Source: blogthinkbig.com
It’s been a brilliant 7 months with our favorite geniuses, and last Monday wrapped it all up with a heartbreaking, yet invigorating final episode. In the season 2 finale, Walter faces some emotional truth and the Quintis question gets its answer (for now).
This episode was one of my favorite of the entire series and it beats last season’s finale but a landslide. Could it be my slight Quintis bias? Sure, but remember that I’m a huge Waige fan too. And besides, there have been plenty of Quintis-centric episodes that don’t even come close to toping my favorites list (looking at you Adaptation, which literally marks the beginning of the Quintis canon relationship). Anways, this episode picks right on up from where the last one left off — Toby’s just been kidnapped by Scorpion’s crazed ex-member Mark Collins.
Here’s my thing about Mark Collins; He’s a really great character. I love his complexity and his insanity, because that’s kind of a common question surrounding geniuses, isn’t it? Where does the line between genius and insanity blur? I love interesting villians, and Collins presents actual challenges for Team Scorpion. So ya, I was excited to see his return. He’s back with a vengeance and he’s not afraid of who he might hurt to get what he wants. Which is apparently for Walter and the gang to admit that Collins is smarter.
The gang realizes Toby’s disappearance aligns with Mark Collins’ escape and they put two and two together just like any genius would. Happy begins to freak out (naturally) and demand that they get right to work on finding him. Sylvester seems to know something about Toby’s activity the night before, but he doesn’t want to tell the team exactly what he knows because he doesn’t want to reveal that Toby went to get an engagement ring for Happy. Walter determines that they need to go back to the mental hospital that Collins escaped from and look for clues there. Once there, Tim actually turns out to be really smart and helpful and uses his sleuthing skills to find a hidden code/plan that Collins etched into the table in the kitchen of the mental hospital. Yay Tim! Stop making me like you because I’m really not supposed to like you!
Per usual, I’m going to skip all the exact details of how the team finds Toby. They use genius science and math stuff. There’s really more pressing issues in this episode to get to. Just know that this episode is really musically focused for some reason, and music notes and frequency has a lot to do with Toby’s rescue, and Tim plays a pretty big role in that. Also, Toby uses some clever over-the-phone secret signaling to Sylvester to tell Scorpion his location. The part I want to talk about is the mind game Collins plays with Toby. Collins claims that reading people isn’t that hard, that anyone can do what Toby does, and most of all that he has Toby pegged. When Collins finds the engagement ring in Toby’s bag, he notices the hexagonal gear setting and realizes there’s only one person who would go for a ring like that — Happy. Collins then goes on to tell Toby that Happy would never say yes to him, but that she can’t. What the hell, Collins? What does that mean?
Collins Criminal Minds esque trap for Toby and when the team finds the warehouse, they see that Toby’s tied to a chair under a jar of acid surrounded by a maze of dental floss. The far is held up by a stand of dental floss and if any of the lines of dental floss the team cuts is attached to the one hold up the jar, the acid will spill onto Toby’s head and burn through his skull and brain, killing him instantly. Happy frantically tries to get to him, and even blames herself for his kidnapping after Collins reveals Toby’s plan to purpose, as Toby was kidnapped while getting the ring. Happy shows the most emotion we’ve ever seen out of her in this episode. It was really amazing to see how hard she was fighting for Toby. It was really clear in this episode how much she really does love him. The team carefully begins cutting the floss lines that don’t attach to the jar, but it’s taking too long and the line just above Toby’s head is fraying. With seconds before the acid spills, Toby tells Happy that he loves her and Happy gives up on strategy and just through the maze head-on and pushes Toby out of the way just in time. Unfortunately, they do not kiss right here, which is really sad because it was a seriously perfect moment for them to kiss.
So they save Toby, capture Collins and Walter confronts him, and now we get to the really interesting stuff, in the last 15 minutes of the episode, as usual. The team gets back to the garage and rather than being relieved, Happy is visibly distraught, angry and distant from everyone. Toby asks her over to talk but Happy says she doesn’t want to. After a slight persistence, Toby gets her over to the piano where he plays a really cheesy, awful song for her. Like so awful it made me cringe. He then got down on one knee and popped the question to Happy. He had a confetti canon and everything. And Happy says, with tears in her, that no she will not marry him. BECAUSE SHE’S ALREADY MARRIED TO SOMEONE ELSE! Wait, what?! Ya seriously. She walks off, telling him not to follow, and that’s the last we hear of it.
Wait, what?! So now we know that Happy’s been secretly married to a mystery person this whole time and apparently Collins knew about it. You would think she would have sorted this all out by now, but clearly this is a complicated marriage, otherwise she would have divorced already. Happy, who told Toby over and over that she was afraid of dating him because she saw in him a person who was unstable and untrustworthy, throws this on Toby! Perhaps it was never herself that she feared would get hurt, but Toby all along, hence why she was so reluctant to be with him. So ya, this is a pretty big reveal. But I feel like Toby is really understanding and he loves her so much that he’d be willing to work through this with her. If there was some reason she couldn’t escape this marriage, Toby would understand. Marriage is just a technicality. The real issue would be if she still loved this person, or was actively with them, which really doesn’t seem to be the case based on her recent activity with Toby. Maybe this other person died and she hasn’t fully gotten over it? There are a thousand possibilities, but the point is, if he’s Toby she loves and Toby she chooses, Toby won’t care. He just wants to be with her. And this is no defense for Happy — she definetely should have been honest with him. But knowing Happy’s character, she’s not good at communication and she was probably really afraid of facing her past and the consequences that come from it. Who knows where Quintis will go from here. Personally, I don’t think this needs to break them up, but that’s likely not how it’s going to go down.
We’ll have to wait until next season to find out. And now to the huge Waige revelation that came in last minutes of the episode. As Toby is drinking away his pain after Happy’s reveal, Walter says that this is better for the team because office relationships never work out and just complicate things. Toby immediately freaks out on him and yells at Walter because he is being selfish. He tells Walter that work doesn’t matter, that nothing matters really except for love. And in similar fashion to last season’s penultimate episode, Toby’s speech really gets to Walter. Walter gets up and tells Toby that he realized he was being stupid and that he actually loves Paige. OH MY GOD!! WALTER O’BRIEN ADMITTED HIS LOVE FOR PAIGE! So then he grabs the keys and chases her to Lake Tahoe, where she went on a weekend trip with Tim.
The episode ends as Walter is running away, so we actually don’t know if he makes it or if he tells Paige that he loves her. So that’s it, folks. We don’t know where Quintis or Waige stand going into season 3, and you know what, I kind of like that. This episode was a really interesting wrap to this season, and next season promises lots of big things as well. I’m really glad that Walter faced the truth of his emotions. There was really no point to hiding them. This was a great episode overall. I live for the episodes that have my blood pumping and my mind reeling. I’m hoping for lots more of that next season!
Thanks for sticking with me every week! I’ll be around this summer with posts about my favorite episodes from season 2, a season 2 recap, and season 3 predictions! Here’s to a happy hiatus, Team Scorpion!
