Techdirt is not buying the Walter O’Brien story.
Why does the IMDb page on Scorpion look different from every other IMDb page?
Wait, I just checked some other new shows and they also have the new look, even though the links from those pages don’t.
Maybe Scorpion Computing coded the site?
I know, I think that the actor is way cute, but when I watched I couldn’t figure out the beginning. Uhm, how did a little whiter than white Irish kid turn Desi?
Yeah, I was the one that wanted to watch it, and The Fella is both a computer nerd and knows airplane stuff. He was basically ignoring it while I watched with the occasional sigh.
Me: So is this going to be one of those shows that I can’t watch b/c you’re dying to tell me how utterly impossible this stuff is? [which, I know it is, but at least two guys are cute and I think I might identify with the schlubby guy]
Fella: No, honey! It’s fun!
<they take the grid down to pop open the server room door>
Fella: Uhm, I’ll just shut up.
It’s not much of a stretch for a Anglo-Canadian actor to play an Irish-American character. Gabel has some Indian ancestry but he was born in London, lived in Britain and Canada, and says he doesn’t consider himself Asian.
Yeah, but…
Here are some of his previous and upcoming characters:
Gurpreet “Guppy” Sandhu
Vimal
Shahrouz / Shahrauz
Umar
Tarik Fayad
Qasim
What, you never heard of the Black Irish?
So I looked at the imdb page for the show, and the pictures of Walter O’Brien show he looks more like the math guy with glasses.
And I forget to mention one of his dumbest claims. He said he has an IQ of 197, and is the fourth smartest person on the planet.
Now let’s get over this fourth smartest person on the planet bit first - there’s no list. Theoretically, Cecil is the number 1, but we all know where that came from. The other smartest person claim is Marilyn Vos Savant, who had a +200 IQ that was measured back before 1950 (or whenever), when she was a child and IQ numbers were calculated differently. Suffice it to say, her claim at least has an actual basis.
As for measuring an IQ of 197, no IQ test as they are currently measured (or as they have been measured since well before 1980) uses that old method. The current method is a statistical process, and measures standard deviations of performance from some average. The highest number any modern IQ test will give is 160 (Einstein’s IQ), because in order to score higher, they would need to administer the test to several times more people than are currently alive on the planet.
But I guess a genius hacker is smart enough to find a way.
I just spent half an hour going down the rabbit hole on this Walter O’Brien guy and his company. Not only does it look like a scam, it looks like a *really obvious *scam. (I literally wouldn’t know where to start with the bullshit claims, but if you need convincing just watch a few minutes of this web infomercial.)
I think a much more interesting show would be about how a major television network got mixed up with this con artist, and what the fallout would look like.
CBS has been doing massive amounts of promotion for Scorpion. It looks so stupid that I can’t believe it. I may have to watch an episode.
Not that I believe the real Walter O’Brien, but it doesn’t even matter whether he’s a con artist or, more likely, a bullshit artist. What matters is whether the fictional entertainment is worthwhile. Based solely on the pilot, though, I woud say no.
What does it say about me that the only part of the pilot episode that bothered me was a passenger jet having a 35-foot-long ISB cable on board?
I lost track of the number of times I thought, “That couldn’t possibly work. … Eh, so what?”
But I did enjoy it.
We watched it again last night. I noticed that for the pilot episode the opening credits said “Based on a true story”, whereas last night it said “Based on the life of Walter O’Brien”.
I think we’re done with this one, it’s just too ridiculous.
I’m out. That was complete rubbish.
I saw it more as What if The Big Bang Theory was actually funny?. Which is to say, this show did nothing to change my unofficial boycott of all CBS scripted shows.
Let me guess, was it the moment when he dramatically unzipped the door to the clean room and announced that no one else in the room could get sick from her disease?
Because when he did that I turned to my wife and said “That’s a pretty risky move to make based on a hunch”.
Or perhaps it was when he noticed the routing patterns for the emails were the same ones used at the hacking collective that just happened to be a few blocks away? You know, the hacking collective, where all of the hackers hang out doing illegal stuff together and don’t even notice when an old guy in a suit wanders in?
It was being DVR’d (so on in the background due to multiple shows being recorded – I refuse to watch with commercials when I can help it) - Something about a computer virus targeting a specific girl to trigger a specific actual virus.
I lost brain cells just hearing that.
Now - a virus (targeted) to load images/flashy things to trigger seizures - I can buy that.
I guess I’m just not seeing the dislike for this show. Is it brainless? Certainly. But come on, NCIS had a story about two of its leads being trapped inside a runaway mini-sub full of explosives. Television is full of brainless shows. Scorpion’s no dumber than average.
That wasn’t what happened. The guy was a biologist. He designed a biological virus that was based on the girl’s DNA and then gave it to her via an aerosol spray. The computer virus was a separate thing (which he hired a computer expert to design) used to tell the family that the biological virus had been an intentional attack.
I liked the part where they sent the math whiz to get the names of the people in the drug trial. One reason they picked him was that he’s the only one with a photographic memory (OK, Sheldon, an eidetic memory).
Umm. . . Anyone ever heard of a camera?
Also, I don’t know of any way a virus could kill someone within seconds of exposure. A poison, yes, but a virus?
The show is just too dumb. One of the problems in creating a drama about smart people is that the writers have to be smart.
I said exactly this to my girlfriend after we watched it.