first season and over the course of the season premiere, they infused her with super speed, strength, razor-sharp fingernails as well as apparent vampirism. They also brainwashed her rather profoundly, so she attacks them as well as anyone who gets in their way.

Ash may be gone, but there’s Kate Freelander, a fresh faced assassanista who was working for the Cabal but, now that they tried to kill her, she figures she can maybe be of assistance to Sanctuary. I liked her. She reminded me of Faith from the Buffy series.

Anyway, the Cabal is trying to scrub abnormal traits from human DNA and it may have uncovered the means of doing so. And just like with Warehouse 13, the show benefits from having a definite villain to fight. Sanctuary was nearly all about the wacky critter of the week storylines until it stepped up the international Cabal conspiracy, at which point it improved enormously.

So I’m looking forward to seeing more of this show, rather than just putting up with it as I had been with too much of last season. New episodes air Fridays at 10/9c on SyFy.

Coming up

As I indicated, the season premieres are winding down, which is a good thing -- there are only a couple of new shows on my radar for this week. “Hell’s Kitchen”s sixth season finale names the new executive chef for the Abraxi restaurant in Whistler, British Columbia, and the chef I’ve been rooting for for several weeks, now, is still in the running. That’s Tuesday at 8/7c on FOX.

“Nip/Tuck” is facing some fallout from the economic downturn as its sixth and final season kicks off Wednesday at 10/9c on FX. And on Friday, “Ugly Betty” returns to ABC at 8/7c with a two-hour fourth season premiere featuring a plucky young editorial assistant navigating a world she is in no way mastering. I’d have thought the fish-out-of-water thing would get old after awhile, but it’s still reasonably acceptable, if only because the world of fashion as addressed by Mode magazine appears to be about as deep as Micheal Urie’s voice and has the learning curve of a goldfish. Soon Betty will have had bad dating experiences with everyone in Manhattan and they might have to consider developing some characters. I kid because I love, and I do love, the show is as adorable as ever but you should watch it for storytelling to about the same extent as you would eat cotton candy for nourishment.

Oh, and in anticipation of a revival of atmospheric thriller series “The Prisoner” next month on AMC, you can catch classic episodes of the series on the Independent Film Channel Friday starting at 9/8c.

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