Scorpion season 3 - disc 2
Following my hissyfit about the Walter being Happy’s husband development detailed previously, these episodes were not my favourites of the season either.
We’re in wacky, zany territory in ‘Night at the Museum’ as the team (original flavour i.e. sans Tim) tries to deal with Happy’s pregnancy and Walter’s citizenship issues (they can’t let on that the wedding was a fraud or he’ll get deported.) We even get a flashback to the most awkward wedding ever.
For the team’s latest job, they’re locked in at a museum overnight. But that job gets derailed when they discover (because Walter has learned to understand and recognise a South American Spanish dialect) that crooks from a made-up country are after a rare metal found in a meteor exhibit that will boost their country’s nuclear weapons. Inevitably, Walter decides that the way to stop this is to carry out the theft before the baddies can. This involves a falcon and the misuse and destruction of museum artefacts, and Walter trying to make things right for Happy and Toby. Happy certainly gets team-as-family. Paige offers Toby advice on parenting and being supportive during a pregnancy. She’s also fine with Walter having been married when smooching her, but not so fine with him getting hurt while doing heroics.
At the end, a prickly IRS person turns up to investigate the (sham) marriage. Thanks to Paige and Toby, the actual married couple have to live together (with Toby as chaperone), which felt like the set-up for a sitcom.
‘Crazy Bat Poop’ AKA the Halloween episode is one of those that land differently in 2020, although it’s mainly goofy horror. Sly reacts as you’d expect him to to mapping some caves sheltering bats that have either a fungus or a virus (but they definitely have rabies) and prevent them from dying off, which would lead to Bad Stuff for humanity.
My main issue was not being able to see what was going on in those caves. The team were using red lights so as not to disturb the rabid bats, which didn’t help me much. They found one of the zoologists they were meant to work with, bitten by those rabid bats, and had to find the other with a very hazy idea of the layout of the caves because Walter’s doohickey had fallen down a hole.
So, Toby was off trying to find a serum, Cabe was trying to deal with a flailing Sly, and Waige got separated from the rest of the team. Happy was in the garage offering back up and looking after a hyper Ralph. (Halloween candy.)
The big thing about this episode was Paige backstory FINALLY, which tied into Waige. The team had been trying to fabricate a shared Halloween history for the marrieds, recorded in a photo album. It emerged that Paige lied about her Halloween past, Toby had to point this out to Walter, who elicited the truth from her in an intimate conversation (which technically everyone should have heard over the comms.) Walter started by talking about father figures pretty smoothly for him, and said that Halloween bothering Pagie bothered him. (Growth!) So, she disclosed that her mother left her father and, broken-hearted, he became a Halloween grump. Walter later adopted most of that story as part of his cover about the fake marriage, but identified with the father and put a nice spin on it in Paige’s hearing. (Never mind that Ireland wouldn’t have the same Halloween traditions as the US when Walter was growing up.) Paige was touched.
Walter also suggested to Ralph that he go trick and treating with him and Paige. For Paige’s sake. Until Tim turned up and suggested the same, as he had every right to do as Paige’s boyfriend, and Walter backtracked. Toby called him out for playing with fire, but I melted over Walter’s motivation here being to make Paige feel better. In hindsight, his line about Paige’s honesty was hugely important for the fallout of the shuttle declaration.
Meanwhile the clever clogs messed up the album, putting Walter in a hazardous position, while Quintis were sweet after Happy admitted that after her brief experience of in loco parentising Ralph she felt trepidation about what lay ahead.
‘We’re Going to Need a Bigger Vote’ is a Scorpion take on the US presidential election day (circa 2016), so I kept firmly in mind that it was set in an alternative universe of made-up countries. I watched it before the November 2020 US presidential election. It’s daft, but ends on a heartbreaker.
Ralph is using Tim’s need to suck up to him to make him his whipping boy for a civics project. The FBI turn up with a job from the President himself (who is campaigning for re-election by spending a lot of time in LA !?!? ALTERNATIVE REALITY) but they don’t want flagged!Walter to come along. So, he stays at the garage and co-opts Ralph into getting him on the job anyway.
Massive voter fraud is going on. Their investigations lead them to TV news channel that couldn’t possibly have been inspired by a real-life one, where it seems like the Chief of Staff is responsible but it’s actually the Chinese. (WHUT, FOREIGN INVOLVEMENT IN ELECTIONS? Oh Scorpion, ripped from the science journals is one thing, but you should have kept away from this…)
Toby spouts rubbish on TV for reasons, Cabe is flummoxed by modern technology and Walter and Ralph have a high old time using science projects to bamboozle an FBI agent and get onto Air Force One…because ‘it’s bring your son to work day’. Oh, Walter.
Tim is introducing Paige and Ralph to his parents (this didn’t seem to track with the previously introduced backstory) at a dance, which the team observe is a sign Tim’s serious and it’s a forerunner to a proposal. Paige is not impressed by the team’s running commentary on her private life. Anyway, Ralph gives her his blessing to go for it with Tim (she isn’t coming across as so in love that she’s ready to rush towards matrimony, though I thought Walter was being optimistic when he claimed there was no sign Paige and Tim had had sex.) Ralph then - I think, the kid playing him butchered a couple of key lines) tells Walter he blew his chance to become a family with him and Paige. It hurts because it’s the TRUTH.
All of which puts the dampener on the alt!President granting Walter citizenship for his actions, which means he can divorce Happy. Paige goes off with Tim. He’s in dress uniform. She’s in a dress that couldn’t decide between showing leg or back and went for both unfortunately, though it was a beautiful colour. Sly has decided to stand as an alderman to save a comic book shop.
But the real kicker is Happy coming back from a doctor’s appointment with the news that she was never pregnant and being all upset about it in a very Happyish way. Being cold and Doylist, it would always have been tough for the show to have adventures with pregnant!Happy. But on the other hand, AWW. Toby sets aside his own grief, is there for her, promising that they will have a child and proposing again. This time, she says yes.
Apparently, I shouldn’t have got as snotty about the idea of droughts in Ireland or seaweed in presumably fresh water lakes as I did when watching ‘Sly and the Family Stone’. But that was a broad range of ‘Irish’ accents from people supposedly from the one village. There were also a lot of feels, as most of the team go to ‘Ireland’ to commemorate Megan. (Including Tim, who never met her.)
By being personable and working at it, Sly has not only been accepted as Megan’s widower but in his own right by one and all. Walter…isn’t. As Paige observes, he doesn’t help himself, coming off as stiff and obnoxious, but the little boy who was rejected and misunderstood is also coming off him in waves. But that boy also cried wolf, (or foresaw disasters, he just got the locations wrong), so his famiily and the village distrust Walter’s claim that the nearby lake is going to explode. But his team believe him.
Adding to the aggro, Toby has ‘masterminded’ Tim and Walter into getting on. It fails spectacularly until Walter’s childhood bullies threaten to beat him up and there’s testosterone-fuelled nonsense. But the two men do co-operate to neutralise the deadly carbon dioxide cloud they can’t outrun. Walter apologises to Tim (again), although the cause of their tension is obviously Paige. (We also learn that Tim used to be a bully. Subtle, show.) Walter and his parents have a small moment.
Happy yields to Toby’s request for a big wedding over her preferred…rerun of her sham wedding in a courthouse. I wrinkled my nose at that, thinking she should at least invite the cyclone.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/451487.html.