A little girl’s life hangs in the balance as the Scorpion team races against the clock in “Ticker.†The team must find out why Los Angeles’s blood supply has been compromised. They only have a matter of hours after a little girl starts her heart transplant surgery to save her life as well as anyone else needed a blood transfusion.
In their downtime, the Scorpion team puts on their own genius olympics. Toby, Happy, and Sly play silly games while Ralph is their referee. Paige hilariously commentates the games, but Walter is against them. He thinks that the Greeks, who invented the Olympics, could have been getting work done rather than wasting time on games. When Walter goes out, he gets in a minor car accident. He goes to the hospital to get checked out and meets an adorable little girl, there for her heart transplant.
Olivia is a sweet girl, and surprisingly Walter has no problem befriending her. She explains to Walter what is wrong with her heart and how this heart transplant will save her life. She’s holding an anatomy book, and Walter is impressed with how advanced the book is for a child her age. Olivia reveals that she wants to become a doctor someday, so she can help kids like her. This scene is so sweet, but you know that the other shoe has to drop soon, right?
The Scorpion team comes to the hospital to make sure Walter is okay, and Toby spots a man being wheeled in with what looks like a routine seizure. Toby immediately sees that the man is being misdiagnosed. They test him for a rare disease, Nibori virus. When the doctors try to figure out how he could have contracted this virus, they say that he was given a blood transfusion. Now, they are realizing that Los Angeles’s blood supply is compromised. Until they can verify which blood is clean, Olivia can’t go through with her heart transplant. To make matters worse, the new heart for Olivia is only viable for 24 hours, and the clock has already been ticking. Walter even tries to step up and give blood as a universal blood donor, but Olivia needs an extremely rare blood type and can’t take Walter’s.
There’s a distributor that sends out the blood to all of LA’s hospitals. If they can figure out how the blood was tainted with the virus, then they can separate the tainted blood with the clean blood. Walter finds out that the distributor just had a software upgrade where the perpetrator planted a bug that changed all of the barcodes on the blood. They discover that Todd Wilcox planted the bug. He’s the CEO of a company developing a vaccine for the Nibori virus.
It turns out the compromised blood wasn’t terrorism; it was only capitalism. With the increase in Nibori virus cases, Wilcox’s vaccine is now in high demand. He created demand for the vaccine to boost sales for his company. Toby got to really strut his stuff, and he profiled the crap out of Wilcox. During a press conference, with the few things that Wilcox said, Toby realized that something tragic happened to his parents. His house was foreclosed when he was a child, and the amount for which the house was foreclosed was the magic code. This code unscrambled the bar codes at the blood distribution center. Now, the Scorpion team can determine which blood is contaminated.
The team found clean blood for Olivia. Walter promised that they would deliver the blood in time and that the doctors should start Olivia’s transplant. After a very daring scene, Walter steals the clean blood off of a truck and takes it to the hospital. They get there just in time, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. Olivia got the blood and will recover just fine. Not bad for a day’s work for Team Scorpion.
We didn’t get to see much with Toby’s and Happy’s relationship this week. While I was a little disappointed, I also appreciated that their lives as a part of the Scorpion team didn’t revolve around their relationship. Happy and Toby seem to have everything under control and aren’t letting their relationship interfere with their work lives. Walter must be happy about that. In the last few episodes before the season two finale, will we see any developments between Walter and Paige? If not, will Paige move on to someone who will actually want to pursue a relationship, unlike Walter?
