Scorpion 'Father's Day' Review: Serious as a Peek Frean

After seven episodes, there are just some things I've come to accept and expect from Scorpion. There will be lots of technobabble. There will be some moments and plot points that stretch credibility just a bit too thin. And there will be some character moments to keep the whole thing from feeling completely pointless.

The latest episode, "Father's Day," had all of the above. I'll start with the good stuff, because I want to give this show credit where it deserves credit. Scorpion functions best when it delves into its characters and shows how these geniuses relate to the world around them. The procedural elements of the show are by far the least interesting. The team always solves the case, it's just a matter of how and of how many times they will screw up before they get to the solution.

But the character development is much juicier. Paige, for example, is the most relatable character on the show. She acts almost as a mouthpiece for the audience most of the time. These geniuses have their own language and their own behavioral patterns, and she's just a normal person dropped into the middle of their world. Honestly, I have no idea what Walter and the rest of the team are talking about half the time, and I don't even think that I need to know. They spout some jargon, hammer away at a keyboard and move onto the next plot point.

But Paige's relationship with her son and with the team provides an emotional entry point for the viewer. She's drowning in a sea of supreme intelligence, and it's easy to see how she could get overwhelmed. She obviously has a handle on how to raise Ralph because she's been doing it for years, but one could easily imagine how that task would get more difficult as her son ages.

That's what made the arrival of Ralph's absentee father all the more complicated. After some digging, we learned that he's not really a bad guy (unless he's hiding something more sinister). He's just a jerk who decided baseball was more important than his son. The different team members had different insights on what Paige should do, but Walter's was perhaps the most intriguing.

We know that Cabe has been a father figure to him, but we didn't quite see how deeply that relationship has affected Walter in his adult life. As Walter himself states, he's never quite forgiven Cabe for the government's using his technology to drop bombs, even if Cabe truly had no knowledge of what the U.S. planned to do. So it's understandable that Walter would be affected by Paige's situation, particularly because Walter's own father never understood him the way Cabe did.

We're slowly starting to learn more about each of these characters, but the procedural elements are holding the show back. "Father's Day" dealt with some serious issues to which many people can relate, but it almost felt like shoving a square peg in a round hole because Scorpion traps itself with preposterous plots.

Notes:

-       Speaking of preposterous plots, let's highlight all the moments in this episode that induced the phrase "Oh come on!"

-       The team used a bag of potato chips and generated sound waves to determine what a team of Russian gangsters was saying on a webcam that had no sound. I don't even know how to process this.

-       A bird drone dropped a cell phone to an inmate during a baseball game in prison.

-       Walter used a computer to start a fire in a warehouse.

-       The flashbacks illuminated more of the relationship between Cabe and Walter, but what in the world was with Walter's father's accent?! I know his name is O'Brien but I wasn't expecting someone straight out of Dublin.

-       Also, why did this visit to the prison trigger these memories for Walter, but not his stint in jail in Vegas a few episodes ago?

What did you think of "Father's Day"? Let us know in the comments section.