Arctic Blue is often called out for its resemblance to the plot of 3:10 to Yuma.
Although set in Alaska, the entire film was shot in Britannia Beach, British Columbia, Canada. The production also made use of the Britannia Mine Museum for the climax.
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.
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).
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.
Written by: Thania St. John
Directed by: Stephen Surjik
Original airdate: August 21, 2009
Synopsis:
Tess calls Jack in to retrieve Kim since she’s technically GD property that Henry took off site. In order to get the data out of Kim, they’ve also brought in a neural networking specialist, Dr. Bruce Manlius, a former TA for a class that both Tess and Allison were in together.
Jack goes to let Henry know about returning Kim, and runs into the three women who are throwing a baby shower for Allison, with Tess’s help: doctors Monroe, Draper, and Bell, all of whom want to impress their boss Allison so much they’ve gone overboard on plans, even trying to monopolize Zoe’s time since the shower is to be at Jack’s bunker.
Once Kim is back at GD, Manlius takes some strands of her hair and extracts a great amount of data from that, and prepares to try and extract the rest.
At the baby shower, all the women come up with extremely useful products for gifts such as super heavy duty diapers, self adjusting clothes for multiple ages, self sanitizing bottles, and a special baby monitor that can sync up Allison and her unborn child.
Later, Jack finds a vehicle off the road and it turns out to be Dr. Monroe from the shower, her car filled with water, and apparently having drowned inside it. Fargo, taking over for Henry, reasons that with grant money being cut, she could be a victim of foul play. After the autopsy, Fargo finds that every cell in her body was bursting with water. That leads Jack to question Draper, who denies having anything to do with it, but is sweating profusely and runs off to the restroom.
Tess asks Jack about going to see an asteroid event, but he is somewhat standoffish after he sees the response Tess had earlier to the ruggedly handsome Dr. Manlius. Tess confides in Allison that she thought Jack liked her and is confused by his reaction. Allison is surprised about their date they had and seems disturbed that Tess is interested in Jack.
Manlius readies Kim for his unique retrieval process but it turns out it affects her negatively and Henry orders the machine turned off. They warn him that if they don’t get the data out of her soon, it will be lost as Kim’s body is changing and deteriorating.
Back at Cafe Diem, Vincent works at cleaning up from a minor flood of unexplained water. Zoe sees Draper’s computer abandoned at her table and opens the door to the restroom and water spills out of it with Dr Draper, dastardly drowned. Jack theorizes that the women may have been over producing water, especially given how Draper could barely grab her glass; her hands were so wet.
Fargo tests the water and discovers that the water in the women’s bodies is synthetic water being developed by a Dr. Rivers, who explains that her water is used throughout Eureka, tracked and returned to her facility to be recycled and reused. Jack excuses himself suddenly to use the restroom, and continues to make several more trips to the restroom as well once he returns home. He has SARAH analyze the bottles that were given to them at the baby shower, reasoning that since they all drank mimosas from them, maybe it somehow caused the SynWater to get into their systems. Jack starts to experience a medical emergency and passes out, waking up at GD where Fargo tells him that there is no water in his lungs, but his vitals and tests seem to indicate he is pregnant. Allison explains it’s just sympathy pregnancy.
Jack gets a call and learns that a worker at the local gym has died as well, in the same manner as the others but has no connection to the baby shower or mimosas but does have syn water inside of her. They manage to get to Dr. Bell before her symptoms become too far gone like the others and work at draining her body of the water as fast as they can.
Henry comes up with a way to extract Kim’s data but also repair her body at the same time. Unfortunately while the process works at first, something starts to go wrong and they have to shut it down again. Manlius understands Henry’s dilemma but tells him they need to sacrifice her in order to get the data.
Jack realizes that the coolant system they use for Manlius’ extraction process has syn water inside of it, and is being affected by the radiation he uses in that process. Dr. Rivers tracks the water from the lab and realizes that it went from there to the gym, where the cleaner was, and that it was used by the sauna, where Monroe, Draper, Bell and the cleaner were, breathing it in. Unfortunately Tess was also present in the sauna and back at GD has started to experience the first signs of water being overproduced in her system.
Tess tries to get to Section 5 but the syn water is acting too quick and she passes out. Jack shows up and gets into the elevator and gives her CPR to keep her breathing. They save her but have to keep her on bedrest while they continually drain the water being produced.
Henry talks with Kim and she convinces him that she is just a copy and that he has to let her go to finish her mission and he finally agrees. Manlius readies her for the process which will dissolve her body away and allow them to download all of the data. As Kim fades away, Henry watches, heartbroken.
Jack asks Manlius to help with Tess’s problem and, with Dr. Rivers, they use his technology to develop a way to extract all of the SynWater from Tess and she is saved.
Jack goes to see Allison to get ready for their birthing class, and she reveals that the reason Jack has been having sympathy pains is because the advanced baby monitor she got as a gift, accidentally joined THEM together instead of Allison and her baby. She tells him that he should go and be with Tess right now. He heads off and meets her at GD and after making a joke about the cpr he gave her in the elevator, she offers him cpr in the form of a kiss.
Stephen Surjik is a long time working TV director, but one of his earliest directing gigs was on Wayne's World 2.
Dr. Bell was Meredith McGeachie. She has a few TV and straight to DVD style movie where she was a bit higher up in the cast list, such as If You Believe, Let It Snow, and Jingle All The Way 2, but was one of the main cast in A Wife’s Suspicion (forensic investigator and her ex boyfriend cop suspect her new husband is the serial killer the police are after).
Dr. Rivers was Laura Mennell. She was also in 10 episodes of Van Helsing, she had a minor role in a Stephen King movie called The Monkey (2025) along with Adam Scott, Elijah Wood, and Tatiana Maslany. She was a lead in the series Project Blue Book, and Alphas (super powered people known as alphas led by a noted neurologist/psychiatrist). She was also in the movie Watchmen as Jenny, a recurring cast member in Loudermilk, and she had a few episodes of Haven (mysterious problems in a small town in Maine, FBI agent, sheriff, and town’s black sheep must deal with the problems). Most recently, she was in the newer Goosebumps series for seven episodes.
Dr. Monroe was Jennifer Spence. Her biggest roles have been in You Me Her (story of a throuple, basically), Traces (a lab assistant discovers the fictitious case where a student in class has a link to her past, and finds the killer story), and Travelers. Most recently, she was a lead in the sitcom Trades (refinery employees balance small town personalities with a stressful workplace). She was in Stargate as Dr. Lisa Park, and a lead in Continuum (detective from the future gets stuck in present day).
Dr. Manlius was Billy Campbell. I know him best from The Rocketeer but he’s had a huge amount of roles, such as in the series Once and Again (a divorced father and a soon-to-be divorced mother meet and begin a romantic courtship which is always complicated by their respective children and their own life problems).
He was the lead, Harrison, in The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli and Baloo, a supporting cast member in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Gary Oldman, Keanu Reeves, Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder), a lead in Dennis Farina's Crime Story (the saga of a Chicago police detective's efforts to stop a young hood's ruthless rise in the ranks of organized crime), a lead in a rated R romcom called Lover's Knot (with Jennifer Grey and Tim Curry, Adam Baldwin and Mark Sheppard), Menno's Mind (Menno is a computer programmer at The Resort, an enormous funhouse where people can live out their fantasies in virtual reality. Feeding their personal data into a software program called The System, head of security Felix Medina is setting up a big voting fraud, in order to win the presidential elections. His only concern is a group of terrorists, rebelling against his plans. As an ex-colleague of their leader, Menno is forced to help them), Tales of the City and More Tales of the City (with Laura Linney. Olympia Dukakis, and Colin Ferguson), he played Ted Bundy in The Stranger Beside Me (while working at a Seattle clinic for women in the 1970s, aspiring crime writer, Ann Rule, unwittingly becomes friends with serial killer Ted Bundy), Jennifer Lopez's Enough (after running away fails, a terrified woman empowers herself in order to battle her abusive husband), and a lead in The 4400.
He's been in Trust (with Sophie Turner, Hollywood actress hides in a remote cabin after a scandal, only to find herself betrayed and fighting for survival against someone she once trusted), The Killing (with Mireille Enos and Joel Kinneman, A police investigation, the saga of a grieving family, and a Seattle mayoral campaign all interlock after the body of 17-year-old Rosie Larsen is found in the trunk of a submerged car), the series Helix (scientists from the Centers for Disease Control travel to a research facility in the Arctic), Cardinal (Detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme investigate the murder of a young girl, while Cardinal struggles to right past wrongs that could derail the investigation and end his career, as the case grows more violent and twisted), We Come In Peace (a mysterious jellyfish-shaped entity hovers over Stockholm, causing widespread panic. Civil Defense agent Elias and scientist Zandra team up to uncover the truth behind this baffling phenomenon and its impact on the city). He was also in The Rocketeer animated series as a supporting character, Dave Secord. More recently he was in I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025).
Written by: Eric Wallace
Directed by: James Head
Original airdate: August 28, 2009
Synopsis:
With Tess handing out story catchers to Eureka’s residents to preserve their memories of the town for a time capsule, Zoey is left struggling to come up with a memory of her own, feeling a bit lost and unsure of where she is heading in life.
Fargo shows up to ask for another memory ball since he is somehow on the fritz, and Jack makes an offhand comment about how a lot of the disasters in Eureka are linked to Fargo.
Jack heads off to Gd to meet Alison for their birthing class but when she gets there she reveals that it’s been canceled for a sonic cleaning of GD and that she has been trying to tell Jack via his special pager, but he had left it at Cafe Diem accidentally. The head of the cleaning process, Dr. Kinnoson asks them to help round up the three remaining employees, Dr. Bubay, Dr. Ashe, and Fargo because the cleaning process will destroy anything organic left behind.
Kinnison finds Fargo in Tess’s lab, viewing other people’s memories of him, despite Tess telling him they were classified. Fargo hits a few buttons on the computer before being rushed out. Jack finds Bubay, but the man is confused and has forgotten what he was doing when his lab suddenly explodes. Jack also finds Bubay’s partner, Ashe, but she seems to have no idea who Bubay is nor what is going on. Henry determines that they are suffering from selective memory loss and Allsion decides to investigate Tess’s lab, telling Kinnison to pause the cleaning.
As Jack and Allison look through Tess’s lab, they realize that Fargo, upset with Jack’s comment, may have tried deleting memories of him from the story catchers, but given that they were all linked up, he accidentally started removing more than just memories of him. Suddenly the room goes into lockdown because of the sonic cleaning and they realize that it wasn’t turned off. Allison tries a failsafe code but it doesn’t work. She says that the failsafe will still send a message to Kinnison so he can come back and shut down the cleaning.
Unfortunately, Kinnison is at Cafe Diem and ignores his pda’s urgent message because he has suddenly forgotten what it’s for. The same thing has been happening to other patrons such as Vincent, Jo, and Henry, all of whom were telling their stories to their story catchers earlier to try and give inspiration to Zoe who was having a problem coming up with an idea for her story catcher.
Alison figures out that she just has to access the mainframe in order to use the storycatcher net to contact help but before she can do that, she starts losing her memory and so unable to remember how to do just that. Jack tries to convince her of memory loss a number of times but she’s slow to believe him until she doesn’t even remember being pregnant. Jack uses the story catchers to help her remember some of her and Jack's past, and then some of her and Stark’s past. Finally she starts to recall on her own.
Jack uses her pager to send a message to his pager at Cafe Diem and Zoe answers it, grabbing Tess as they both rush to GD, taking Kinnison’s PDA with them since he doesn’t even know what it is anymore. Tess gives Zoe access to Section 5 while she heads off to shut down the cleaning. Zoe finds Alison and Jack but they’re concerned that the cleaning hasn’t been shut off. Zoe stays with Alison who is starting to have her baby, while Jack goes to find Tess in Alison’s office.
When Jack arrives, Tess has forgotten him too but he tries refreshing her memory before giving her the Superman love kiss and her memories come back. She shuts down the cleaning using Kinnison’s pda and Jack returns to the very much in labor Alison while Tess goes to retrieve Fargo to reverse what he did, restoring his memories along the way with another gizmo. He starts working on the reversal process but is worried he may end up erasing everyone’s memory permanently. They all yell at Fargo to push the button and try as Alison gives birth to her new daughter, Jenna Stark, named after Nathan’s mother. Zoe, having helped deliver the baby, believes she may have found her calling and Alison, ready for maternity leave, puts Tess in charge.
In the commentary track, writer Eric Wallace revealed that his wife was pregnant as well when he wrote the script for this episode, naming Allison’s daughter Jenna. He and his wife liked the name so much they actually named their own daughter Jenna.
