“Dirty Seeds, Done Dirt Cheap”
Original Airdate: February 20, 2017
The case this week took the team to Greenland, and a facility that holds a vault that houses samples of seeds of every known food crop and plant in the world. The facility is there to protect crop diversity against catastrophes like famine, to ensure that the world has backup seeds in case agricultural output is destroyed and safeguards against warfare-caused starvation. So, it’s a pretty important vault, and it’s suffering from a technical malfunction. And that is why the members of Team Scorpion have been tasked to fix it and save the world’s backup food reserve.
Since the facility is an unmanned one, Toby’s skills wouldn’t be required. He is left at the garage to help Ralph with his school project while the others leave for Greenland. And for once, Sly is more than happy to travel because it means he just might miss the debate he has in his election campaign against his opponent, and Allie’s boss, Patel.
Unfortunately, the job doesn’t end up being as simple as they’d expected — which is pretty much the summary of every Scorpion episode. Emergency brass doors separate and lock up the team, leaving them with no power and no access to the computers. Sylvester is locked down alone, Cabe alone, and Happy alone, while Paige and Walter find themselves together but also locked down. The plan is simple: Cabe has to switch a fuse, Happy has to turn on the generator, and Sylvester has to fix the server’s clock, which was the problem to begin with. Unfortunately, all three of them had been exposed to rye seed fungus, which causes hallucinations that affect the fear center in the brain.
And so, instead of fixing the problem at hand, all three of them experience their deepest fears. Actually, they don’t just experience them — they hallucinate and actually live them.
For Sylvester, it’s a fear of chickens. For Cabe, it’s getting old. And for Happy, it’s abandonment and not being wanted. In Sly’s hallucination, the server room is full of chickens out to get him. In Happy’s, she is back at the orphanage, being rejected by every potential adoptive family. And in Cabe’s hallucination, he is dating a young Allie as he ages rapidly, until he’s a very, very old man. It is up to the other three to pull them out of it, and the only way to do it is to revisit the moment that fear was born in them and help them fight through it.
And then of course, even after they do that, things still get a little worse — because this is Scorpion — and all three fall into comas. Luckily for Paige and Walter, they are in a facility that houses all kinds of crops and plants, and creating a concoction that will wake them up is just a short adventure away. They do end up rescuing their friends, but not before Paige herself inhales some of that fungus and sees her worst fear — losing Walter to someone else!
Facing their worst fears actually served them well in the end. For Happy, facing her fear and having Toby be the one to help her through it was a beautiful moment for the couple and gave Happy the belief she needed to move forward. It helped her overcome whatever hesitations she might have had and reaffirmed the fact that Toby does love her and would never leave her.
As for Cabe, it helped with Allie as well. He doesn’t need to pretend to be something he isn’t or to prove anything to her. It also allowed him to finally jump into this relationship with both feet and be himself, completely, no longer questioning himself or her feelings for him.
As for Sly, he comes out of this, in my opinion, the strongest. He takes his overcoming of his fear and uses that strength in his political debate. It’s a new Sly on that podium. He is a reborn man who has realized something about himself, who is proud and sure and confident. He embraces who he has become and uses everything in him to kick ass in the debate as his friends watch proudly from the sidelines.
As for Walter, he may not have been exposed to the fungus, but he had already started the episode on the right track. After reconciling with Paige a few episodes back, they have been working together and he has apparently spent a lot of time apologizing to people he has wronged in the past, one of whom is the frozen yogurt vendor, and now they can go back to having frozen yogurt from their favorite place.
It is good to see that Walter is back on track and slowly working on becoming a better person. And the fact that he is doing so with Paige is also good.
Speaking of Paige, it was rather interesting to see that her worst fear is losing Walter. I have to admit that yes, it is a good Waige sign, but I was slightly disappointed with that. I always thought her worst fear would have to do with Ralph, and not Walter. But either way, this was a good way for the writers to show that the viewers should not give up on Waige just yet. It was another little crumb dropped, but Waige needs to move forward soon or else people will get bored. They’ve dragged this ship along for way too long.
Either way, this was a great character-focused episode that gave everyone a huge leap forward and I hope Scorpion continues with episodes like this, because this is what they are best with — episodes with a fun, exciting case, but still mostly driven by character development.
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