Scorpion (TV series)

Synopsis

Cast and characters

Main

• Elyes Gabel as Walter O'Brien, a genius with an IQ of 197; Walter was notably arrested for hacking into NASA's mainframe as a child, seeking a set of blueprints to put on his bedroom wall. He has a hard time handling emotional situations. Walter is incredibly intelligent, and it is that high intelligence that gives him a very low EQ. He is blunt and doesn't really care how his words affect others, causing him to come off as arrogant and rude. Due both to his high IQ and low EQ, he has problems connecting with people, even geniuses he's known for years. He fears being alone, even though he once claimed to not have feelings, a notion he has since rejected. He's confident, and when he sees a problem he wants to solve it. He cares for his friends, so much so that he's willing to risk his life for them without a second thought. when he believed he was going to die, he told them stories of his fond memories of them, his way of telling them he loved them. He has occasionally said warm words to them, but rarely. Not only does he not often express emotions, but when faced with grief or anger or extreme emotion, he compartmentalizes his emotions until something triggers it and then it all comes gushing out. His inability to express emotions normally stems mainly from the fact that for most of his life, he only ever connected with two people: his sister, Megan, and Cabe Gallo. While his relationship with Megan was very loving and the only friction in it was caused by their different views on her MS. Walter can be selfish and arrogant at times, but at heart is a kind individual who is always willing to help others, lay down his life for them if need be, especially those he cares about.
• Katharine McPhee as Paige Dineen. Her mother had her when she was seventeen, and wound up going to jail for various kinds of fraud for a few months periodically, so Paige would lie to her friends and say her mom was a saleswoman. Eventually, her mom left. Because of the loss of the love of his life, her father never took her trick-or-treating, he just bought a bag of candy and put it on the front porch with the light off while he and Paige watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown". At 22, Paige had her son Ralph with her then-boyfriend Drew, but eventually, he left, telling Ralph he was going to see a movie. When Ralph was three, they were evicted, their stuff picked over at the curb, and she walked with him for blocks. She found a diner with a help wanted sign, used her last two dollars to buy him an ice cream, interviewed, and convinced Nemos to give her an advance. She worked there until she met Scorpion. She now serves as office manager for the team and helps to 'translate' the real world for them, helping them interact with the people they meet. In turn, the team helps her understand her genius son, Ralph. Paige is very kind, caring and very emotional. Not only is she the mother to Ralph but she plays the role of the team's mother, as she takes care of them, makes sure they eat, socialize and have fun. Even though Paige is not one of the geniuses she manages to fit in, in numerous situations. Not only that she manages to fit into team scorpion, but she also has an ability to keep her head in the game and helps her teammates and others to keep their head in the game too. Again, Paige is not a genius, but because of her humanitarian knowledge that the other teammate doesn't possess, she is sometimes the one with the solutions. Paige is very humane, and she likes to embrace that, and help others to embrace it.
• Eddie Kaye Thomas as Tobias "Toby" Merriweather Curtis, M.D., is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist with an IQ of 170, which is the lowest on the team. Toby serves the team as a behaviorist, 'reading' people whom the team encounters. His gambling addiction occasionally causes trouble for the team and him. Toby was raised in Brooklyn and attended PS 90 in Coney Island. His mother was clinically bipolar, and his dad often forgot he was there because Toby's mom's disorder drove him crazy. Toby decided to become a psychiatrist to help his parents. His father would also take him to tracks on Christmas Day, and later to pay for school Toby began to gamble, which led to an addiction and often trouble with loan sharks. His fiancée left him because of his addiction. He received his doctorate when he was seventeen. Toby is a narcissist with a slight dusting of addiction tendencies. Toby is usually humorous but can become very serious in appropriate situations. He usually jokes in inappropriate situations as well. He makes these jokes to cover his real feelings he still harbors inside of all of his conflict of both his ex-fiancée and his parents’ mental issues that he failed to cure. He met Walter at the Cornet Room, a sleazy casino he hustled at. Walter intervened and bailed him out, just as he was about to receive a beating from the pit boss.
• Jadyn Wong as Happy Quinn, a gifted mechanical engineer with an IQ of 184; Her mother died giving birth to her and this led to her father becoming an alcoholic so he gave her up for adoption because he thought he was an unfit parent. Happy never found a real home, constantly moving from foster home to foster home. Many of these homes promised they would be the last one, but inevitably sent her back. This could be why Happy is the way she is now. Somehow, she found a cousin who owns a mechanic shop in Phoenix, Arizona. Happy was named for her parents' favorite song, R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People". After her mother died in childbirth, her father gave her up for foster care; her experience makes it difficult for her to interact with and relate to others. Happy has a hostile exterior, due to her being raised in the foster system. This is somewhat of an irony considering her name is happy and generally she is not happy. The trauma in the foster system caused her mistrust of people. She possibly has PTSD from her trauma and her flashbacks and aggression and avoidance of the memories she has, She normally keeps her emotions in check, but gets angry quickly and tries to deal with her pain by turning it into anger. She is extremely distrustful of others and being hurt by them. Despite this, she truly does love her friends.
• Ari Stidham as Sylvester Dodd, a gifted mathematician and statistician; he is described as a "human calculator". He is a highly sensitive person and struggles with obsessive–compulsive disorder and anxiety, and harbors fears of germs, air transportation, boats, open water, he has more phobias than you can count and an eidetic memory. Sly's phobias can be limiting, but he is a courageous man who fights through those fears during a time of distress. His parents were frustrated with him as he was a disappointment to them and sent him to live with his uncle before Christmas one year. However, at the age of 16, he hacked a bank and stole $2,500 and ran away. Eventually, he ended up alone, broke and scared, ’contemplating bad things’, until the bank's forensic analyst tracked him down. Walter never reported him to the bank. Once, his father gave him weights as a gift, as his father wanted him to be into sports.
• Robert Patrick as Agent Cabe Gallo, a former Marine and an FBI agent before joining Homeland Security; Gallo initially recruits the team to fix a serious air traffic control problem; afterward, he asked them to become a liaison team to tackle difficult missions that the government does not have the manpower or technological prowess to handle. When he was younger, he was married to a woman named Rebecca, with whom he had a daughter, Amanda, who died of a terminal illness at a young age with him by her side. He divorced Rebecca, but he only asked for their house. He first met eleven-year-old Walter when he was the agent who was sent to investigate the NASA hacker and recruited Walter to work for the government. He was Walter's handler and father figure for five years until he asked Walter to design some tracking software for "humanitarian purposes". However, the software was really used to bomb Baghdad and kill 2,000 civilians. Walter broke all ties with Cabe but was continuously tailed thereafter by Homeland. Cabe is an outgoing man who seeks to help those he loves and seems to have a lot of trust in those people. In the show, Cabe shows this trust to his surrogate son Walter, who he had difficulties with in the past. Walter even states this level of trust near the end of season 3, stating that out of all the crew, Cabe trusts Walter most. Cabe is a very forgiving person given the circumstances of Walter in the past, but when Allie, his girlfriend, betrays Sylvester by posting humiliating videos of him under the instruction of her boss, Cabe cannot forgive and ends the relationship, where at this moment Cabe seems relatively upset. With Sylvester’s encouragement, they later get back together.
• Riley B. Smith as Ralph Dineen, Paige's son; he is initially believed to be a troubled child before meeting and interacting with Walter, who tells Paige that he is actually a genius. He interacts well with the team, and on occasion, assists with cases. Ralph was born to Paige Dineen and Drew Baker, and unbeknownst to them, was a genius. His father left when he was young, saying he was going to go see a movie, so Ralph had little memory of his father. Later when Ralph had a sense of maths he started counting how many movies his dad would've seen until the present day. He has an IQ of 200.

  Recurring

• Camille Guaty as Megan O'Brien, Walter's sister and Sylvester's wife, who had multiple sclerosis, a condition that Walter sought to "fix" to repay the favor of her always being there throughout his childhood. She died in the episode "Arrivals and Departures" after suffering complications due to her disease.
• Brendan Hines as Drew Baker, Ralph's biological father, who is a struggling minor-league baseball player.
• Daniel Zolghadri as Young Walter
• David Fabrizio as Paul Merrick, the Director of Homeland Security. After the events of season 1, Merrick was demoted and reassigned as Homeland Security's liaison to NASA. He dies in the episode "Da Bomb" after being exposed as mole for China.
• Andy Buckley as Richard Elia, a billionaire technology mogul who wants Walter to work for his company.
• Jamie McShane as Patrick Quinn, a mechanic and father of Happy.
• Joshua Leonard as Mark Collins, a former member of Team Scorpion, who kidnapped Toby.
• Alana de la Garza as Adriana Molina, the new Director of Homeland Security, who is Merrick's successor. Eventually, as of "Fish Filet", she is no longer interacting with team Scorpion since Cabe called her a disappointment for offering to leave Sylvester in a prison to die.
• Kevin Weisman as Ray Spiewack, Walter's new buddy from community service; Ray is a former firefighter who has post-traumatic stress after losing his best friend in a fire 10 years ago. After Paige leaves the team briefly, Ray temporarily joins Scorpion. He also conducts Toby and Happy's wedding, and sometimes hangs out outside the Scorpion headquarters.
• Peri Gilpin as Katherine Cooper, the Deputy Homeland Security Director who takes over for Molina as Scorpion's Homeland liaison; prior to working with Scorpion, Cooper had never served in the field.
• Pete Giovine as Chet, Happy's "date", a comedian who is her comedy coach.
• Horatio Sanz as Heywood "Jahelpme" Morris, a lawyer with his own TV commercial who first takes on Sylvester's game-show contract case, then eventually becomes the team's personal attorney.
• Brooke Nevin as Linda, a matchmaker in speed dating whom Walter ends up briefly dating in an attempt to try to connect emotionally with others.
• Scott Porter as Tim Armstrong, a Homeland Security trainee and former Navy SEAL, whom Cabe brings in to work with Scorpion. Armstrong starts to develop feelings for Paige on their first meeting, and he soon takes Paige out on a date. Armstrong also takes Paige to a jazz concert upon Walter's insistence; however, Walter intended the tickets to the concert for Paige and himself. Although initially established as a master chief petty officer, Tim's uniform for the United States Marine Corps birthday ball in "We're Gonna Need a Bigger Vote" is that of a lieutenant. In "Don't Burst My Bubble", Paige and Tim are revealed to have broken up.
• Lea Thompson as Veronica Dineen, a con artist and Paige's mother, with whom Paige does not get along.
• Reiko Aylesworth as Allie Jones, who works for the campaign of the city councilman against whom Sylvester is running, and who later dates Cabe.
• Nikki Castillo as Patricia "Patty" Logan, a high-schooler and Sylvester's manager for his campaign, and has been a reporter since 6th grade. After interviewing Sly, Patty becomes his intern and often hangs out around Scorpion, occasionally getting caught up in their cases. She is a perfectionist who is known for never being tardy. Ralph develops a romantic interest in Patty, something she appears oblivious to though she and Ralph are good friends.
• Tina Majorino as Florence "Flo" Tipton, a chemist whose lab is next to the team's garage. After initial tensions between Flo and Scorpion's members, she develops a friendly relationship with the team and begins assisting them with cases.

  Production

Development

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Critical reception

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