Category Archives: Eureka Season 5

I really miss this place

 

image from i.imgur.com

I took this picture on one of the last days of production.

Whenever I watch Eureka this season, and I see an advert on the network formerly known as Sci-Fi for one of their stupid goddamn are-you-serious-with-this-bullshit reality shows, I get angry and then sad. Eureka was and is such a great show, and it deserved better than it got from the network. I guess if we knew then what we know now, we would have put in more ghosts and wrestling.

 

Colin, Jaime, and Neil came over for boardgames and homebrew last weekend. We had so much fun, what was intended to be a few hours of goofing off turned into an entire day and most of the evening. 

 

image from i.imgur.com

Neil Grayston, Colin Ferguson, some nerd, Jaime Paglia

I love the stories and characters on Eureka, and I am really proud of the work I did as Doctor Parrish… but what I miss most about Eureka is getting to see these people (and others who are not pictured) every day.

Afterthought – In comments, Jeff L. makes a point that I agree with:

To a point, I recognize the reality shows as a necessary evil in the current cable marketplace. The much higher margin on shows like that is what enables the channel to put on the more expensive scripted stuff. And you can make the case that a lot of the reality stuff is at least tangentally related to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Genres (wrestling, on the other hand, pure money grab).

Based on the ratings for its scripted shows, if SyFy tried to run on a schedule of mostly original programming, it would probably be off the air in 6 months. So I've chosen to just watch what I like through the miracle of Tivo (and I try to do it within one day for max ratings bump) and I just ignore the ads for the shows I don't like.

Syfy may not be the destination channel it once was, but they still put out some quality programming, and as noted, they are a business so they can't really be blamed for making business decisions, as much as we personally may disagree with the whys and hows of them.

When I talk about how much I miss Eureka, and how much I want to kick certain NBC/Universal executives in the nuts for cancelling it, I readily admit that I'm not coming from a rational place. I am coming from an emotional place, because something that meant a lot to me was taken away.

I get it, it's business, and I'm not going to pretend that it's anything different… but I'm also not going to pretend that, for me, it isn't personal on some irrational level.

I’m on a boat: On the Delivery of Technobabble

I’m on JoCoCruiseCrazy 2, and I’m taking an Internet vacation until I get home. So every day while I’m gone, something from my archives will post here automatically, for your entertainment. I had a lot of fun picking these different things out, and I hope you enjoy them again, or for the first time.

On the Delivery of Technobabble

Originally published May 2011.

I was in three scenes yesterday, one of which contained a massive amount of technobabble.

For those who don't know what that is: on a sci-fi show, technobabble is what we call pseudoscientific dialog like "I'll have to run a level four diagnostic on the antimatter inversion matrix to be sure." It's pretty much the worst dialog an actor can have to deliver on a show, because it's rarely connected to anything in reality, and if we're talking about the inertial dampeners in a scene, we're pretty much infodumping to the audience, instead of doing something interesting with our characters.

…or so I thought until yesterday.

The thing about technobabble is that it isn't usually connected to reality. By that, I mean that though it does follow the logical rules of the show's universe, and references things the fans know about, for most actors, it's like being asked to perform in a foreign language that you barely understand (if you understand it at all.)

The other thing about technobabble is that the character delivering it is supposed to be an expert on the subject, and should have a point of view about it that stays alive through the whole scene. For example, maybe Doctor Hoobajoo is the leading expert in the galaxy on ion resonance within the subspace induction processor core, so when Doctor Hoobajoo talks about that subject, she's an expert. You can't ask her a single question about the subspace induction processor core that she can't answer. But for the actor playing Doctor Hoobajoo, she has to deliver a bunch of dialog based on something that doesn't even exist as if she's been studying it her whole life.

This is a tremendous challenge for the actor, because, unlike normal dialog that comes from an emotional place, technobabble comes from memories that don't exist. While the actor who plays Doctor Hoobajoo can draw on the emotional memory of being betrayed, or being afraid, or being in love to inform a scene, she can't draw on the memory of studying and mastering the twin fields of ion resonance and subspace induction. As an actor, it's easy to fall into the trap of delivering technobabble by rote, and for a lot of us, it's the only way we can remember those lines at all.

But sometimes, a scene is emotionally important, and is filled with technobabble. That's just the reality of working in science fiction. So when Doctor Hoobajoo is trapped in the power conduit with Commander Framitz, her former lover from her first deployment who left her for an android, and can only save them from certain depolarizaion by repairing a malfunction in the subspace induction processor core, the actor has a lot of work to do. Not only does the actor have to be an expert who can solve the problem and save their lives, she has to be emotionally connected to the scene and the history between the two characters. Oh, and she has to remember that the stakes in this case are pretty high. And she has to do this over and over again for several hours, during the master shot, the VFX shots, and all the coverage.

Boy, writing those three paragraphs just exhausted me. I'll be back in a little bit.

Okay, some coffee and steel cut oats seem to have revitalized me, so I can get to my point now, about what I realized yesterday:

I had a scene that was almost entirely technobabble. It sets up a lot of the action for the episode, tells the audience what's at stake, and gets them excited enough to sit through commercials for MegaSomething versus Giant Other Thing to find out what happens next. I drove the scene. Everyone else was reacting to me and the information I gave them, and I think I had one line in two pages that wasn't technobabble. It was challenging, and I knew from experience that I was going to have trouble remembering the jargon, so I did a lot of extra homework to make sure I was totally prepared. 

As I did my preparation, I realized that while the technobabble is just a dump of information, it's information that Doctor Parrish has an opinion about. The function of the scene is to get the action going and give the audience some important information, but that doesn't mean it has to be an infodump. The way Doctor Parrish feels about the other characters affects the way he talks with them regardless of the words. It affects who he chooses to give certain bits of information to, and it affects how he delivers the information. So I found ways to be emotionally connected to the scene and the characters, while caring about the information I was giving them, so it wasn't an infodump. A scene that could have been tedious and boring became a scene that was a lot of fun to perform.

Still, it was really hard to remember all the technobabble I had, and at one point, when I blanked on a line, my Star Trek skills automatically sprung to life, went into failsafe mode, and made me say "blah blah emit blah pulse blah blah blah." (The fun of technobabble is that a lot of the words are interchangeable. The frustration of technobabble is that we can't paraphrase or use any of the interchangeable words, because a subspace matrix is different from a subspace array.)

It honestly could have been boring and exhausting to spend much of a day delivering technobabble, but when I realized that I could keep it interesting by endowing the technobabble with emotional resonance, the whole thing came to life in a surprising and unexpected way. It was like I'd detected anomalies in the starboard neutrino emitter, and instead of adjusting the warp plasma induction subroutine to compensate for multiadaptive fluctuations, like you'd usually do, I thought about it, and equalized the portable phase transmission with a self-sealing warp core transmuter.

I know, right? I bet you never thought to do it that way. Well, I did, and it worked.

 

Eureka: This One Time At Space Camp

In a few hours, I will be picked up and taken to the set for my last day on Eureka. Though I've known this day was coming for a couple of weeks, and I've been trying to prepare myself for it, I'm not ready. I don't want this to be over. I don't want to say goodbye to my friends.

Monday, we had our last day of work in Cafe Diem. At the end of the day, Chris Gauthier and Nial Matter were wrapped for the entire series, along with some other actors who are [SPOILER]. I stood there, next to Neil and Felicia, and applauded for them. Then, without warning, I began to cry. It's real. It's really over. We're really done. In two days, I'll finish my last scene, and the first AD will call out, "That is a series wrap for Wil Wheaton," and I'll cry again.

I'm glad to feel sad, as strange as that may sound. I know I've said this about some other things, but it's true: I'm happy to be sad when something is ending, because if I wasn't, it would mean that nothing good happened that I will miss.

I will miss everything about Eureka. I'm going to be a wreck tonight.

So let's talk a bit about This One Time, At Space Camp, shall we? It's going to be Spoileriffic, so you have been warned (or you've already been spoiled, because you follow me on Twitter. Sorry about that.)

I learned to ride a recumbant bike for this episode. It was challenging, but not as difficult as I expected, and ended up being quite a lot of fun. I also think that "May the best man BLAH BLAH BLAH" is my favorite Parrish line of the series.

Wasn't Aaron Douglas magnificent? I loved seeing him play totally against his usual type, and I loved the way he interacted with the kids.

We talked a lot about how douchey Parrish should be in this episode. I wanted to let him be as supremely arrogant as possible, because he's convinced that all of this is just a formality at this point. I wanted him to lift himself up as high as he possibly could, so the fall at the end of the episode would be that much more brutal for him (and awesome for the audience, who are almost certainly cheering for Holly and Fargo at this point, if we've all done our jobs.) 

I watched the episode with Neil and Chris in Neil's trailer during breaks in filming, and when Fargo makes it but Parrish doesn't, Neil pointed at sad Parrish on the television, and did a Nelson Muntz HA HA right at him and then at me. It was really, really funny.

Can we just take a moment to marvel at how incredible Wallace Shawn was, too? I mean, holy shit was he incredible. We're so lucky he is part of the show, and you guys haven't even seen the best of it, yet.

Weeping for Titan,

#TeamParrish

This is a post about PAX Prime, which is suddenly upon us.

It's raining in Vancouver. Little rivulets of water are running down the window, as low clouds slowly move across downtown, swallowing up the tops of buildings as they roll by.

I have a late call today. I'm in one scene, and then I'm off until next Monday. Tomorrow morning, I'm going home to get ready for PAX.

I can't believe that PAX is already here. In years past, I've counted down for the entire month of August and most of July, but this year I've been so busy, not only have I not had time to count down to PAX, I haven't even had time to play games. In fact, if it wasn't for Pirates and Carcassonne on my iPad, and the occasional attempt to pull three stars on the last few non-three-starred levels in Mario Kart DS*, I wouldn't have played any video games at all**.

I have this bag of travel dice that I keep in my backpack, you know, just in case… I occasionally take it out and empty them into my hand. I look at them for a moment, the way normal people look through a photo album, and then I roll them a few times, just so I can hear the sound they make as they clatter onto the table. It makes me smile for a moment, before then I sadly put them away again. I haven't played actual boardgames more than once or twice since last PAX, and I haven't played an RPG at all. It's good to be busy, and I'm incredibly grateful for it… but I'm so excited to go to PAX and play games for four days, I can hardly sit still right now.

If you're coming to PAX, this information may be relevant to your interests:

My Schedule: 

Friday 2:30pm -3:30pm in the Pegasus Theatre – THE AWESOME HOUR WITH ME WIL WHEATON

Wil Wheaton first came to PAX in 2007, when he gave the keynote address that your parents won't stop making you listen to in the car. In 2008, he returned for a panel that asked and answered the burning question, "Can Wil Wheaton really be a panel all by himself?" This year, Commodore Wil Wheaton welcomes you aboard the USS AWESOME for 60 minutes of story-telling, lingerie-dodging, mirth-making, myth-making, iconoclasting, and the obligatory burning-questioning … ing.

Saturday 3:30pm-5:30pm in the Main Theatre - Acquisitions, Inc: The Last Will and Testament of James Darkmagic I

Jim Darkmagic receives a magical missive, informing him that his grandfather has died. There's to be a reading of the Last Will and Testament at the family estate. Not long after the family convenes, wackiness ensues.Join Gabe, Tycho, Scott Kurtz and Wil Wheaton as they guide Jim Darkmagic, Binwin Bronzebottom, Omin Dran and Aeofel "Al" Elhromane through an unscripted Dungeons & Dragons adventure before a live audience.

 

I'm going to have a booth, and I'll be signing stuff and trading shiny gold rocks for nifty things, like the special edition of The Happiest Days of Our Lives, my short collection of gaming essays Games Matter (expanded to include the complete text of my PAX Prime and PAX East keynotes), and an assortment of delightful 8×10 photographs, perfect for framing or folding into origami dicks. I won't have any of the new 3 Wheaton Moon T-shirts, but I will have a few 3 Wheaton Moon posters. I'm not bringing too many, because I don't know if anyone else in the world thinks it's as funny as I do and I don't want to have to haul them back home.

Anne thinks I should bring some of my cheesy 80s pinup posters, so that's going to happen. I'll also make a few of the Compleat Workes Of Mee Wil Wheatone DVDs. I imagine those will go quickly, though, so get there early if you want one.

I'm not going to spend too much time in my booth, though, because I desperately need to make up for the appalling lack of gaming in my life for the last 365ish days. I'll post a schedule when I get there, and probably blather about it on the Twitterbox, too.

Oh!! I hope that you'll bring me dice, so I can continue testing my theory that it's not possible to have too many dice … but that will be in its own post a little later today.

Wow. PAX is in four days. I can't believe it's actually here.

*Seriously, fuck you, Rainbow Road. Fuck you right in the face with a blue shell.

**Until last night, when I finally finished the single player of Portal 2. IN SPAAAAAAAACE.

I’ve never been so grateful to be so exhausted.

"How are you feeling?" The question sounded like it had been asked by a person standing at the other end of an aluminum tube, possibly while underwater.

"I can taste sound, and I can hear color," I said, only partially joking. "Can someone please turn down the sky?"

It was just before 8 in the morning, and I had been awake for close to 27 hours. I was standing in the airport in Vancouver, but my day had actually begun in Portland, because I'm working on two shows at once, playing Cha0s in the season finale of Leverage and Doctor Parrish in what it turns out is the series finale penultimate episode of Eureka.

This is a weird and awesome life, and I've never been so grateful to be so exhausted.

Because this happened in the middle of the night, and was only on Twitter, most of you missed it. However, it's hilarious to me and I wanted to make sure you saw it:

@TimHutton: return of the @BethJRiesgraf robot with an introduction by @wilw http://www.twitvid.com/9DSZG

and

@TimHutton: and now… almost live from west linn oregon, @wilw as mecha Chaos and… wait for it…… #Leverage http://www.twitvid.com/6X3ZW

We really do have this much fun when we work together (remember this and this from Eureka last season?) but we can still focus and get the work done … though I'm not sure it's really accurate to call it "work", when we love what we do so much.

I was worried that I would be so tired and spacey by today that there was a real risk that Doctor Parrish and Cha0s would bleed into each other, so I made two lists on the back of a script page. One is titled Cha0s, and the other is titled Dr. Parrish. On each list, I wrote down all the defining charactaristics, as simply and specifically as possible, for each character, so I have it clearly in my head and available to me at a glance on the set. I also drew a thick black line all the way down the page, to remind myself that there needs to be a firewall between the two of them. And because I know it'll be a FAQ, the fundamental difference between the two of them is: Isaac is, in his heart, basically a good person who is a little insecure, and easily annoyed. Cha0s, though, is basically a bad person who is profoundly arrogant, and easily amused.

I have a mercifully late call to Eureka today, before I head back to PDX at ouch-it-hurts-me-are-you-fucking-serious-o'clock tomorrow … and I couldn't be happier about that.