EUREKA Has a Ghost in the Machine

Episode 507 “Ex Machina”

Apologies for getting this in late, but the past week has been a brain-melting series of days where you just want to bring in the exorcist (or two) to just scrub the place clean.

OK. Diving in…

Holly’s alive. Sort of. And the fact that she’s only “mostly dead” means Fargo isn’t really all that engaged in her funeral. Because he knows something they don’t know… that she’s still pre-animate matter caught in the Matrix. And he and Zane just have to figure out a way to get her out before the Department of Defense decides to take matters – and the Matrix – into their own hands. Because they plan to re-format the hard drive and erase every trace of the Matrix. Thus introducing the Eureka Standard Ticking Clock.

Said DOD operatives arrive in the form of military personnel, who proceed to install the new security system at Global Dynamics. Of course, it’s going to be some kind of ethernet-linked network of pieces and parts that allow for a virus to work its way through the system, which is what appears to be happening after Zane attempts to download Holly into a partition on GD’s mainframe.

At this point, when things started going wonky, I knew Holly was the ghost in the machine. The writers pretty much telegraphed it. And the episode pretty much spent all the time spinning its wheels for everyone to figure it out. It was organic, sure, but Zane should have grokked what was going on a lot sooner than he did.

Of course, there were some nice Carter bits, while he was Henry’s zeta wave lab rat. And it looks like we’re finally past the whole Carter-Allison-Jo-Zane mess. Jo gets to shine a bit, having impressed her former CO and then acting out against authority, something she never would have done in her time in uniform. She’s grown, and her realization of that in this episode was fun to watch.

Fargo’s getting some nice moments in these final episodes. His whole Lord of the Rings code during the break-in, followed by his calling for his “precious”, was a gem of a scene. And to have straight-laced Allison helping Fargo and Zane break all sorts of rules/laws/regulations, shows that Allison has grown as well, and is willing to go out on a limb for her friends.

Holly’s moment? When she realizes that the giant “laser pointer” is named after her. Really? A giant laser pointer? But she’s irritated in that fun-to-watch Felicia Day way that we all thought we’d miss when Dr. Marten was killed in the Matrix. Only she wasn’t. But she’s really dead. Only she isn’t…

It’s enough to make your head hurt a bit.

It was a solid, typical Eureka episode. But it wasn’t a momentous episode. It didn’t go anywhere new. Although the sheriff’s house is starting to look like those Old West bed and breakfasts. How many more entities can fit into the house with Carter and his soon-to-be family? And will Dr. Marten have to stay there? Can her memory box be moved? Is there any chance she gets out in some kind of animatronic form?

And is the rest of this season going to be so Fargo-centric?

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