Numb3rs Overview
Dear crack_van junkies,
I am jmtorres, I am your Numb3rs crack-dealer for the month! I apologize for not getting started on this earlier, I spent the first four days of the month on a shoot location with no internet, no cell service, and no running water. (Interestingly, though, we were using the same model HD camera as they use for some of the pick-ups on Numb3rs.) (Aside from that coincidence, my qualifications for writing about this fandom include one story and general weekly squee. My participation in the fandom proper is limited to, uh, hey, where's the fandom? It's sad. But I read. So I will show you what I read.)
But enough about me! Let's talk Numb3rs.
Numb3rs is a 1-hour episodic case-based show which airs on CBS on Fridays, currently in its 4th season. There is always an FBI case. There is always an application of math that can be used to aid in solving said case.
Or, let me break it down to fannish terms:
Don is an FBI agent. His brother Charlie is a genius and professor of applied mathematics. Together, they fight crime!
In a recent episode (4x09 "Graphic"), Don and Charlie's crime-fighting antics inspired a comic book artist played by guest star Christopher Lloyd. Wil Wheaton was also in this episode. And Joe Morton. And did I mention the comic book convention? I would say this was the geekiest conglomeration of geekdom Numb3rs had ever produced, but a few weeks before that it turned out Charlie's girlfriend and fellow math whiz Amita had been playing a fictional equivalent of WoW since she was an undergrad, so, you know, comics, gamers, comics, gamers... tough call. Plus the show teaches you mathematical concepts as ways to fight crime so it's not like it's light on the geek in the first place.
Character rundowns:
The Eppes family: Alan Eppes (Judd Hirsch) and his two pretty sons, Don (Rob Morrow) and Charlie (David Krumholtz). For all the mathematical crime-fighting, this show is really centered on the family dynamic--which, when you have a genius in the family, can be a little strange. For instance, Don and Charlie graduated high school at the same time, despite being five years apart in age. Issues such as these created friction between Don and Charlie that they are still sorting out. (Don's in therapy. Sometimes he takes Charlie. Differing takes on childhood memories = specialsauce.) There was, actually, a period of a few years during which Don avoided speaking to his family much at all, pre-series; the only thing that ended this period was their mother's impending death from cancer, which brought Don home in a hurry.
Currently, Charlie still lives with Alan, or possibly vice versa, since Alan attempted to put their house on the market and Charlie bought it. With the money from various math awards and government contracts he hadn't been spending on room and board up until then. Don theoretically has his own place (we saw it once? In season one? When Charlie showed up there at 2am?) but he regularly eats dinner at Chez Eppes and ends up sleeping on the couch there half the time.
I should probably take a moment to mention that this fandom tends to have a strong Don/Charlie bent. Because they have deep and conflicting emotions for each other that the show explores fairly regularly. And they love each other very much. Oh, fandom: what would you do to push boundaries if you didn't have incest?
Two other minor Charlie (or Charlie-actor)-related warnings:
1. Extended viewing of David Krumholtz has been known to cause this reviewer's ovaries to spontaneously explode.
2. David Krumholtz is not as smart as Charlie. He's good at the technobabble explaining mathematical concepts in lay terms! But he can only scribble equations for so long before they turn into squiggly marks.
I will now split the following characters into two categories: Charlie's fellow geeks, and Don's fellow FBI agents.
Charlie's Fellow Geeks
Amita Ramanujan (Navi Rawat) started off as Charlie's doctoral student slash teaching assistant. Everyone teased Charlie about his extremely hot student who came over to study at the house, and Charlie blithely ignored the possibility of inappropriate student-teacher relations. Recent driver license revelations tells us that Amita and Charlie are actually the same age (the youth of Charlie's accomplishments continues to haunt him!), which may have contributed to both the ribbing and Charlie's stalwart abiding by the rules-ness.
So Amita finished her doctorate in math and Charlie was sad because she was going to leave because she was, like, done with school. Except that she then decided to get a second Ph.D. at their fictional university of CalSci, this one in physics. Charlie, being well-socialized for a genius but honestly, that's not saying a whole lot, mostly went, "But you don't like math anymore? *puppy eyes*" until Amita hinted that if she studied in a different area, Charlie wouldn't be her thesis advisor anymore and could form a different kind of relationship with her.
After a couple of seasons of the total awkwardness that is the geek dating scene, Amita and Charlie seem to actually be making some progress with that. Now I just wish the show writers would remember she's smart as often as they remember she has boobs.
(This might be a good time to mention that approximately 95% of Numb3rs episodes utterly fail the DTWOF test. Sigh.)
My pet theory about why Amita has set aside various academic and career opportunities at other institutions in order to stay near Charlie is that she's an NSA agent assigned to babysit him and make sure he doesn't manage to get his extremely valuable brains blown out with all the crime-fighting. This theory is not particularly supported by canon and I mention it only in the hopes that someone will write me the story so I don't have to do it myself. *cough*
When Charlie went to Princeton at the tender age of 13 (his mother came along with him), he studied physics under Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNicol). They made a lasting impression on each other, forming deep soul-bonds on the academic and intellectual levels, and Larry ended up following Charlie back across the country to CalSci, where they both now teach. There were some intermediate institutions in there--Charlie also attended MIT and Stanford--and while I have no proof, I somehow suspect that Larry may have, oh, gotten a visiting professorship wherever Charlie happened to be.
I do not think Charlie would know what to do with himself if Larry stopped wandering after him. This particular belief of mine is borne out by the arc in which Larry fulfills his lifelong dream of going into space. Space! A great deal of denial occurs on Charlie's part. And flailing.
Larry is simultaneously more sensible than Charlie and with his head further up in the clouds than Charlie's has ever been. I do not know how to explain him further than that, except that he is awesome.
For, like, a season and a half, there was also Millie Finch (Kathy Najimy), chair of Charlie's division at CalSci and general thorn in his side (making him do department fundraisers! the cheek!). Millie's more awesome decisions include Amita's promotion. Millie's more horrifying decisions include dating Alan. Yes, Charlie's boss was dating his father. Because what Charlie needed was MORE issues.
Don's fellow FBI agents
Colby Granger (Dylan Bruno)(left) and David Sinclair (Alimi Ballard)(right) are usually paired up for fieldwork. I'm trying to come up with more to say here and spinning my wheels, because there's a massive characterization shift that occurs in the s3 finale/s4 opener that I don't want to spoil.
Er, here, have a spoiler box. Highlight to read.
[spoilers]
So in the s3 finale, Colby is revealed to be a double agent, selling secrets to the Chinese. David (and the rest of the team, but let's face it, David) feel really betrayed. David cries. Don rubs his head a lot. The fans spend the entire summer screaming "Noooooo!" and then in the s4 premiere, it turns out that Colby is in fact a triple agent, as much of fandom surmised/hoped/fanwanked, working for the Department of Justice to root out actual double agents. David spends a couple of episodes continuing to feel betrayed and generally slashing it up, and finally they patch things up and get their groove back on. Although now Colby dates women. Because the reason he wasn't before was the undercover thing. Yes, that's absolutely the reason.
[/spoilers]
Megan Reeves (Diane Farr) is a profiler on Don's team in the FBI. She's got a dry, gentle sense of humor and one of the hottest, smokiest, most real voices you've ever heard from TV womankind.
She has a relationship with Larry, which baffles Larry to no end. Ways she copes with Larry's OCD issues: they only have lunch together on a specific day of the week, they only have X many dates per month, plus one wild-card where she gets to ask for something unusual. Like, sex, or something.
Megan is perhaps the only woman in the FBI (nay, indeed, any law enforcement agency) that Don does not have a sexual history with. Having noted that, I might as well run through the ladies of his *cough* acquaintance.
Terry Lake (Sabrina Lloyd) was the forensic psychologist/profiler on the team during season 1. She left to go patch things up with her ex-husband right around the time that Don brought up their romantic history from Quantico. *cough*
Liz Warner (Aya Sumika) got the hots for Don at Quantico too, but unlike Terry, with whom Don was a fellow student, Liz studied under Don as her training instructor. Because it's Numb3rs, and they go there. Now she's his subordinate in LA, and while she seems to not have much issues with sleeping with the boss, everyone else thinks she deserves an award for it (Don being a moody bastard much of the time). Don himself seems to be troubled by it.
P.S. She's hot and kicks a lot of ass--one of the more active female field agents we see. I'll be sad if she goes off the show because Don cannot cope.
Kim Hall (Sarah Wayne Callies), specialist in counterfeit money, was in one episode (1x07 "Counterfeit Reality") but I feel she's a significant enough part of Don's past to mention, considering he was engaged to her while he was Special Agent In Charge of the field office in Albuquerque. This how Don broke it off with her: "My mom has cancer, I'm going home."
She seems to have taken it okay?
It's probably also worth noting that Charlie's reaction to Don having had a fiancée was, "Uh. I. Didn't know?"
You know, I could continue discussing Don's ex-girlfriends, but after a little bit, he starts to sound like a ho, and that's just not true. He's really a sensitive guy whose job and family keep him from forming the kind of romantic relationship he wants to. (Also, I keep finding myself comparing him to Aral Vorkosigan, if any of you know Bujold. He has a type. His type is law enforcement. Female law enforcement keeps him from facing the issue head-on more than he's comfortable with. Ahem.)
So we'll just move onto the ex-boyfriend.
Billy Cooper, or Coop (Max Martini), only appeared in one episode (1x13 "Man Hunt"). I mention him because he nonetheless appears in a disproportionate amount of Don-fic. This might have something to do with how during that pre-series period when Don wasn't talking to his family much, he was, part of the time, doing Fugitive Recovery with Coop as his partner, roaming the country and doing things Don was ashamed to tell his poor ailing mother about together.
ETA: Courtesy of niqaeli, the long-awaited Edgerton section.
Having mentioned the ex-boyfriend, I should also mention the current on-again/off-again boyfriend who shows up in fic all the time, Agent Ian Edgerton (Lou Diamond Phillips), who has appeared in five episodes.
Edgerton is the FBI's top sniper/tracker, did a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and is an all-around total badass. He is also sarcastic and intelligent and a lot of fun to watch interact with the other characters. He has been brought in as a consultant on several of their cases, during which he has had strong chemistry with the brothers Eppes, both individually and collectively. This has lead a fair portion the fic involving Edgerton pretty much exactly where you'd expect it to especially when one of the strong OTPs is already the incest. Oh, fandom, never change.
/ETA
Fandom Resources
Numb3rs Online--I haven't explored this site thoroughly but I feel I should give their screencaps a shout-out, because they are disgustingly complete and saved my bacon for finding pictures of characters who only appear once ever.
numb3rs_fic--bit of everything.
numb3rsficathon--specifically slash ficathons.
numb3rsflashfic
eppescest--because yeah, Don and Charlie.
Numb3rs fanfic awards in various genres--a good place to go to start looking for the best of the fandom.
ETA: spikedluv's Guide to Numb3rs Fandom on LJ, a more complete list of comms by type.
I am jmtorres, I am your Numb3rs crack-dealer for the month! I apologize for not getting started on this earlier, I spent the first four days of the month on a shoot location with no internet, no cell service, and no running water. (Interestingly, though, we were using the same model HD camera as they use for some of the pick-ups on Numb3rs.) (Aside from that coincidence, my qualifications for writing about this fandom include one story and general weekly squee. My participation in the fandom proper is limited to, uh, hey, where's the fandom? It's sad. But I read. So I will show you what I read.)
But enough about me! Let's talk Numb3rs.
Numb3rs is a 1-hour episodic case-based show which airs on CBS on Fridays, currently in its 4th season. There is always an FBI case. There is always an application of math that can be used to aid in solving said case.
Or, let me break it down to fannish terms:
Don is an FBI agent. His brother Charlie is a genius and professor of applied mathematics. Together, they fight crime!
In a recent episode (4x09 "Graphic"), Don and Charlie's crime-fighting antics inspired a comic book artist played by guest star Christopher Lloyd. Wil Wheaton was also in this episode. And Joe Morton. And did I mention the comic book convention? I would say this was the geekiest conglomeration of geekdom Numb3rs had ever produced, but a few weeks before that it turned out Charlie's girlfriend and fellow math whiz Amita had been playing a fictional equivalent of WoW since she was an undergrad, so, you know, comics, gamers, comics, gamers... tough call. Plus the show teaches you mathematical concepts as ways to fight crime so it's not like it's light on the geek in the first place.
Character rundowns:
The Eppes family: Alan Eppes (Judd Hirsch) and his two pretty sons, Don (Rob Morrow) and Charlie (David Krumholtz). For all the mathematical crime-fighting, this show is really centered on the family dynamic--which, when you have a genius in the family, can be a little strange. For instance, Don and Charlie graduated high school at the same time, despite being five years apart in age. Issues such as these created friction between Don and Charlie that they are still sorting out. (Don's in therapy. Sometimes he takes Charlie. Differing takes on childhood memories = specialsauce.) There was, actually, a period of a few years during which Don avoided speaking to his family much at all, pre-series; the only thing that ended this period was their mother's impending death from cancer, which brought Don home in a hurry.
Currently, Charlie still lives with Alan, or possibly vice versa, since Alan attempted to put their house on the market and Charlie bought it. With the money from various math awards and government contracts he hadn't been spending on room and board up until then. Don theoretically has his own place (we saw it once? In season one? When Charlie showed up there at 2am?) but he regularly eats dinner at Chez Eppes and ends up sleeping on the couch there half the time.
I should probably take a moment to mention that this fandom tends to have a strong Don/Charlie bent. Because they have deep and conflicting emotions for each other that the show explores fairly regularly. And they love each other very much. Oh, fandom: what would you do to push boundaries if you didn't have incest?
Two other minor Charlie (or Charlie-actor)-related warnings:
1. Extended viewing of David Krumholtz has been known to cause this reviewer's ovaries to spontaneously explode.
2. David Krumholtz is not as smart as Charlie. He's good at the technobabble explaining mathematical concepts in lay terms! But he can only scribble equations for so long before they turn into squiggly marks.
I will now split the following characters into two categories: Charlie's fellow geeks, and Don's fellow FBI agents.
Charlie's Fellow Geeks
Amita Ramanujan (Navi Rawat) started off as Charlie's doctoral student slash teaching assistant. Everyone teased Charlie about his extremely hot student who came over to study at the house, and Charlie blithely ignored the possibility of inappropriate student-teacher relations. Recent driver license revelations tells us that Amita and Charlie are actually the same age (the youth of Charlie's accomplishments continues to haunt him!), which may have contributed to both the ribbing and Charlie's stalwart abiding by the rules-ness.
So Amita finished her doctorate in math and Charlie was sad because she was going to leave because she was, like, done with school. Except that she then decided to get a second Ph.D. at their fictional university of CalSci, this one in physics. Charlie, being well-socialized for a genius but honestly, that's not saying a whole lot, mostly went, "But you don't like math anymore? *puppy eyes*" until Amita hinted that if she studied in a different area, Charlie wouldn't be her thesis advisor anymore and could form a different kind of relationship with her.
After a couple of seasons of the total awkwardness that is the geek dating scene, Amita and Charlie seem to actually be making some progress with that. Now I just wish the show writers would remember she's smart as often as they remember she has boobs.
(This might be a good time to mention that approximately 95% of Numb3rs episodes utterly fail the DTWOF test. Sigh.)
My pet theory about why Amita has set aside various academic and career opportunities at other institutions in order to stay near Charlie is that she's an NSA agent assigned to babysit him and make sure he doesn't manage to get his extremely valuable brains blown out with all the crime-fighting. This theory is not particularly supported by canon and I mention it only in the hopes that someone will write me the story so I don't have to do it myself. *cough*
When Charlie went to Princeton at the tender age of 13 (his mother came along with him), he studied physics under Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNicol). They made a lasting impression on each other, forming deep soul-bonds on the academic and intellectual levels, and Larry ended up following Charlie back across the country to CalSci, where they both now teach. There were some intermediate institutions in there--Charlie also attended MIT and Stanford--and while I have no proof, I somehow suspect that Larry may have, oh, gotten a visiting professorship wherever Charlie happened to be.
I do not think Charlie would know what to do with himself if Larry stopped wandering after him. This particular belief of mine is borne out by the arc in which Larry fulfills his lifelong dream of going into space. Space! A great deal of denial occurs on Charlie's part. And flailing.
Larry is simultaneously more sensible than Charlie and with his head further up in the clouds than Charlie's has ever been. I do not know how to explain him further than that, except that he is awesome.
For, like, a season and a half, there was also Millie Finch (Kathy Najimy), chair of Charlie's division at CalSci and general thorn in his side (making him do department fundraisers! the cheek!). Millie's more awesome decisions include Amita's promotion. Millie's more horrifying decisions include dating Alan. Yes, Charlie's boss was dating his father. Because what Charlie needed was MORE issues.
Don's fellow FBI agents
Colby Granger (Dylan Bruno)(left) and David Sinclair (Alimi Ballard)(right) are usually paired up for fieldwork. I'm trying to come up with more to say here and spinning my wheels, because there's a massive characterization shift that occurs in the s3 finale/s4 opener that I don't want to spoil.
Er, here, have a spoiler box. Highlight to read.
[spoilers]
So in the s3 finale, Colby is revealed to be a double agent, selling secrets to the Chinese. David (and the rest of the team, but let's face it, David) feel really betrayed. David cries. Don rubs his head a lot. The fans spend the entire summer screaming "Noooooo!" and then in the s4 premiere, it turns out that Colby is in fact a triple agent, as much of fandom surmised/hoped/fanwanked, working for the Department of Justice to root out actual double agents. David spends a couple of episodes continuing to feel betrayed and generally slashing it up, and finally they patch things up and get their groove back on. Although now Colby dates women. Because the reason he wasn't before was the undercover thing. Yes, that's absolutely the reason.
[/spoilers]
Megan Reeves (Diane Farr) is a profiler on Don's team in the FBI. She's got a dry, gentle sense of humor and one of the hottest, smokiest, most real voices you've ever heard from TV womankind.
She has a relationship with Larry, which baffles Larry to no end. Ways she copes with Larry's OCD issues: they only have lunch together on a specific day of the week, they only have X many dates per month, plus one wild-card where she gets to ask for something unusual. Like, sex, or something.
Megan is perhaps the only woman in the FBI (nay, indeed, any law enforcement agency) that Don does not have a sexual history with. Having noted that, I might as well run through the ladies of his *cough* acquaintance.
Terry Lake (Sabrina Lloyd) was the forensic psychologist/profiler on the team during season 1. She left to go patch things up with her ex-husband right around the time that Don brought up their romantic history from Quantico. *cough*
Liz Warner (Aya Sumika) got the hots for Don at Quantico too, but unlike Terry, with whom Don was a fellow student, Liz studied under Don as her training instructor. Because it's Numb3rs, and they go there. Now she's his subordinate in LA, and while she seems to not have much issues with sleeping with the boss, everyone else thinks she deserves an award for it (Don being a moody bastard much of the time). Don himself seems to be troubled by it.
P.S. She's hot and kicks a lot of ass--one of the more active female field agents we see. I'll be sad if she goes off the show because Don cannot cope.
Kim Hall (Sarah Wayne Callies), specialist in counterfeit money, was in one episode (1x07 "Counterfeit Reality") but I feel she's a significant enough part of Don's past to mention, considering he was engaged to her while he was Special Agent In Charge of the field office in Albuquerque. This how Don broke it off with her: "My mom has cancer, I'm going home."
She seems to have taken it okay?
It's probably also worth noting that Charlie's reaction to Don having had a fiancée was, "Uh. I. Didn't know?"
You know, I could continue discussing Don's ex-girlfriends, but after a little bit, he starts to sound like a ho, and that's just not true. He's really a sensitive guy whose job and family keep him from forming the kind of romantic relationship he wants to. (Also, I keep finding myself comparing him to Aral Vorkosigan, if any of you know Bujold. He has a type. His type is law enforcement. Female law enforcement keeps him from facing the issue head-on more than he's comfortable with. Ahem.)
So we'll just move onto the ex-boyfriend.
Billy Cooper, or Coop (Max Martini), only appeared in one episode (1x13 "Man Hunt"). I mention him because he nonetheless appears in a disproportionate amount of Don-fic. This might have something to do with how during that pre-series period when Don wasn't talking to his family much, he was, part of the time, doing Fugitive Recovery with Coop as his partner, roaming the country and doing things Don was ashamed to tell his poor ailing mother about together.
ETA: Courtesy of niqaeli, the long-awaited Edgerton section.
Having mentioned the ex-boyfriend, I should also mention the current on-again/off-again boyfriend who shows up in fic all the time, Agent Ian Edgerton (Lou Diamond Phillips), who has appeared in five episodes.
Edgerton is the FBI's top sniper/tracker, did a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and is an all-around total badass. He is also sarcastic and intelligent and a lot of fun to watch interact with the other characters. He has been brought in as a consultant on several of their cases, during which he has had strong chemistry with the brothers Eppes, both individually and collectively. This has lead a fair portion the fic involving Edgerton pretty much exactly where you'd expect it to especially when one of the strong OTPs is already the incest. Oh, fandom, never change.
/ETA
Fandom Resources
Numb3rs Online--I haven't explored this site thoroughly but I feel I should give their screencaps a shout-out, because they are disgustingly complete and saved my bacon for finding pictures of characters who only appear once ever.
numb3rs_fic--bit of everything.
numb3rsficathon--specifically slash ficathons.
numb3rsflashfic
eppescest--because yeah, Don and Charlie.
Numb3rs fanfic awards in various genres--a good place to go to start looking for the best of the fandom.
ETA: spikedluv's Guide to Numb3rs Fandom on LJ, a more complete list of comms by type.