EUREKA UNSCRIPTED

"Reprise" - Comment Post

Welcome to Eureka, Felicia Day!

 

There's a new scientist in town, and she brings surprising news... Allison has an adventure with an unusual outcome... What did you think of episode 412, "Reprise"? Post your comments below.

Boilerplate reminders:

• Please be courteous and respectful. Thoughtful debate is great, but personal attacks on other posters or being a jerk are not.

• Comments may contain spoilers, so if you don't want those, best to stop reading here...

• We'll try to get to any questions when we can, but your patience and understanding are appreciated if we can't -- we're busy working on Season 5!

Twitter 10K Contest Winners!

Thank you, everyone, who helped us make it to 10,000 followers by our premiere! We're well above that now, but please do continue to spread the word -- the more people who watch and love Eureka, the more likely they'll let us keep making it for you.

We've randomly selected the three followers who will receive a Eureka signed script. Congratulations to Mikes_at_home, hollieajohnson, and jnrxing!! Watch your DMs, you three, for a message from us about receiving your prize!*

And don't worry if you didn't win this drawing... we hope to do more contests like this!

(*fine print -- the winners have one week from today, July 15, to get back to us, and if we haven't heard from someone, we will draw an alternate winner.)

 

Poll: "Liftoff"

We're posting polls inspired by Eureka Season 4.5 episodes, starting with the premiere, "Liftoff." If you haven't seen the episode, heads up -- mild spoilers follow.

It's hard to imagine Eureka without technology… nothing powered by electricity or with electronic components of any kind. Science goes way back before the modern age, of course, but what if you lived in a Eureka that didn't have anything with an on/off switch?

 

Online Surveys & Market Research

Eureka Idea Lab

Love science as much as we do? Then be sure to check out the Eureka Idea Lab, Syfy's blog that explores the kind of technology and science that you see on the show.

For instance, click here to read a post about "Liftoff" and what writer Bruce Miller has to say about what befalls Zane and Fargo.

Here's a welcome from Idea Lab's Tiffany Lee Brown:

Eureka takes the most cutting-edge technologies and mixes them with the everyday stuff of life. Idea Lab explores the everyday stuff of life, too, and some unexpected (sometimes hilarious) science and tech phenomena. Things that take hold of the popular imagination often inspire us: space travel, robots, and neuroscience, along with films, art, and music about sciencey subjects.We love DIY stuff, too, from incredible contraptions to a solar roadway that sounds like it should be powering Eureka's highways.

And for the new season beginning July 11, we'll be posting more about what you see on Eureka itself, from the science to what inspires the show's makers and writers. We also interview researchers, science fiction authors, and inventors. Check it out!

Click here to read more about Idea Lab and the new season of Eureka!

"Liftoff" - Comment Post

 

Welcome to Season 4.5, Eureka fans! What did you think of the premiere episode, "Liftoff"? Post your thoughts in the comments section below, and start a conversation with other viewers. (A gentle reminder to be courteous and respectful. Thoughtful debate is great, but personal attacks on other posters or being a jerk are not.)

And if you don't want spoilers, best to stop reading here...

We'll try to get to any questions when we can, but your patience and understanding are appreciated if we can't -- we're busy working on Season 5!

 

 

 

Welcome to Season 4.5!

Executive Producer and co-creator Jaime Paglia has a few words of welcome to everyone as we launch into Season 4.5! [Note: The post below includes spoilers for Season 4.0's finale. But you've already seen it, right?]

Executive Producers Jaime Paglia and Bruce Miller

It's that magical time of year again.  In 24 hours, Eureka will make its premiere for Season 4.5, our seventh year on the air.  To our amazing legion of fans who have grown every year, we want to say thank you for visiting our little town every week, for allowing us to share their stories, and for keeping us employed another year.  Big ups for that.

When we last left off, Beverly Barlowe and the Consortium were getting ready to send Trevor Grant back to 1947, to right all of the wrongs that science has created over the last 60 years.  But Sheriff Carter inadvertently chased Grant back to 1947 after Allison was killed by the Bridge device energy pulse.  Together, they managed to get a message to their future selves in order to save Allison from the same fate, and find a way back home.  Beverly escaped and Grant was given a new identity.  But having been wise enough to buy stock in Johnson & Johnson before they left 1947, Grant got to leave Eureka as a billionaire.  But for Carter, Allison, Henry, Jo and Fargo, their secret was beginning to crack.  Zane discovered that Jo had his grandmother's engagement ring, and sealed his suspicion with a familiar-feeling kiss.  Zane knows they're hiding something and he wants answers.  Carter and Allison are together.  Henry and his new wife, Grace, are making a go of an actual marriage.  Fargo is feeling like the real Director of GD.  Deputy Andy and S.A.R.A.H. the smart house are enjoying a unique A.I. romance.  Balance seems to be restored.  But Beverly Barlowe is still out there.  And she has a new target in mind...

A little anecdote about that finale.  The story for "I'll Be Seeing You" was born in less than 48 hours when we were in the middle of prepping to shoot the Season 4 premiere, "Founders' Day."  We were making the most ambitious episode to date, and building the set for Camp Eureka.  I went to see the camp under construction and was blown away by the scale of it.  Our line producer, Co-EP Robert Petrovicz, and his crew, led by production designer, Lance King, and the intrepid Venturi brothers, had created something that was simply too incredible to use for only one episode.  It looked and felt like a real town.  I called my co-showrunner Bruce Miller and our writing team back in LA and said we have to find a way to use this set again before they tore it down in seven days.  After some intense creative discussions, we came up with the broad strokes to what would become our Season 4 finale, "I'll Be Seeing You."  But with only two days left of prep, we had to convince our network and studio execs to let us have an extra day of shooting time (a big upfront expense that would save the production money later).  With our entire team contributing, we wrote a brief outline of what we thought the story would be, and I scripted only the scenes that I knew we would need to shoot in the exterior of the camp.  The goal was to shoot the pieces that would allow ourselves the most latitude when we had to break the details of the episode and I had to actually write the entire teleplay. 

Our amazing network and studio execs took a huge risk on us.  Before we had shot a frame of "Founders' Day," they gave us an extra day on the end of the schedule to shoot a handful of fragmented scenes from our future finale, and hoped we would somehow find a way to have it all make sense.  While co-EP, Matt Hastings, was directing the season opener, I was running around with another camera and director Mike Robison setting up shots that we would use for the finale.  On our last night, fighting rain and racing the rising sun before we lost the dark, our exhausted actors delivered terrific performances, having only a notion of what it was they were doing in the episode.  Then, four months later, we re-created part of that camp on a sound stage and filmed the rest of the episode.  Mike Robison managed to seamlessly stitch together our footage from the real camp with our stage set, and it was lit and filmed beautifully by our director of photograpy, Rick Maguire, and gaffer Mark Berlett.  It was one of the best reviewed episodes in the history of our show.  And it never should have worked.

Cut to Season 4.5.  Bruce Miller wrote this incredible premiere episode while I was writing and shooting last season's finale.  With his trademark wit and storytelling, he had a notion to do something that, once again, should be impossible for a cable show to do with our limited time and budget.  It was too ambitious and cool to pass up.  Once again, our network was behind us, and once again, our incredible production team with director Mike Rohl, visual effects producer Matt Gore, and the VFX team at Lux, led by Kevin Little, have delivered what I think is one of the most visually stunning episodes we've ever done.  It kicks off a story arc that will continue over the entire season.  It will bring in amazing new guest stars like Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, Ming-Na, Wallace Shawn, Dave Foley, Matt Frewer and the great Stan Lee.  There will be new challenges and old enemies.  Secrets will surface and romances will rekindle.  And there will be twists and turns that you will never see coming. 

So buckle up, kids.  It's time for "Liftoff!"

Cheers,

J.

Help Us Get To 10K Twitter Followers and Win a Signed Script!

UPDATE: Sometime on Sunday, July 10, we clicked over 10,000 followers! Thank you, everyone, for all your support and help as we launch into Season 4.5. We will draw the winners soon and announce them here and on Twitter. Thanks again!!

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Did you know we have a Twitter feed? We do! Follow us @EurekaWriters for all sorts of news and behind-the-scenes awesomesauce from the Eureka writers' room.

Season 4.5 premieres in just days -- 8pm Monday, July 11 on Syfy -- and to celebrate we want to get to 10,000 followers!

We're close, but we need your help. Please spread the word on Twitter, and if we get to 10K before the July 11 premiere, we will pick 3 followers at random to receive a EUREKA SCRIPT of their choice (an aired episode, of course. Sorry, no sneak peeks!), SIGNED by all the Eureka writers!

Our fans are the best, and with you behind us we're sure we can make our goal in time. Go forth and tweet, and thank you!

 

Eureka Premiere Countdown - 1 Day!

Day 1 – It’s Almost Here!

Only one more day to go until the Eureka Season 4.5 premiere -- 8pm tomorrow, Monday July 11 on Syfy!  We’re so excited we can hardly stand it!

We have a very special treat for the last post in our countdown, a picture of our singular Season 5 mascot.

A big thank you to Writers' Assistant Margaret Dunlap, who put together this whole 10-day countdown!

Eureka Premiere Countdown - 2 Days!

Two days to go until the Season 4.5 premiere!   We can’t wait to hear what you guys think of the new episodes!  (Beginning Monday, July 11^th at 8pm, 7pm Central.)

2 – The Dynamic Duo

There are a lot of things that come in pairs in the Eureka offices.

Water bottles.

Tribbles.

Two steps make it possible for those who are not Ed Fowler, Eric Wallace, or Eric Tuchman (our tallest writers) to reach the top of our corkboard.

But the duo without whom none of Eureka would be possible is our co-showrunners: Jaime Paglia and Bruce Miller.

Thanks guys!  You’ve made Eureka not only a great show, but a great place to work.

Check back here tomorrow at 9am for our last countdown peek inside our offices!

About Us: John Herrera & Nina Fiore

JOHN HERRERA and NINA FIORE
Staff Writers

We have new additions to the Eureka staff this season: writing team Nina Fiore and John Herrera, a.k.a. THE WONDER TWINS!

John and Nina grudgingly agreed to answer five pressing questions: 

EUREKA UNSCRIPTED: So, are you, in fact, twins? 

WONDER TWINS: No. But that does count as a question.

EU: Crap!  Well, then why do they call you that? 

WT: Well, we’re about the same height, have short, dark brown hair.  We’re both of Spanish decent – John Basque, Nina Puerto Rican. We’re both athletes, having competed nationally in competitive sports – John in swimming, Nina in tennis.   We both share a weakness for quoting Terence Stamp in Superman II and frequently find ourselves unable to resist repeating “Kneel before Zod” more often than acceptable in polite society.

EU: Yeah, I was wondering why you said that before we sat down.

WT: Force of habit, sorry. 

EU: Do you always speak with one voice?

WT:  Oh, yes.  We are actually symbiotic beings who will burst into flames if more than 10 feet from each other which makes everything from bathroom breaks to air travel a little… complicated.  Luckily, the smart folks at Eureka engineered this quantum anklet thingy that holds our molecules intact when they separate us in the writer’s room.

EU: Do you ever argue?

WT: No, never-- 

(Now the “Nina” carbon-based life form begins speaking independently.)

NINA: Well… except when you’re wrong.

(The “John” life form now goes rogue as well.)

JOHN: Excuse me?  When am I ever wrong? 

N: For real?  You want me to answer that?

J: If you’ve got an answer, Miss Thing, bring it!

N: Oh, it’s already been brought--

EU: Alright, alright, everybody calm down.  Those anklets don’t have unlimited power—

WT:  This is us calm, thank you very much… and you’ve used up three questions now, pokey, let’s get a move on.  Jaime already thinks we’re slacking off in here.

EU: Okay, okay… why don’t you tell us a little about yourselves… before you became symbiotic, that is.

WT: The John life form will speak first.

J: Your readers may have read my script coordinator bio from last season, but just to refresh, I started writing dark, brooding plays in High School while growing up in the O.C., mostly heady philosophizing, angst and extremely high body counts, and I had a few of those performed around the country before I discovered the wonders of the video camera and a sense of humor.  I went to USC School of Cinema Arts before working at Showtime Original Programming and on the staffs of several series (Including The L Word where Nina and I met) before landing at Eureka as their script coordinator.  I also have a gorgeous wife Tina and a darling little two year-old named Sofia.

N: And I’m from New York and was fortunate to live in both the Bronx (Go Yankees!) and up in the sticks in this little town called Mahopac.  Never losing my love for the city, I moved back to the Bronx the first chance I had attending Fordham University on a tennis scholarship.  After graduation I bartended in New York City to free up my days to write.  But it didn’t take long to discover that if I wanted to write anything people would actually see I needed to get a job in the industry.  Luckily, I found a few set PA gigs on The Manchurian Candidate, The Sopranos and various other New York productions before moving to Los Angeles for a job as the writers’ assistant on The L Word.  There I met, John and have been incredibly fortunate to work nonstop in TV since.  Before landing in Eureka I worked as a script coordinator on the new Starz series, Torchwood: Miracle Day.  And no, I won’t reveal any secrets about the new season, thank you very much.

EU: Aww, man… that was gonna be our next question.

WT: Yeah, well, you’ve only got one left, so you better make it a keeper.

EU: What past Eureka episode do you secretly wish you had thought of first?

WT:  That’s a tough one… so many to choose from (and so many good writers to piss off by not choosing them)… since we are two-in-one, can we pick two?

EU: Sure.

WT:  The Nina life form has a soft spot for Jaime’s Season 4.0 premiere from 1947.  The John life form thinks you should not miss Bruce and Jaime’s 4.5 premiere (airing July 11^th!).  Could we be bigger kiss-asses?

EU: Probably not.  But before we let you go, can you guys say it for us just once… please???

WT: Okay, if you insist… (As the two life forms fist bump) Wonder Twin powers… ACTIVATE!