TV Review - Scorpion

This Fall, CBS is debuting its new action drama series Scorpion (or, as the title card has it, </scorpion>). The show will air in Singapore on RTL CBS Entertainment and I attended a screening of the pilot tonight.

Scorpion is created by Nick Santora, whose TV credits include The Sopranos, The Guardian, Law & Order, Prison Break and Lie To Me. Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the screenwriters behind Star Trek (2009) who are showrunners on Sleepy Hollow, are executive producing. Also executive producing is Justin Lin of Fast and Furious fame; he directed the pilot. Touted as being based on a true story, Scorpion is inspired by the life of self-proclaimed Irish genius Walter O'Brien. O'Brien hacked into the NASA computer system at age 13 and made an extradition deal with the Americans. This is dramatised in the opening scene of the pilot, which also features ineffective, creepy-looking de-aging makeup on Robert Patrick. Anyway, O'Brien went on to establish the Scorpion Computer Services company, using his expertise to solve cybercrimes. 

I couldn't help but roll my eyes at the premise. It's a team of high-functioning misfit super-geniuses whom the government calls on for help because nobody else is smart enough. It's been described as The Big Bang Theory meets CSI. A tad late on the "nerds are cool" bandwagon there. O'Brien (Elyes Gabel) states in the opening voiceover that Einstein had an IQ of 165 and he has an IQ of 197. Most of us don't run into "eccentric geniuses" on a daily basis, but they're all over TV. Everything from Numb3rs to Sherlock has amply proven that audiences love a protagonist who's that many steps ahead of everybody else. And then there's the team: Trilby-wearing behaviourist Toby Curtis (Eddie Kaye Thomas), mathematician and programmer Sylvester Dodd (Ari Stidham) and mechanical whiz Happy Quinn (Jadyn Wong). They answer to stern Federal agent Cabe Gallo (Robert Patrick), with whom O'Brien has a sour history. These are character types we've seen plenty of times before and character traits like Sylvester's OCD are annoying rather than amusing. Of course, this being just the pilot, there's probably room for meaningful character development and perhaps the bunch will grow beyond the caricatures they're presented as in the pilot. 

Something I didn't expect was how the show touches on the difficulties of raising a high-functioning kid. There's a subplot involving diner waitress Paige Dineen (Katherine McPhee), a single mother who struggles with understanding and nurturing her extraordinarily gifted son. By the end of the episode, she joins the Scorpion crew as the "one normal member", the de-facto heart of the team, if you will. There are moments in the pilot that are kinda sappy, but the connection that Walter shares with Paige's son adds some warmth to the fast-paced techno-babble-driven proceedings. Of course, a romance between Walter and Paige is teased. It's a fun cast and they seem to have decent chemistry together, but I need to see more to make a proper judgement. What is noteworthy is that Elyes Gabel's portrayal of Walter O'Brien does not come off as arrogant and obnoxious, as "insufferable genius" types in TV shows are wont to, and that is to his credit. I'm calling Eddie Kaye Thomas' Toby as the fan-favourite breakout character. 

In the pilot, the Scorpion Computer Services team is called upon to solve an emergency bug in the software at the LAX airport control tower, with the lives of hundreds of airline crew and passengers at stake. The series creators have promised a more realistic portrayal of hacking and computer systems than audiences are used to. I'm no expert, so I can't vouch for the veracity of any of it, but at least there aren't the floating, spinning graphics of Hackers and Swordfish. Any realism and grounding the show has flies out the window by the time the pilot's denouement rolls around, but it flies out the window in a most entertaining fashion. Justin Lin is at the helm, so there are really fast cars involved. It's one of the most gleefully ridiculous, over the top action climaxes I've seen in a TV show and it does rival something that might appear in Lin's Fast and Furious movies. I'm not going to give too much away but the pilot is definitely worth a watch for that rather ambitious sequence. If the show continues to deliver set pieces akin to the one in the pilot, it'll be quite the hoot. 

Scorpion premieres on Tuesday 23rd September on RTL CBS Entertainment, Mio TV Ch. 318/StarHub TV Ch. 509

Intelligence

RTL CBS Entertainment Channel held a press screening of the Intelligence pilot episode earlier tonight, and I was able to attend. The CBS television show's first episode was watched by 16.49 million viewers on its first airing in the U.S. and is the highest-rated debut of the 2013-2014 television season. Here's a quick, informal review of the pilot. 

Scruffy heartthrob Josh Holloway, best known as Sawyer from Lost, stars as Agent Gabriel Vaughn, an operative of Cyber Command. He has been implanted with a supercomputer and is able to draw on satellites, the internet, security cameras and recording devices, making a wealth of knowledge instantly accessible. His boss, Cyber Command director Lillian Strand (Marg Helgenberger) hires ex-Secret Service agent Riley Neal (Meghan Ory) to protect Vaughn, something neither are initially keen on. Rogue Chinese agents, led by Jin Cong (Will Yun Lee) plan to implant a similar chip into an operative of their own, kidnapping scientist  Shenendoah Cassidy (John Billingsley) and forcing him to do their bidding. Meanwhile, Vaughn is intent on getting to the bottom of the mysterious disappearance of his wife Amelia (Zuleikha Robinson), a CIA agent who was apparently turned and was complicit in the Mumbai bombings. 

Creator Michael Seitzman's intention was to build a TV show around a "modern Six-Million-Dollar Man", and the premise is reminiscent of the action-comedy series Chuck (sans laughs) and even more than that, Jake 2.0. The show has something of a 90s techno-thriller vibe, marrying a pared down cyberpunk sensibility with post-Bourne espionage thrills. It's relatively solid but it really isn't nothing we haven't seen before. The characters are very much stock archetypes, the protagonist being a highly decorated patriot who's skilled, sexy and reckless. He has a dark and troubled past (TM), seeking to unravel a personal mystery. He's paired with the beautiful newcomer who wants nothing to do with him - we're told that she single-handedly fought off four assailants while on the protective detail of Sasha and Malia Obama. And of course there's the no-nonsense boss lady running the show. It is pretty rote.

Vaughn's ace up his sleeve is an ability called "rendering", a process which pulls data from every available source and allows Vaughn to reconstruct a virtual crime scene, frozen in time and fully annotated, in his mind, his own imagination filling in some of the blanks. It is presented slickly and is sufficiently futuristic. We are also shown that this technology has its limits, keeping Vaughn from turning into a hyper-connected superhero. In addition to that, we have the expected fisticuffs and gunplay and some of the fights are decently choreographed.

Holloway is handsome and charming, by no means a great actor but a dependable choice to carry an action-oriented television series. A good deal of the dialogue is quite cliché: for example, upon meeting Riley Neal, Director Strand tells her to "take a walk with me" as they stroll through Cyber Command headquarters, allowing Strand to deliver some exposition. Vaughn and Neal bicker and will supposedly warm up to each other over the course of the show. He's still pretty attached to his presumed-dead wife, but you can bet there'll be a "will they or won't they" possible romance between Vaughn and Neal. It's also pretty hard to take an agency named "Cyber Command" very seriously. Points for an unexpected and plausible reveal midway through the episode, though.

Overall, it's high-tech and fairly entertaining, but nothing cutting edge. There is every chance that it could eventually develop a rich mythology and use its premise in creative ways, but honestly, it's pretty unlikely as what I've seen so far is kinda run of the mill.