When it comes to prisons, our resident human calculator is not too fond of them. However, he is the only one who could solve the case and save the lives of three federal judges, whose names were written in a code that only those who are part of an elite gang could understand and decipher, in this week’s episode of Scorpion.
The team sent Sylvester into the Harrison Prison under the guise that he is a psychotic serial killer, complete with the infamous orange jumpsuit and tattoo (fake, of course). He even got a name to go with his new look, Jackson Wyles, the name of the bully that’s making Ralph do his homework for him. The OCD-prone genius tried to fit in with the other prison inmates, but that didn’t work out too well as Sly got himself beaten up by an inmate named Ten-Ton out in the prison yard.
Turns out, the beat-down in the yard was premeditated by the rest of Team Scorpion as Sly needed to get to the infirmary, not the prison library, to look for the manual that contains the code needed to decipher the names of the remaining judges that will be assassinated. I laughed at the irony of the fact that there’s a book called Gray’s Anatomy given that there’s a show called Grey’s Anatomy that airs on ABC. I’m not sure if it was intentional on the part of the show’s writers, but it brought a smile to my face nonetheless. The scene where Agent Gallo was teaching Sly how to speak prison was one that made my imaginary anime sweat-drop return with a vengeance as I watched Sylvester attempt to channel his inner criminal. Sylvester, don’t ever go down a life of crime. It’s not your niche.
The scene where Sylvester was looking for the manual in the infirmary after finding out that pages of acetate were being ripped out from various medical books in the prison library was nail-biting every step of the way. Sly rushed to put everything back the way he found it and made it back to the gurney where he was sitting in just in time to see the prison doctor wheel in a patient, who was revealed to be the prison warden. Things then got real, really fast.
Team Scorpion then rushed to come up with a Plan B to break Sylvester out of prison. Toby would design a drug that would make Sly appear as if he was dead, which led Walter, albeit reluctantly, to ask his community service acquaintance, Ray, to obtain the necessary pills that would fake Sylvester’s death. Ray, along with Paige, then posed as lawyers to get into the prison where everything was set into motion. There was only one downside: Sylvester couldn’t decipher the code without a legend, and since the legend was not among the pages of the manual, time was of the essence to find the missing legend and break Sylvester out of prison before he died for real. The missing legend was then found hidden beneath the seat cushion of the wheelchair used by Shima Funukoshi, head of the Eh-Ta-Me gang. Sly deciphered the names of the remaining judges and got out of prison before being apprehended by the prison guards. Just another exciting day at the office, right, Sylvester?
I found the scene where the geniuses told Ralph that doing the bully’s homework for him to avoid injury was the best thing to do to be a bit confusing, but I understood their view on bullies: if you do what they want, then you won’t get beat up as much. My confusion was the fact that the geniuses didn’t encourage Ralph to stand up for himself against bullies and to show them that he’s not some punching bag, but again, I understood their whole “don’t poke the bear” tactic. I mentally applauded Agent Gallo when he offered to teach Ralph how to fight, but violence isn’t the answer to everything. There are other ways to deal with bullies than using one’s fists.
It was intriguing to see Toby feel jealous of Happy when he overheard her making plans with a mystery man, whose name is Chet, in this episode. It made the shrink so angry that he wanted to hit something so he went over to the punching bag that Agent Gallo was going to use to teach Ralph and started punching away. The Marine turned Homeland Security agent then deducted the situation and offered to help the shrink punch correctly. It was also shocking, a little bit, to see Agent Gallo stand up for Team Scorpion against Director Molina when he said that she was only worried about saving the judges, and not about saving Sylvester. I half-expected the former Marine to yell out the line “Don’t try to politic your way out of this,” but it was all good.
As for the bullying situation with Ralph, it looks like he made himself a popular kid by applying to top-notch colleges like CalTech, MIT, and Harvard, much to the shock of his mother, who didn’t approve of her son going on TV to be interviewed. It was later revealed that Ralph used Walter’s voice adaptation software to mimic his mother’s voice to make it look like she “approved” of the young genius to go on national television, much like what Toby did at the beginning of the episode when he demonstrated the tweaked version of the software. It’s nice to see Ralph standing up for himself in a way that guarantees zero confrontation from schoolyard bullies.
In all, this was yet another great episode of Scorpion, and I’m Walter took Paige’s advice and found a friend in Ray. It was also to nice to see Sylvester finally tell Megan, Walter’s older sister, that he loves her in his unique, geeky way. It would be equally as nice if a certain genius with a 197 IQ would do the same with a certain liaison. One can only hope, right?
[Photo credit: Neil Jacobs/CBS]
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