Eureka (TV Series) God Is in the Details (2007) User Reviews

Really?

[genesis_finley · 7/10 · 22 March 2011]

Eureka is full of unbelievable things, probably many of them are poorly explained. Most of us wouldn't know it, though. Most of us have no idea about quantum physics, dark matter theories, or the technical specs for colonizing Mars.

The minute they try to touch on >>RELIGION<< (ahhhh...) people get their knickers in a twist. This is something you KNOW - something close to your heart! Hate to break it to you, but they probably get their science and religion from the same place: Cliff's Notes! It's only a one-hour show, for Chri- for Pete's sake!

I like Eureka. It's one of my favorite shows. I don't plan to sit my kids down in front of it when they're having trouble understanding Calculus or Physics... or RE.

Just a Waste of Potential

[GunnersMate · 4/10 · 19 May 2018]

God and science are and have been at the very core of theological and philosophical debates for as long as people have had discussions about anything, and in a town like Eureka (where science is a part of everything done, felt, created, etc.) an exploration of the relationship between faith and science could have been really amazing. It wasn't. There were some entertaining character interactions that kept the episode from being a total loss, but it was downright uncomfortable and unpleasant and not very science-fiction-fun or interesting. The season arc element of the espisode was a disappointment and just plain silly. Not on the "watch again" list.

Insulting

[illjot · 2/10 · 25 December 2010]

This is insulting whether your religious or not. For how it can be insulting to the religious check mkey-2's review. I am not a person of faith I'm agnostic(somewhere between atheist and deist and not at all religious).

This episode makes it seem that the beliefs of people who are not religious are incredibly fickle, because as soon as something resembling miracles occur they become incredibly religious. Even though they live in a town where similar and even more unbelievable things happen. The town is full of scientist practicing fringe science.

Most of the people would have what they believe to be incredibly rational reasons for they're beliefs so they wouldn't convert to Christianity the moment something seemingly unexplainable happened. Even the religious scientist are highly intelligent individuals who would look for reasonable explanations and not just be "oh that resembles the bible and upon hearing it i have no explanation must be a miracle". And I should mention they almost never have an easy explanation and the town has experienced much more catastrophic events through which they never jumped to religion.

I apologize for the rant but something in this episode really got on my nerves. I don't give it a 1 because it wasn't that awful an episode outside of that.

Not again....

[ricky-batman · 4/10 · 29 June 2013]

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.

Terrible episode

[seyramb · 4/10 · 30 October 2013]

I only recently started watching this series and I have enjoyed it so far. However, this episode was poorly written. At onset, I was expecting some intelligent look at how people deal with the matter of religion and faith in the face of overwhelming evidence that suggests that belief in the supernatural (i.e. the unexplainable) is not necessary. Instead we get this crap episode. A town consisting of the most brilliant minds, a place where the bounds of science are constantly being pushed back and suddenly when water in a fish tank somewhere becomes red and people start glowing and others are unable to speak, all the towns folk find religion? Common folks. This is the same town where one day there were hail storms, sand storms, snow fall and hurricanes, all within the space of a few hours and no one batted an eyelid. I guess what irks me about the episode is that the writers do not seem to understand the nature of scientists and why science is incompatible with religion in many respects. Scientists are curious people, skeptics inspired to constantly question the natural world around them. Such people would not simply run and cower in church pews because a random fish tank somewhere turned a color that we associate with blood. The guy who was working on the fish tank was looking to transfer bioluminescence aquatic life forms, with possible human applications!

Not another "God" scifi

[Colehead · 3/10 · 26 August 2012]

As an atheist scientist. This episode almost made me stop watching the series. There has been way to much god in my scifi and I had hoped this series would buck the trend, but unfortunately, no. The whole akashic field theory I was willing to have a suspension of disbelief as every show gets one good by. However a blatant religious inference to a Christ child and a holy roller episode made me angry. I had suspected the artifact as a god theme but was hoping I was wrong as the structure resembled a neuron synapse. As a research psychologist the entire mess with their understanding of neurology ( especially the whole crap idea with humans only using 10% of their brain therefore psychic powers takes 5 minutes of research to debunk- we often only use 10% at a TIME but we use ALL of our brain). I will only be giving this show another couple of episodes before it goes in the dumpster with Battle Star Galactica and Promethius as religious poop in my scifi chocolate.

Just poorly written and rushed

[GreyHunter · 4/10 · 15 February 2019]

Unlike (I suspect) many who watched this episode, devout and atheist and everything between alike, I have no objection to the exploration of faith and science and how they can interact. It's a legitimate avenue of inquiry, and the episode was remarkably non-committal on the issue (which, I suspect, also irked quite a few people.) But the writers managed to be simultaneously guilty of trying too hard and not trying hard enough. They rushed, and therefore handled extremely poorly, the imposition of questions of faith in a scientific milieu by suddenly having everyone talking and debating religion after three extremely underwhelming miracles. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Carter's dialogue with Larry over these events. Larry describes someone losing their voice as reflective of the Tower of Babel because both impeded communication...when no voice is close to the exact opposite the story of the Tower of Babel, where suddenly there *too many* different voices in too many different languages (a point reinforced with some degree of irony when Zoe could, in fact, communicate via writing because she still shared a common language with everyone around her.) Glowing Alison is, well...the episode even pointed out the existence of bioluminescence in the real world (and the Bible does not, in fact, say a word about "transfiguration" despite the fact that he was searching the page for that word, and seeing as "transfiguration" isn't exactly an obscure word, or even a specifically religious one. there would be no reason a GD employee would have to look for it in the first place.) And given that Henry actually tested the "blood" and determined it was no such thing, it's just bizarre that a bunch of scientists still cling to that interpretation.

The writers simply tried far too hard to convince us that what people were doing made sense, and expended very little effort or thought into making the transition even remotely believable. Their reach far outstripped their grasp, and suddenly turning all those scientists into something resembling a lynch mob hunting heretics was ludicrous in every possible way. It made no sense, and I doubt the writers had the skill or intellectual cleverness to even write a credible scenario where it would. Such a disappointment, because this is exactly the sort of issue that a show like Eureka could have tackled with intelligence and insight. There have always been scientists who are also religious and the way they reconcile these two very different perspectives on existence and life could be a rich vein for storytelling, especially in context of scientists who find the two incompatible. There's no need to come down firmly on one side or the other (not doing so was one of the very few things this episode did right) but there is a need to discuss them with something approaching intellectual and narrative honesty.

Ignorantly written

[mkey-2 · 2/10 · 29 September 2007]

I have enjoyed most of Eureka's episodes (as evidenced by the fact that I've bought the entire season in iTunes), but this one had some serious issues. I felt that overall, this particular episode did a disservice to people of faith. The beginning started out okay, with the church pastor depicted in a positive manner and I thought that this might end up being a thoughtful episode about the conjunction between faith and science. Instead I felt that the show made people of faith look like stupid bumpkins who because of their belief in something that is intangible, are willing to believe just about anything if it starts to resemble a miracle. I personally believe in the possibility of miracles, but I am also a rational person (and quite skeptical). This means that I generally apply Occam's razor to most situations--if there is an easy and human-based explanation, then I'll tend to come to that conclusion first. In this episode, it seemed obvious that there was a human-based cause to all of the events that took place, especially when they started uncovering solid evidence that they were related. Yet otherwise highly intelligent characters began to immediately jump to the conclusion that the events were miracles, with no good reason for doing so, particularly since this kind of thing happens in Eureka every single day! This smacks of insult, that whoever wrote this episode believes that if you have faith, you have a large part of your brain that simply isn't rational. The show reached its low point in the church when the Sheriff wanted to take the reverend in for questioning and people immediately started to rise up against him, like medieval villagers or something. Please. Again, another insult to people of faith. I acknowledge that there may be people of faith out there like the ones in the episode--ignorant, ready to ignore rational explanation for ones of faith, ready to chuck all science away in favor of their "superstition." But in my opinion, they are in the minority. This kind of stereotyping of faith-filled people is a huge insult. I honestly expected better of Eureka's writers, and I was disappointed.

It wasn't great...but it wasn't THAT bad..

[noteventhesameguy · 5/10 · 6 September 2009]

This was actually the first episode that I had ever watched. I know that quite a few people were upset with the way that they handled this episode. However, there were a few bright spots. First, it wasn't the minister who was behind the whole thing. (Kudos, BTW, for usage of a female minister) This episode, like so many others of different TV shows, was not intended to reveal the "hypocritical evil inherent in the church" It was, instead, the result of one woman's grief and her attempts to find an end. The idiots weren't the original churchgoers. They were the ones who refused to even listen until unexplained tragedy struck, and then tried desperately to cling to anything other than the science that had failed them. Then, once the lights had come back on, they closed their religious books and pushed it aside once more. Granted, there were some definite low points in the episode. Plus, I'm still not sure why they had to quote Revelations 24. (There's only 22 chapters in that book) Still, there's an recurring theme in the whole series that sometimes faith is the only thing that gets you through. I don't think the episode was intended as a slam. If it was, I don't know why they would have ended with a full church. A town full of that many unbelievers is going to look a little dumb when it comes to faith. It's all about finding the balance. Overall, for what it was, it was OK.