Eureka “I’ll Be Seeing You” 

With this episode, Eureka hits pause, closing out the summer season of nine outstanding episodes without a big old cliffhanger (thank you!), while setting the stage for some love geometry with Zane/Jo/Zoe, and Bev to resume Big Bad status when season four continues next year. The episode picks right up where “The Ex-Files” ended, sort of, after a flashback intro that shows Grant meeting with Adam Barlowe and Lily Morgan, a lab rat from Berkeley who helped build the Bridge Device. Jackie Robinson is still a topic of discussion, and Lily also casually tells the men to invest in Johnson & Johnson (this will be important for Grant later). They’re discussing their mission, which involves Barlowe taking a wormhole back to 1939 Los Alamos to prevent the atomic bomb.

Back in the present, Carter and Allison are enjoying their first morning-after banter when they’re summoned to GD by Fargo to find out the latest, which isn’t much. (Sidebar: closed captioning had a racy line not in the actual dialogue, so I wonder if Syfy kiboshed it after the CCing was done.) At GD, we learn the DED Device is still missing, but Henry has been tracking radiation readings and discovered an area in the woods outside town that doesn’t have any at all, so he and Allison head out to investigate. Carter and Jo head to the office, where Zane is still locked up and requesting a meeting. Meanwhile, out in those woods, in a barn concealed by a projected hologram of a gorge, Bev is about to send Grant back to 1947 with promises he will assume God-like status.

At the precinct, Zane is making the case that something’s amok with all of them, and that Grant set him up, so Carter and Jo head to Grant’s historian office at GD, but not before Zane promises Jo a later chat about the ring. In the woods, Henry and Allison are realizing they have no cell phone service. At GD, Jo and Carter walk and talk and she asks about Allison, threatening him with a tase if he doesn’t spill, and he tells her they’re together. She’s genuinely happy for him. They head to her office and listen to tape that Grant recorded the night they were arrested in 1947. Carter hears the name Adam Barlowe, snaps to about Bev, and realizes that Henry and Allison are likely on a fool’s errand.

Back in the woods, Henry and Allison chat about Carter and Henry is goofy happy for them. Inside the barn, the Bridge Device is powering up and the energy spike sends them running to the car. Carter, meanwhile, is hauling ass up the road in the Jeep. The spike sends both cars into the air and then back down. The result? Allison is dead. Carter and Henry are devastated. I’m furious, but aware we’re only 12 minutes into the episode.

Carter sees the barn, storms in, and attacks Grant, telling him he’s killed Allison. The Bridge Device is still active, so it catches both of them and sends them back to 1947 again, alongside the events of the season premiere (think Back to the Future II where Marty McFly had to keep avoiding himself in revisits to events of the first film. I’m assuming this episode was filmed alongside/after the premiere). Carter and Grant quickly realize they can change the future again and unkill Allison, but they have to tread carefully because they also can’t undo any of the events from when the group visited before. Grant goes a little off-plan and steals jumper cables to prevent Traveler Alison from saving Barlowe with the crude defibrillator. It doesn’t work because she pounds his chest until he breathes.

Carter comes up with another plan—recording a message to himself on Grant’s reel-to-reel, telling himself (a la Bill and Ted) to get to the woods early. In the second go around in the present, Allison and Henry see the spike early enough to get safely to the car—and this time, Allison puts on her seat belt. Still-2010 Carter has also heard the new message and gets there as the spike starts. This time, he drives straight into the barn, interrupting the device. Outside, Allison’s car is still wrecked from the energy blast, but she and Henry survive. Back in the barn, still 2010-Carter gets out of the Jeep, confronting 1947/2010-Grant, and they meld back into the versions that had jumped that morning (which I think bends some of the time-travel canon, but I don’t care–Allison’s alive!).

Bev gets away and GD gets the Bridge Device. With everybody looped about Bev, Jo goes to the precinct to release Zane. He’s genuine when he asks her to tell him about the ring and what they meant to each other. She can’t tell him the truth, instead telling him there was nothing between them. She turns away from him to leave, and he pulls her back for a smoking hot kiss. She kisses him back and then makes herself stop. He smiles and asks her why that didn’t feel like a first kiss. Just then Zoe arrives and hugs Zane, happy he’s released. She invites him out, and Jo, too. Zane gives Jo his best, “This isn’t finished” look as she begs off and hurries out.

At GD, Grant is packing up to leave town. Carter arrives with new papers that will throw off any investigation into who he really is, and credentials from Fargo that will let him write his professional ticket anywhere in the world. Instead, Grant opts to travel a while. Turns out his J&J shares have made him a gazillionare. (Sidebar: he references taking Lily’s advice “this time,” so I don’t quite know when he had time to do that in the revisit, or maybe he left instructions for somebody to do that for him before they left?) He leaves Carter with a handshake, and an autographed Jackie Robinson baseball. The final scene (to be continued) is of Bev setting her sights on Carter and Allison as her “new target,” but for now, everybody is relatively safe in Eureka. We’ll find out whether the re-reset affected anything else when the show returns.

This was an awesome, awesome rebound season for Eureka. I’m so pleased Henry, Carter, and Allison finally have some personal bliss, Fargo has a leadership role that moves him past nerd-with-attitude status, and Jo has continued to evolve as a really layered character. I’ve watched the show from the pilot, but took a hiatus for a while there last year, where it stopped being appointment TV. This summer, I went back to watching the episodes live as much as I could. The time-travel reboot gave everybody a creativity boost and it came off in the writing, the acting, and the direction. I have no idea if anybody was burnt out after season three, between what we saw onscreen and the network drama that kept it off the air so long, but everybody seems to have come out the other side of it happier and better. I love it when established shows are given a chance to get “it” back, and do. I used to think/hope Eureka would get to five seasons. Now I see no reason they can’t make it to seven, or ten. Happy break, everybody.

We get a Christmas episode in December and then season four resumes in 2011 (hopefully sooner than later). You can catch up on Hulu and Syfy.com.