Before I Forget:
Written by:
Story by : Karl Schaefer
Teleplay by : John Rogers
Directed by: Michael Robison
Original airdate: August 1, 2006
Airing number: 3
Synopsis:
While Zoe busies herself with a school play, Jack, Henry, and Jo enter Vincent’s cafe, all carrying a seriously grim look as they find a man named Jason sitting at the table. Jack goes to ask him to come with them but suddenly a gunshot rings out, Henry is hit by a bullet, and the man is gone, with everyone aghast at what has happened.
One day earlier, Henry meets up with two friends/former colleagues, Jason and Kim, in town to help Stark with his special force field suit, given their individual specialties. Kim asks Henry to help them with the suit, hinting at their last working together. After meeting Jason, Jack takes an instant dislike to the arrogant man. When the trio tests out the suit, things go well until they apply napalm to the suit and it fails.
Later, Jack sees Jason speeding down the road with Beverly and pulls them over. Jason gets out of the car and confronts Jack who started to write down a speeding ticket as well as calling Jo for backup, when suddenly Jo has arrived, and Jack finds only himself there, with no memory of what he was doing.
Back at the lab, Henry and Kim work on the formula for the suit, trying to figure it out in rider to make the tests successful. Henry goes to get a new pot of coffee when Jason arrives and looks at their formula and miraculously solves it for them. Henry is happy but notices the coffee pot he was going to go to fill up is already full and very hot.
Jack, remembering he was supposed to deliver Zoe’s costume for her school play, runs into Henry and they both realize they have experienced missing time. They listen to a recording of when Jack called into the station and he has no recollection of having made the call. Checking his ticket book, they find pages missing but can see the leftover imprint of writing and realize the numbers match Jason’s license plate.
The three head out to confront Jason but Jason pulls out a gizmo and activates it, allowing him to escape, while everyone forgets what had happened and only sees Henry having been shot and Jack holding the smoking gun.
Allison suspends Jack but after returning home and seeing Zoe practice the play with the student director, he gets a spark of an idea and heads back to the station, telling Jo about his theory of Jason having a gizmo that affects them somehow. They then find info on their computer that indicates they were looking up information about Jason.
Henry and Kim eat together in his hospital room, and she asks him what happened with them in the past, that she can’t seem to remember, and Henry just says that they must have had an argument of some kind and just let things go too long, being thankful that they were able to rekindle a friendship out of it.
Jack confronts Jason, accusing him of having a gizmo, and Jason laughs it off while Stark and Allison watch, shocked as Jack shoves Jason. They decide to put Jack in jail so he can’t interfere with the upcoming test of the suit. Beverly comes to the jail to try therapy with him, but Jack, resistant at first, does talk with her, leading him to realize he needs to talk to Henry which he eventually does when he gets out. Henry reveals that he invented a device that can cause short term memories to be forgotten, but could never get it to work. They reason that Jason used to make Henry think it never worked.
Meanwhile, Kim has figured out what has been going on and confronts Jason, erasing part of the formula and asking him to solve it again. He laughs it off and tries to find his gizmo but Kim reveals she has it and uses it. Later Jason is suiting up for the test, deciding to be the guinea pig himself, which Stark is surprised by. Jack and Henry confront Kim with Allison and she reveals the truth about what she did to Jason, making him decide to be the test subject. Before anyone can stop her, she erases their memories and she leaves to watch the test.
Jo comes in and reveals that Jack had her wire him up with a camera and they watch the footage of Kim confessing. Jack stops the test and explains the camera footage, questioning whether Jason thinks he’s smarter than Kim, which gives Jason pause, knowing Kim is the smarter one, finally deciding to not go through with the test, worried about what may happen to him if he does.
Henry confronts Kim, telling her to not kill Jason, despite what he’s done. They both realize that they were manipulated so many years ago by Jason. Kim confronts Jason who reveals he was jealous of Henry and Kim’s relationship. Kim explains that the suit works now, and that she just turned down the power so Jason would get banged up. Henry is happy to hear that and decides to punch Jason out himself.
Later, Henry and Kim share a kiss and begin to rekindle their romance as they watch Zoe’s play, with Jack, who told Zoe he was there to see her in her play, giving her a renewed faith in their relationship.
Advanced Research:
Writer John Rogers wrote the movie The Core and has story credit on Transformers. He’s the creator of the TV shows Jackie Chan Adventures, Leverage and The Librarian. Rogers has also written for the comic book industry, he launched an ongoing DC Comics series starring the new Blue Beetle, Jaime Reyes, and received a credit on the 2023 film. He had previously penned the script for Catwoman (2004).
Writer Karl Schaefer previously created the series Eerie: Indiana.
Kim was played by Tamlyn Tomita, who we have seen before in Heroes as Hiro’s mother, Ishi Nakamura, and in the Quantum Leap episode “Temptation Eyes.” She was also in The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai as Kumiko. She was in the Star Trek series Picard as Commander Oh, a recurring character on The Good Doctor named Allegra Aoki, and Noshiko Yukimura in the Teen Wolf series. She is a Nisei, second generation Japanese descent and continues acting to this day, playing Caroline in the Kurt and Wyatt Russell series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (set after the battle between Godzilla and the Titans, revealing that monsters are real, follows one family's journey to uncover its buried secrets and a legacy linking them to Monarch).
Jason was played by Andrew Airlie. Although he’s recently done smaller one off roles and Hallmark style movies, he has been in a number of different series, such as The Romeo Section (spies and lies), Defying Gravity (astronauts on an international spacecraft), Reaper (a slacker must find and return escaped souls to hell), and Whistler (local snowboarding legend Beck McKaye returns home from the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics with a gold medal, only to be later found dead).
Jason Anderson’s licence plate reads NID-563. A network interface device (NID) acts as the demarcation point—or boundary—between a telecommunications carrier’s local loop and a customer’s internal wiring. Often found as a box on the side of a house, it separates the service provider's network from in-home wiring, allowing for troubleshooting, testing, and connection.
The background posters for the school play incorrectly title it “A Midsummer’s Night Invasion (Dream)” instead of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
The 4th dimension is generally understood in two ways: as time in physics (the 4th dimension of spacetime) or as an extra spatial dimension perpendicular to length, width, and height in mathematics. It allows 3D objects to have duration (time) or extends them into 4D shapes called tesseracts.
The panel that controls the weapons firing is the same panel used to control Walter’s device in the pilot.
Right as Raynes:
Written by: Johanna Stokes
Directed by: Michael Rohl
Original airdate: September 5, 2006
Airing number: 8
Synopsis:
A man named Callister Raynes walks into Eureka, seemingly activating a traffic signal by touch and then entering Cafe Diem, much to Fargo’s surprise, who alerts Stark of the man’s arrival.
Zoe storms off to school angry with Jack due to his opinion of her new totally realistic looking wig, I mean, dyed red hair. Jack attends to a broken traffic light with Henry’s help.
When Jack and Allison enter the cafe, they find it freezing, with Vincent chalking it up to a broken CPU. Allison explains Callister’s history, when he left Eureka, and his previous relationship with Jo, after she arrives to first kiss Callister, and then punch him for leaving. After a while, the broken AC turns into an actual snow making machine.
Jack meets Callister but he prefers to walk to Beverly’s rather than take a drive from Jack. Fortunately, the matter isn’t pressed further as Jack is called out to a farm to attend to yet another glitch, a malfunctioning electric magnetized fence. Callister snakes away and enters an old abandoned warehouse that seems to hold a makeshift laboratory. Stark soon shows up and he tells Callister he has to leave, due to the risk. Callister, however, tells him that something is wrong. Stark tells him to stay out and he will get back as soon as he can.
Henry shows Jack and Allison that a virus has infiltrated Eureka’s computer system. Allison heads off to get information from Stark but he claims he’s not feeling well and is taking the day off, something that causes great suspicion in Allison.
Callister makes it to Beverly’s and meets Zoe, waiting for her appointment. The two bond about being misfits when Beverly returns home, followed quickly by Jack who was sent a fax revealing that Zoe committed identity and credit card theft in order to make it to Eureka. Jack leaves angry while Zoe has a heart to heart with Vincent. Stark bursts into Beverly’s, desperate to find Callister but when he does, he realizes that Callister has accidentally set the building on fire. Luckily Henry has just the device to save the day.
Jack and Allison get information out of Fargo and find the abandoned warehouse and confront Callister and Stark, who tells Callister to show them his hands, the flesh ripped off with computer circuits running below them.
Stark reveals that he built Callister, the only Ai robot he built that actually worked, introducing him as his own assistant. Callister went on to have friendships and relationships but Stark, wanting to protect Callister from being turned into a weapon, burned down the lab, trying to make everyone believe the project was destroyed. When Sheriff Cobb started asking questions, Stark was forced to send Callister away. When Callister returned, his corrupted systems began to infect the town’s networks.
Callister takes off in Stark’s car and picks up Zoe, eventually ditching the car, and using more identity theft to buy a bus ticket out of town. Jo finds out where the car was left and using the identity that Zoe has stolen, finds out that bus tickets were purchased, leaving Jack and Stark to go find them, bonding on the way, one father to another.
Upon finding them, Zoe is scared because it appears that Callister is sick, unable to move and crouching on the ground. Stark goes to Callister and talks with him, doing what he can to comfort him, as his system finally shuts down, wondering what will happen to him, with Stark reminding him of Alan Turing‘s words about how God could give a computer a soul if he wanted to. Jack and Zoe have a moment where he promises her that he will never be done with her, glad that she is with him here.
Advanced Research:
David Paetkau played Callister Raynes. He boasts a large number of Hallmark movies to his resume. Funnily enough, he was a main character on the show Whistler, mentioned earlier. He was also a main character in the fire fighter procedural, Flashpoint, and LAX.
Cisco Systems, Inc. is a leading American multinational technology conglomerate based in San Jose, California, specializing in networking, security, AI-powered solutions, and collaboration tools like Webex! Founded in 1984, it provides hardware and software to securely connect systems. Key focus areas include cloud management, data centers, and industrial automation.
Callister is derived from Mac Alisdair (son of Alasdair), which is the Scottish Gaelic form of Alexander. Because it stems from Alexander, it inherits the meaning of "defender of men" or "protector". Reynes is derived from the Old French word renard for fox. It likely originated as a nickname for a cunning person.
Nathan Stark’s licence plate reads STARK 1 because of his massive ego.
Alan Turing, widely considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, addressed the concept of a "computer soul" primarily in his seminal 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". He tackled the "theological objection" that thinking is a function of an immortal soul, which God gave to humans but not machines, by arguing that this limitation does not prevent machines from thinking.
A scene with Jack and Zoe has visible blocking marks on the floor.
