Walking around with the little Sheriff on display, eh, Jack? I know some people (my editor) who have that dream regularly, mostly of you. Directed by director and actor Eric Laneuville, he’s best known for being in 29 episodes of the 1970s comedy show Room 222, as well as directing everything from St. Elsewhere and My Wife and Kids, to a small show called Lost. Never heard of it. While “Noche De Sueños,” literally meaning night/evening of dreams in English, is written by co-creator, producer, and showrunner, Jamie Paglia.

With Allison’s shower on the blink while she and Jack are out for a run, he offers to do a bit of plumbing… she just forgets to tell him that it is a “fusion water heater,” because women like to boil their skin off at 315°C. On his way home after being fusion-balled by Nathan, he runs into Fargo, who is standing in the middle of the road as a sleepy trucker nearly kills him. You know, normal Eureka stuff: Jack tackles him like the greatest linebacker breaking Joe Theismann’s leg, only for the truck to smash into cars, turn over, and start spewing toxic waste like it is the White House press team.

Turns out, after getting showered in questionable liquids, Jack needs to strip in the park and have dreams where his little man’s out in front of his daughter, his co-workers, and the whole town. Sharing dreams like a group of women who buy crystals to align their periods or whatever that nonsense is about, the whole town is sharing dreams. Husbands dreaming about bending the assistant over the desk, Jo thinking about Jack’s little partner and Fargo killing the truck driver. You know, normal stuff. Oh, and Nathan is trying to force an autistic child to tell him the secrets of the universe, while some of us just want the Powerball numbers.

Yeah, turns out Kevin is trying to manifest the crossover episode with Sci-Fi Channel’s brilliant mini-series, The Lost Room, in Allison’s first dream, while Jack works out why his daughter saw him naked in their shared dream. Yeah, it is one of those “the town’s gone crazy” episodes with everyone and their neighbor claiming crimes were committed while they were asleep. Some of them are funny, and some of them are just a bit stupid.

There is one about 20 minutes in where the whole town is reporting thought crimes, where one woman claims another “slandered” her for calling her a “jack ass” in their dream. Now, legally, I can’t say what you should do and I don’t think you should take this as legal advice. Though broadly speaking, because of the use of what can be called swearing or “vulgar” language, it can often make statements like this inadmissible simply on the grounds of being an opinion. Calling someone a “F—ing idiot” isn’t slander, but saying someone is so incompetent they should be fired is defamation, slanderous, libel, or, for Chris Chibnall, totally true.

I quite like Paglia’s run out this time. It is a simple story that is odd, fun, and a touch cartoonish, the things that make memorable episodes of Eureka in the future. As it occasionally has in the past. The big thing this time out, of course, is the sleepy people of Eureka, but also Kevin, basically saying that autism is a superpower. It is dressed up a little more than just autism, but generally speaking, we’re moving towards the story that Kevin is special and has some weird magic ability to interpret the artifact in special ways.

Cue the red herrings, cue the dream where Fargo is Zorro, Jo is the sexy Hispanic woman in danger, and Stark is the sexy evil man, and most importantly, cue the woman that suddenly pops up and seeks to do the evilest of things, efficiency. I’ll just say it, I hate those people. The ones that like to micromanage to eek out some made-up metric they’ve come up with in their head, simply because their kink is to make everyone else feel inferior. Often resulting in them quitting, now you need to hire and train someone, or not bother, burdening someone else with that to save $10 a week.

Rants about annoying business people aside, Paglia’s “Noche De Sueños” is a simple episode of Eureka when it comes down to it. The best of them are. There is a bit of mystery this time out, particularly that Jack dreams that Henry zapped him with some mind-wipey machine. I’ve no idea where he got that idea from. The other being that Kevin has a connection to the artifact and that he is changing because of it. Yeah, from Meshach Peters to Trevor Jackson, spoilers on that by the way.

I’ll admit, probably my favorite bit with “Noche De Sueños” is The Mask of Forro’s dream, or rather someone else’s dream about him being “The man in black.” Sure, other shows could do that, but rarely do they pull off something like this with the right tone of camp and seriousness. It doesn’t feel like a cheap joke for the sake of it, but rather something based on the characters we’ve met and known so far. Fargo fawning over Jo, Jo ignoring/threatening him, and Nathan being self-centered. Again, simple and it works.

Ultimately, “Noche De Sueños” is probably the first bit of proper Eureka as people remember it for the entirety of Season 2. I could do without mysteries dragging themselves out like a zombie from a grave, and some of the pacing throughout the episode felt like it could have ever so slightly picked itself up for a moment. However, six episodes into season 2, and we’ve finally got an episode that I’m trying to avoid saying is boring because of a slow mystery that helps the episode move along.

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7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Forro!
• Finally, one of the fun episodes that doesn't take itself too seriously.
• Jack's moment with Jo.

Cons

• Six episodes in, and I've seen old age kill someone quicker than this mystery.