Monday, April 16, 2018

Scorpion 4x21 Review: "Kenny and the Jet" (I Can't Always Protect You) [Guest Poster: Yasmine]


"Kenny and the Jet"
Original Airdate: April 9, 2018

It’s Paige’s turn to shine again, as the geniuses are distracted by dealing with their own issues (and in Sylvester’s case, facing a combination of all his fears at once). That doesn’t mean the team doesn’t bring their A-game, but they do struggle to balance their own problems with the case at hand.

With only one episode left in the season, making Paige the star and the hero (in more ways than one) of an episode came in the nick of time. It also focuses on the other relationship in her life — the one, in my opinion, more important than her romance with Walter: her relationship with her son.

The case is, in typical Scorpion style, equal parts exciting, emotional, and ridiculous. With Cabe, Sly, Paige, and Ralph on a flight back from Hawaii, Cabe’s instincts pick up something off with the Air Marshal and, after confronting her and the crew, they understand something’s not right in the cargo hold. The team offer their expertise and help, building a makeshift device to detect cell signal... which leads them to the discovery of a young boy hiding in the wheel well. The team back at the garage is already looped in and airport surveillance shows a boy running onto the runaway and sneaking onto the plane. They identify the boy and find out that his father is on the plane. It turns out the boy’s parents had recently divorced and he was living with his mother in Hawaii with his father in LA. The young boy, Kenny, wants to live with his father back in LA and had tried to get there by sneaking onto the plane.

Unfortunately, hanging out in the wheel well is not the best way to do it. He is already unresponsive, low on oxygen, and cold, and the team’s job now is to keep him alive while they figure out how to get him out of the wheel. They need to do all this without alerting the passengers to anything, to avoid a panic. Of course this is Scorpion, so they manage to succeed in all the most ridiculous ways possible — and by ridiculous, I mean that yes, I understand the science they’re using, but it is requiring a lot of suspension of disbelief. But that’s fine. It’s what Scorpion does best, balancing the science with the entertainment with the disbelief.

They manage to poke a hole in the plane, send the passengers into a panic, and almost cause a disaster. But it wouldn’t be Team Scorpion if things went smoothly.

Paige pulls off her most heroic stunt, putting her life on the line to save the young boy, and she proves that she may not be a genius but her mom superpowers can outshine the geniuses any day. Of all the things I love about her, her maternal strength is the most inspiring at times.

Not only does Paige use her super mom skills to keep Kenny calm and then to literally hang on to him as the plane lands, but she also overcomes a huge hurdle with Ralph. Her little boy is growing. He’s a teenager now, and while he may not be a typical teenager, he does have to go through what we all had to. He has a crush on a girl who’s older than him — and he later has to endure the heartbreaking truth of finding out she does not return those feelings. To make things worse, his mom makes him go on a trip to Hawaii with her which means he misses his crush’s birthday party, and he makes sure his mother knows exactly how he feels. Luckily, these two have a beautiful bond and what they go through on the flight only brings them closer and makes them realize they are entering a new phase in their relationship and there are going to be changes they both need to adapt to.

The relationship between these two has always been so precious and so beautiful. Unfortunately, there have been fewer and fewer episodes focusing on it lately, so this was a beautiful moment for it to come center stage and shine.

Another woman on the edge of a new phase of her life is Happy. Sadly, the pregnancy attempt failed and that is tragic for both her and Toby. On the surface, Happy claims she is okay with it, but she obviously is not. And it is heartbreaking watching her in this very hard time in her life. Happy’s recent behavior had shifted toward reckless. She is risking her life every chance she gets, participating in dangerous activities and acting irresponsible and out of control. Toby’s vocal about it throughout the episode and when she finally opens up, she tearfully admits that she’s doing all this as a distraction to keep her mind off the fact that she has not been able to conceive. The two manage to find an acceptable compromise where Happy can keep her mind of the baby and Toby does not have to worry about “having to conceive on his own,” as he put it: mechanical bull riding and a soft cheese plate. A win-win situation for all.

However, there is someone who has dug himself into a hole that looks like there won’t be any “winning” way out of it anymore: Walter O’Brien.

I’ve made my frustration clear as of late about Walter’s behavior and he does very little this week to make me less pissed off about him. While we finally have some recognition on his end that his actions have not been right and have been deceptive and unfair towards Paige, he is still struggling. And, once again, it feels like all these years of growth and developing his EQ have hit such an inexplicable drop. Walter continues to treat his relationship with Paige as a science experiment, and while it could have been cute and quirky at some point, it no longer is. He starts a Pros and Cons chart of telling Paige and the truth, but at the end of the day, even after Paige almost dies saving the day, he still fails to come clean.

And what is frustrating is that the actual thing that he did is so simple and not that big a deal, but it is no longer about him taking Flo to the lecture. This is now about his lies and deception and his treatment of Paige. I personally don’t care that he went with Flo to the lecture at this point. I am pissed at him for failing to own up to his actions, and as much as I love Waige, I honestly believe Paige deserves better than this and better than Walter — or at least the Walter we’ve seen over the past few episodes.

Fortunately, Paige is a smart cookie, and what she does best is read people, and she already knows Walter is keeping something from her. She’s on to him and I am glad because it would have been a disservice to Paige’s character to have her walking around so oblivious.

The next episode is the finale, and I wonder how they’ll clean this mess up between Paige and Walter and poor Flo who has been dragged into this whole thing unwittingly. And I hope Happy and Toby get some good news and that Sly finally — FINALLY — says something to Flo about how he feels because I think he is ready to move on and deserves to be happy.

0 comments:

Post a Comment