TV Review: Scorpion - "Pilot"

Scorpion - "Pilot" (1x01) CBS, Mondays, 9 p.m.

If you combined "The Big Bang Theory" and "Numb3rs," you would get the new CBS crime procedural "Scorpion," which features a group of super geniuses who will presumably stop terrorist attacks or solve bank robberies and the like on a weekly basis.

Now I'm a fan of both "The Big Bang Theory" and late, great "Numb3rs," so this one was pretty high on my list of potential new shows to pick up this season. Lead Eleyes Gabel, who plays hacker extraordinaire Walter O'Brien, even looks a bit like David Krumholtz, who in turn played math genius Charlie Eppes for six season on "Numb3rs."

The question early on with that show was just how many crimes could the FBI solve with math? Turns out quite a lot, even if they stretched the premise on more than one occasion.

Here we have four geniuses, with human behavior specialist Toby Curtis (Eddie Kaye Thomas), electronics expert Happy Quinn (Jadyn Wong), math savant Sylvester Dodd (Ari Stidham) and Walter.

When we first meet this group, they are working with Walter performing mundane jobs to support themselves in a world in which they struggle to function. Along comes Government Agent Cabe Gallo (the always wonderful Robert Patrick) to give them a mission of utmost importance, saving around 20,000 people flying on some 70 airliners trapped in the sky without communication after a software patch shuts down air traffic control in the region.

Needing some stable WIFI, the action moves to a diner, where Walter installed a new system earlier in the episode, putting him and his friends in contact with waitress Paige Dineen (Katharaine McPhee) and her son Ralph (Riley B. Smith). What should be a simple hack and software switch job grows increasingly difficult through a terribly inconvenient setbacks.



While the premise is solid, and I liked the characters so far, the action grows increasingly unbelievable with the last sequence only making sense in the context that Justin Lin (who directed the past three "Fast and Furious" movies) is one of the executive producers. Seriously, "Gotham," in its pilot, is more grounded and realistic than this.

Hopefully, they will tone things down in future episodes, because I think this one has promise.

BEYOND HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

This being a procedural, there aren't really a lot of deep considerations, but I do have to say I really liked the scene in which Walter explains to Paige that her son was about to beat a chess grandmaster in less than 10 moves, using salt and pepper shakers and sugar packets. This book-ended nicely with the closing scene of Walter and Ralph playing video games. I'm guessing we know which characters are going to get shipped together first.

I was also happy that they revealed the incident that resulted in the bad blood between Walter and Gallo, and didn't drag out the secret unnecessarily for several weeks.