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healingmirthThis is a mess. It is a long, unwieldy post. (And yet, there's still a lot of scattered thought niggling at me from the cutting-room floor.) If I were really as serious as I would like to be about critique, this would be a series of posts, but I have got yuletide words to wrangle, and this has gone on long enough. I told myself this week that I couldn't start anything else (friending meme, december meme, watch the rest of the TV in my DVR queue) until I finished this stupid draft post.
So:
I hate the opening of Scorpion. Hate it. Haaaaaate it.
Does the fact that I couldn't locate the intro online in any of the many, many videos on the Scorpion youtube page mean that someone with a minimal talent for marketing at actual CBS also thinks it's horrible? Signs point to yes.
It's not even the credits! It's just sitting there, killing time and narrating me into a bad mood, and it's been there every flippin' week since the show's premiere, and now it's never going to go away.
But I will say this: that it does a good job of setting the tone for what it might be like to spend an hour with Fictional Walter O'Brien, if that were the show they were really trying to make.
I have been trying to make this post since the week Scorpion premiered, but I kept putting it off. At the time, Linda Holmes of NPR's Monkey See had just written about how there's no reason to stick with bad TV in the hope that it will improve (I think she was talking about Stalker) when there is so much good stuff out there. It's been on my mind a lot.
The first week, I thought, "I'll wait til they get past the pilot." Then the next week, I thought, "Well, they're still trying to keep new viewers in the loop." And the next week, and the next week. Now, nine episodes in, I think we finally had an episode without a moment that made me want to yell at the writers. Maybe they legitimately got notes from the network that they had to keep making ham-handed references to the characters' IQ and "EQ" (which, as a gamer, will always be EverQuest to me, forever and ever amen, but that's a separate problem.) and "mentally enabled" as both Actual and Fictional Walters O'Brien refer to the team. Just. We get it, dudes. They're smart. They're superlatively good at their areas of expertise, even. Now shut up about it already and just let them be awesome.
This afternoon, while trying to find a clip of the intro, I came across an overview that referred to "eccentric genius Walter O'Brien" and while, yes, I can see why a reviewer would want to use the descriptor, also no. Walter O'Brien, in both fiction and fact, is an utterly ordinary genius.
The central problem I see with Scorpion is that they have cast quite a likeable actor (Elyes Gabel) as an actual dude who is just not endearing, or even charismatic in any way. He's not Sherlock (either Elementary, BBC, or otherwise). He's not any of the characters on The Big Bang Theory. He's just meant to be really, really smart in the math-science-and-engineering sense, and fairly terrible at people.
At the Comic Con panel, Actual Walter O'Brien said this in response to the question of whether having a show made of his life was a source of anxiety:
While that's a fairly cute, flippant answer, I also get the feeling that he meant it. So this presents a narrative problem when this guy they're writing is anything more than a crime-solving robot. As the show opens, Walter is the self-appointed leader of a team. We see in the first episode that his IQ-type-smarts extend to attempts at problem-solving and pattern recognition in people in general, but not successful attempts.
The problem is, I don't get it. Why was he dating that lady? Why has he created, why is he attempting to maintain this team? Does he actually "not have" emotions? Or is he just incredibly ill-equipped to process his emotions and so he suppresses them? Tell me why he does literally anything other than the math, or coding, or whatever, that actually catches his interest. Societal expectation? Needs to keep the lights on? His mother worries? In talking about the show, the creators keep claiming that having a staggeringly high IQ is lonely. Is that it?
When emotions appear - betrayal, loss, love for family members and friends, whatever the hell is going on with Walter and Paige and her kid - that feels like a completely different character from the Walter they claim they are selling to us the rest of the time.
The only way I've been able to make sense of Walter so far is that he only seems able to relate to others in incredibly self-interested and self-centered ways. He looks out for Paige's kid because he himself was not always looked out for. He's formed this team because... okay, I'm still not sure why. Maybe because he just believes that people need to engage in capitalism in order for society to continue to function, and if society doesn't continue function, he has to be a nomadic hunter instead of a mathematician.
For me, the most interesting thing I've seen out of Walter demonstrates a naivete that seems completely incompatible with the pragmatism that he's written with at other times. Walter has a few lines that make it clear that he's got an "us versus them" mentality, that high-IQ geniuses need to stick together against lower-IQ people out to betray or manipulate them. Walter also says, over and over, that he viewed Cabe as a father, and now there seems to be some tension about who is the father figure (actual, preferable, whatever) to Paige's kid, but what does that even mean to Walter, to feel a strong familial attachment to one relative stranger, and then be wholly unconcerned with social norms and societal structures with others.
Someone - I don't remember now whether it was Elyes or one of the show's creators - claimed that the show was about stretching Walter's emotional capacity. I am all for that, and if the show runs long enough, maybe the writers will be able to knit their two halves of Walter into a more internally consistent character. But I still don't feel like I understand why the wheels started turning. I should be content to be dropped onto the train in motion so long as it stays on a track.
Look, there are a bunch of things about this show - the actual show, not just my fannish hopes for it - that I really like. I love a good procedural. (Okay, and most of the half-assed procedurals.) I love a team dynamic, I love academics and other narrowly-smart people being thrust into messy real world consequences. (I adored the early seasons of Numb3rs.) I like that there's a whole group of people who are Good at Things and Bad at Life (which seems to include their government handler Cabe, even though he at least nominally cares about integrsting with society). I even mostly like Paige, the one person who is Okay at Life and Good at People, but historically Not Great at Things due to focusing on aforementioned life. I have high hopes for the rest of the season!
But seriously, I really, really, really hate that intro. So much.
So:
I hate the opening of Scorpion. Hate it. Haaaaaate it.
Does the fact that I couldn't locate the intro online in any of the many, many videos on the Scorpion youtube page mean that someone with a minimal talent for marketing at actual CBS also thinks it's horrible? Signs point to yes.
It's not even the credits! It's just sitting there, killing time and narrating me into a bad mood, and it's been there every flippin' week since the show's premiere, and now it's never going to go away.
But I will say this: that it does a good job of setting the tone for what it might be like to spend an hour with Fictional Walter O'Brien, if that were the show they were really trying to make.
I have been trying to make this post since the week Scorpion premiered, but I kept putting it off. At the time, Linda Holmes of NPR's Monkey See had just written about how there's no reason to stick with bad TV in the hope that it will improve (I think she was talking about Stalker) when there is so much good stuff out there. It's been on my mind a lot.
The first week, I thought, "I'll wait til they get past the pilot." Then the next week, I thought, "Well, they're still trying to keep new viewers in the loop." And the next week, and the next week. Now, nine episodes in, I think we finally had an episode without a moment that made me want to yell at the writers. Maybe they legitimately got notes from the network that they had to keep making ham-handed references to the characters' IQ and "EQ" (which, as a gamer, will always be EverQuest to me, forever and ever amen, but that's a separate problem.) and "mentally enabled" as both Actual and Fictional Walters O'Brien refer to the team. Just. We get it, dudes. They're smart. They're superlatively good at their areas of expertise, even. Now shut up about it already and just let them be awesome.
This afternoon, while trying to find a clip of the intro, I came across an overview that referred to "eccentric genius Walter O'Brien" and while, yes, I can see why a reviewer would want to use the descriptor, also no. Walter O'Brien, in both fiction and fact, is an utterly ordinary genius.
The central problem I see with Scorpion is that they have cast quite a likeable actor (Elyes Gabel) as an actual dude who is just not endearing, or even charismatic in any way. He's not Sherlock (either Elementary, BBC, or otherwise). He's not any of the characters on The Big Bang Theory. He's just meant to be really, really smart in the math-science-and-engineering sense, and fairly terrible at people.
At the Comic Con panel, Actual Walter O'Brien said this in response to the question of whether having a show made of his life was a source of anxiety:
"Well, I'm left-brain dominant, so thankfully anxiety and nervousness are minimal for me. Pretty much any feelings are. But yes, if I had feelings I would have anxiety.
While that's a fairly cute, flippant answer, I also get the feeling that he meant it. So this presents a narrative problem when this guy they're writing is anything more than a crime-solving robot. As the show opens, Walter is the self-appointed leader of a team. We see in the first episode that his IQ-type-smarts extend to attempts at problem-solving and pattern recognition in people in general, but not successful attempts.
The problem is, I don't get it. Why was he dating that lady? Why has he created, why is he attempting to maintain this team? Does he actually "not have" emotions? Or is he just incredibly ill-equipped to process his emotions and so he suppresses them? Tell me why he does literally anything other than the math, or coding, or whatever, that actually catches his interest. Societal expectation? Needs to keep the lights on? His mother worries? In talking about the show, the creators keep claiming that having a staggeringly high IQ is lonely. Is that it?
When emotions appear - betrayal, loss, love for family members and friends, whatever the hell is going on with Walter and Paige and her kid - that feels like a completely different character from the Walter they claim they are selling to us the rest of the time.
The only way I've been able to make sense of Walter so far is that he only seems able to relate to others in incredibly self-interested and self-centered ways. He looks out for Paige's kid because he himself was not always looked out for. He's formed this team because... okay, I'm still not sure why. Maybe because he just believes that people need to engage in capitalism in order for society to continue to function, and if society doesn't continue function, he has to be a nomadic hunter instead of a mathematician.
For me, the most interesting thing I've seen out of Walter demonstrates a naivete that seems completely incompatible with the pragmatism that he's written with at other times. Walter has a few lines that make it clear that he's got an "us versus them" mentality, that high-IQ geniuses need to stick together against lower-IQ people out to betray or manipulate them. Walter also says, over and over, that he viewed Cabe as a father, and now there seems to be some tension about who is the father figure (actual, preferable, whatever) to Paige's kid, but what does that even mean to Walter, to feel a strong familial attachment to one relative stranger, and then be wholly unconcerned with social norms and societal structures with others.
Someone - I don't remember now whether it was Elyes or one of the show's creators - claimed that the show was about stretching Walter's emotional capacity. I am all for that, and if the show runs long enough, maybe the writers will be able to knit their two halves of Walter into a more internally consistent character. But I still don't feel like I understand why the wheels started turning. I should be content to be dropped onto the train in motion so long as it stays on a track.
Look, there are a bunch of things about this show - the actual show, not just my fannish hopes for it - that I really like. I love a good procedural. (Okay, and most of the half-assed procedurals.) I love a team dynamic, I love academics and other narrowly-smart people being thrust into messy real world consequences. (I adored the early seasons of Numb3rs.) I like that there's a whole group of people who are Good at Things and Bad at Life (which seems to include their government handler Cabe, even though he at least nominally cares about integrsting with society). I even mostly like Paige, the one person who is Okay at Life and Good at People, but historically Not Great at Things due to focusing on aforementioned life. I have high hopes for the rest of the season!
But seriously, I really, really, really hate that intro. So much.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-20 01:50 pm (UTC)For me, part of it is the color palette. Even though I watched it only once yesterday, the memory is that it's mostly drab, yellows and browns ( with the BLUE CAR for color relief).
Then too, it's got nothing to hook me, to make me curious about the characters. Again, going by my memory, they're all just ... sitting, looking pretty passive, while the voiceover tells me what they do. It's like the office tour on the first day of work -- an info dump that's mostly forgettable. ~ The only other similar "voiceover info dump" openings I can think of offhand are the ones for Lost Girl (which I got tired of as well, tbh, but that one at least had better music and some intriguing shots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPj7sRca0YU) and The Pretender (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x11bxnj_the-pretender-1996-season-1-opening-vo-hq_tv).
And ... now my brain is off trying to recall others, but I can certainly agree with you - that opening had nothing to hook me. It was a
hottepid mess.no subject
Date: 2014-11-20 04:30 pm (UTC)I've mostly been comparing it to the voiceover on the Person of Interest opening credits - which are actual credits, and also include the teaser shot of that week's number, so at least 6 times better than what Scorpion chose to do. Ugh.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-20 05:24 pm (UTC)ETA: Now that I've read the entirely of your post (note that I've never seen a single ep of the show) it seems like what they might be missing is underscoring that Walter put these people together obstebnsibly because "High IQ people need to stuck together," but in reality because he needed more "resources" in order to make himself successful. (You did say at the beginning of your post that his previous problem-solving hadn't been all that successful?)