'Eureka' Season 4, Episode 8 Recap

('Eureka' - 'The Ex-Files') "You never said who you were seeing." --Allison Blake to Charles Grant
"Tall, leggy blonde, slinky red dress." --Grant

That, my friends, was a good one. In an obvious nod to James Callis's other little sci-fi and Syfy, role, the entire episode revolved around familiar faces making return appearances. Beverly Barlowe's return last week was apparently just the beginning of a whole slew of 'Eureka' return engagements. And that wasn't even the main story.

Giving Trevor, I mean Charles Grant a little more character, it turns out that he's against using research facilities like Global Dynamics for the purpose of creating weapons of mass destruction, or chaos, or anything else that the military and General Mansfield want the facility churning out like it's an assembly line.

The military was a necessary evil in his day to get Eureka off the ground and running, but as most big research companies can tell you, it's just as necessary today to maintain funding.

It looks like this reality's Beverly Barlowe didn't fall too far from the tree of her counterpart in the original timeline. I say that with very little information so far as to her true motives, which is kind of how she always operated. It must have been nice for her to have a new face who didn't know anything about her to manipulate into doing her bidding. Dr. Old Spice was in the right place and is apparently from the right time, though why we just don't know yet.

She and her consortium tricked Grant into helping them get the DED device just so they could use its power source to send him back to 1947 so he can "change the world." Now, that could mean change the world to what she and her shady group of backers want it to be, or even change it back to what it was before the time travel event of the season began. I'm fully invested in the dramatic potential of this new reality, so I don't really want everything to go back to the way it was, but I can see the storytelling value in doing so. Especially now that everyone is finally starting to settle into their new lives.

Only Jo continues to suffer needlessly. When specters from everyone's memories began to haunt them, a clever way to bring back Nathan Stark without really having to do it, it was only Jo who's moment of clarity backfired on her so horribly. She was also the only person who was hallucinating a person who also was co-existing around her. So, of course she spoke her mind and gave closure to her parallel world relationship with Zane to the real Zane from this reality, rather than the memory that had been haunting her.

Two things come out of that. If she didn't have her "moment" with the Zane memory, then how could it have gone away, unless it was listening in, or if it didn't matter if it was there or not? More potentially intriguing is that the real Zane from the new reality now has the version of his grandmother's ring from the original timeline that he gave Jo there. That means there are two rings in this altered timeline, and he could pretty easily figure that out. What would he think then? That Jo is so obsessed with him she made a copy of his grandmother's ring, or maybe something a little closer to the truth.

Charles Grant's vision of Beverly's father from when he knew him in 1947 helped encourage him to do the wrong thing, though he didn't know it at the time. Did he have his moment of clarity that would eliminate that guy? Am I overthinking the need for that moment of confrontation with their inner demons to exorcise the visions? 'Eureka' doesn't usually carry elements from the B-story into the next episode, and it would take some fancy exposition to explain the continuance of any visions from this week.

I figured out that Tess and Stark were figments of their imaginations pretty quickly, but they got me pretty good with the first appearance of Fargo's arch-nemesis from the fifth grade. That a little girl gave him the stones to finally stand up to General Mansfield was just sheer brilliance. That it took some outside prodding to get Allison and Jack to finally admit their feelings for one another makes perfect sense, too. Particularly in Jack's case, as he'd been harboring and doing nothing about his feelings for Allison for years now.

With the next new episode (in two weeks) being the season, or mid-season, finale there's a good chance they're going to throw things for a loop. Could this be the end of James Callis as a cast member of the show, as he could easily stay back in 1947. The stakes have never been higher, with all of reality hanging in the balance. We could come back to Eureka 1.0, 2.0 or a whole new 3.0!