Code Name: Eternity

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Code Name: Eternity was a low-budget Canadian sci-fi series that ran for 26 episodes in 1999. Sci Fi channel later reran the series in 2005.

The story follows an alien, Banning, who takes on human form and comes to Earth, intending to alter the environment to make it suitable for his species. Since this will kill all humans on Earth, another alien, Ethaniel, is sent with a team to stop him. The solution may lie with Ethaniel's brother Thorber, who worked for Banning, but escaped with some of his secrets and is now missing. With the help of his psychologist and love interest, Laura, Ethaniel tries to hunt down his brother and figure out how to live like a human on Earth.

The main characters are:

  • Ethaniel (Cameron Bancroft), a stoic alien;
  • Dr. Laura Keating (Ingrid Kavelaars), a psychologist who specializes in psychic phenomena;
  • Dent (Gordon Currie), a shapeshifting robot;
  • David Banning (Andrew Gillies), the evil alien mastermind who uses a high-tech company to front his research;
  • Byder (Joseph Baldwin), a conspiracy theorist who helps Laura and Ethaniel uncover Banning's plots; and
  • Tawrens (Olivier Gruner), a member of Ethaniel's original team, who was brainwashed into serving Banning.

Tropes used in Code Name: Eternity include:


  • Clip Show: "Underground." As often happens when a show's episodes are aired out of order, it includes clips of episodes that hadn't aired yet.
  • Cut Short: The finale episode starts to resolve the season-long arc, such as it was, and then ends in a cliffhanger and "To Be Continued."
  • Follow That Car!: In "Making Love," when Laura pursues the mind-controlled Ethaniel, she gets in the cab and says "I can't believe I'm saying this, but follow that car."
  • Green Rooming: Caused by getting Screwed by the Network. If you put the episodes in a rational order, Byder shows up about a third of the way through and becomes Laura and Ethaniel's sidekick, and Tawrens shows up about two-thirds of the way through the season to replace him, with a few episodes of overlap. In the order the series was aired, Byder shows up in Episode 3 and Tawrens in Episode 7, and they randomly appear and are forgotten at odd stretches.
  • Out of Order
  • "Previously On...": Includes clips from episodes that hadn't aired at the time.
  • Screwed by the Network: The episodes were run completely out of order, making the storyline completely nonsensical.
  • The Spock: Ethaniel.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifting: Dent, a humanoid robot.