So, What Happens In Burma has this exchange:

Peter: In the last year, it was held in a secured vault at a state mining facility, under army guard, in the middle of a jungle.
Neal: Not exactly a prime location for a college kid to just walk in and grab it.
Peter: No. The mine is in the Mogok Valley.
Neal: You can get there by a helicopter or a seven-hour jeep ride over some nasty terrain.
Jones: You just know these things?
Neal: Yeah, that's why they keep me around.
Peter: Mm.
Neal: You'd need some muscle, a cargo plane, and a few grand in bribe money just to get started.
Peter: You would?
Neal: And who knows what else? Because I've never considered stealing gems in Burma.

(Emphasis added.)

In Forging Bonds, when Mozzie walks in with the information on Kate's whereabouts, Neal is doing some red-ink work on a map. The conversation there:

Neal: Hey. Rubies in Burma. I'm gonna need a bush plane to get–

–and then he sees the look on Mozzie's face and asks him if his pigeon died.

( Tongue-in-cheek examination of probably-unintentional canon implication. )

'cause I really love Eleventh Hour. (The British version, with Patrick Stewart. I hear that they're making an American version, and I really wish they'd stop doing that. The British version is fine, guys, it's just fine.)

1) It's a pretty bold genre. Billing itself as science-based rather than science-fiction, it aims to produce shows looking at scientific problems as they exist today.

This is HELLA COOL.

I'm a sci-fi junkie, from space opera/science fantasy all the way up to Dragon's Egg-style hard SF, and I still think this is hella cool. Or perhaps that's why I think this is hella cool. Of course, it's subject to the lensing effect where the more rigorous they try to me, the more sensitive I am to things that don't seem *quite* right, but it's a show that tries, at least, and manages to make running around after scientific things pretty gritty and gripping. How many of my nerd buttons don't get pressed, there?

2) It's adorably idealistic about science, even when it's being gritty with its dark lighting and its (quite good, actually) dramatic music and cinematography. The main character, Professor Ian Hood, will stop to explain scientific concepts to his bodyguard in a way that shows passion and respect for the field and isn't at all hokey. (Or maybe it's a little hokey. Any time you have someone stand there and exposit, it's hokey. But it's hokey in a way that makes me think that the writers, the actors, and their expected audience really want to know about this science and are eager to share it.

I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was adorably idealistic itself. It focused more often on social and political issues, but that sort of real care about real things in fiction is still my intellectual comfort food. (And then Star Trek slowly became less and less about the ideas and more and more about the franchise and the action, and... I died a little. But this! This is good! And I am grooving on it SO HARD right now!)

3) It's incredibly well put-together. I may complain about the official procedure and how a few of the incidental characters seem more useless/to know more than they should or that it really doesn't feel like appropriate precautions are being taken in this situation or that, but the plots are tightly-woven and well-layered and even if I can predict a twist or two, I feel rewarded. I caught two of the twists in episode 3 before, Kryptos, before they were revealed, and BOTH TIMES I reacted not with a groan but with a "You clever BASTARDS!". The ways in which plot elements are introduced and recur are an absolute joy to watch.

Add that with the direction, cinematography, and music, and WAH. I'm hooked. I love it. It's polished in exactly the ways I like it to be. (Though I will maintain that the lighting of the hospitals and clinics in the first episode was patently unrealistic, even if the visual effect was pretty nice.)

4) Patrick Stewart.

...what? I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'm pretty sure I said this. And I ♥ Patrick Stewart a great deal from those days.

I had a conversation with my brother once about people who got into arguments about things like how Sisko (Deep Space 9) could beat up Captain Picard (The Next Generation). But that was the thing. Picard never needed to beat up anyone. There were other options available to him.

I love that this is the kind of person Stewart plays. In Eleventh Hour, he's the scientist. Science is the Cause for which they fight, and it's that which leads to the resolution. Science is worth fighting for. It's worth drama. It's worth having a show made about it, and Stewart infuses that role not only with the high notes of passion and drama, but with the sort of presence that says he believes that, too. And... ♥. Just ♥. ♥ forever.