In this episode of The Eureka Rewatch, Cory and Tom say goodbye to the old clip shows as they discuss season 3 episodes 15 & 16, Shower the People and You Don't Know Jack.
Shower the People:
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.
Advanced Research:
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).
You Don't Know Jack:
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.
Advanced Research:
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.
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