1.20.2015

Television: Scorpion, "Forget Me Nots"

The team juices an injured ex-Secret Service member's brain in hopes of accessing his memory so they can stop the launch of nuclear missiles.

Basically, the "football" has been stolen. You know what that is: the briefcase with the launch codes and the big red button. And hackers have started the prep sequence for a US missile to launch itself at St. Petersburg. So there's a limited amount of time to, you know, stop World War III.

Despite a strong turn by David James Elliot as the Secret Service agent, I didn't find this particular episode all that engaging. Elliot plays Bruce, an agent injured during an assassination attempt on Clinton, which left Bruce with a scrambled brain. Yet something in that brain is necessary to identify the person behind the theft of the football, so the team hooks Bruce up to a car battery and gives him a little mind massage. They do Cabe first, ostensibly to show Bruce it's all okay, but really for the onscreen value of seeing Cabe at peak performance: running and catching things better than ever!

It's sufficient to say, yes, they get the info they need from Bruce, and yes, they get the football back just in time. There was really little more to it than that.

As for the personal side of things, Paige asks Walter what he thinks of the possibility she and Ralph might move to Maine with Drew. "It's cold," he tells her, then warns her she doesn't want to know what he thinks. Eventually, however, it spills out that he wouldn't like it if they left. But, to be fair, he also researches programs in the area that might be good for Ralph, to make sure the boy gets the support he needs. (Drew had given Paige a brochure from a school for gifted kids too.) It's the most progress we've seen Walter make in terms of being able to express his feelings and was suitably awkward/touching. But it wasn't enough to buoy the episode, which on the whole was relatively flat.

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