Scorpion is the latest TV show to do us nerds a disservice
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Version 0 of 1. Scorpion’s Walter O’Brien is a genius. At the start of the new geek-action procedural (which begins on ITV2 on Thursday) we’re taken back to his childhood, where Walter is arrested for hacking into Nasa’s database because he’s a child prodigy and that’s what child prodigies do. Flash-forward to adulthood, and Walter is breaking up with his girlfriend by handing her notes he has compiled detailing the emotions she will experience – because he lacks social skills because he’s a former child prodigy. He is then extremely rude to a waitress, because he’s a genius. Geniuses lack empathy. I read that on the internet somewhere once and so did Scorpion’s writers, and we’ve also both seen Sherlock so it must be true. Walter’s IQ is 197. He tells everyone this. He is “smarter than Einstein”. Laypeople know Einstein, even if we don’t know how or why or any “science”. Next on the list of well-known geniuses for comparison were Dr Emmett Brown, the professor from the Weetos box and Dr Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog. They wouldn’t have sold the point quite as well as Einstein. Each member of Walter’s freelance group of nerds for hire is as poorly drawn as he is. Toby (played by American Pie’s Finch, for some reason) is a genius behaviourist, so he uses his screentime telling everyone what their body language means with prodigious accuracy. Sylvester is a dumpy, bespectacled statistician who vocalises his genius by spending the entire episode describing the group’s probability of success, like a linen-clad C-3PO. He’s also got OCD, because: genius. Happy Quinn, the sole female genius, is an engineer, displaying her genius via a speech impediment. Remember that nerd at school with the lisp? So does Scorpion, and it knows you do too. It’s genius shorthand. Haha! Poindexter! Nerdth! Geekth! She’s probably has asthma attacks and nosebleeds too. While being very attractive, obviously, because this is still television. The group has a collective IQ of 700, we’re told. We’re told everything, because when writers who aren’t nerds, geeks or geniuses try to write characters that are, there’s clearly a sinking moment when they realise they don’t actually know how to do it. “What says ‘nerd’?” they ask themselves. Chins are scratched. “Nerds geeks losers” is Googled. We get playground tropes and barrages of “say don’t show” exposition, pulling deductions from the ether. Clever! Standing in front of chalkboards covered in equations. Nerd! “Eureka!” moments. Geek! Being a bit of an arse to people. Genius! Only it’s not their fault, because they’re clever, like Sherlock and Einstein and Robotnik. Scorpion brings the waitress whom Walter has been rude to into the fold as an everyperson, there to rein in the four nerds’ propensity for social faux pas, teaching them valuable life lessons in the process. This has worked for The Big Bang Theory for eight series, of course – a show which portrays its intellectuals as socially inept, sci-fi-obsessed buffoons trapped in a purgatory of perpetual arrested development, encumbered by their big brains because surely it’s impossible to squeeze both empirical and emotional knowledge into the same tiny cranium. As all brilliant scientists apparently love video games and Star Wars and are rubbish with girls, so it must follow that because I love video games and Star Wars and am rubbish with girls then I am a brilliant scientist. This is fantastic news. It should also be noted that the “socially adept” characters in these two shows are both pretty waitresses. Whether you’re a calculator-noggined chess grandmaster, a convention-attending uber-geek or someone to whom these shows piously ascribe the notion of “normality”, this simplistic labelling might begin to grate. Nerds, geniuses and geeks are seemingly homogenous, and everyone else is us, the audience, viewing these odd beasts from afar. The Scorpion nerds join the Big Bangers, Chuck’s Morgan Grimes and Criminal Minds’ Spencer Reid (IQ 187) in that they all share something: they’re geniuses, geeks or nerds, written by people who are probably not. And they’re all oddballs in some way, because there must be no other way to portray them as bright. They may be loveable, but they’re the product of writers using lazy tropes to appease an audience they’re terrified of baffling. To be fair, all this is the least of Scorpion’s problems. It’s bad. You shouldn’t watch it, ever. It did teach me something, though: if I want to look clever and attractive, I should just be a bit of a dick. So I’m off to find a waitress to tell that I’m a brilliant scientist. I’ll then mention that she smells of fried eggs and that her hair looks like bracken. Not my fault – genius. Cheers, Scorpion. You’ve helped me a lot. |