Pilot:
Written by: Andrew Cosby & Jaime Paglia
Directed by: Peter O'Fallon
Original airdate: July 18, 2006
Synopsis:
In the town of Eureka, a man named Walter works on a circular machine in his basement, that after activating he is elated to see it working. However, his joy turns to fear as he realizes something is wrong.
US Marshall Jack Carter gets into a car accident while transporting a prisoner named Zoe, after she claims she just saw herself and Jack in a car going the opposite way of them on the road. Eventually the two walk into town and get help from Sheriff Cobb and his aggressive deputy Lupo.
Henry, a local fixit man, works on a large magnetic device but a few minutes after activating it, it explodes. He gets the call to bring his tow truck to help out the Marshall.
Henry greets Walter and his wife Susan who appear to be going on a trip, but soon realizes they are packing and leaving the town for good. He soon leaves to tow the Marshall’s car but when Walter turns around they see that a circular anomaly seems to have caused the back of their camper to disappear, along with their young son.
Jack starts to help out with the search, much to the annoyance of Sheriff Cobb and Deputy Lupo who tell him he actually doesn’t have the type of experience he thinks he does for this situation. While inspecting the cordoned off camper, he runs into Allison Blake of the department of defense, also there to investigate. The two butt heads but Jack demonstrates his detective skills by deducing the missing boy, Brian, is not missing and instead actually hiding beneath one of the camper’s seats.
The search is called off but Henry tells Jack he can’t have his car up and ready for about three days. Allison tells Jack she has a place for him to stay, a local bed and breakfast, while Sheriff Cobb takes a call from a man named Taggart who tells him they found something else out in the forest, the missing back of the camper, along with the remains of his dog, burnt to a crisp.
Arriving at the B&B, Allison mistakenly thinks Jack is hitting on her. She leaves and Jack meets Beverly, the owner returning from a helicopter out in the back who refers to her guests as clients. She asks about his wife, and Jack reveals that they’re separated and she inappropriately pries further as to why.
Back in the forest, a man named Fargo tells Professor Warren King that it’s been confirmed one of their chips is missing. The sheriff interrupts them to instruct them they’ve got 24 hours to figure it out.
Back at the B&B, Jack wakes up to find his clothes missing. Looking for Beverly, he finds her copy of the book ‘The Joy of Sex’ and she reveals she sent out his clothes to be cleaned. He quickly dresses and heads into town, using her car. As he drives in the solar powered car, he notices strange things to add on top of the super intelligent boy he met earlier, such as a woman blowing triangular bubbles, four identical men playing chess, and a boy working out complex equations in chalk on the sidewalk.
Back at the jail, Jack tells Zoe he can’t keep running away from her mother, with Zoe throwing it in his face that he ran away from her as well, revealing their broken home. Jack defends the end of their relationship but leaves her there as he heads out to investigate on his own, noticing some residue on the ground where the camper was yesterday. He follows the dog he almost hit, again, into the woods and an area where the trees are apparently burned white hot and several cows frozen white in place. He finds himself shot by Taggart with a stun dart, waking up to find himself being driven in a cage in the back of his vehicle, and unable to give him any answers. Taggart stops suddenly when he sees the dog, named Lowjack, and starts to try and stun it but misses. He tells Jack that the dog is certainly not just a dog but the devil himself.
Jack heads to the police station and demands an answer but Allison and Taggart show up and they all square off. She calls the sheriff who arrived at his home, telling his dog Lowjack to get food from the fridge. The sheriff tells Allison something is happening as he hangs up the phone and he finds himself pulled toward an anomaly opening in the center of his house causing his belongings and parts of himself to start to disappear. Allison drives and finds him passed out and a large hole in the floor.
Back at the jail, Jack and Zoe are both in jail now and Allison and Lupo debate what to do with them, telling Jack they need to go for a ride. She makes him sign a non disclosure agreement because of the things they have going on in the town. She drives over a bridge that looks to be broken but is actually an illusion. Together they drive to an advanced research facility that was started by Einstein during world war 2, a facility that is responsible for most of the world’s scientific breakthroughs. Allison reveals herself as the government liaison to Eureka, overseeing its projects.
Elsewhere Professor King trains in a holographic simulator run by Fargo. They are introduced to Jack who has agreed to help out while the sheriff recovers. They reveal the trees they found at the event location have been carbon dated and are up to 1200 years old, and that the back half of the camper seems to have been caught up in a different time stream somehow.
Later, Jack finds Zoe picking up takeout for her and Lupo and he tells her about how they need to stay here. She is less than enthused and storms out. Jack goes to try and find out where the anomaly started from and finds Allison’s son, who she reveals has autism and doesn’t actually speak much. He asks Professor King to use his specialty to try and pinpoint the sources of the anomaly.
After another anomaly hits the diner, a call is made to one Colonel Briggs who immediately calls for a special meeting.
Jack returns to the B&B and finds Walter there confessing to Beverly, working as a psychotherapist, about how some unknown people helped him with his project but it has had unforeseen circumstances. He leaves when Jack shows up and Jack and Beverly discuss the town and relationships over a drink and she goes to kiss him. Suddenly Jack awakens and it’s the next morning and Allison and Lupo are standing by him. They tell him about the diner and how one of the patrons died. Professor King found a possible source and they all headed to Walter’s house. They find him locked in the basement, floating above his machine and disappearing and reappearing as well. Colonel Briggs and the military then show up and quarantine the area, telling Allison she now reports to him.
They take Walter’s machine to the Eureka facility and King reveals it’s a tachyon device that is causing the laws of physics to break down. Henry wonders how Walter could have built this without help since it uses Eureka’s classified section five materials. Briggs has all of the town put into shelters, including Jack’s daughter.
Looking at the chalkboard containing only parts of Walter’s formula, Jack gets an idea and has Lupo distract a guard so he can get out. He reunites with his daughter and they get Allison's son, Kevin, to help out with Walter’s formula. While he struggles at first, after Jack outs the blackboard on the ground, Kevin begins figuring out the formula. King, Henry and the others get to work to try and counteract the anomaly. The machine begins to activate and finally releases a pulse into the sky that covers the whole town and fixes the problem with the anomaly.
Allison confronts King about lying about how Walter got the section 5 chip. He feigns innocence but she leaves upset. Jack finally gets his car back from Henry and he goes to pick up Zoe. The sheriff shows up to thank Jack for his help, showing off his new bionic leg. Jack apologizes to Zoe about the breakup of their family as they drive out of town, before glancing back at Allison’s house.
Back at the B&B, Susan talks with Beverly about how shocked she was that Walter was involved in corporate espionage, noting he would get late night calls. Beverly gives her some tea to drink and Susan suddenly feels odd as Beverly monologues about how it took them so long to find a proper candidate to infiltrate section 5. As Susan dies, Beverly plants some drugs and calls Lupo to tell her that Susan committed suicide.
Back at work, two agents from the DoD arrive to explain that Jack is getting a promotion due to Major Cobb’s recommendation, revealing that the sheriff is actually a member of military intelligence. Jack then finds himself working as the new sheriff in Eureka as a large explosion happens, and they find Henry’s machine crashed into their office.
Advanced Research:
Series co-creator Andrew Cosby worked at Malibu Comics from 1993 to 1995, at which time he left the company to pursue a career in films and was involved in producing the feature film adaptation of Mage by comic book creator Matt Wagner. In 2005, Cosby launched BOOM! Studios, creating their first published comic, Zombie Tales. Working with Mike Richardson and Dark Horse, Cosby set up Damn Nation at MTV Films/Paramount Pictures, a comic book Cosby created and was subsequently attached to write and produce. Cosby received sole script credit for 2019's Hellboy film, a reboot of the film series. Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola also contributed to the script, though both went uncredited. In October 2017, it was announced that Cosby would write the script for a film adaptation of the graphic novel Silver. He was also co-creator on the UPN horror series Haunted starring Matthew Fox.
Andrew Cosby and fellow co-creator Jaime Paglia were college friends. In 2003, Paglia and Cosby sold Eureka to Syfy as a pitch. In July 2006, the series premiered to critical and viewer success. Over the course of the show's six-year run and 77 episodes, Paglia contributed to 20. He made his directing debut with the fifth-season episode, "Jack of All Trades". He also wrote episodes of the CW Flash, and Scream: The TV Series.
Director Peter O’Fallon is a working TV director. He landed this job because of his reputation for being a good pilot director, and because he directed some early episodes of Northern Exposure. In the commentary, Cosby and Paglia refer to Eureka as a mix of Northern Exposure, Twin Peaks and X-Files.
Debrah Farentino was Beverly Barlowe, psychotherapist and owner of the ‘Barlowe Bed and Breakfast.’ She hasn’t done much since Eureka aside from a role or two here and there. Previously she was in the 22 episode series Get Real (follow the dysfunctional Green family as the parents face a midlife crisis and the kids go through their teenage years, with Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway). She was a lead in the 12 episode series EZ Streets (gritty crime drama set in a corrupt decaying city near the Canada-U.S. border about the leader of a vicious new gang called the EZs, a dedicated cop who's struggling to stop him, and an ex-con forced to work for the gangster, with Joey Pants Pantoliano), a 12 episode series called Total Security (a high-tech security firm in Los Angeles is the setting for a world of espionage, threats, investigations, and surveillance, with Jim Belushi), a 26 episode lawyer procedural called Equal Justice and the main lead in Earth 2 (Colonists, crash-landed on an alien planet, begin the long trek to their originally designated landing place, facing alien and human threats). She was a recurring character in John Ritter’s Hooperman (San Francisco cop Harry Hooperman inherits a run down apartment building. Not having the time to maintain the building, Hooperman hires Susan as the person in charge. They begin a relationship). She was in 1256 episodes of the soap opera Capitol which is almost the entire series (1369 total).
Rob Labelle was Walter Perkins, and we’ve seen him before in the Sliders episode ‘The Return of Maggie Beckett’ as Mr. Xybo (the Sliders arrive in a world in which Maggie is an internationally famous astronaut who died on a mission to Mars. Maggie initially enjoys the world until she is recognized and becomes the prize in an unusual tug of war). We have also seen him in the Quantum Leap episode ‘Temptation Eyes’ (as a television reporter Sam protects a psychic, who can tell who Sam Beckett really is, from a serial killer). He was also in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in the episode ‘Just Say Noah' (an undercover investigation into the Larry Smiley marriage institute gives Lois and Clark the perfect opportunity to work on their own relationship. It also gives them the inside track on a plot to flood the Earth).
General Briggs (Garry Chalk) was in Sliders (Time Again and World, the Sliders travel from one world where they witness a murder to its near-exact replica, where they become embroiled in a conspiracy to restore the U.S. Constitution to the public).
In the United Kingdom on Sky1 the show is known as A Town Called Eureka although it is also shown under its original name on the BT Vision platform.
The show was filmed entirely in British Columbia, with the interiors being shot at Vancouver Film Studios, Chilliwack standing in for Downtown Wellington Avenue Cafe Diem, and Ladysmith for Downtown First Avenue, and Roberts Street.
Reshoots for the pilot were done towards the end of filming season 1, nearly 2 years after it was filmed. In the commentary track, Andrew Cosby and Jaime Paglia praise the makeup team for their work at recreating Jordon Hinson’s look, as she had aged from 13 to 15 in that time, and footage was sometimes spliced together even in the same scene.
According to Jack’s transfer paperwork, Eureka is in Washington. This may change later in the series…
Tom Skerrit and Lee Majors were both considered for the role of Sheriff Cobb. Lee Majors would have gotten the role of it weren’t for a scheduling conflict.
This is the only episode that features signage for “Henry’s Car Clinic,” it is later named only “Henry’s Garage.”
Henry’s truck licence plate is NAPP-18, NaP2 is a type of crystal that scientists can create from a very common white clay called kaolin. Kaolin is used in a lot of everyday products like paper, ceramics, paint, rubber, and plastics. When this clay is treated with heat, water, and certain chemicals, its structure changes and forms something called a sodium zeolite. Zeolites have a microscopic sponge-like structure full of tiny holes. Those tiny holes let the material trap or swap certain minerals and molecules. Because of that, sodium zeolites are really useful. They can soften water by removing minerals like calcium and magnesium, which is why they’re often used in laundry detergents instead of environmentally harmful phosphates. They’re also used in water purification, in oil refining to speed up chemical reactions, and even in air filters to absorb gases and odors. So in simple terms, NaP2 is a special crystal made from clay that works like a tiny molecular sponge to help clean water, improve detergents, and filter air.
The license plate number of Taggart's jeep is NACL 93. The scientific symbol NaCl is Sodium Chloride, or salt.
Beverly’s electric car featured in the pilot is a Dynasty IT. These Canadian-made neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs) were used throughout the show to represent futuristic, eco-friendly transport, with the pilot version often modified to appear solar-powered. The production was offered the use of a Mercedes, but as they were heading into filming it was pulled by the company when they realised they were making fun of the car’s size.
The electric car’s licence plate is RAI-834, RAI2 is the chemical symbol for Radium Iodide or Radioactive Iodine, which is used in nuclear medicine to treat hyperthyroidism (overactive thyroid) and thyroid cancer by destroying abnormal thyroid tissue.
According to the town map, there are several lakes near Eureka. To the north is Heisenberg Lake, Werner Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist, one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics and a principal scientist in the German nuclear program during World War II. To the southeast is Pregl Lake, Fritz Pregl was a Slovenian-Austrian chemist and physician who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1923 for making important contributions to quantitative organic microanalysis, one of which was the improvement of the combustion train technique for elemental analysis.
