Scorpion Pilot Review: Should You Watch CBS' New Show Starring Katharine McPhee?

Every fall season, the new shows inevitably settle into three categories. First, there's the can't miss category of new shows. These are the ones you need to sit down at your television each week and watch live or else you'll have nothing to talk about at the office the next day.

Second, there's the category of shows you should avoid like the plague. These are the ones that make you wonder, "Who the hell decided it was a good idea to put this show on the air?" But the third category is often the toughest to determine. These are the shows after which you simply shrug and have almost no reaction because you're not sure if you enjoyed it or not. That's the category that fits CBS' new show, Scorpion.

The premise is simple enough and is actually based on true events. Walter O'Brien (Elyes Gabel) is a real-life genius with an IQ approaching what would be a pretty good bowling score. The name of the show comes from O'Brien's hacker alias.

On Scorpion, O'Brien has tow major character traits. He has an understandably inflated ego because he's smarter than everyone else in the room 999 times out of 1000, and he has very little in the way of social skills. At one point during a conversation with waitress Paige (Katharine McPhee), he tells her that the typical emotional rallying speech doesn't work on him because his brain is just wired differently.

O'Brien leads a team of other highly intelligent people as part of a consulting agency that is struggling financially. But they catch a break when government agent Cabe Gallo (Robert Patrick), a former associate of O'Brien's, knocks on their door with a crisis. Thanks to a software bug at LAX, multiple planes are about to crash and about 20,000 people are going to die.

After this, we're off to the races, but it's also where Scorpion exposes its two biggest problems. Firstly, the plot unfolds at a frenetic pace that's extremely difficult to follow. Shows can use jargon effectively (whether it's technobabble, medical language, etc.) but the audience has to be able to follow it. One gets the sense that everything the characters on Scorpion are saying is authentic tech speak, but it's not all that entertaining because you have absolutely no idea what they just said.

Secondly, the characters so far seem like cookie cutter brainy types that have been exaggerated to an almost ridiculous degree. Toby (Eddie Kaye Thomas) specializes in human behavior and can determine what someone is saying or thinking based on their body language, personal history and other details. And he wears a fedora.

Happy (Jadyn Wong) deals with the machinery and is able to tell someone miles away how to steal a Ferrari without even looking at it. Sylvester (Ari Stidham) is a math whiz and chess grand master who seems to have a pretty severe case of OCD. For example, he has to sort chalk properly before he can begin work on a blackboard even though every second counts in solving the plane problem.

The trouble is none of these characters really felt important. Pilots have the difficult task of setting up the characters and establishing the premise of the show, but Scorpion sacrificed too much of the former in service of the latter. Only Walter and Paige really get any significant development, as we learn Walter was hesitant to work with his former associate because the government took his program to drop food packages (which he wrote when he was 16) and used it to drop bombs on Baghdad, which killed 2,000 civilians.

Paige is simply a waitress who gets caught up in this crazy tech world at first, but she comes to genuinely want to help these people. Part of her motivation is her son, whom she never really understood and struggles to connect with because of his social problems. But Walter immediately figures out that her son is actually a genius, and he proves it when the little scamp beats Sylvester at chess.

This provides a connection between Walter and Paige, and Walter brings her onto the team in order to help them deal with other humans. In exchange, he promises to help her understand her son and connect with him more. It's a somewhat sweet premise, as Walter sees a lot of himself in the kid, and it will surely lead to some sort of relationship between the two.

Oh, and we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that absolutely bananas climax of the episode, in which Walter and Paige speed a Ferrari at 200 mph under a plane flying eight feet above the ground in order to hardwire Walter's laptop to the plane to download the software necessary to save the day. This was undoubtedly entertaining and impressive for a network show, but it was also "John McClane killing a fighter jet with his bare hands in Die Hard 4" levels of ridiculous.

Scorpion is not a bad show. It's not a good show, either, but there are many worse options on television to take up an hour of your time. As we said at the top, it's a show that you watch, shrug, and move onto the next one. It has potential, but we'll have to see where it leads.

Did you watch the pilot of Scorpion? What did you think of it? Let us know in the comments section.