In the final moments of Eureka's fourth episode this season, "I Do Over," Nathan Stark (Ed Quinn) seems to vanish into time, and the characters think he's dead. Fans reeled: Why kill off Nathan, a character that has grown in interesting ways since his introduction early in season 1, and who worked so effectively as a counterpoint to Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) and Henry (Joe Morton)?

Is he dead? Does this leave the way clear for Carter and Allison (Salli Richardson) to get together? Is this a good thing for the show? Is it another case of killing off the third wheel, a phenomenon I discussed earlier in the year?

Check out the preliminary thinking here.

Young wizard Harry Potter is the latest victim of last winter's writers' strike: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, originally slated for Thanksgiving release, has been pushed back to next July to fill the void in the Warner Brothers' summer blockbuster schedule left by a hundred days without writers.

The irony is that the special effects-heavy film was apparently on schedule for its Nov. 21 release – in fact production is reportedly already complete. It's being moved to July 17 not because director David Yates needs more time to finish the movie, but because the studio needs a summer cash machine and expects the climactic Half-Blood Prince, the sixth film in the Harry Potter series, to deliver in spades.

"We are still feeling the repercussions of the writers strike, which impacted the readiness of scripts for other films – changing the competitive landscape for 2009 and offering new windows of opportunity that we wanted to take advantage of," said Warners president Alan Horn. "We agreed the best strategy was to move Half-Blood Prince to July, where it perfectly fills the gap for a major tentpole release for midsummer."

In other words, Half-Blood Prince is going to sit in a can for eight months just so that Warners won't have a weak summer. This despite the fact that its screenwriter, Steve Kloves, fretted to Entertainment Weekly that the Potter movies might start to tank without regular book releases to support them.
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