Scorpion season 2 - disc 5
‘The Fast and the Nerdiest’ (response to the first time I saw it here when I wasn’t that bothered, which was true the second time around too) starts off with Sly on ‘The Price is Right’ for Megan-honouring reasons and Paige gravitating towards Walter in celebration because she can’t help herself. An old friend of Cabe’s (I remembered enough to join the team in doubting him) turns up with a rumour about some smugglers he’s been working with being about to smuggle a biological weapon via fast cars. Spoiler: they are and it would lead to genocide in a made-up country.
Cabe talks a suspicious Walter into taking on the case. Walter’s ego and need to win (there’s a drag race) endangers Happy. Pal Nick betrays Cabe, and Toby’s gambling history helps them track down Nick’s gambler girlfriend, hack into her TV and abduct/rescue her from a motel. Nick betrays her too, but Cabe beats him.
Happy talks with her only friend who is a girl, which is rare on the show, and admits she’s worried about what she’s learning about Toby’s gambling habits and has an emotional meltdown over it.
As the episode’s central question of whether a person can truly change hovers, Toby finds a way to gamble on Quintis. The big, emotive scene on the roof was undermined by my wondering who’d lit all those candles.
In Ticker (first response here, when I am way harsher on Walter), Walter is retreating into research, because the dating experiment did not go well, quoth Toby, while the rest are playing Scorpion Olympics, until they play on his ego and he proves he can’t throw. A minor traffic accident sends him to hospital where he mees a quirky lawyer and a smart and wise kid about to have a heart transplant. He connects with the latter, adding personal stakes and a countdown when the team diagnose that the blood supply has been contaminated.
Team Scorpion deploy their nous to figure out how, who and why. It ends up with Walter having to jump on to a lorry from a camper van to get the rare blood they know is safe for the little girl. He has to throw it and then himself back to the van in an impressive stunt sequence.
In recovery, with a new heart, the wise kid tells him she’s going to have some fun, so Walter joins in in the resumption of the Scorpion Olympics.
During all this, we see Toby and Happy being a couple (which involves her calling him out for trying too hard). Paige empathises with the kid’s mum I wondered why they had no other family members or friends at all to stay with her during the op other than the team who they’d known for like a day. Walter overpromises but delivers.
In ‘Djibouti Call’, (first reaction here) Sly takes on the lawyer with the terrible name for his legal case against quiz shows. But more importantly, enter Tim, an ex-Navy SEAL who’s now a trainee Homelander. First Cabe takes to him and then Paige…making Walter jealous however much he denies it. He’s hostile and willing to break laws to find proof of his suspicions, which were accurate, as Tim was on a secret mission, keeping the rest of the team out of the loop until Cabe was captured and tortured.
Scorpion have to replace an ancient bowl with a 3D-printed copy - easy, until Sly encounters a monkey. Paige and Tim have to pose as a married couple, Walter and Toby engage in a fight with a tank-like henchman, which was as funny the second time around as the first. As a shipper. I felt for Walter having to witness Tim getting to rub ointment into a wound Paige had sustained, being clearly impressed by her and all smooth.
I enjoyed ‘Twist and Shout’ AKA the tornado in Vietnam episode. (My first reaction here, in which there is speculation that I now know will et sunk by canon.)
Linda returns with a hero complex and rescinds her previously sensible turning down of a date with Walter. He’s threatened by Tim beating his high score on an arcade game. SUCH A BOY.
Also, Ralph has come up with software so amazing that it impresses the adult geniuses. His professor doesn’t believe he came up with it and fails him for it. Walter has to give him a ‘buck up, little genius’ speech when they need Ralph’s software to help save their lives. The professor’s actions will be a reason to bring back the lawyere who’s name I never took in. Basically, he’s no Ray.
[Skip the next three paragraphs except for the last sentence of the second paragaph if you read the first review.] The case of the week involves finding dead US soldiers’ remains in Vietnam to an already crazy tight timetable, which is even more squeezed by a storm. I wasn’t particularly sympathetic to the grieving son who was willing to save their lives to complete the mission. Paige’s instinct to help nursing home staff in the midst of all this pays off.
The strom turns into a tornado they can’t outrun (of course it does). Walter’s plan to cool it down is their only hope, but as his mode of transportation is an old jalopy, it’s risky. Paige insists on staying with him and then gets nearly blown away, but he holds on to her and saves her life. (Aww.) (But how did they not dislocate their shoulders?)
Toby introduces the idea of him and Happy getting married here and misses Happy’s face when he does so. He also calls Walter out on feeling more than friendship for Paige. But by ‘moving on’ and accepting Linda’s offer, Walter enables non-team member Tim to ask Paige (and Ralph) out. Hoist with his own petard.
So my past insistence that Ralph is smarter than Walter came from half-remembering ‘Hard Knox’ (first reaction here) where it’s confirmed, not deduction on my part. The previousles are big on Walter and Paige’s angst about the other going out with Linda and Tim respectively.
Walter takes Linda on a terrible date, while she goes along with his not warning her about the smell of the unusual plant !?!? Toby diagnoses it’s not so much Walter that she’s into as her feelings when he saved her. Meanwhile Paige and Tim are getting on fine.
Ralph’s useless lawyer (in the case against the professor passing off Ralph’s work as his own) only buys them more time for Ralph to rebut new evidence. Walter tries to help, but doesn’t understand Ralph’s code!!! He snaps at Ralph when he tries to explain it to him, and Paige rightly tells Walter off for this.
And then the case begins.
Basically Tim (and $1 million) talks Scorpion into a job to prove that they can break into Fort Knox and et a specific item, proving they shouldn’t have subcontracted the security. (We’ll assume greed dazzled Toby from noticing the man proposing all this was dodgy.)
They all have their jobs to BREAK INTO FORT KNOX, and predictably hit snags with Walter, equally predictably, not getting any Indiana Jones references.
They realise the sceptre they’re stealing contains polonium (OBVIOUSLY), and while they need to try not to get caught, they also need to stop Cook from getting away with it. Using some heist clichés, they come up with a stealthy way to do so.
The emotional wallop comes as Ralph, more than his legal representation, proves the code was his because he put in bookmarks including imporatnant days in his life, which include the day he met Walter, which Walter is moved by. He later apologises to Ralph, gaacefully yielding to the boy’s smarts and says he snapped becuase Ralph was holding back for him (okay, let’s go with that) and urge him not to do that in future because the world will be a better place if he’s hiself. Aww. (Paige overhears all this.)
Walter accosts Linda with the truth (they don’t discuss whether he really likes her), but on seeing their break-up hug, Paige agrees to go on a date with Tim, who was suckin up to her earlier in the ep (and has realised how crazy this team is by now.)
Meanwhile Toby, although he joins Happy in mocking the Waige cluelessness is not ‘playing it cool’, but planning to propose.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/444640.html.