‘Scorpion’ season 3, episode 17 review: The team faces fears in one of season’s best

If there is one problem that “Scorpion” is facing at this point in its run, it is getting lost somewhat in a sea of sameness. When you are doing more than 22 stories a season, the odds are high that eventually many of them are going to feel like roughly the same thing.

The struggle there is coming up with ways to make episodes original, engaging, and perfectly matching the spirit of the show that we know and love. We’re therefore rather pleased to announced that Monday night’s new episode achieved that, and from a character-development standpoint may have been one of the best of the entire season.

The mission – At first, it was very different: To resolve a problem unfolding at a local seed bank, one that could someday be responsible for ensuring the safety of future generations in the event something terrible happened to the food supply. Unfortunately, there were issues at the facility after the developers forgot to add the extra second to 2016, throwing off the operation and causing weeks’ worth of problems.

When the team eventually arrived, things went from bad to worse after we started to see Happy, Cabe, and Sylvester struggle with a series of hallucinations, ones that were discovered to be the result of a fungus that was growing within the facility. Happy suddenly started to think that she was back at an orphanage, afraid of not being adopted to a loving family. Meanwhile, Sylvester encountered a terrible fear of chickens that he first got as a child, and Cabe had to face the idea of being helpless. While he wasn’t so much afraid of getting old and dying, he did want to feel useful. On the outside of this crisis, Toby, Walter, and Paige had to help all of them conquer their fears and convince them to effectively save themselves from being locked up with deadly toxins that would eventually cost them their lives.

This was all incredibly entertaining, mostly because it did at times force some of the actors to act as though someone else was in the room even when that wasn’t the case. Sylvester, for example, made himself a miniature chicken coop under a desk to hide in for a time. The effectiveness of this story mostly was predicated on watching how these characters handled some of these crises, difficult as they were, and then figured out the proper way to move forward from them.

The resolution – Toby helped Happy realize that she was never alone, even back when they didn’t know each other and she felt like nobody loved her. Meanwhile, Walter made Cabe realize that if his relationship was to work, he had to stop being afraid of the age difference and the future and just be himself in the present. Finally, Paige’s work with Sylvester made him confident enough to own his Alderman debate. It’s not clearly precisely if he’ll end up winning the post, but he may be able to save the comic-book store regardless.

The big appeal of Monday’s episode was putting the characters through some tough situations, and then helping them further realize that they could conquer them. On the basis of this and this alone, we’d consider this episode in particular to be a success. Also, great comedy from start to finish. Grade: B+.

Let us know below what you thought about this episode of “Scorpion”!