Scorpion: Forget Me Nots Review

“There’s no such thing as luck. Only good science and math.”

This week the team is staffed with the rather interesting mission of trying to jar a military personnel’s memory so that some weapons of mass destruction don’t end up being detonated and ruining everybody’s day. With a show as ridiculous as Scorpion, a plot like this one is at least a step in the right direction. Oh, these guys are the smartest team out there, you say?  Well if they’re so smart, let’s watch them solve a guy’s brain!

Scorpion also doesn’t waste any time with this plot, not meandering or giving us pointless obstacles in the way of Bruce, the afflicted party. Bruce has found himself mentally displaced to the ‘90s, with the crucial nuclear launch info locked away inside it. This nuclear information is also in the form of a container known as “the football,” so through all of this craziness we get to keep hearing people say absurd phrases like “he lost the football.” It’s reassuring to see them promptly reach Bruce and it all soon turns into a match of wits between the two of them as they try to extract the details from him. It’s in this material that we get such winning dialogue between Bruce and Cabe like, “What do you remember, pops? The Alamo?” Anyways…

Instead a lot of this episode revolves around Team Scorpion trying to decipher Bruce’s locked away clues, using their brilliance for literal problem solving rather than math or sciences. It’s a welcome change of pace seeing Walter and co trying to stimulate Bruce’s brain in different ways to go about new plans, rather than the typical Scorpion fare (although it does have a very Scorpion-colored coat of paint to it all).

Elsewhere Paige is faced with the inevitable progression of the Drew storyline, that Drew wants Ralph and Paige to move with him to Portland. Paige mulls over the decision and whines about the importance of having the family together for Ralph. Meanwhile we see Drew outlining responsibilities, as Ralph is clearly thrilled and having a wonderful time science-ing out with Walter. Oh how is Paige ever going to make this decision? How will she know what Ralph really wants?

In a rather convenient matter, Bruce’s back story with the secret service involves distance and a loved one in a situation that feels all too similar to Paige’s current one with Drew and Ralph. It’s incredibly transparent and comes out of nowhere, but at least the show is beginning to dovetail their storylines, which is progress.

In spite of any freshness with the basic set-up of the plot this episode, it’s not as if the show proceeds forward in any plausible manner with it. In a particularly nonsense segment we see Walter ostensibly hacking Bruce’s brain, forcing him towards certain memories to help guide their mission. But I suppose when you get into an episode that involves recovering someone’s memories, it’s only natural to reach this outrageous set piece.

Don’t worry. Just in case any of this sounds too brainy for you, the last act has a lot of loud, overdone gunfire to re-balance the scales. The final stunt of the episode sees the nuke information being thrown onto an electrified train track just as the train is barreling down on it ready to set everything off (but not before, “Best thing about America? The trains always run on time!” is shouted out). It’s unreal stuff. The group calculates that they have forty-five seconds to grab the launch codes as they literally do math to figure out how to beat a speeding locomotive. The whole ordeal ends up coming down to science and magnets in the end, with a resolution that Breaking Bad would find more than a little derivative. There’s even a tacked on sequence towards the end where Cabe brags about his performance due to them juicing up his brain, only for Walter to reveal that the juicing wore off hours ago, and that was him out there.

This and basically everything in the episode we’d understand on our own without the very heavy, manufactured ways the show presents it all to us. Once again subtlety would go far here, and even though the episode brings to the table an unusual, different sort of story this time around, the episode falls on old patterns with the results being pretty similar looking to what’s being turned out every week.