EUREKA

The plain truth is that over the years we have preferred cozy murder mysteries from Quincy ME and Columbo to NUMB3RS, Bones, and Foyle’s War, and a little science fiction. Comparing everything to ST:NG  we did not like the new Picard. We found ST:Discovery compelling in Season 1 and disappointing thereafter. After 20 minutes of Game of Thrones, we were sure that we had seen it or read it many times before. That all being as it may, we are happy to have found Eureka. 

When one portal closes, another opens. Always something happening here.

It is true that being only as far as Season 2, we are pretty sure that each episode runs about two or three hours. However, this is our time together and we don’t mind the fact that this show is like a Marvel\DC comic with someone else turning the pages for us. 

Sometimes science and religion collide.

Fascinating details flash by quickly.

The theme music reminded us of The Good Place, but the composers are not the same: Mark Mothersbaugh and John Enroth for Eureka versus David Schwartz for The Good Place.

Former space shuttle mechanic Henry Deacon and Sheriff Jack Carter
Even best friends have secrets from each other.

When I brought The Big Bang Theory Season 1 home from the Ann Arbor public library in 2008, Laurel could not watch it because it was too embarrassingly like her real colleagues at the university. But she got used to it and we have all 12 seasons on disc. In fact, TV shows such as that and this are like “breaking the fourth wall of the stage.” In a 1950s sitcom, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Burns escaped the kitchen chaos by retreating to his study to watch Gracie on TV. 

Deputy Sheriff Josefina Lupo is one of the putatively normal viewpoint characters.

And now I work at a university, albeit as a blue collar non-exempt. I still meet the 3,000 teaching professors, 15,000 support staff, and our 55,000 very, very special charges. Some of them do neurological research and others have an atomic reactor. Then, I come home and watch them up close. 

We like the quirky yet predictable plots.

• “I knew it was her.”
• “You didn’t say anything.”
• “But I knew it was her.”

On Wikipedia here:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_(2006_TV_series)

Fan Wiki on Fandom here: https://eureka.fandom.com/wiki/Eureka

Previously on Necessary Facts

Nerd Nation 2.5 

JAG: 10 Seasons of Military Bearing 

FanFic by ChatGPT (Part 2) [NCIS meets NUMB3RS]

FanFic by ChatGPT (Part 3) (Bones meets Sherlock)

Nerd Nation: Natalie Portman, Danica McKellar, and Felicia Day 

JAG: 10 Seasons of Military Bearing

Last week, Laurel and I viewed the final episode of the final season of the television series JAG. It took us about a year to work through the set. Laurel is a voracious reader, primarily of murder mysteries and computer documentation. As a writer and reader of non-fiction, I am informed by Ayn Rand’s theory of aesthetics expressed in The Romantic Manifesto. For being television, written, shot, and edited on a grinding production schedule by a large, changing staff of writers and directors, with the attendant holes in plot, character development, and theme, JAG held up well.

Ayn Rand based her theory of art on Aristotle’s maxim that fiction portrays people as they can and should be. Every work of art is “a selective recreation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments.” (The Romantic Manifesto, Signet 1971, p. 19) An artist cannot present all of reality, so some aspect of it stands for the whole. Is the world hospitable or hostile or indifferent? Rand called this one's "sense of life."

Complicated pasts leave them internally
conflicted. Their moral lodestars are on
the far horizon. They eventually find home port.

“Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man’s concepts into the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly as if they were percepts.” (RM p. 20) 

"Since man lives by reshaping his physical background to serve his purpose, since he must first define and then create his values--a rational man needs a concretized projection of these values, an image in whose likeness he will re-shape the world and himself. Art gives him that image; it gives him the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals." (RM p. 38)

A biography of Abraham Lincoln’s life could run six volumes, chronicling every detail, but the characterization of President Lincoln in a Civil War drama will subsume and encapsulate all of that and deliver it to the audience, according to the intent of the artists--the actor, writer, director, and the others in the team. Ultimately, someone has artistic control of the final product and it is that person’s vision of life that we receive.

Petty Thief to Petty Officer
Zoe McLellan played
PO1 Jennifer Coates

In this case, the controlling artist was the executive producer, Donald P. Bellisario. A Marine Corps sergeant, Bellisario also created the original Magnum, P.I., Airwolf, and Quantum Leap. That last reveals the most about Bellasario’s view of your place in the universe. Is history inevitable? To what extent can you make your own life? In JAG, there is no doubt that we all make choices and accept responsibility for those decisions. Sometimes, the characters are in circumstances that are very constrained, but “I had no choice” is met with “You always have a choice.”

(I perceived a hidden undercurrent from Quantum Leap in the re-enactment episodes. The story is carried forward by the same actors, though in costume. Season 5 Number 11 “Ghosts of Christmas Past,” take place in the Viet Nam war. Season 6 Episode 23 “Mutiny” is a re-creation of the Somers Mutiny. Season 9 Episode 14 “Each of Us Angels” is set in World War II. Season 9 Episode 18, “What if?” offered alternate stories launched when they read fortune cookies at a restaurant. In the world of Donald P. Bellisario, you always have a choice. Tangentially, I followed the historical clues offered in Mutiny. Read here. )

Our viewpoint characters,
the normal couple.
Beset by life's hard losses,
they never lose their moral compass,
and so they persevere and thrive.

Of course, the show suffered from errors of fact and the fan base responded. You can read other foible finding on the  TVtropes.org wiki. Nonetheless, I benefited from keeping a handbook of military justice at the couch, just to help with the details. It is not the purpose of fiction to be didactic, but it is important not to make up everything, otherwise you are not even creating science fiction but are selling fantasy.

We bought most of the DVDs, borrowing a couple of seasons from the local library. We have not watched broadcast (cable) television since 2010 and we were never big consumers before that. But people recommend shows and we read about them. In this case, JAG was a back-filling of our NCIS collection. (NCIS was piloted in Season 8 of JAG.) We discovered NCIS sometime after 2006. We picked up Season 1 of The West Wing at a neighborhood Blockbuster just as that series was concluding. We eventually viewed Mark Harmon's portrayal of Secret Service Agent Simon Donovan and found it positive and realistic. That led us to NCIS. 

Just for contrast here, we did once watch most of an episode of CSI but could not tolerate more. In fact, we withstood two seasons of torture with 24, so we think we’re tough. As for politics, I did view half an episode of The Veep (reviewed here ) but I would rather clean the latrines after drill. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Romantic Realism 

Ayn Rand and Star Trek 

The Art of Finance

Objectified 

Art and Copy 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus as The [Bleep]

My wife and I have seen many shows that we did not like, both new and famous oldies that made us wonder why we liked them the first time.  De gustibus non est disputandum. The marketplace is agnostic. You do not have to drive through the order lane if you do not want the food. Obviously, millions of others do. That said, I have not seen a show so bad and so highly acclaimed as The Veep. We watched 20 minutes of the first episode and ejected the disk.

Emmy Awards 2015 http://www.hbo.com/veep/

The first challenge for the writers was to force as many expletives into each line as possible. Discussing Wiseguy (made into the movie Goodfellas), author Nicholas Pileggi says that the gangsters have a limited vocabulary in the first place, and they use profanity so often, that the only way to achieve emphasis in discourse is to resort to echolalia: "Why the fucking fuck did you fuck up the fucking job?" The people in The Veep are as erudite as the Goodfellas.  

The next challenge for the writers was to make politicians, especially our nation's leaders, look stupid. As a libertarian I can appreciate that.  But it takes some finesse. You have to have smart people as standards in order to portray lamebrains. The Three Stooges were the standard against which Nazis, gangsters, and other bullies were set. Writing from the post modernist school, The Veep has no standards: everyone is dumber than the audience.  On the other hand, in The West Wing, the dullards included Gov. Robert Ritchie of Florida (played by James Brolin), and Dr. Jenna Jacobs (Claire Yarlette).  Of course, we had a couple dozen smart people from both parties to compare them to.  The Veep could use one.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
A Culture of Reason, Reality, and Freedom
The Science of Liberty
Why Democracy is Difficult
Nerd Nation 4.0