Scorpion

I’ve only seen one episode of this so far, the pilot. I’m not sure I’m going to see a second. Yet, the pilot was so memorable I just have to say something.

I generally don’t appreciate the “it’s so bad it’s good” concept. This was an exception, one of the few times I could really appreciate how unintentionally hilarious a bad show could be.

Specifically, I’m referring to the scene where the hero drives a sports car at 200 MPH along a runway while a jetliner’s copilot hangs on to the plane’s running gear and dangles an ethernet cable down to the laptop held by the hero’s love interest. Up until that point, the show had been merely kind of stupid. That pushed it into the “bwahahaha, I can’t believe they’re doing that” zone. I get a grin just thinking about it.

It pretty much destroyed any point of mocking the show otherwise. Sure, I could point out that hard drives aren’t nearly as sensitive to magnetism as they depict, or that you can’t open a locked door by causing a brownout, or that comparing your IQ score with Einstein’s is a truly Dunning-Kruger move. All that pales before the awesome stupidity of the jetliner scene. After that, nothing else matters.

The one thing that puzzles me is how that scene not only got written, but filmed. You’d think someone would have pointed out how terrible it was.

Holy fuck.

So, apparently this whole thing is inspired by the “real life” of this guy, a self-proclaimed genius (197 IQ!) and apparently the “6th fastest coder in the world” (nevermind that his team placed 90th out of 250).

While his Reddit AMA is fascinating, that’s only his PR account. Apparently his “real” account is DarqWolff, which posted this fascinating bit of insanity over a year ago.

I mean, props to the dude for somehow selling his “super-genius who saves the world via hacking” fictional autobiography to a TV exec, and apparently, with the show barely dropping viewers for its second ep (still over 13m), he might even stand to make a decent amount of cash off of this whole affair. God the world is weird.

P.S. - After the “I am smarter than many degree-holding psychologists” rant, this is my favorite piece of O’Brien insanity. The faceless, shadowy “Specialists” at the bottom completely seal the deal for me on this guys genuine Bonkersness ™.

Oh man. That’s definitely Wile E. Coyote, super genius material. “I can even debunk some of Freud’s theories” is hilarious. I bet he’s such a good physicist, he can even prove that fire, earth, air, and water are not the fundamental elements.

I made a passing reference to the Dunning-Kruger effect in relation to the show’s main character, but it’s pretty clear from your links that Walter O’Brien almost certainly suffers from this. Reading between the lines of comments about his mother’s boyfriend, I strongly suspect that the boyfriend was “aggravated” as he said because he was giving O’Brien clear explanations, and O’Brien kept getting it wrong while insisting that he’s a physics expert. Thermodynamics, which he mentions “not quite understanding,” is actually quite simple. The basic principles, anyway, since they follow from the ideas taught in high school physics.

The show clearly suffers from the problem of rather stupid writers trying to write about geniuses. Walter O’Brien is listed in the writing credits on IMDB for the pilot, so that obviously includes him. I have trouble imagining someone of even average intelligence putting up with some of what’s in that script.

I’ve been watching this show and hoping someone here would start a thread. The first two episodes made my brain want to explode. I knew it was loosely based on a real person(s), but I did not know until just now that the guy it’s based on is actually writing and consulting for the show. Knowing that makes me think that he has to be meta-trolling everyone through the show, because it takes the whole “Hollywood tech” thing to ludicrous extremes. Even Hawaii Five-O and the myriad NCIS shows do more realistic tech than Scorpion. Many examples of ridiculousness were cited above, including the completely insane “Dangling an Ethernet cable from a jumbo jet 20 feet off the runway and plugging it into a laptop in a moving car” scenario. The best part of that little bit was that they somehow managed to download gigabytes of air traffic control software to the laptop in 8 seconds.

The show is basically nerds-as-superheroes fantasy. Walter’s group can do anything, hack into any system, compute any needed statistic or equation effortlessly, fix or rig any device to do whatever they want, and they do it all as a team of special agents working for the government. Straight up nerd fantasy. The show is cute in it’s own way, and the actors likeable, but the writing is awful and the plots laughable. Still, I’m not surprised it’s successful.

But at least Paige is cute…

Spot on. It’s Chuck, but very badly written. The original premise of Chuck, before he got the software update, was that he didn’t solve most situations by “flashing,” he solved them by being a nerd. Granted, Chuck wasn’t always great, but it was occasionally witty, and the tech stuff, while frequently wrong, wasn’t hilariously bad.

Also Chuck never tried to take itself too seriously, it was an unabashed nerd fantasy romp and made no apologies for it. Scorpion on the other hand poses as a real life story.

Anyone still watching? Its just tons of crazy over the top, no way this shit could happen, events that make for fun weekly episodes. No brain required. :p

Season 2 added Alana De La Garza as the new boss for the team, I approve of this casting! ;)

I watched the Season Two premiere, it’s even more crazy than Season One. The weather balloon thing had me laughing out loud, and I like that given about 10 minutes Happy was able to make an EMP device out of some microwave oven parts a board and a bullhorn, and she somehow had time to add red/green indicator lights to the switches… Only on television!

Also, Paige was upgraded. I thought Paige 2.0 was a different actress at first, but apparently they just stopped toning the actress down and let Katherine McPhee look like her normal supermodel gorgeous self while in-character.

I’ve never posted about this show because, well, it’s Scorpion, but I love it. I’ve watched all the episodes. There is some weird combo of cast, concept, and general craziness that draws me to it. It’s so preposterous and revels in it. It’s like watching a pig root around in the mud.

I imagine the writing sessions go like this: “Give me your nuttiest idea…okay, that’s good but still a little too believable, how can we juice it up?”. Those people are geniuses at being stupid.

I guess Forever got cancelled then?

I still have some of these I dvred from last year I have no even gotten to yet.

The show lied to me, I haven’t seen De La Garza on in like the last 4 episodes.

Also I am caught up, the Subway episode was pretty entertaining, but the recent area 51 episode put me to sleep.

Area 51+Scorpion should have equaled a series high point, and it was surprisingly unimaginative. I did like the weightless fight, it was so half heartedly done I couldn’t help but laugh. Also at the end there he’s working on this high tech storage device and has a soldering iron right next to it. Nothing tells a tv audience serious tech work is going on like seeing a soldering iron.

I am behind on just about every other show, the repercussions of painting 2 rooms and getting carpet installed, but I did squeeze in the last 3 episodes of this yesterday. All 3 were pretty good.

Sad to see Megan’s passing. But the college episode was fun and uplifting at the end. Also I guess Ray is leaving for awhile? He is always a fun addition to any episode.

Yeah the recent episodes have all been, in an underlying, way really about Walters journey to develop human emotions.

Awe yiss, season 3. And… the first double episode had way too much troubled love shit going on.

At least there was a nuke being launched and Super Fun Guy PJs.

This show has always been one of those take it for what it is and suspend belief kind of shows. Theres no jumping the shark because they got that out of the way in the very first episode. You know, when they hacked into a jet that was taking off, externally from a moving car using a laptop, probably the one from Independence Day. Anyway its that kind of show. But this season opener, gawd it was bad. Did you know you can disable all signals to a destroyer with aluminum foil? Or that you can easily remote hack and redirect an nuclear missile? Well that was the good stuff. The bad? The relationships. They continue to milk that crap like a prized Guernsey. And they do such a horrible job of it. Either get it done with or have Walter wig out and go on a brilliant genius level murder spree.

Its better now than it was at the start of the season, perhaps because Tim hasn’t been in the last 2 episodes? :D

But the side story of Walter and Happy being married is dumb, and needs to end soon.

This is beyond stupid. Its actually so dumb its annoying. There is no way the US would deny Walter citizenship and risk him moving to another country who could take advantage of his mind. No matter what laws or rules are involved in halting or delaying his citizenship, the government would find a way, immediately, to assure Walters citizenship and keep him working for the US.

Finally the Walter and Happy married side story is over. The election related episode was extra dumb this week. Paige in that blue dress, yowza! :D