Anybody else catch this? It’s so exponentially ludicrous it makes Agents of SHIELD seem like a gritty procedural. It’s wonderful! In fact it’s exactly what I wanted SHIELD to be but never was. My new guilty pleasure for the season!
I saw it.
In one scene, one of the so-called geniuses entered the data center/server room in which he needed to find the server on which the air traffic control system for LAX was running. He went through a series of ridiculous deductions to find it. “The big boss is left-handed, so he would have put it on the left. And he wouldn’t have wanted to have to stand on a stepladder to reach the server, so it’s going to be lower.” So they looked at the servers at shoulder height, and then noticed that one was labeled “LAX.”
And then there was the scene in which one of the geniuses drove a fancy convertible sports car very fast down a runway so he could match the speed of a passenger jet that flew low above him. The co-pilot of the jet dropped an Ethernet cable to the waitress in the passenger seat of the car, so that she could connect it to a notebook computer, so the genius could download an uncorrupted copy of the ATC software. I’m not sure why the plane couldn’t just land without the aid of the air traffic-control system, given that the pilot was able to get it to within about twenty feet of the ground.
In short, it was laughably bad. And they put it on after The Big Bang Theory. So they have a sitcom about geniuses followed by an unintentionally funny drama series also about geniuses.
The title Scorpion doesn’t make any sense. The series needs a title that better reflects what the show really is.Mission: Improbable
I’m anticipating it will the first cancelled. It certainly deserves to be.
But if you turn your brain off it might be fun. But I think it needs the right sense of awareness of its own absurdity, in a Eureka or Warehouse 13 kind of way, to prevent a spate of eye-rolling injuries.
I mentioned in another thread (about new shows) that I eagerly await the second episode because no way could it get WORSE.
I thought it was fun, kinda like a What If the Big Bang Theory Guys Actually Had Testicles.
Sure it could. It’s fun value is in direct proportion to its preposterousness. What if it became, for even one second, sensible?
It was ridiculous, but Katherine McPhee makes me weak in the knees, so I’m in for now.
If I insisted my television shows be believable, there wouldn’t be much I would watch. All I want is that they be entertaining.
I saw the episode and had a very difficult time following it. Granted, I was training my Pokemon while I watched, but usually that doesn’t slow me down THAT much with CBS shows. 
It seemed like everything was happening so fast. If they could slow things down a tad, that might be better for the older people in the viewing audience. Not every conversation has to be a mile-a-minute.
Getting a little tired of the autistic kid = super genius trope.
I saw this show. It sounded like a great concept. I wanted to enjoy this show.
OMG, every single thing about the technical problems is complete and utter shit. It’s a shit-tornado of stupidity.
Where to begin? How about the plausibility of U.S. Federal agents storming into Ireland to arrest a hacker?
Let’s see, the huge problem of the day is that LA’s airport communication system computers uploaded an automatic update that had a bug, and it crashed the system so no communications work. They managed to reroute all incoming planes to other airports, but the planes that were in the landing pattern routing were left incommunicado - they’re stuck flying in circles until they crash, what will we do?
Uh, how about get on the radio? You know, radio? Yeah. Start checking fuel statuses and forwarding folks on. I mean, if they have 2 hours of fuel left, send them to Vegas or Reno or San Diego or pretty much anywhere within 100 miles.
Oh, no, we can’t get them on radio, because…
Okay, let’s take the 5 geniuses and race them to LAX through traffic. At least they figured out that wouldn’t work, but hey, all they really need is a good wireless connection, right. Let’s just go to the diner where I installed one this morning.
Oh, look, the backup copy of the software resides in a server farm that happens to get updated in 20 minutes, which will destroy the only copy left. Race over there. Crap, it’s a storage unit with sealed doors, no people, and electronic locks. How do we open electronic locks? I know, short them out with a power outage. Yeah, a power outage. And you know what the power outage does? It automatically opens the doors. How, exactly? The power’s out - what is powering the door motors? :smack:
You know what I would have tried? Smashing the doors in with the truck. Because that actually works. Criminals use it all the time. Oops, geniuses can’t think like that.
They go inside, run through some pretend idea of psychology to determine which server would be the right one for LAX. :rolleyes: And then after rescuing the hard drive, the frag it with the speakers in the doors of the car, because they’re geniuses.
Crap, I guess we’ll have to shoot the planes down, with our jet fighters. Wait, you have jet fighters? Can you talk to them on the radio? Why don’t you send them over to talk to the other airplanes on the radio? What do you mean, radios on airplanes can’t work if the computers at Air Traffic Control are hosed?
Okay, we need to download a copy from an airplane, because they have a copy of the software on board. Wait, they have a full copy of the software on board the airplanes? Uh, okay.
So we have to get to an airport in a hurry. I know, hack the computer grid and set all the traffic lights to give clean passage. That sounds great, but how come their computer expert who hacks the traffic light grid can only trigger the lights exactly as their car gets to them, and not roll ahead a couple blocks and cycle the lights green beforehand, in an orderly manner, so cross traffic has time to respond? Wouldn’t that make sense? No, instead we get a chance to watch the Homeland guy ram his pickup into an oncoming truck to prevent it hitting their car. Okay, so how did he manage to see the problem and accelerate his truck fast enough to catch up and pass their car in time? And airbags are useless at that speed :rolleyes: , but somehow both he and the driver of the other truck made it out okay.
Next they have to contact one of the airplanes. Radio? Oh wait, that won’t work, we have to find somebody on the airplane with a cell phone that’s turned on. And how do they get his attention? Those aforementioned jets fly up alongside the plane. Wait, you have jets, why can’t you use the jets to, oh, I don’t know, guide the airplanes into pattern and land? Yeah, visual communication and all that, but sheesh, you’d think pilots could be bothered to figure out how to line up visually when cued by a fighter jet.
No, we need an airplane to fly over a small airport tower to email a copy of the software from their computer to the ground. So they buzz a tower at a smaller airport in hopes of yanking it off the airplane wireless, via email, as the plane goes by. Crap, too short a window, how do we ever solve this problem? How about circling the tower? No? Oh, I know, break into a Farrari and race along the runway under the airplane, yeah, that makes more sense.
But instead of trying the wireless thing a couple times, no, we have to hardwire it to be sure. :rolleyes: Dangle an ethernet cable out the wheel well and hook it to the laptop. Which then forwarded it immediately to the tower. Except how does that work? If the plane is going too fast to connect to the tower, then how come the laptop on the car that is matching the airplane’s speed isn’t going too fast?
Magically, they get low enough, connect the cable, send the file, just in time to rip the laptop out of her hands and send it crashing to the tarmac, while narrowly missing the Tower with the plane (that was apparently jet wash that blew out the tower windows - I thought for a second that was supposed to be a collision) and missing the car slamming into the barricades at the end of the runway. Yay, everybody is safe.
God, it’s horrible. And I was sure they were going to use the kid’s mathematical ability to somehow sort the planes or something so they could direct them down manually. What a missed opportunity there!
The characters are all caricatures, the tech problems don’t work that way, the plot is indescribably bad. Maybe they should have just had tough girl punch her way into the storage unit - that would have made as much sense.
The sad part is, I’ll probably watch another episode.
They addressed that, that airport was too small for the big airliners to land at. And that guy was talked in over the cell phone, as opposed to all the other airplanes that would have to be talked in by semaphore or light flashes in morse code, or laser pointers or something.
Okay, reading that page, that guy is a verified liar and likely a sociopathic conman. But apparently somebody believed him enough to give him a TV show.
I commend you for having the fortitude to watch this one to the end. I switched it off before the second station break because I could see where they were headed. 
I think the idea is to move fast enough that people don’t have time to think about how stupid it all is. And yes, autism equals genius is tiresome as is genius equals no social skills.
Irishman, I carefully read your post and have this to say:
No car on television has airbags.
Wait a minute.
The “real”-life inspiration for this badly written fan fiction come to life actually claims that in 1988, at age 13, he was arrested in Ireland by U.S. Federal agents arriving in helicopters AND that he started a company called ScorpionComputerServices.com?
The show is actually more credible than he is.
Their address is a post office box at a UPS Store in Burbank, CA. 
My wife and I watched it, laughed at the complete absurdity of all of it, and loved it.
It was a lot of fun pointing out the plot holes and ridiculousness of every situation.
I think we’ll watch it again!
I thought it was fun. But the thing I found most unbelievable was Irish Persian Genius Guy. Since I didn’t see the very beginning, I didn’t know he was supposed to be Irish until hubby (who was the one who was really watching it on demand) looked up the supposedly real life guy and read me his backstory when I mentioned how enlightened the show was to have a Middle Eastern person as an anti-terrorist.