Scorpion season 3 - disc 3

[shallowness]

‘Motherboard’ is a little more like it than the previous episodes. Paige is all het up about them all celebrating Thanksgiving together while freaking out about Walter and Tim having become ‘Wally and Timbo’ now. Sly was making me go ‘Oh, darling, no’ by bringing his geekdom to his campaign in all the wrong ways, but this lead to Cabe meeting his opponent’s campaign manager and some flirting (which was one way of dodging the more squicky pseudo incestuous ship that could have happened.)

Walter accepts a job that turns out to involve an unsafe nuclear reactor in a disused basement and PAIGE’S MOTHER. We (and Toby mainly) get the Paige backstory I’d been craving and one of my favourite flavours of Paige: angry Paige. Veronica Dineen was and is a conwoman, straight out of jail. Paige’s father is dead, and their daughter mainly berates and mistrusts her mother. She certainly won’t let her meet her grandson (although it’s a Thanksgiving episode, so you knew she would, and indeed, Cabe, Paige’s new paternal figure leans on her to do it.)

The team do their genius thing to move the reactor from its dangerous location to somewhere it can be stored safely until the authorities (on holiday) can deal with it properly. They’re slightly hampered by Veronica’s former associates shooting at their truck, which is carrying the volatile nuclear reactor. Among many other silly things, we had Happy jump on Cabe to lever the nuclear reactor up and the visual of a giant Super Fun Guy balloon carrying the reactor out to sea.

Meanwhile, Veronica takes against Tim, who is just trying to be a good boyfriend, and turns out to be a Waige shipper, giving Walter a more affirmative message than the one he’s been hearing lately (although Walter’s description of trying to woo Paige was hardly accurate.) I wasn’t sure if Veronica had decided to support him because she thought he could be manipulated or the adoring way he looks at Paige/talks about her reminded Veronica of Paige’s father.

‘This is the Pits’, is again, a notch up. Walter is using Veronica’s help to sneakily try to ‘woo Paige’ while Tim is away with a terrible film and pretending to have a grunge past, Toby smells a rat (he’s also on a 1950s slang kick.) Scorpion get called to do a rescue job, meaning Paige is forced to leave Ralph with Veronica (who’s staying in Ray’s van) and her idea of ‘hanging out’ is conning hipsters (heh), but Ralph guilts her into behaving herself.

The rescue job involves a woman in a car in a tar pit. Walter offers to do heroics (a just returned Tim has been benched by Paige because he’s been informed that the state of his back will permanently end his navy career.) Obviously things go wrong and the plan is revised, endangering Walter, who has to trust the team (actually, Ralph) to get him out of the pit in a spectacular way, and one that associates him with the creature from the black lagoonish character Paige was obsessed with.

Tim turns down a job offer abroad to stay in Scorpion, thus meaning Paige can dodge a tough call of her own. (Well, Tim admits that LA is the right place for Ralph and that is going to come before Paige deciding how important her relationship with Tim is.) But there is Waige content, from the comedy of Walter following Veronica’s tips about grunge to a whole lot of ‘I don’t want you t die’ staring. Walter then questions Paige on not giving Veronica a second chance, especially to be a part of Ralph’s life. He listens to Paige’s response about the importance of honesty when it comes to Ralph and rejects any further manipulating from Veronica (yay), stating he wants to win Paige the right way, making Veronica ship them harder. Heh. Lea Thompson is really credible as Paige’s mother.

There’s also background stuff involving Sly’s silly campaign.

In ‘Wreck the Halls’, having learned nothing from Thanksgiving, Paige is determined the team will have a quiet Christmas holiday, with no phones or computers in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. Inevitably the come across a man about to be killed, step in, so now the bad guys are after them and they have no weapons , so they’ll have to use the Christmas gifts they brought along to defend themselves. But the man they saved isn’t an undercover agent like he’d claimed and kidnaps Ralph, who’s smart enough to help himself enough for Walter to rescue him.

In the midst of all of this, my favourite moment was Cabe asking Paige to let him give Raph his grandfather’s knife. My second was Happy telling Sly he should be himself when campaigning, because people should like him and vote accordingly. (I agree, but with the caveat ‘Not in a cape’.)

But the episode’s main emotional throughline is Walter being a dork. He undermines Tim, hates watching him bond with Ralph and it ends up in a verbal fight (at least no punches were thrown) where both men admit they were never friends. Toby observes astutely enough that there’s no place in Scorpion for a natural leader like Tim, who has swallowed much for Paige’s sake. She has to make some decisions about their future. Which is to have a long-distance relationship. As Toby points out, this will make Walter the bad guy in Paige’s eyes, so there’s a miserable new year ahead. (Like he hasn’t had a miserable few months already, and although it was all of his own making and his behaviour was facepalmy, I felt sorrier for Walter than the other characters did.)

There’s also sweet Christmas stuff going on and the geniuses’ ingenuity on display is enjoyable. Although, I know Tim said he was crazy about Ralph, I never saw them share a connection. It all seemed to be abot pleasing Paige as Raloh’s mother. Anyway, he was off.

In ‘Ice Ca-Cabes’, there’s a snake on the show which means the crack is high.

Even Walter notices that Paige is furious with him for hounding Tim away, which is one interpretation of what happened (but Toby offered another.)

The team’s latest job is something to do with water in a desert. but the thing that goes awry this time is that some metal ricochets into Cabe and with ages before a medivac can come out to him, he’s in danger of bleeding out, so Walter comes up with a crazy plan to save him, i.e. freeze Cabe, stop the bleed and stop him from having a heart attack when they restart his heart. In the desert. SHOCKINGLY that is further complicated but Sly has to catch a snake for its venom, and Walter and Paige have to get naked in pursuit of some chemicals. (I rolled my eyes at this instead of going along with it.)

Walter is extremely bad at telling Cabe he loves him (like, worse than ‘Cliffhanger’ bad) which Paige calls him out on. He later acknowledges that he’s so terrible at processing his emotions that he comes off as an android. In between talking panicky nonsense, he claims Cabe is his father to get on the medivac with him and does get out the words that he loves Cabe. It’s all team as family and Cabe as its dad. Even though the chances of Cabe not making it were zilch, there was an edge because he was technically dead (for a ood long while).