Eureka “Liftoff” 

Let’s start the morning with a little math. Eureka began its run in July of 2006. Last night, it began the second half of its fourth season, a full ten months after the first half concluded. They’re shooting the fifth season now. If that season turns out to be the final one, and Syfy parcels it out over two summers, too, it will have taken EIGHT YEARS to see all the episodes. This is madness, y’all (and it’s greed for divvying DVD sets).

Every year since they started doing this (in 2008), I say I won’t come back, and then I do, because I’m Eureka’s bitch like that. It’s just way too charming a show to blame it for its circumstances. And it’d be stupid to skip a lovely little show that, frankly, I’m amazed and delighted is still on the air. So, Tina caught y’all up on 4.0.

4.5 picks up with episode 11 and launches Fargo and Zane into space, where they have an amusing role reversal of sorts with Fargo calm, cool, and in charge and Zane working the color wheel of nausea and a barf bag. Down on the ground, everyone’s scrambling to bring down the unmanned rocket until Jack realizes it’s not so unmanned. This puts him at odds with new love Allison and there’s a lot of sniping on her side before she softens back up and they sort of chat about the sleeping together vs. working together delineation. I still say she amped up the jobspeak too much and didn’t really apologize for biting his head off, but that’s just me.

In other amusing news, we get an opening scene fakeout that makes you think Allison and Jack are about to get hitched (unless you actually watch the show and recall that the last time Allison and Jack were at a wedding, she was the bride, and he was telling her that Nathan was dead) when in fact S.A.R.A.H. is the cold-footed bride and Andy is the soon-to-be-jilted groom. Andy later saves the day when it turns out that because he went off to process his jilting 1,000 feet underground in the power grid, he’s the only power source to survive a blackout. Jo also comes to the rescue with horses for transportation, which Jack is downright giddy about.

Using the Andy-battery, the team brings Zane and Fargo safely home. Fargo clues Zane in on the v 1.0 series of events with Jo and is about to have to account for that to Jo when he’s carted off to Washington to explain himself, and Global Dynamics, to the Senator in charge of his funding (guest star Ming Na) — which I guess will be the big arc, and she will be the big bad, for 4.5.

And that was that. Short, sweet, and to the point. I have to give a little love to Kavan Smith, who is just pitch perfect as Andy. I liked Ty Olsson as Andy, too, but there’s something just really charming and childlike and gleeful about the way Smith plays him. Even when S.A.R.A.H. is giving him the “let’s be friends” speech, he’s delighted that she’s offering to “leave a door open” for him.

I loved that all of the time travelers (minus Grant) were in the episode right away — that they’re all still bonded by that secret and yet all back to living with the lives they’ve got now. I’d say it was a seamless transition between seasons but, it’s still season four in plotland.

So many good one liners, too. I’ll steal style from Tina here and list a few:

• “Well don’t look at me. Talk to the bride.” — Allison to Jack after he’s summoned to soothe the bride.
• “Gotta boogie. Blueberry cobbler day in the cafeteria. It goes fast!” — Fargo to Jo after his alarm beeps on his watch.
• “Well, how the hell was I supposed to know you’d be in here playing with yourself?” — Zane to Fargo after they’re trapped.
• “I scraped the I.S.S. Now they’re never going to let me be an astronaut.” — Fargo after he nudges the shuttle away from the I.S.S. but still scratches the side of it.
• “Where’s the Radio Shack?” — Jack to Henry when he tells him there’s an outpost that may have power.
• “I’m on a horse!” — Andy after Jack throws him over the saddle and rides away with him.
• “Fine. But don’t touch my ass!” — Jo agreeing to let Zane hug her after he gets back.

We get nine more episodes through September. I hope they’re as sweet and clever as this one (and pretty much all of 4.0) was. If you missed it, it’s now online at Syfy.com. P.S. to Syfy — enough with the commercials, though. Seriously. I think the episode was about 38 minutes long.