Scorpion disc 1 the final stretch
As you can tell from the episodes, I’m referring to in my fic, I’ve got well into season 2, and have caught up with the point where I started watching the show on TV. Anyway, I thought this was a strong run to the end of the season.
Disc 5
‘Going South’ starts off with the notorious local TV news interview, which Walter decided to do without telling anyone, in which he came off as self-aggrandising and hacked off the whole team, except Sylvester who has decided to tell him about him and Megan. When Sly does rip off that particular bandage, it’s well after they’ve got to Mexico (realising my hopes when I saw the title).
They’re on the case of a kidnapped tech giant’s daughter. I kept expecting her to have Stockholm syndrome, but no, the cartel who had her were just your regular bad guys.
But the team is not at its most united - Happy goes renegade, Toby can’t let the interview go and Sly is heartbroken because Walter doesn’t seem to think he’s good enough for his sister. They get it together after Cabe (so badass) barks at them.
It turns out that Paige can speak better Spanish than all of the geniuses. There’s also a heart-in-mouth moment where Walter smartly rescues a pinned down Paige.
Walter eventually apologises for being a dingbat and, urged by Paige, talks to Sylvester, revealing it’s not what Sly thought, but that he’s worried about how Sly will handle losing Megan. Sylvester again shows he’s braver than Walter, and there’s a nice bit of acting to suggest Walter dimly discerning this.
Walter turns down a job offer from the relieved father who will return again. This happens to better music than the show usually plays, while Sly and Megan have a touching dance.
I’m going to try not to use capslpock when discussing ‘Once Bitten, Twice Die’, but it’s the crackiest s1 episode. Walter is playing around with greenscreen, Paige has been taking ‘European history’ night classes (from now on, I will replace ‘normal’ with ‘liberal arts type’) and has thus become an expert on ‘Lithuanian/Latvian/Belarus’ history and customs, which is handy because those three countries are on the verge of war, apparently, if secret negotiations held at the very place Cabe’s favourite cowboy movie was shot don’t work.
There’s a State Department person who is persistently rude to Paige until she isn’t. I mean, Walter is rude to a president, also, but that’s par for the course. Toby is rude to a fellow doctor, which Happy finds hot - it’s enough for her to initiate their first kiss.
A president is poisoned. Paige and Walter work out it was snake poison (I was hoping for a spider bite from the title). Walter asks Happy to punch him. Walter shares Indiana Jones’s feelings for snakes, but deliberately lets one bite him for reasons, the team acquire Ferret Bueller, who is important in fanon. This episode’s Improbable Vehicle is a burrito van or something. Cabe gets to be a cowboy and Walter wakes up to find his team averted world war three without him, but kind of because of him.
Whew.
There’s also stuff about Cabe and Walter’s past, Cabe trusting his team (Paige) and annoying Merrick, his boss, both of which will play out in the rest of the season. There’s fallout from the Valentine’s Day ep, with a poisoned Walter rambling about the date that wasn’t. He’s candid about how amazing he thinks Paige is to Cabe, but only gives her a ‘Buck up, I’m proud of you’ speech before her exam.
It is a step up in ridiculousness and thoroughly entertaining.
‘Young Hearts Spark Fire’ is a bit less cracky, which is still a whole lot crackier than most shows.
Toby calls Walter out on his changing behaviour around Paige, in a very Tobyish way, involving a diagram on a whiteboard. It’s very evident that Toby’s feelings for Happy make him want everyone to be in love. He’s going to follow up that kiss however much Happy tries to shut him down.
So, both guys try to rescue their lady loves (although Walter doing this for Paige is a given) . At the point when they think they’re going to die from FIRE, Toby more or less declares his feelings for Happy, while Walter, despite all his denials, holds hands with Paige at the same moment.
Also, Cabe plays dad-at-a-distance to all his kids, Sly has to spend time with a brash military pilot who reminds him of his father (not good) but does something heroic and earns his stand-in father figure’s approval
The plot: trying to rescue some kids lost in a forest before wildfires start, most of team Scorpion are involved in a helicopter crash. So the rescue party has to find the kids and get to the extraction point hoping Cabe won’t have given up on looking for them and that they won’t get caught by the fire.
‘Crossroads’ starts with Happy drssing up for The Date with Toby, who self-sabotages by falling asleep because he gave himself a tawelydd. There is violence and despite his grovelling, no forgiveness (as the rest of the team observes.)
Their case is protecting a witness against a gang of very bad men, who tried to kill her. They promise to protect her, but because there’s a mole in law enforcement, their useful suggestions don’t work. So they have to go it alone, and Paige then diagnoses that Maia, the witness, is a pregnant genius (Walter observes that her IQ is lower than his.)
Cue a road trip, Cabe is dad, Quintis the squabbling kids. There’s a Speed-referencing hig velocity stunt in the improbable vehicle of the week: a high-tech RV. The action really is impressive.The team find a way of doing the right thing - enabling Maia to give her testimony safely.
All this makes Toby tell Walter bluntly that he needs to take risks with Paige. Walter has been espousing the view that romance in the workplace is a bad thing, which Happy now agrees with. (Paige diagnoses Happy’s trust issues.) Walter actually goes over to Paige’s place to Declare His Feelings, but sees Drewhas returned early from Portland and is over there. Walter is crushed.
Of course he didn’t rub ot the stick figure drawing by Toby of him and Paige holding hands because it was associated with an actual memory, not just a desire.
Disc 6
I didn’t mind the contrivances ‘Cliffhanger’ (in the features, a writer admits the title was too on the nose), because of the emotional pay-offs.
The full truth about Cabe and Baghdad comes into play as a hacker-terrorist threatens a nerve agent facility over what happened. When he tells Walter he did know what the software was for in enough time that he could have told him, but didn’t, Walter’s trust in him is shattered. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with Cabe - the rest of the team are less certain about it - but Paige logics him (she’s getting good at that) into working with him on the case.
The way they enter the shut-down facility is typically ridiculous/brilliant. But the twist is that Ralph, shown to idolise Walter, bunks off school (as easily as ever), because he’s the littlest team member and endangers his life to save others. It’s one thing Walter, an adult, doing his heroics out of guilt for his part in Baghdad…
So, Paige is understandably wound up about what happened with Ralph, and unleashes ‘YOU’RE NOT HIS FATHER’ in an epic fight that’s driven by Paige’s terror that this life/Walter’s influence isn’t safe for Ralph. She decides they’re leaving for Portland (and Drew) i.e. rejecting Walter.
By the end of the ep, Walter has lost his father figure, his filial figure and the woman he loves. Obviously he gets into the sport car the rich guy was trying to bribe him with, echoing previous risky behaviour except he’s in a total state. And he crashes the car (over a cliff) in a highly effective closing scene. A cliffhanger, if you will.
‘Postcards on the Edge’ starts with Walter not picking up his phone. Sly has called him 10 times, Ralph three times and Paige has left a message once to berate him for the latter. The audience knows why he’s not answering. Also heartbreaking is Happy’s response to her first gal pal’s decision to leave them and how the team seems to be imploding. Still, an angry Happy gets results. The three remaining geniuses find Walter and wake him up to being in a car hanging off a cliff, while he’s impaled.
They have to call Cabe, because sans Paige, Happy and Toby don’t do well with cops and get arrested. Meanwhile, Paige has to deal with a recalcitrant Ralph who knows something’s up. She’s trying to get them to Portland for a scouting trip with a view to moving there.
So, while the team try to keep him alive and rescue him, Walter is saying his goodbyes (I am pretending hard they just forgot to put the missing scene where he talked to Megan over the phone on the disc) and wants Paige and Ralph to be found. But officers come the wrong way to Paige’s, and just miss her dragging Ralph off to the airport.
There’s Walter operating on himself following Toby’s instructions, a crow massively impacting proceedings, a FIRE and ultimately Cabe needs to be lowered down halfway a cliff to fetch his son without the necessary safety doo-dads.
Paige sees the news at the airport and does a DASH to the spot - leaving her bag behind to be examined by security presumably so she can’t phone him - she arrives in time to witness the rescue.
The action and tension are great; there’s a meta nod to all the crazy stuff the team got up to this season, but I was well into it. The team, all broken at the start of the ep, is one big family at the hospital at the end of the episode. But that’s not the very end. Paige pushes Quintis together to babysit Ralph - Ralph who’s been more emotionally open with her than she could have expected a year ago - and returns to a now druged and unconscious Walter to declare her feelings for him. This is sweet, as he was on the verge of all but telling her he loved her before he got saved from certain death. She then kisses him, which I was torn about because of his state.
There are fairly decent extras. Of the actors, Eddie Kay Thomas and Robert Patrick are the MVPs, the hams. The tendency is to go ‘Oops, we made an action show, not so much a procedural, fancy that’, although apparently Justin Lin directed the pilot, so I call that disingenuous.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/432471.html.
Disc 5
‘Going South’ starts off with the notorious local TV news interview, which Walter decided to do without telling anyone, in which he came off as self-aggrandising and hacked off the whole team, except Sylvester who has decided to tell him about him and Megan. When Sly does rip off that particular bandage, it’s well after they’ve got to Mexico (realising my hopes when I saw the title).
They’re on the case of a kidnapped tech giant’s daughter. I kept expecting her to have Stockholm syndrome, but no, the cartel who had her were just your regular bad guys.
But the team is not at its most united - Happy goes renegade, Toby can’t let the interview go and Sly is heartbroken because Walter doesn’t seem to think he’s good enough for his sister. They get it together after Cabe (so badass) barks at them.
It turns out that Paige can speak better Spanish than all of the geniuses. There’s also a heart-in-mouth moment where Walter smartly rescues a pinned down Paige.
Walter eventually apologises for being a dingbat and, urged by Paige, talks to Sylvester, revealing it’s not what Sly thought, but that he’s worried about how Sly will handle losing Megan. Sylvester again shows he’s braver than Walter, and there’s a nice bit of acting to suggest Walter dimly discerning this.
Walter turns down a job offer from the relieved father who will return again. This happens to better music than the show usually plays, while Sly and Megan have a touching dance.
I’m going to try not to use capslpock when discussing ‘Once Bitten, Twice Die’, but it’s the crackiest s1 episode. Walter is playing around with greenscreen, Paige has been taking ‘European history’ night classes (from now on, I will replace ‘normal’ with ‘liberal arts type’) and has thus become an expert on ‘Lithuanian/Latvian/Belarus’ history and customs, which is handy because those three countries are on the verge of war, apparently, if secret negotiations held at the very place Cabe’s favourite cowboy movie was shot don’t work.
There’s a State Department person who is persistently rude to Paige until she isn’t. I mean, Walter is rude to a president, also, but that’s par for the course. Toby is rude to a fellow doctor, which Happy finds hot - it’s enough for her to initiate their first kiss.
A president is poisoned. Paige and Walter work out it was snake poison (I was hoping for a spider bite from the title). Walter asks Happy to punch him. Walter shares Indiana Jones’s feelings for snakes, but deliberately lets one bite him for reasons, the team acquire Ferret Bueller, who is important in fanon. This episode’s Improbable Vehicle is a burrito van or something. Cabe gets to be a cowboy and Walter wakes up to find his team averted world war three without him, but kind of because of him.
Whew.
There’s also stuff about Cabe and Walter’s past, Cabe trusting his team (Paige) and annoying Merrick, his boss, both of which will play out in the rest of the season. There’s fallout from the Valentine’s Day ep, with a poisoned Walter rambling about the date that wasn’t. He’s candid about how amazing he thinks Paige is to Cabe, but only gives her a ‘Buck up, I’m proud of you’ speech before her exam.
It is a step up in ridiculousness and thoroughly entertaining.
‘Young Hearts Spark Fire’ is a bit less cracky, which is still a whole lot crackier than most shows.
Toby calls Walter out on his changing behaviour around Paige, in a very Tobyish way, involving a diagram on a whiteboard. It’s very evident that Toby’s feelings for Happy make him want everyone to be in love. He’s going to follow up that kiss however much Happy tries to shut him down.
So, both guys try to rescue their lady loves (although Walter doing this for Paige is a given) . At the point when they think they’re going to die from FIRE, Toby more or less declares his feelings for Happy, while Walter, despite all his denials, holds hands with Paige at the same moment.
Also, Cabe plays dad-at-a-distance to all his kids, Sly has to spend time with a brash military pilot who reminds him of his father (not good) but does something heroic and earns his stand-in father figure’s approval
The plot: trying to rescue some kids lost in a forest before wildfires start, most of team Scorpion are involved in a helicopter crash. So the rescue party has to find the kids and get to the extraction point hoping Cabe won’t have given up on looking for them and that they won’t get caught by the fire.
‘Crossroads’ starts with Happy drssing up for The Date with Toby, who self-sabotages by falling asleep because he gave himself a tawelydd. There is violence and despite his grovelling, no forgiveness (as the rest of the team observes.)
Their case is protecting a witness against a gang of very bad men, who tried to kill her. They promise to protect her, but because there’s a mole in law enforcement, their useful suggestions don’t work. So they have to go it alone, and Paige then diagnoses that Maia, the witness, is a pregnant genius (Walter observes that her IQ is lower than his.)
Cue a road trip, Cabe is dad, Quintis the squabbling kids. There’s a Speed-referencing hig velocity stunt in the improbable vehicle of the week: a high-tech RV. The action really is impressive.The team find a way of doing the right thing - enabling Maia to give her testimony safely.
All this makes Toby tell Walter bluntly that he needs to take risks with Paige. Walter has been espousing the view that romance in the workplace is a bad thing, which Happy now agrees with. (Paige diagnoses Happy’s trust issues.) Walter actually goes over to Paige’s place to Declare His Feelings, but sees Drewhas returned early from Portland and is over there. Walter is crushed.
Of course he didn’t rub ot the stick figure drawing by Toby of him and Paige holding hands because it was associated with an actual memory, not just a desire.
Disc 6
I didn’t mind the contrivances ‘Cliffhanger’ (in the features, a writer admits the title was too on the nose), because of the emotional pay-offs.
The full truth about Cabe and Baghdad comes into play as a hacker-terrorist threatens a nerve agent facility over what happened. When he tells Walter he did know what the software was for in enough time that he could have told him, but didn’t, Walter’s trust in him is shattered. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with Cabe - the rest of the team are less certain about it - but Paige logics him (she’s getting good at that) into working with him on the case.
The way they enter the shut-down facility is typically ridiculous/brilliant. But the twist is that Ralph, shown to idolise Walter, bunks off school (as easily as ever), because he’s the littlest team member and endangers his life to save others. It’s one thing Walter, an adult, doing his heroics out of guilt for his part in Baghdad…
So, Paige is understandably wound up about what happened with Ralph, and unleashes ‘YOU’RE NOT HIS FATHER’ in an epic fight that’s driven by Paige’s terror that this life/Walter’s influence isn’t safe for Ralph. She decides they’re leaving for Portland (and Drew) i.e. rejecting Walter.
By the end of the ep, Walter has lost his father figure, his filial figure and the woman he loves. Obviously he gets into the sport car the rich guy was trying to bribe him with, echoing previous risky behaviour except he’s in a total state. And he crashes the car (over a cliff) in a highly effective closing scene. A cliffhanger, if you will.
‘Postcards on the Edge’ starts with Walter not picking up his phone. Sly has called him 10 times, Ralph three times and Paige has left a message once to berate him for the latter. The audience knows why he’s not answering. Also heartbreaking is Happy’s response to her first gal pal’s decision to leave them and how the team seems to be imploding. Still, an angry Happy gets results. The three remaining geniuses find Walter and wake him up to being in a car hanging off a cliff, while he’s impaled.
They have to call Cabe, because sans Paige, Happy and Toby don’t do well with cops and get arrested. Meanwhile, Paige has to deal with a recalcitrant Ralph who knows something’s up. She’s trying to get them to Portland for a scouting trip with a view to moving there.
So, while the team try to keep him alive and rescue him, Walter is saying his goodbyes (I am pretending hard they just forgot to put the missing scene where he talked to Megan over the phone on the disc) and wants Paige and Ralph to be found. But officers come the wrong way to Paige’s, and just miss her dragging Ralph off to the airport.
There’s Walter operating on himself following Toby’s instructions, a crow massively impacting proceedings, a FIRE and ultimately Cabe needs to be lowered down halfway a cliff to fetch his son without the necessary safety doo-dads.
Paige sees the news at the airport and does a DASH to the spot - leaving her bag behind to be examined by security presumably so she can’t phone him - she arrives in time to witness the rescue.
The action and tension are great; there’s a meta nod to all the crazy stuff the team got up to this season, but I was well into it. The team, all broken at the start of the ep, is one big family at the hospital at the end of the episode. But that’s not the very end. Paige pushes Quintis together to babysit Ralph - Ralph who’s been more emotionally open with her than she could have expected a year ago - and returns to a now druged and unconscious Walter to declare her feelings for him. This is sweet, as he was on the verge of all but telling her he loved her before he got saved from certain death. She then kisses him, which I was torn about because of his state.
There are fairly decent extras. Of the actors, Eddie Kay Thomas and Robert Patrick are the MVPs, the hams. The tendency is to go ‘Oops, we made an action show, not so much a procedural, fancy that’, although apparently Justin Lin directed the pilot, so I call that disingenuous.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/432471.html.