The bright side is that it’s taken me nearly through the end of Eureka’s third season to finish watching an episode and think it was truly bad television. We don’t always get so lucky with the shows we follow.

But I can’t sugar-coat this: what a mind-numbing way to spend an hour. Recapping the storyline doesn’t even matter (hmm, a clue to the problem?). For some reason it was designed as a “flashback” episode, you know the type; and I sat there pondering whether this was the season finale (it wasn’t) or whether someone was about to die (no one did) or whether some huge Eureka-altering event was about to unfold (nope). Near as I can tell, the flashbacks served no purpose other than dragging the episode down, down, down. And I even like to reminisce.

So the story’s about people in town losing their memories, and thus their capacity to function, due to these little “storycatcher” devices that are part of a time capsule project. I suspect the attempt was to juxtapose flashbacks against scenes of people not knowing who they are. But the storycatchers and the time capsule (and the other storyline about the General Dynamics facility preparing for a very rigorous “sonic cleaning”) aren’t important or even really interesting, and neither is the knowledge that this little flub is Fargo’s fault (because many things in Eureka are Fargo’s fault). My attention waned even before the flashbacks started.

(And one side snark about the flashbacks: Why did none of them include crazy Jim Taggert? The teaser for the next episode during the final credits previewed the return of Taggert to Eureka; oh gee, what if there had been a way to remind viewers who that guy was?)

As for the big picture, all you need to know is that Allison had her baby. Lucky for her, labor to birth spanned only about 20 minutes, and Zoe delivered the baby (which everyone must have thought was a crackerjack idea because no one sent for an actual doctor when given the chance).

So I debated between a 1 or a 2 on my rating scale, and settled on the latter, which might be a tad generous but I’ll stand by it. Here’s the saving grace from the lower rating: on this show, we’ve seen worse acting, we’ve seen worse dialogue, and we’ve seen worse story decisions (in each case other aspects, much better done, have kept those episodes from ruin). But a meaningless episode is still, at the end of the night, an utter waste of time.

Reviewer rating: 2 out of 5 S.A.R.A.H.s