I find it’s getting harder and harder to watch Eureka. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a fun show and fills the space between the Atlantis season ending and everything else starting nicely. I love the setting. I love the casting and characters (except for maybe Matt Frewer as the Australian zoologist, Taggart).

It’s the science that’s getting hard to stomach. Now, I’m not a scientist. I’m not even a detractor of soft science fiction– unless you count that time in high school when I got in a fight with Vince and Mark about the plausibility of the TNG series finale, which I don’t. There’s a statute of limitations on these things.

Last week on the show, in the episode E=MC…?, someone grew chicken parts from stem cells, which is all fine and good. Except that the lack of a chicken brain attached to the parts turned everyone who ate them into idiots. Would I have been okay if they had left it at that? Sure, it would still be silly, but I could let it go. Add in some technobabble with fictional terms? Fine. But they didn’t. They decided to explain: low levels of GABA can cause Alzheimer’s in rats. What? How is that related to stupidity or lab grown chicken? One leap of logic per episode, please.

I guess the writers themselves should lay off the genetically-engineered poultry.

Big news this week is the series premiere of Torchwood on BBC America. Next week the episodes will start airing on HD Net as well.

Tuesday (Sept 4):

• Eureka - “Sight Unseen” An abandoned research project turns Carter invisible.

Thursday (Sept 6):

• Who Wants To Be A Superhero - Two hour season finale.

Friday (Sept 7):

• Doctor Who - “The Family of Blood - PT 2″ Martha must help the Dr. restore his memory before The Family captures him and rewrites history.
• Flash Gordon - “Assassin” Ming sends an assassin to Earth with orders to drain Zarkov’s brain.

Saturday (Sept 8):

• Torchwood - “Everything Changes” Series Premier! During the course of an investigation police constable Gwen Cooper comes across a mysterious organization, introduced in Doctor Who, called Torchwood. Torchwood fights aliens and steals their technology. The show tends to be very sexual, so it’s kind of like an adult version of MIB/X-Files/Doctor Who.

It’s well established that western governments have the cooperation of the established media when it comes to efforts to coverup extraterrestrial activities. It is a common tactic of theirs to introduce elements into popular works of fiction in order to discredit people the witnesses of these activities. That is why I wasn’t surprised to learn that a telephone box had been spotted hovering over the UK a couple of weeks ago.

From the NASA Photojournal site:

Impact-battered Mimas steps in front of Saturn’s rings, showing off its giant 130-kilometer (80-mile) wide crater Herschel.The illuminated terrain seen here is on the moon’s leading hemisphere. North on Mimas is up and rotated 20 degrees to the left. Mimas is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera on Oct. 13, 2005 at a distance of approximately 711,000 kilometers (442,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 112 degrees. The image scale is 4 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.

I realize that this review is rather late coming but it has taken me quite a bit of restful meditation and learning about Zen to get a foul taste out of my mouth. Truthfully, my expectations for Flash Gordon were pretty low and I’m shocked at how disappointed I am. This new “Sci-Fi Original Series” makes the crappy movie from 1980 look like a cinematic masterpiece.

They’ve had enough time to re-imagine things but they forgot to use any imagination. Flash’s hometown is second only to the villain’s home world, Mongo, as the most boring place in the universe. The most exciting part of the show is all about who’s going to get busy with Flash first.

It’s basically like this. Flash, a professional runner with dreams of starting his own auto-repair shop, finds out that his dead father may be on the other side of a mysterious-remote-controllable-top-secret-wormhole-thingy. He decides that the smart thing to do is save his dad with the help of Dr. Zarkov and his unavailable high school sweetheart/television reporter.

The biggest problem with the show is the bad guy, Ming the Narrow-minded. He’s not scary and entirely too redeemable. All he needs to do is find a viable water supply for his city and things are good plus he looks way too much like, I can’t remember the name– Oh yeah. Flash Gordon!

In addition to the reporter, there are two more hot women that are introduced to keep us guessing about Flash’s companion choices. Ming’s daughter seems to be a basically good person, if not over-dressed, and there is a third woman that we’re not entire clear about other than she’s a really good fighter/survivor woman.

I’ve decided that I’m going to keep watching so you don’t have to. If things improve, I’ll let you know. If they don’t I’ll send the writers some boxes so they can clean out their desks.