What About Bob?

Where’s Tag? Is Jim Taggart gone for good?

One guy I’ve been missing lately is the unique and colorful Jim Taggart, fondly known as Tag. Some of my favorite episodes have included Tag’s Australian accent, his hiking boots and hunting vest, his nude form and his obsession with Lojack, the dog that first put in an appearance in the 2-hour premiere.

Taggart is Eureka’s biological containment specialist and working veterinarian and he would have been a great asset to have around in Show Me the Mummy and even What About Bob?, and yet he never appeared. Season three of Eureka has been entirely Tag-less.

With Taggart’s fondness for mechanical animals (think geese from Duck, Duck Goose — Season 2), I imagine he would have had an awesome biomimetic dog for Eureka’s dog show (think Best in Faux — Season 3), but he never put in an appearance.

I spent some time searching online, but all I could really come up with was the fact that Jim Taggart’s actor Matt Frewer spent quite a bit of time last year working on the Canadian drama Intelligence. I’ve never heard of the show before now, but then again, I’m not Canadian and it’s not scifi.

What it comes down to is that the Eureka writers might have just eased Taggart out of the series. Although I would love to have the show address what has happened to Jim Taggart (because I haven’t noticed yet that they have), I’m afraid Tag is gone for good.

Mummies, bugs and critters. Eureka’s future?

When I watch Eureka, I’m looking for the unique mixture of science and fiction that has always made up the show in the past. The first episode was based on the premise of a messed up time machine, followed by an episode about cloning.

There’s been the virus shows and the artifact shows, shows about genetics and a great many shows about out of control technology. Now we’re venturing into the monster shows. First that was What About Bob?, now there’s been Show Me the Mummy.

What About Bob? might have technically been a genetics episode, but the title guy, Bob, could have been Voyager’s Tom Paris. Tom just happened to devolve (or was it evolve?) into a lizard. The episode was Threshold and it wasn’t one of my favorites. I’m a forgiving viewer. If I like a show I’ll let it get away with just about anything… But that’s not to say I don’t raise my eyebrows and wonder what the heck the show-runners are thinking.

I actually liked What About Bob? but Show Me the Mummy didn’t make my list of can’t-miss episodes. You might think it was the Mummy I objected to, but it wasn’t. The bugs bugged me.

No, that isn’t even right. The bugs didn’t bother me until the music entered the picture. I have no problem believing the frequency of Lexi’s music could have attracted the bugs, but to believe that it was possible to round up every last bug in that freezer in a one shot deal just boggles my mind. So, an otherwise interesting episode lost a lot of luster for me right then and I downgraded my rating from a 4/5, possible 5/5, to a 3/5.

I hope Show Me the Mummy is the last organic/biological villain show we have for a while. I do like monster shows, but I prefer technology over biology any day!

The next episode to appear on Scifi’s schedule is Phased and Confused. The title inspires me to speculate wonderful things. :-)

What About Bob?

Where’s Tag? Is Jim Taggart gone for good?

Mummies, bugs and critters. Eureka’s future?

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