As a science enthusiast and an atheist, I tend to prefer my Sci-Fi "hard", but I don't mind some silliness now and again, and I'm enjoying this show immensely even if they do sprinkle the storyline with blatant pseudoscience and chain e-mail clichés like the Akashic Field, psychic powers and whatnot. This episode, however, almost made me stop watching the series for good. The episode begins in a church with a famous Einstein quote often taken out of context by religious people, and already I was rolling my eyes. Next we see the small congregation which is of course comprised of the best and most intelligent people in the town, at which point I knew exactly where the episode was going: the usual "Science is right, but without religion everything is meaningless" drivel that's so fashionable right now. So during the episode, strange phenomena start happening in the town (as they usually do), but this time they're notable for being similar to events talked of in the Bible. Acting completely out of character, the whole town immediately turns to religion, even though events like these (or even stranger) are commonplace in Eureka and have never been in any way supernatural in origin. At this point my eyes were rolling at supersonic speeds. About halfway through the episode, however, we find out that the pastor, who previously complained that her congregation was too small, was instigating people to come to church by distributing Bibles, and I felt a glimmer of hope that the series was going to subvert the trope and instead turn the episode into a lesson about using reason even when things seem too strange. Unfortunately, this was not the case. The pastor is of course innocent and it turns out the whole mess was just an innocent mistake; by the end of the episode everyone's going to church and people are talking about meeting their loved ones in Heaven because they have faith. What? No mention is ever done of the fact that none of the phenomena were in any way traceable to any god or that people unreasonably assumed they were, nor of the fact that when Carter accused the pastor of wrongdoing, the whole town reacted with unthinking hostility, going so far as to physically threaten him when he tried to question her. The overall lesson of the episode seems to be "All good people are religious, it's fine to believe in things you have no evidence for and clergymen are automatically innocent of any wrongdoing." We even had a faith healing scene. I don't know if this was the writer's original intent or if he was somehow hijacked by production or something else, but it's episodes like these that make me nostalgic about the good ol' days of Star Trek, when the question of the relationship between religion and science was explored honestly and without an obvious slant towards "Religion is right". Sci-fi is a wonderful tool to explore the beauty of science and of the human mind and yes, even religion. Episodes like these, however, do a disservice to the genre. If ever I watch this series again, this is an episode I'll definitely skip.
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