Have an Ice Day:
Written by:
Story by : Joan Binder Weiss & Constance M. Burge
Teleplay by : Bruce Miller & Charlie Craig
Directed by: Joe Morton
Original airdate: September 11, 2009 (1 week break)
Synopsis:
GD receives a special delivery from the arctic, a very long ice core that dates back thousands and thousands of years into the past, but until they receive a sign off from the Russian commissar in charge of the ice core, they can’t actually study it. Taggart, having heard about the ice core project during his walkabout away from GD, became the team leader, wanting to be a part of the study of primordial life. The commissar turns up but won’t sign off until he makes sure that all of GD is up to spec for security and safety. He starts partaking of all that GD has to offer, such as the food and shops, continuing to put off the signings.
Jo, happy that Zane has returned, gives him a warm welcome but he gives her the cold shoulder, preferring to focus on his nano-particle refrigeration system for the ice core. Later, Taggart and Jo talk about how he left without a goodbye, with him explaining that he figured she was fine since she had started a relationship with Zane. Jo tries again to talk with Zane but he remains stone cold and unemotional with her.
Jack senses something is wrong and talks to her about Zane and he tells her to try and be patient.
Zoe receives the results of her SCAT test which tells her that she should be doing something in robotics as opposed to the medical field she wanted to go into. Lucas encourages her to try robotics since the test is 98.8% accurate.
Taggart starts to study the ice while Zane creepily watches from afar with an icy look. Jack comes down to find him to get some needed measurements for the commissar, but he finds Taggart frozen in the ice which has somehow expanded suddenly. They thaw him out but he can’t explain how the ice trapped him. Jack and Jo find that some of the ice has black striations within it. They wonder if Zane’s cooling system is the problem but he coolly maintains that it’s not his machine that’s the issue, blowing them off. Taggart apologizes to Jo for leaving so suddenly, expressing his desire to still be friends with her. He explains the black streaks are indicative of very fast growth and that the ice is still growing. Back at GD, Tess and Jack find that out as the ice starts to take over the rest of GD.
After trying to talk to Zane again, Jo and Jack find that Zane’s coffee is frozen solid. They find him lying on the floor seconds later, his body cold, with Tess reporting they found ice crystals growing inside of him, especially in the parts of the brain that controls emotion, explaining his odd behavior. Jo talks with Zane and he apologizes for his earlier behavior and she apologizes for thinking that he was the one who had frozen Taggart.
Taggart finds evidence of Stone Age fungi in the core that could explain why the ice is spreading and wants to drill out a sample but the commissar refuses, citing the safety measures not being signed off on yet. Jack tells him that knows that the commissar is just wanting to delay the signing so he can stay in America and enjoy the things he doesn’t have back home and finally relents, understanding that the growing and spreading ice could affect the rest of the world if not contained.
Zane shows up to help Taggart but with Zane still feeling cold, despite his special Petrotech clothing which keeps him and every building and road in Eureka insulated, warm and safe from freezing over, Jack realizes that the problem might be that special material. Zane does some tests and figures out that the Petrotech acts as a fertilizer, helping the fungus to make the ice expand and grow.
Taggart and Zane develop a cure to stop the fungus but with everyone being frozen in they have to find a way to get it inside all of the walls of the town before the expanding ice destroys them and causes collapse after collapse.
Luckily, Jack discovered that Eureka has a pneumatic tube message system and they manage to create an aerosol version of the cure and they push it out that way. Jack and Taggart make their way to Cafe Diem where Zoe protects everyone from freezing by having them hide inside the freezer. They open up Vincent’s pneumatic message system and the spray comes out and instantly heats everything back to normal.
Zane apologizes for his behavior towards Taggart and he says he’s glad Jo is happy again. Zane and Jo head off to have a proper welcome back.
Lucas apologizes to Zoe for pushing robotics on her and tells her to do what she wants to do and to go with her gut feeling, despite what the test said.
Tess and Jack have a nice date night alone at his bunker while Zoe stays over at a friend’s house.
Advanced Research:
Joe Morton directs an episode a season from now on (three episodes of Eureka total). He has directed on other TV shows here and there, including an episode of Tribeca in 1993 (various stories about various people living in Tribeca - the famous New York neighborhood, seven episodes total), Scandal, Bull and Our Kind of People. He directed 3 episodes of God Friended Me (an atheist's life is turned upside down when God adds him as a friend on Facebook). He also directed an independent feature in 2004 called Sunday on the Rocks, but it doesn’t seem to be available anywhere.
Jay Brazeau played Commissar Yuri Gregor. He’s a veteran character actor with 250 credits to his name. He played Father Mould in Daniel Radcliffe’s Horns, and is a regular in the movie series Garage Sale Mystery where he plays the coroner, Dr. Tramell, alongside Lori Loughlin. He has been in a number of other Hallmark style movies as well, such as Hats Off To Christmas, has played Santa on the series Mr. Young, he’s been on the Poltergeist Tv Series, several of the Air Bud movies, he was in Stargate for a few episodes as Harlan, and he did the voice of Uncle Quigley in Sabrina (the Teenage Witch): The Animated Series. He was in the original It, Gi Joe Series 2, and a handful of Booker episodes. We’ve seen before in the show and episode that started this whole thing, Sliders: Pilot where he played the KGB Colonel talking to Ross J Kelly (Rembrandt is their prisoner, he’s backlit in shadow).
What Goes Around, Comes Around:
Written by: Jaime Paglia
Directed by: Matt Hastings
Original airdate: September 18, 2009
Synopsis:
Zoe receives news that despite having a B- grade average, that equates to an A+ elsewhere in the world and has been accepted two years early into Harvard’s medical school due in large part to a glowing letter of recommendation. The news hits Jack hard as he had expected to have more time with HJ’s daughter before she left home for college. Lucas takes the news not so well and vents to Henry who he has been working with on various projects, when they notice that Kim’s data shows a scan of their universe with some new readings of Nemesis, a neutron star that has been theorized to be in binary orbit with Earth’s own path is said to cross paths with Earth every 65 million years and is accompanied by extinction level events.
At GD, Tess is readying for a test of a new super collider, which has some people like Larry very wary about the negative consequences that could occur. Regardless, they fire the machine up and things look like they’re going well, until they’re not and the machine starts vibrating off its restraints and parts go flying through the room, narrowly missing Jack, Tess, and company. As they study the machine to figure out what went wrong, Fargo later finds himself suddenly magnetically suspended to the ceiling with other metal objects in the room.
Tess reveals that she was offered a job in Australia recently which takes Jack by surprise, as she hadn’t told him about it before because she wasn’t sure if they were actually going to go anywhere with their relationship.
Zoe takes part in Pilar’s dive contest in which participants attempt a dive while being controlled remotely by robotics. Unfortunately, when Zoe starts her dive, there’s an explosion in the water and the pool is engulfed in fire while Jack jumps in to save her.
Later, Henry reveals that Fargo has been taking iron supplements all of his life which could account for his magnetism. He also finds that there are some electromagnetic hotspots that have been appearing and could explain the strange incidences. Jack theorizes that Nemesis has arrived earlier than the date it was supposed to arrive some 2000 years in the future. Tess says it’s impossible but he asks about the possibility of this one being a replica of some sort, and they realize that the only person who could have created one with access to Henry’s data, is Lucas.
They show up and find Zoe and Lucas about ready to get hot and heavy, and Jack, Henry and Tess tell him what they found with Lucas explaining that his machine was supposed to simulate Nemesis’s effects but that it isn’t even on. He even created an electromagnetic amplifier to lock Earth’s magnetic poles in place so they wouldn’t reverse because of Nemesis. He thought his test failed but they use special glasses to show him that his machine is working and has started to create a second North Pole above Eureka. The explosion of the collider provided his machine with enough energy to start up and create a loop of building energy. He admits that he did all of it because he thought by coming up with a solution for Nemesis, Henry would write him a recommendation letter for college as well and he could leave with Zoe early.
Henry and Zane come up with the idea to launch a tactical missile with a positive payload to balance out the negative charges of the disturbances. Unfortunately, the disturbances proceed to take out the power grid, squashing the plan. Jack decides to enlist the drone Martha, who was unaffected by the electromagnetic forces due to the materials used in her build, to deliver the payload.
Lucas shows up to warn them that the em pulse could end up turning his machine on, meaning that if Martha delivers her payload, it could make things even worse. The solution is for Jack to go to Lucas’s and reverse the polarity of his machine. Unfortunately, the effects of the machine could cause him to lose control of his motor functions, so they use Pilar’s diving controls to allow Tess to pilot Jack through the process, eventually making it through the extreme forces and physical objects flying around the workshop, reversing the polarity and getting away just as the payload is delivered and things are reset to normal
Tess tells Jack she accepted the job and they make plans to still work at things, with him saying she can always come back if she hates it and her responding that she can always come back even if she doesn’t. The sentiment is shared later again by Zoe when she tells her dad when they say goodbye as she leaves for college.
Jack returns to the sheriff’s office and Jo invites him for a Vinspresso but he opens a package delivered to him first: a ticket to Australia given to him by Tess. He then gets a phone call from Allison, telling her he was just about to call her.
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