Scorpion season 3 - disc 1
Civil War/More Civil War
I didn’t realise while watching that this season started with a double bill (I’ll claim I was too excited about finding out what happened next after catching up with all that I’d seen before) but in hindsight, it explained why so much happened in this episode. Though not how Walter got a crop while he was driving to Lake Tahoe. No wonder he was just too late, and had to watch a (not very heated if we’re comparing it with ‘Satellite of Love’) kiss between Paige and Tim, after she verbally put the past behind her.
What sympathy I had for Walter diminished when I realised he’d spoiled Tim’s plans for dinner and adjoining rooms at the hotel. It’s only at the end of the ep, when Cabe seriously dads him, that Walter begins to comprehend what he did wrong and at least stopped himself from instinctively repeating his actions and breaking his word. And it’s not like Paige wouldn’t have known and gone even more ballistic. I was entirely behind her for being angry, though I thought that when she calmed down she might guess Walter’s motives. But, like I half-suspected she would, she did her insecure ostrich act.
But everyone on the team except her had heard Walter explain why he’d turned up, i.e. declare his love. That includes Tim, even though he’s not technically part of the cyclone.
Anyway, Walter’s appearance on the plane to bring Paige and Tim back home from Lake Tahoe for the latest emergency was super awkward, as was a car journey with him and Paige.
Some Bulgarian kids (I didn’t believe that none of them spoke English, not even the one who worked in the cinema, but that’s Scorpion for you) had hacked into US military planes, ships and subs. As the case lasted two normal episode lengths, more of Scorpion’s crazy ideas to fix this went wrong, which culminated in Walter only being able to hack into a nuclear missile because Tim and Cabe were able to stop the Bulgarian hackers the dumb way (guns).
Also awkward: Happy being called back to work with Toby, who soon progressed to anger, rescinding the proposal. (Eh, he’d clearly get over it.) We learned Walter knew who the husband was, having done some hacking to stop Toby from finding the name (real talk, for all of two seconds I did suspect Walter of being The Husband, but then talked myself out of it, given his reaction at the end of season 2. I hadn’t much pondered the question of who Happy’s husband was, TBH, because I’ve always been more invested in Waige, and I had residual feelings about already have seen this trope.) Happy was going to ‘fix’ things.
There were lots of nice little details along with near action movie thrills (rogue jets and missiles). I couldn’t say when one episode morphed into another because there were so many ‘cut to break’ dramatic cliffhangers.They even paid more attention to who was listening in on the comms and made it a plot point, which thrilled me.
The randomest bit was Sly’s helpful encounter with an old lady in Bulgaria. Not only did she speak English, but she had the equipment for him to communicate with their pilot. She also thought a plant was her husband. Sly was a darling and the most whole-hearted of the team. He even tried (and failed) to get the whole family sitting and eating together. At the end of the episode, Walter was left sitting on Cabe’s advice to put Paige first, wait until he was fully fledged and ready to have a relationship with her, because the stakes (including Ralph) were so high, even if it meant losing her. Cabe had also talked Tim out of punching Walter itno a pulp for what he’d done. (I wasn’t a huge fan of all the alpha male jostling, because it objectified Paige.)
‘It Isn’t The Fall That Kills You’ was probably my favourite episode of the season, which, yes, I’ve watched, and am, as ever, behind in writing up. What swung it was the beautiful space shuttle set. But the ep answered some of my questions after the double-bill in the most cracktastic way.
It started with an in media res taster of Walter freefalling through the sky. For a bit, the show teased us with whether this was down to hypnosis, as we went back six hours to Sly forcing Walter and Toby to meditate. Happy was hilariously welding in the background, that’s Happy who would be the most focused, least frazzled genius all episode.
Walter and his whiteboard admitted to Toby that his way of ‘dealing’ with Paige/Tim (doomed never to get a portmanteau) was avoidance.
Anyway, Elia had called on Scorpion for assistance, because his people modified Walter’s throttle design from last season’s rocket research and it wasn’t working as it should. Walter and Happy were snotty about these modifications, rightly so. Paige and Tim were being cutesy, so Walter, working alone in the beautiful shuttle had taken out his comms (I was all ‘keep this up, show’ and mostly it did all season) just before a lightning strike hit (oh show) and the rocket launched. (This was kind of foreshadowed in the season 2 extras.)
It was soon obvious there were problems with the oxygen levels, and Walter was hallucinating imaginary!Paige , whom he was wooing with perfect recall and scientifically interesting desserts. Cue dancing in the Charade outfits (my only quibble was that there was no zero gravity while this was going on.) This was undercut by the bemused observers’ reaction to watching Walter dancing alone and kissing his own hand.
The earthbound team needed to get through to Walter to get him to help them help him. Paige was the only one who could do so. So she insisted on privacy to talk to a hypoxic Walter who admitted he loved her (!!! Though also good that this wasn’t something that everybody knew apart from her for too long), which made her cry as true love always does (!!) and she told him she loved him too (!!!!). She had to promise they’d be together forever to get him to pull a lever, which he thought was her hand. Because of this, he held on to it for longer than Sly calculated, which threw off Sly’s calculations for Cabe to rescue him (Robert Patrick getting a little of the stunt action, but it was mainly Elyes Gabel.) So they had to find another crazy plan B to save Walter who did I mention was FREEFALLING THROUGH THE SKY. Tim helped a little.
In the wash-up, it seemed that Walter doesn’t remember his hallucinations or the exchange with Paige. This happened while he was in an unbuttoned shirt, which I totally note because of the actor’s choices showing Walter’s embarrassment about being in this state around Paige. Toby, who only knew part of what happened, told Paige not to poke around, or Walter would remember, not deal and chaos would ensue. Paige’s desire to learn what Walter did remember was interesting given her claim to Tim that she’d told Walter ‘what he needed to hear.’ (Koff. It merited four exclamation marks because that’s a huge statement.) But Walter’s reference to baked Alaska meant that it was all there in his subconscious…
Elia, who must have really wanted a son or a kid as smart as he is - as Paige admitted to Tim, Walter has wrecked a lot of his stuff now even if it’s been inadvertent - because he was totally on board with doing everything possible to save Walter here. Anyway he had a chat with his protégé he wishes, in which he pinpointed one choice that Walter made (which, although counter-intuitive, did save his life) that was about avoidance, and possibly self-destructive, and warned Walter about this tendency.
I didn’t expect them to go so full throttle (excuse the pun) with the stakes, the fantasy stuff and the callbacks (in the service of the ship), not to mention the action. I was seriously impressed with the beginning of season 3 and how it was building on the solid emotional foundations of what had come before. Part of that might be the novelty of the crazy.
But then, there was most of ‘Little Boy Lost’, (its most heart-clenching moment is when Ralph shows compassion and understanding towards an autistic classmate <3 Ralph, <3 Paige’s mothering), and there was the team working together brilliantly and then there was my growing suspicion that Happy was pregnant - I was fairly sure from when Cabe benched her for acting weird - and then there was the twist at the end. Walter is revealed to be Happy’s husband. I had an absolute meltdown, because as mentioned, I had considered and rejected this possibility on the basis of his reactions to the whole Quintis debacle at the end of season 2. I subsequently went back to rewatch those scenes, and discovered that actually they had left space for this in the edit and the performance, which almost aggravated me as much as thinking the writers had pulled this out of nowhere.
The ep began with Ralph acting like a snotty preteen around Tim (heh), who was gracious about it. I was not gracious abut the fact that we knew more about Tim’s family and upbringing than we did about Paige’s. Ralph behaved much better around Daniel, the previously mentioned classmate, during a school trip at a museum that was a bit much for him. But Daniel then got lost. Because this is Scorpion, the tablet non-verbal Daniel depended on got mixed up with the tablet of a criminal gang about to carry out an assassination.
So, the team plus Ralph had to work together to find Daniel by thinking like him, oh, and stopping the baddies, obvs. Cue a daring rescue by Walter, aided by Sly as a counterweight, after going through icky tunnels. Happy was very much the tough guy as she and Cabe interrogated a chemist. Paige empathised with Daniel’s mother about bringing up a special kid. Meanwhile Toby spent most of the ep trying to decipher a clue Mark Collins (yes, Toby was desperate enough to go there; Happy was understandably enough all !?!? aboud that) gave him about the husband.
Who was Walter, having married Happy to could get a green card. That made sense but made me wonder about Megan’s immigration status. Toby wanted to punch him. (The show could be subtitled ‘X Times Someone Wanted To Punch Walter O’Brien’) But Happy wanted a divorce because of the pregnancy. (I kind of thought that if Walter managed not to hack the Homeland people off, he’d done enough for them to want him to be a US citizen. But sure, raise the stakes.)
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/448562.html.
I didn’t realise while watching that this season started with a double bill (I’ll claim I was too excited about finding out what happened next after catching up with all that I’d seen before) but in hindsight, it explained why so much happened in this episode. Though not how Walter got a crop while he was driving to Lake Tahoe. No wonder he was just too late, and had to watch a (not very heated if we’re comparing it with ‘Satellite of Love’) kiss between Paige and Tim, after she verbally put the past behind her.
What sympathy I had for Walter diminished when I realised he’d spoiled Tim’s plans for dinner and adjoining rooms at the hotel. It’s only at the end of the ep, when Cabe seriously dads him, that Walter begins to comprehend what he did wrong and at least stopped himself from instinctively repeating his actions and breaking his word. And it’s not like Paige wouldn’t have known and gone even more ballistic. I was entirely behind her for being angry, though I thought that when she calmed down she might guess Walter’s motives. But, like I half-suspected she would, she did her insecure ostrich act.
But everyone on the team except her had heard Walter explain why he’d turned up, i.e. declare his love. That includes Tim, even though he’s not technically part of the cyclone.
Anyway, Walter’s appearance on the plane to bring Paige and Tim back home from Lake Tahoe for the latest emergency was super awkward, as was a car journey with him and Paige.
Some Bulgarian kids (I didn’t believe that none of them spoke English, not even the one who worked in the cinema, but that’s Scorpion for you) had hacked into US military planes, ships and subs. As the case lasted two normal episode lengths, more of Scorpion’s crazy ideas to fix this went wrong, which culminated in Walter only being able to hack into a nuclear missile because Tim and Cabe were able to stop the Bulgarian hackers the dumb way (guns).
Also awkward: Happy being called back to work with Toby, who soon progressed to anger, rescinding the proposal. (Eh, he’d clearly get over it.) We learned Walter knew who the husband was, having done some hacking to stop Toby from finding the name (real talk, for all of two seconds I did suspect Walter of being The Husband, but then talked myself out of it, given his reaction at the end of season 2. I hadn’t much pondered the question of who Happy’s husband was, TBH, because I’ve always been more invested in Waige, and I had residual feelings about already have seen this trope.) Happy was going to ‘fix’ things.
There were lots of nice little details along with near action movie thrills (rogue jets and missiles). I couldn’t say when one episode morphed into another because there were so many ‘cut to break’ dramatic cliffhangers.They even paid more attention to who was listening in on the comms and made it a plot point, which thrilled me.
The randomest bit was Sly’s helpful encounter with an old lady in Bulgaria. Not only did she speak English, but she had the equipment for him to communicate with their pilot. She also thought a plant was her husband. Sly was a darling and the most whole-hearted of the team. He even tried (and failed) to get the whole family sitting and eating together. At the end of the episode, Walter was left sitting on Cabe’s advice to put Paige first, wait until he was fully fledged and ready to have a relationship with her, because the stakes (including Ralph) were so high, even if it meant losing her. Cabe had also talked Tim out of punching Walter itno a pulp for what he’d done. (I wasn’t a huge fan of all the alpha male jostling, because it objectified Paige.)
‘It Isn’t The Fall That Kills You’ was probably my favourite episode of the season, which, yes, I’ve watched, and am, as ever, behind in writing up. What swung it was the beautiful space shuttle set. But the ep answered some of my questions after the double-bill in the most cracktastic way.
It started with an in media res taster of Walter freefalling through the sky. For a bit, the show teased us with whether this was down to hypnosis, as we went back six hours to Sly forcing Walter and Toby to meditate. Happy was hilariously welding in the background, that’s Happy who would be the most focused, least frazzled genius all episode.
Walter and his whiteboard admitted to Toby that his way of ‘dealing’ with Paige/Tim (doomed never to get a portmanteau) was avoidance.
Anyway, Elia had called on Scorpion for assistance, because his people modified Walter’s throttle design from last season’s rocket research and it wasn’t working as it should. Walter and Happy were snotty about these modifications, rightly so. Paige and Tim were being cutesy, so Walter, working alone in the beautiful shuttle had taken out his comms (I was all ‘keep this up, show’ and mostly it did all season) just before a lightning strike hit (oh show) and the rocket launched. (This was kind of foreshadowed in the season 2 extras.)
It was soon obvious there were problems with the oxygen levels, and Walter was hallucinating imaginary!Paige , whom he was wooing with perfect recall and scientifically interesting desserts. Cue dancing in the Charade outfits (my only quibble was that there was no zero gravity while this was going on.) This was undercut by the bemused observers’ reaction to watching Walter dancing alone and kissing his own hand.
The earthbound team needed to get through to Walter to get him to help them help him. Paige was the only one who could do so. So she insisted on privacy to talk to a hypoxic Walter who admitted he loved her (!!! Though also good that this wasn’t something that everybody knew apart from her for too long), which made her cry as true love always does (!!) and she told him she loved him too (!!!!). She had to promise they’d be together forever to get him to pull a lever, which he thought was her hand. Because of this, he held on to it for longer than Sly calculated, which threw off Sly’s calculations for Cabe to rescue him (Robert Patrick getting a little of the stunt action, but it was mainly Elyes Gabel.) So they had to find another crazy plan B to save Walter who did I mention was FREEFALLING THROUGH THE SKY. Tim helped a little.
In the wash-up, it seemed that Walter doesn’t remember his hallucinations or the exchange with Paige. This happened while he was in an unbuttoned shirt, which I totally note because of the actor’s choices showing Walter’s embarrassment about being in this state around Paige. Toby, who only knew part of what happened, told Paige not to poke around, or Walter would remember, not deal and chaos would ensue. Paige’s desire to learn what Walter did remember was interesting given her claim to Tim that she’d told Walter ‘what he needed to hear.’ (Koff. It merited four exclamation marks because that’s a huge statement.) But Walter’s reference to baked Alaska meant that it was all there in his subconscious…
Elia, who must have really wanted a son or a kid as smart as he is - as Paige admitted to Tim, Walter has wrecked a lot of his stuff now even if it’s been inadvertent - because he was totally on board with doing everything possible to save Walter here. Anyway he had a chat with his protégé he wishes, in which he pinpointed one choice that Walter made (which, although counter-intuitive, did save his life) that was about avoidance, and possibly self-destructive, and warned Walter about this tendency.
I didn’t expect them to go so full throttle (excuse the pun) with the stakes, the fantasy stuff and the callbacks (in the service of the ship), not to mention the action. I was seriously impressed with the beginning of season 3 and how it was building on the solid emotional foundations of what had come before. Part of that might be the novelty of the crazy.
But then, there was most of ‘Little Boy Lost’, (its most heart-clenching moment is when Ralph shows compassion and understanding towards an autistic classmate <3 Ralph, <3 Paige’s mothering), and there was the team working together brilliantly and then there was my growing suspicion that Happy was pregnant - I was fairly sure from when Cabe benched her for acting weird - and then there was the twist at the end. Walter is revealed to be Happy’s husband. I had an absolute meltdown, because as mentioned, I had considered and rejected this possibility on the basis of his reactions to the whole Quintis debacle at the end of season 2. I subsequently went back to rewatch those scenes, and discovered that actually they had left space for this in the edit and the performance, which almost aggravated me as much as thinking the writers had pulled this out of nowhere.
The ep began with Ralph acting like a snotty preteen around Tim (heh), who was gracious about it. I was not gracious abut the fact that we knew more about Tim’s family and upbringing than we did about Paige’s. Ralph behaved much better around Daniel, the previously mentioned classmate, during a school trip at a museum that was a bit much for him. But Daniel then got lost. Because this is Scorpion, the tablet non-verbal Daniel depended on got mixed up with the tablet of a criminal gang about to carry out an assassination.
So, the team plus Ralph had to work together to find Daniel by thinking like him, oh, and stopping the baddies, obvs. Cue a daring rescue by Walter, aided by Sly as a counterweight, after going through icky tunnels. Happy was very much the tough guy as she and Cabe interrogated a chemist. Paige empathised with Daniel’s mother about bringing up a special kid. Meanwhile Toby spent most of the ep trying to decipher a clue Mark Collins (yes, Toby was desperate enough to go there; Happy was understandably enough all !?!? aboud that) gave him about the husband.
Who was Walter, having married Happy to could get a green card. That made sense but made me wonder about Megan’s immigration status. Toby wanted to punch him. (The show could be subtitled ‘X Times Someone Wanted To Punch Walter O’Brien’) But Happy wanted a divorce because of the pregnancy. (I kind of thought that if Walter managed not to hack the Homeland people off, he’d done enough for them to want him to be a US citizen. But sure, raise the stakes.)
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/448562.html.