The dental floss trap

Scorpion is not a completely terrible show. But it seems that every time I watch it, I come away with at least two nits. The Season 2 finale, "Toby or Not Toby" (groan right off the bat), was no exception. An unstable former Scorpion team member, Mark Collins (Joshua Leonard), escapes the psych ward and predictably wants revenge.

Collins kidnaps Toby (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and traps him in a web of dental floss with a jar of acid just about to fall straight into his mouth. In order to rescue Toby, the rest of the team must piece the clues to together to figure out where Collins is holding Toby. Doing that involves Walter (Elyes Gabel) climbing a cellphone tower with a keytar in order to allow Sylvester (Ari Stidham) to narrow down Toby's location. Sure, I'll suspend my disbelief for now.

To be fair, it was a vicarious adrenaline rush to watch this life-or-death scenario in which the slightest mistake could cost Toby his life. When the team arrives and finds Toby captive in the floss web, they figure out something about tension and musical pitch to determine which strings of floss they can safely cut. The more you think about this particular plot point, the less sense it makes.

Supposedly the string with the highest pitch is the one that would drop the acid if cut. Okay, I'll buy that, at least I bought it as I was watching. So they pluck some strings and a lot of them have the same pitch. Here I had a problem. They don't all seem to be the same length, so how can they have the same pitch? Also, with this question it makes me wonder what exactly is providing the resonance for these strings to produce such clear tones.

Just in the nick of time, Happy (Jadyn Wong) makes it into the web and pushes Toby out of the way right before the acid drops. Apparently, Toby was about to propose to Happy before he was kidnapped, but Happy doesn't seem all that happy at the prospect.

Safely back at the Scorpion lair, Toby tells Happy that he will not say a question to her, that he'll sing it. Toby does sing a song, but after the song, he still says the question: "Will you marry me?" This is a nit because in this show almost every major character tries to be insufferably literal and precise in what they say.

Happy declines Toby's marriage proposal, and I guess maybe the show's fans will be on pins and needles over the summer as they wait to find out why; I sure won't, I probably won't even remember and I make no promises as to whether or not I'll watch the Season 3 premiere. There's also relationship drama for Walter and Paige (Katharine McPhee).

I guess I would have been okay with seeing Toby rescued with only three or four minutes left in the episode, instead of almost twenty, leaving little time for the shipper stuff. With Toby safe, the episode went from exciting to boring almost immediately. As Collins is hauled away, he seems less interested in revenge and more interested in making some dumb point about self-sufficiency (yawn).

I also found the talk of the consciousness transfer research and mind reading capabilities a little implausible, but the episode zipped along fast enough not to bother me too much with that.