Your fragile mind can’t have forgotten the terrifying technothriller series known Scorpion. Because it features the worst hacking scenes ever broadcast in any medium.


It’s also a mystery. Why does anyone care about its “genius” hero Walter, whose main skill is identifying public wifi networks? How will the team ever survive the virus they caught from a video downloaded at a hospital? How could this show be back for another season?

Soon you will actually know the answer to one of those questions. Spoilers ahead!


Last we saw them, the Scorpion team was disbanded by DHS and Walter had barely made it out of a dangling car where he semi-declared his love for the series’ requisite Non-Genius Hot Lady Office Worker, known as Paige. Apparently a summer has passed with everybody doing boring things, and now DHS needs them back together again to prevent (I shit you not) a Russian satellite from smashing to Earth. Of course, their new DHS boss tells them all this by announcing “This is a jump drive,” while holding a USB drive, and telling them everything they need to know is on it.

Later, we get to hear all about it at least three more times — including in the wonderfully awful car infodump scene, excerpted in the clip above.

As usual, the best part of the episode was the terrible, mangled representation of technology which all boils down to something like “we need to create a bluetooth network to talk to the satellite.” Oh yeah, and we need to go up in a weather balloon without breathing tanks for some reason. And we need to make an EMP out of microwave ovens (actually kind of a cute scene) and we need to yell a lot about magical things known as trajectories which you can somehow know about using math. The word “genius” is used way too often and also for some reason Hat Boy Psychologist is required to figure out something about how satellites work — I guess because people created them, and he’s an expert in human behavior.

And as usual, the worst part was the fact that Walter and Paige are supposedly really into each other ... as are Hat Boy and badass engineer Happy. So many painful, awkward scenes. Hat Boy urges Happy to think of him as a really rare but appealing cheese fungus. Walter downloads a video of Paige kissing him in the hospital and “catches a virus” from the hospital network, which then interferes with the math thing and makes the satellite dangerous again.


Don’t even make me relive the moment when Hat Boy and Happy have to “outsmart” the Russian embassy people (human behavior!) by spilling pens and speaking Japanese while Hat Boy plugs an incredibly ostentatious and suspicious-looking device into their electrical outlet. Yes, you guessed it: the device will get on their computer network! Even more sophisticated than wifi or bluetooth!

But don’t worry, because it all turns out alright. Happy’s eye doesn’t explode; Hat Boy gets to hit on her creepily; Walter and Paige kiss but agree that they didn’t like it; and their new boss tells the media that she has a “science team under our umbrella” that does pretty good work.


Contact the author at annalee@gizmodo.com .

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