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shallowness) wrote2021-06-12 12:41 pm
shallowness) wrote2021-06-12 12:41 pm
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Scorpion Season 3 - Disc 5
‘Dirty Seeds, Done Cheap’ is good, ‘Don’t Burst My Bubble’ is better, ‘Monkey See’ less so and ‘Broken Wind’ is the weakest of the four episodes on this disc.
After ‘Dirty Seeds, Done Cheap’, Toby was the only adult member of the team not to hallucinate, probably because as the one with the medical knowhow, he can diagnose what’s happening and prescribe treatment.
There’s an effective build-up about Sly’s fear of chickens, Cabe’s worries about the age difference between him and Ally, and Paige getting Walter to apologise to people he’s affronted in the past. When the rest of the team sets off to sort out the international seedbank, Toby stays behind to dash the littlest shipper’s hopes (the kid playing Ralph still mumbles.)
The team diagnose the problem, say that it’ll only take 40 minutes, I go ‘Ha, ha not’…and then Sly sees chickens. Paige and I doubted they could get to the seedbank, and, of course, they hadn’t, they were hallucinations. He, Happy and Cabe are Scarecrowed by psychotropic spores. Happy is reliving being rejected by potential adoptive parents and has regressed to childhood, worrying Toby. They just about sidestep the ickiness of him playing a pseudo-paternal figure to Happy as he tries to communicate with her, plus Jayden Wong playing a Happy who thinks she’s a kid opposite a kid actor playing her projection of Toby’s voice. Don’t ask me how. The pay-off is a sweet dream sequence where kid!Happy (here played by an age-appropriate actress) meets kid!Toby several years earlier than in reality.
In terms of oddness, this is perhaps topped by Cabe (in aged-up make-up) thinking he’s in a sitcom that’s also a quiz show, where the one joke is that he’s really old and the lovely Ally really isn’t. It’s a nod to every crack that has been made by the younger characters about Cabe’s age, which have been many. Ray turns up! And when Walter talks to Cabe over the comms, he thinks it’s the voice of God (a nice nod to Walter’s God complex). At Paige’s urging – she’s dealing with Sly - Walter manages to empathise enough with Cabe living out his fears to talk him into pulling a lever – harking back to the rocket episode.
So far unaffected, Waige then have to use pipes to breathe oxygen as they move about, collecting seeds to come up with medication to counteract the bad spores, before they affect them and they start hallucinating their greatest fear. After the false alarm of purple fire (it was real), Paige hallucinates seeing Walter snogging someone else (the shipper in me was very satisfied that this showed Toby was wrong, but surely Paige’s greatest fear would have been Ralph in danger) and she’s disconcerted, but doesn’t share this hallucination with anyone.
Sly uses this experience to excel at the town hall debate he’s been worried about, Cabe admits he wears reading glasses to Ally, who doesn’t mind, (and proves again that she hates her politician boss.) I agree with Ralph’s diagnosis that Walter was too afraid to tell Paige how he felt in season 2.
I approved very much of the show using altered states to explore emotional truths.
Admittedly, ‘Don’t Burst My Bubble’, with Ada’s plight of being stuck at home and not being able to hug her dad etc, might have hit me more because I was watching it in 2020 A.D., but I think it would have been emotionally epic whenever I saw it, and the ending is darling. So, it’s probably my second favourite episode of the season.
Happy’s emotional issues are again at the forefront (after the previous ep). She’s been chatting online with a fellow female mechanic, and when her buddy doesn’t respond, she ignores Toby’s belief that someone was catfishing her (and it was improbable) and finds the team’s case of the week. Ada is a bubble girl, but a storm hit their house, cutting short the chat, and is threatening to burst that bubble or to electrocute her, so it’s a puzzle how to rescue her safely.
Before that, a few things have been set up: Walter is trying to be a supportive friend to Paige and is patting himself on the back for giving her space and spouting what Toby claims is pyschobabble; Paige is upset because of the strains of having a long-distance relationship with Tim; Ralph doesn’t want to go on a school trip; and today is election day for Sly.
But the team are obviously focused on helping Happy’s friend Ada. It’s just that Happy is snappy and the boys are tactless, focusing on solving the puzzle. Despite their best efforts, things go wrong, so they improvise (this means Ada gets to hug her dad in a hazmat suit.) They improvise some more with input from germaphobe Sly, coming up with a desperate plan that involves Ada being submerged in honey, then sent into a burning meat locker in the hope that it can become a temporary living space that won’t kill her. It’s heartbreaking and awesome, with Happy having to be an emotional support for Ada – who is, I have yet to mention, a teenager, and who looks up to Happy.
They even come up with Walter devising an algorithm to try to find a tissue match for a life-transforming bone marrow transplant for Ada (it had occurred to me that they might be able to come up with something like that) but they also use a VR helmet that Walter had tried to give Paige so that she and Tim could communicate better, and set up a Scorpion winter formal Ada can virtually attend (as she couldn’t attend her high school one.) I got a lump in my throat watching Ada’s dad outside the meat locker, watching his daughter inside, dancing with a VR helmet on.
Before that, Paige admits she and Tim broke up (offscreen, with a whimper not a bang) because the long-distance thing wasn’t working out (and, shipper me extrapolated, she’s still in love with Walter). Walter is sincerely sad she’s sad and is able to articulate it. Ralph gets over his hump. Cabe breaks up with Ally because she put out an an online attack vid that won Patel the election. I.e. she did her job. But really because she attacked one of his kids. (Sly finds another way to save his beloved comic book store.) Aptly, the two broken hearts dance together. Here as throughout the ep, the show gauges the emotional content just right (perhaps learning from the sinkhole ep and ‘Ticker’.)
On the one hand, watching ‘Monkey See, Monkey Poo,’ during a pandemic, I was even more snarky about the science. On the other, there is physical comedy with a monkey, mainly involving Toby. Also, Ralph hangs out with a manically freaked out Sly, and Paige wears a great hat.
The ep starts with Happy dragging Toby to see that quirky therapist, who gives dismissive Toby a clicker for every time he and Happy should bicker. The team (sans Sly) are sent to an Amazonian rainforest to analyse a monkey’s DNA to stop a viral pandemic in South America - the WHO were going to make a vaccine (2020 me: Well, if it were that easy…) I morbidly thought Cabe had definitely caught the virus when Robert Patrick was doing a Robert Patrickesque stunt.
The therapist tells Quintis their love will conquer their issues. Meanwhile, Walter demonstrates empathy towards Cabe (still heartbroken over Ally), which Toby and Paige witness. Toby theorises it’s born from experience and tells Paige that she inadvertently broke Walter’s heart. (I was like, ‘Did she not get that from Walter‘s oxygen-deprived ramblings?’ And it was still his fault for pushing her toward Tim and not facing the depth of his feelings? Which, also, I thought Toby had recognised at the end of season 2, but he was busy getting drunk then.) Let’s just say I squinted at the Waige course correction, as in I appreciate where they’re going, but not the way we’re getting there.
There was also a Bond nod.
I had mixed feelings about ‘Broken Wind’. There was wedding build-up pressure as Paige assumed she’d be Happy’s maid of honour, Happy assumed that would mean that ‘the cheerleader’ would dress her up in pink taffeta while Walter, Sly and Cabe competed to be Toby’s best man. Obviously something was going to go wrong with their job, but I was so busy going ‘Ooh, pretty set’ that I was surprised that Paige and Happy were in some repurposed sky gondola that was in danger of crashing to the ground unless if Walter and co. could science them back up into safety.
Obviously, Paige and Happy had started fighting because Happy had stepped all over Paige’s inferiority complex about not being smart, and her brutal honesty and emotional cluelessness made things worse, especially as the solutions to save them involved Cabe shooting near them and electrocution. It was good to see the ladies’ relationship foregrounded as Happy realised that cheerleading helped Paige come up with a way of saving them and shared her real anxieties about the wedding , which helped Cabe to realise he’d hurt Sly’s feelings (he’d gone full-on RPG here hitting my embarrassment squick a little more than it made me laugh.) Toby avoided the trio’s competitiveness by picking Paige as his best man, so Happy would have ‘dudes of honour’ including her ex husband.
It’s a fairly low-wattage Waige episode, Walter doesn’t react anywhere near as much as Toby does to Happy being in danger over Paige, but Waige agree to collaborate on planning the big weddin.
In ‘Rock Black’, Quintis try out complimentary spas at potential wedding locations and everyone else does all the work. Walter misses the point and sets up pre-wedding lectures for them, which Paige will talk him out of.
The team take a time-sensitive private gig from a made-up country, leaving Cabe at the garage, which is handy, because Ally turns up with evidence against her soon-to -be former boss. She will also help Cabe not blow up the garage.
For the made-up military-backed ‘democracy’ where they all speak English in a faux-Russian accent) has been doing some space harvesting. Scopion help them get an asteroid down to Earth safely. Except there’s also a potentially lethal pathogen along with their precious palladium. The military don’t care about endangering humanity but the scientist president-in-name does and helps Scorpion as Walter and Happy nearly get shredded, more animal excrement is utilised (as lampshaded, this has been a theme all season now) and Sly’s unsuspected negotiation skills come into play.
Sly u to use those skills to talk Cabe into trying to get back with Ally. Paige calls Quintis out for taking advantage and Walter has cancelled all the lectures, but arranged dancing lessons for Quintis, which is, as Paige observes, sweet. His song choice for their first dance is less awkward than it could have been, and he finally makes a move, acting on Ralph’s observation a while ago that he should have taken Paige dancing. So we ended on a hopeful note for Waige.
After ‘Dirty Seeds, Done Cheap’, Toby was the only adult member of the team not to hallucinate, probably because as the one with the medical knowhow, he can diagnose what’s happening and prescribe treatment.
There’s an effective build-up about Sly’s fear of chickens, Cabe’s worries about the age difference between him and Ally, and Paige getting Walter to apologise to people he’s affronted in the past. When the rest of the team sets off to sort out the international seedbank, Toby stays behind to dash the littlest shipper’s hopes (the kid playing Ralph still mumbles.)
The team diagnose the problem, say that it’ll only take 40 minutes, I go ‘Ha, ha not’…and then Sly sees chickens. Paige and I doubted they could get to the seedbank, and, of course, they hadn’t, they were hallucinations. He, Happy and Cabe are Scarecrowed by psychotropic spores. Happy is reliving being rejected by potential adoptive parents and has regressed to childhood, worrying Toby. They just about sidestep the ickiness of him playing a pseudo-paternal figure to Happy as he tries to communicate with her, plus Jayden Wong playing a Happy who thinks she’s a kid opposite a kid actor playing her projection of Toby’s voice. Don’t ask me how. The pay-off is a sweet dream sequence where kid!Happy (here played by an age-appropriate actress) meets kid!Toby several years earlier than in reality.
In terms of oddness, this is perhaps topped by Cabe (in aged-up make-up) thinking he’s in a sitcom that’s also a quiz show, where the one joke is that he’s really old and the lovely Ally really isn’t. It’s a nod to every crack that has been made by the younger characters about Cabe’s age, which have been many. Ray turns up! And when Walter talks to Cabe over the comms, he thinks it’s the voice of God (a nice nod to Walter’s God complex). At Paige’s urging – she’s dealing with Sly - Walter manages to empathise enough with Cabe living out his fears to talk him into pulling a lever – harking back to the rocket episode.
So far unaffected, Waige then have to use pipes to breathe oxygen as they move about, collecting seeds to come up with medication to counteract the bad spores, before they affect them and they start hallucinating their greatest fear. After the false alarm of purple fire (it was real), Paige hallucinates seeing Walter snogging someone else (the shipper in me was very satisfied that this showed Toby was wrong, but surely Paige’s greatest fear would have been Ralph in danger) and she’s disconcerted, but doesn’t share this hallucination with anyone.
Sly uses this experience to excel at the town hall debate he’s been worried about, Cabe admits he wears reading glasses to Ally, who doesn’t mind, (and proves again that she hates her politician boss.) I agree with Ralph’s diagnosis that Walter was too afraid to tell Paige how he felt in season 2.
I approved very much of the show using altered states to explore emotional truths.
Admittedly, ‘Don’t Burst My Bubble’, with Ada’s plight of being stuck at home and not being able to hug her dad etc, might have hit me more because I was watching it in 2020 A.D., but I think it would have been emotionally epic whenever I saw it, and the ending is darling. So, it’s probably my second favourite episode of the season.
Happy’s emotional issues are again at the forefront (after the previous ep). She’s been chatting online with a fellow female mechanic, and when her buddy doesn’t respond, she ignores Toby’s belief that someone was catfishing her (and it was improbable) and finds the team’s case of the week. Ada is a bubble girl, but a storm hit their house, cutting short the chat, and is threatening to burst that bubble or to electrocute her, so it’s a puzzle how to rescue her safely.
Before that, a few things have been set up: Walter is trying to be a supportive friend to Paige and is patting himself on the back for giving her space and spouting what Toby claims is pyschobabble; Paige is upset because of the strains of having a long-distance relationship with Tim; Ralph doesn’t want to go on a school trip; and today is election day for Sly.
But the team are obviously focused on helping Happy’s friend Ada. It’s just that Happy is snappy and the boys are tactless, focusing on solving the puzzle. Despite their best efforts, things go wrong, so they improvise (this means Ada gets to hug her dad in a hazmat suit.) They improvise some more with input from germaphobe Sly, coming up with a desperate plan that involves Ada being submerged in honey, then sent into a burning meat locker in the hope that it can become a temporary living space that won’t kill her. It’s heartbreaking and awesome, with Happy having to be an emotional support for Ada – who is, I have yet to mention, a teenager, and who looks up to Happy.
They even come up with Walter devising an algorithm to try to find a tissue match for a life-transforming bone marrow transplant for Ada (it had occurred to me that they might be able to come up with something like that) but they also use a VR helmet that Walter had tried to give Paige so that she and Tim could communicate better, and set up a Scorpion winter formal Ada can virtually attend (as she couldn’t attend her high school one.) I got a lump in my throat watching Ada’s dad outside the meat locker, watching his daughter inside, dancing with a VR helmet on.
Before that, Paige admits she and Tim broke up (offscreen, with a whimper not a bang) because the long-distance thing wasn’t working out (and, shipper me extrapolated, she’s still in love with Walter). Walter is sincerely sad she’s sad and is able to articulate it. Ralph gets over his hump. Cabe breaks up with Ally because she put out an an online attack vid that won Patel the election. I.e. she did her job. But really because she attacked one of his kids. (Sly finds another way to save his beloved comic book store.) Aptly, the two broken hearts dance together. Here as throughout the ep, the show gauges the emotional content just right (perhaps learning from the sinkhole ep and ‘Ticker’.)
On the one hand, watching ‘Monkey See, Monkey Poo,’ during a pandemic, I was even more snarky about the science. On the other, there is physical comedy with a monkey, mainly involving Toby. Also, Ralph hangs out with a manically freaked out Sly, and Paige wears a great hat.
The ep starts with Happy dragging Toby to see that quirky therapist, who gives dismissive Toby a clicker for every time he and Happy should bicker. The team (sans Sly) are sent to an Amazonian rainforest to analyse a monkey’s DNA to stop a viral pandemic in South America - the WHO were going to make a vaccine (2020 me: Well, if it were that easy…) I morbidly thought Cabe had definitely caught the virus when Robert Patrick was doing a Robert Patrickesque stunt.
The therapist tells Quintis their love will conquer their issues. Meanwhile, Walter demonstrates empathy towards Cabe (still heartbroken over Ally), which Toby and Paige witness. Toby theorises it’s born from experience and tells Paige that she inadvertently broke Walter’s heart. (I was like, ‘Did she not get that from Walter‘s oxygen-deprived ramblings?’ And it was still his fault for pushing her toward Tim and not facing the depth of his feelings? Which, also, I thought Toby had recognised at the end of season 2, but he was busy getting drunk then.) Let’s just say I squinted at the Waige course correction, as in I appreciate where they’re going, but not the way we’re getting there.
There was also a Bond nod.
I had mixed feelings about ‘Broken Wind’. There was wedding build-up pressure as Paige assumed she’d be Happy’s maid of honour, Happy assumed that would mean that ‘the cheerleader’ would dress her up in pink taffeta while Walter, Sly and Cabe competed to be Toby’s best man. Obviously something was going to go wrong with their job, but I was so busy going ‘Ooh, pretty set’ that I was surprised that Paige and Happy were in some repurposed sky gondola that was in danger of crashing to the ground unless if Walter and co. could science them back up into safety.
Obviously, Paige and Happy had started fighting because Happy had stepped all over Paige’s inferiority complex about not being smart, and her brutal honesty and emotional cluelessness made things worse, especially as the solutions to save them involved Cabe shooting near them and electrocution. It was good to see the ladies’ relationship foregrounded as Happy realised that cheerleading helped Paige come up with a way of saving them and shared her real anxieties about the wedding , which helped Cabe to realise he’d hurt Sly’s feelings (he’d gone full-on RPG here hitting my embarrassment squick a little more than it made me laugh.) Toby avoided the trio’s competitiveness by picking Paige as his best man, so Happy would have ‘dudes of honour’ including her ex husband.
It’s a fairly low-wattage Waige episode, Walter doesn’t react anywhere near as much as Toby does to Happy being in danger over Paige, but Waige agree to collaborate on planning the big weddin.
In ‘Rock Black’, Quintis try out complimentary spas at potential wedding locations and everyone else does all the work. Walter misses the point and sets up pre-wedding lectures for them, which Paige will talk him out of.
The team take a time-sensitive private gig from a made-up country, leaving Cabe at the garage, which is handy, because Ally turns up with evidence against her soon-to -be former boss. She will also help Cabe not blow up the garage.
For the made-up military-backed ‘democracy’ where they all speak English in a faux-Russian accent) has been doing some space harvesting. Scopion help them get an asteroid down to Earth safely. Except there’s also a potentially lethal pathogen along with their precious palladium. The military don’t care about endangering humanity but the scientist president-in-name does and helps Scorpion as Walter and Happy nearly get shredded, more animal excrement is utilised (as lampshaded, this has been a theme all season now) and Sly’s unsuspected negotiation skills come into play.
Sly u to use those skills to talk Cabe into trying to get back with Ally. Paige calls Quintis out for taking advantage and Walter has cancelled all the lectures, but arranged dancing lessons for Quintis, which is, as Paige observes, sweet. His song choice for their first dance is less awkward than it could have been, and he finally makes a move, acting on Ralph’s observation a while ago that he should have taken Paige dancing. So we ended on a hopeful note for Waige.