To outsiders and recent transplants, the Pacific Northwest remains a bit of an enigma. Not the cities, mind you -- the secret is out, way out, that Vancouver, B.C., is beyond cool, that Seattle is a place of unparalleled beauty and that Portland has a pristine public transportation system. And dirty, dirty strippers.
What fascinates people is the incredibly varied nature that surrounds these and other urban centers -- deserts, mountains, empires of pine and cedar thick enough to hide lots of strange, creepy things.
It probably was a foregone conclusion that when the producers of Sci Fi's "Eureka" were looking for a setting for their bizarre hamlet, the Pacific Northwest would win, hands down.
The nation may be full of little towns sequestered from the rest of the world where a U.S. marshal conceivably can get stranded after crashing his car, but let's face it: If "Eureka's" Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) and his kid, Zoe (Jordan Hinson), spun off the road in bayou country, viewers would start humming the theme to "Deliverance."
Getting lost in the Northwest brings scenes from "Twin Peaks" and "Northern Exposure" to mind, translating to a friendlier kind of sinister.
Not to mention smarter. Eureka, Carter discovers in tonight's two-hour pilot, is a town in which mild-mannered guys build deadly contraptions in their basements, where children write lengthy equations on the sidewalks for fun, and where the police carry unusually complicated guns.
Following World War II, the story goes, President Truman enlisted the help of Albert Einstein to gather the world's finest minds in one place that no one would ever pinpoint. There they could invent and perfect a galaxy of contraptions to make our lives better, and make the military more intimidating.
As one would expect, something goes horribly wrong with one of those experiments, and Carter rolls up his sleeves, signs a few non-disclosure agreements, and saves the day.
It's all very quirky. Too quirky, maybe, for an audience that is used to spaceships, robots and explosions.
Though every episode promises an "aha!" moment based in quantum physics and obscure scientific laws, this world is relatively flat, conceptually speaking, in comparison to the complexity woven into series such as "Stargate SG-1" and "Battlestar Galactica."
This does not mean "Eureka" is a complete waste of time. Not at all. The characters are fun, Ferguson is believable and pleasant, the script is solidly constructed, and the visuals are slickly produced. All in all, it's a sweet series and probably not long for this world.
But that will depend on whether the darker forces at work in "Eureka's" community can take this story beyond its current mundane direction.
