Oh, what a pity! Eureka is SyFy's only quality show. It may not be SyFy's choice; USA could have pulled the plug. Or maybe even farther up the food chain -- it could have been an NBC decision. SyFy is low man on that totem pole. But whoever it was who decided to cancel Eureka, off with HIS head!

Monday night, when we turned on Eureka, I realized I was grinning. The show hadn't even started yet, and already I was grinning. How many shows can create that kind of anticipation?

Here's what the New York Times says:

Reversing what it had said just last week, Syfy now says it has canceled “Eureka,” a playful science-fiction series that the channel has broadcast since 2006.

The final season, its fifth, will have its debut early next year. “The 2012 episodes are some of the best we’ve seen, and will bring this great series to a satisfying end,” the channel said in a statement.

To disappointed fans, that sounded like a flip-flop. Last Thursday Syfy’s president of programming, Mark Stern, told Entertainment Weekly that the channel had committed to a six-episode sixth season. But there was a miscommunication. Inside a sprawling company like NBC Universal, which owns Syfy, giving the green light to a new season of a show requires approvals by many layers of bosses, and those approvals apparently had not been given.

Syfy did not elaborate on Tuesday, but called the move not to order a sixth season a “difficult business decision.”

We finally got a Jack episode on Torchwood, but what a downer! This show has turned really dark. That last episode evidently is the set-up for the conclusion, so some relief has to be on the way.

Yeah, it was a downer, all right. Bleak. But Doctor Who is back, as wild and witty as ever.

Incidentally, the 2-hour opener of Terra Nova cost $16 million to make.

That's obscene.

A new semi-regular character is joining NCIS. I was hoping it would be a new Director, but he's an FBI agent. I hope he's not replacing Fornell, because he and Jethro play off each other so well. Oops, just realized this is the wrong topic. Oh well.

Naughty Rita.

In a way, Torchwood is Children of Men in reverse, but very like that movie in its unnatural and so far unexplained interference with the cycle of life and death. They're also similar in the way they show the quick breakdown of normal life and the despair and desperation that follow. Grim.

The movie Torchwood makes me think of is Blindness -- this horrendous event that the populace is in no way prepared to cope with, the panic, the helplessness. That movie ends with the beginning of the return to normalcy, and Torchwood seems headed in the same direction. The ending of Children of Men is more problematic (and more effective, IMO); the ray of hope we're given comes with a big question mark attached. But all three share that same heavy atmosphere of despair, so difficult to achieve fully and remain credible.

A more upbeat Torchwood this week, if you can call the death of an old man and Jack's getting shot "upbeat". But they're rolling toward a solution now, not paralyzed by despair. Wayne Knight is arrested, and look who the new CIA head honcho is...John DeLancie. Guy gets around.

I'm wondering how it can all be wrapped up in just one more episode; I hope Torchwood doesn't leave a lot of loose ends dangling the way BSG did. I'm especially concerned about Jack's kiss of death -- what in the world is behind that?

Is anyone watching Haven? It seems to have picked up the weirdness torch from Eureka, but without the humor.