Well, I wish the title of the episode was accurate. I’d have an easier time shooting fish in Lake Tahoe with a shotgun from the moon than digging out decent credits from this writer-director combo. D3: The Mighty Ducks director Robert Lieberman helms his only episode of Eureka after one episode of The X-Files, and later going on to work on The Expanse. While writer Thania St. John wrote for the original 21 Jump Street, Roswell, and later went on to produce and write for Chicago Fire. Now, where is that shotgun so I can fish for my brain?

I wonder if you can tell if I woke up on the angry side of the bed, and need to get up in 4 hours, today? With Zoe’s birthday only days away, Jack is very happy, almost too happy. He even asks Allison out for coffee. Henry is trying to provoke Bev into admitting she’s an extremely boring person with a mystery wrapped around her like the pastry around whatever sausage rolls are made out of now, especially the vegan ones, they are like magic in flaky puff pastry. Meanwhile, S.A.R.A.H. says the weather will be a heat wave, frosty, rain, hail, gale force winds, and severe lightning, or as I’d call that, Tuesday.

As it turns out, GD has a special spa that is temperature controlled by a nuclear reactor’s by-product and the wishes on the farts from unicorns. So yeah, S.A.R.A.H. was right about the weather being that of Scotland. No, I mean it, just last week I saw a bald guy in a rain jacket and shorts while the rain was coming in sideways, and it was a Tuesday. Oh, and there is this small other thing going on where Jack is organizing a surprise party for Zoe’s 16th, but to his surprise, his ex-wife shows up to take Zoe back to LA.

Though plenty of shows could very well make the divorced parents thing less basic, Eureka isn’t one of them. Predictably, “Unpredictable” does everything by the numbers in typical Eureka fashion, but maybe my hatred for this Beverly plotline tips it over the edge. I hate saying this because I feel like I say it a lot (especially after writing 6 TV reviews back-to-back), but “Unpredictable” isn’t a bad episode of TV. The problem is that it is, more or less, the filler episode of American TV that feels like it does nothing too big but nothing too offensively bad either.

Played by Olivia d’Abo, who is most famous for playing Karen Arnold in The Wonder Years, Dr Abby Carter isn’t stretching her abilities. Though for us here, as Eureka acts as a stop-gap between Doctor Who ending and Strange New Worlds beginning again, d’Abo is probably better known as Amanda Rogers from The Next Generation, i.e, the hot blonde intern in “True Q.” However, if we’re doing a biography of the woman, we might as well mention that her dad wrote “Build Me Up Buttercup” and “Handbags and Gladrags,” as well as replace Paul Jones as the lead singer for Manfred Mann.

I have nothing against d’Abo or practically anyone from an acting perspective. I think my problem is that St. John’s writing leaves a lot of Eureka-based twists on the table. Maybe I’m spoiled by the writing of another show I’m prepping to review and things like Ted Lasso, but the big two plotlines feel as mature and simply told as the wiki of Kingdom Hearts does for the synopsis of that series’ plot. The Beverly mystery does so little to the plot of not only “Unpredictable” but Eureka as a whole at this point that it might as well not be there.

Meanwhile, Abby’s thing here is that she’s here to take Zoe back to LA and to bicker with Jack because she thinks he works too much. If I do have a problem with her, then yeah, it is the fact she’s written like a child who can’t comprehend the world outside of their own little bubble. Her remit for this whole episode is telling Jack that he works too much and that this is the cause of everyone else’s problems, including hers and the reason their marriage failed. To quote Tennant’s Doctor from “The Girl in the Fireplace,” get a little perspective!

I’m not saying she’s wrong, I’m saying that she’s looking at it from one narrow viewpoint that means, as a character, she’s always right and no one else can have their own problems, their own lives, and their own things going on. About 25 minutes in, while Jack’s in the middle of a possible murder case, Abby kicks down the door and shouts that Zoe has gone missing and it is all Jack’s fault because he is working. She’s 16, Zoe that is. It’s almost as if she’s at a friend’s place, at the café, in a library, maybe at the park?

No, no, no, she’s run away, and it is all Jack’s fault. If anyone says that the world isn’t exactly as Abby says so, then it is, “Oh, so I’m to blame.” Again, it isn’t the actor I have problems with, it is the writing, especially for a highly-educated woman who works in the medical field. She doesn’t come across as anywhere near that mature. I hate saying that because of certain people who will criticize any woman on TV for the smallest of things, but Jack is oddly being the mature one here.

Anyway, the weather thing is fine and a good Eureka idea. Beyond the late episode reveal of the relationship angle, it does so little to truly be such a unique idea. I mean, a government-funded weather machine that’s trying to kill people, I think I’ve heard that from a politician too stupid to realize that the US tried to do that before, and failed. No really, read the Pentagon Papers (https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers) and specifically look for Operation Popeye; it is hilarious how stupid it is.

The point, more or less, is that while the title suggests there is something unpredictable about the episode, “Unpredictable” is probably the most predictable we’ve seen from Eureka thus far. Abby is immature and won’t talk things out without devolving into name-calling, accusations, and storming off in the huff. While the scientists continue to stray a bit too close to the sun, or in this case, whatever makes snow.

I remember that bit of The Magic School Bus that says the sun’s rays evaporate the water, forming clouds. Clouds get too heavy, it rains, we capture the rain and turn it into drinking water, you pee, and the cycle starts again when that goes out to sea. That’s a dumb way of explaining it, but it explains it. However, for the life of me, I can’t work out from that where it becomes snow other than atmospheric pressure freezing the water into tiny ice crystals, which clump to form snow. I’m probably wrong, but would you trust me or the woman who shouted “Jewish space lasers” that control the weather?

Ultimately, while the space lasers are being controlled to turn Eureka into a frozen, tropical Sahara with hail, “Unpredictable” is the most basic episode of TV that changes nothing, does nothing, and makes you feel nothing. Other than maybe a strong dislike for Abby Carter, and I don’t think that should be the case here. People fall out of love and move on all the time, but she’s as complex as A4 paper. As the child of divorced parents, the one character who could have saved “Unpredictable,” making it more mature and interesting, would be Zoe. Too bad she’s not in it for more than 10 minutes.

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Eureka "Unpredictable"

4.5

Score

4.5/10

Pros

• Dr and Mrs Whiticus' relationship is being treated as such.
• Nice to see someone else get Scotland's weather for once.

Cons

• The writing of Abby.
• I don't love the implication that Dr Whiticus' disability makes him unable to do certain things.
• Jack is no better than Abby initially.