Don't be fooled - this is awful.

rainynight65

I see a lot of reviews here saying "It's just television, it doesn't have to be realistic, just entertaining" - as if that was an excuse for bad writing. But there is no excuse for the mindbogglingly awful writing exhibited in the pilot of Scorpion.

There was a time when thriller writers realized they couldn't just keep making stuff up as they went along, but actually had to do their homework. This was some time in the 80s - last century, folks. If you write about something, you'd better know the basics. Yes, it's fine to sacrifice realism for drama and entertainment. All good shows and movies do that. But the good shows do something else also: they play by their own rules and make it easy for the viewer to suspend disbelief.

Scorpion does neither. The writers of this series clearly don't know the first thing about most of the stuff they're writing about. They don't know about aviation, they don't know about information technology, they constantly change and break their own rules, and as a result, we have a plot with holes so big you could fly a 777 through them.

(Spoilers ahead)

Am I really to believe that LAX does not have any sysadmins? That their most crucial piece of software was made by a company that went out of business 20 years ago? That that same software from the same company suddenly and without warning got a software update nobody knew about? That all planes in the world run the same software? That they store their backups in an unmanned, unsecured data centre somewhere in the boondocks of L.A., in what looks like a garage complex? That they have only one backup that gets overwritten every 12 hours? That the IQ 197 geniuses can just simply deduce by the pricking of their thumbs which hard drive that backup sits on, out of a choice of, well, thousands? That they can just rip out this one hard drive and connect it to a random laptop to retrieve the software? That you can hover a 777 8 feet above a runway long enough to throw a conveniently long ethernet lead down to a Ferrari driving below them at 250mph, to hook up to a laptop and download the software, which at the same time gets transferred via Wireless to a nearby control tower and from there to LAX tower, which, for all intents and purposes, is incomunicado?

I'm sorry. This pilot episode was nothing but a load of hogwash. Suspension of disbelief broke after ten minutes. From there on it wasn't entertainment any more, it was just annoying. Don't be fooled by the currently high ratings. This series has had an awful start, and one star is still too much.

score 1/10

rainynight65 1 October 2014

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3096764/