ten reasons to watch numb3rs
The premise of Numb3rs is simple: using math to solve crimes. Now, I know there are approximately 21,345 primetime shows already on air that take a crime-ridden city, a crime-solving team as on CSI and replace forensic investigator with an anthropologist/brilliant detective with OCD/published crime novelist/Nobel laureate/their pet dog* (*delete where applicable). While Numb3rs does initially appear to fit this archetype, with a mathematician becoming invincible crime-fighter, it is more than the typical primetime crime drama. Yes, there are the car chases and hostage situations and shootouts which seem to clutter TV with terrible and unecessary violence. Yes, there is the inevitable portrayal of a character with a hero complex, a character with issues, a character with near zero social skills. Yes, the statement that “this show is different” has been tossed around so many times it’s virtually meaningless.
But– and I’m sure you saw that one coming, after several sentences awash with anaphora– but let me not flood you with preconceptions.
Numb3rs has Charlie Eppes, a professor of applied mathematics, and his brother Don, an FBI agent, solving crimes together– Charlie brings the numbers and the intellectual gibberish, Don the manpower and the implied coolness of a federal law enforcement agency. There’s an overview over at crack_van on LiveJournal that has a succinct description (plus snark where necessary) of the characters on the show.
Ten Reasons To Watch Numb3rs
1. The math.
The math is sup
posed to be secondary, a gimmick to sell a new crime series, some say, but it’s my primary reason for watching. In a 40-minute episode, there are maybe 5 or 6 minutes– and that’s a kind estimate– of real math, but it’s almost always worth it. Part of the reason why I feel so strongly about Numb3rs, I think, is the way the math is made understandable, believable. There’s even a site, Wolfram, that has the ‘math behind Numb3rs’ for each episode. It’s even difficult to feel stupid when mind-boggling technical terms (“combinatorics”, anyone?) are spoken, because everyone else on screen– save the mathematician, Charlie– has the same blank look. And then the math is explained using an analogy (in what is called an ‘audience vision’) that likens the theory to something in real life. One of my favourites involves the use of the Hanging Man Paradox rather than math, but I couldn’t find it on Youtube, so here’s the next best thing: the Monty Hall problem. While not an ‘audience vision’, it does give a good idea of how good David Krumholtz (who plays Charlie) is at making math sound interesting. The exploding gumball machine at right also has a neat explaination that is, however obliquely, linked to the refraction of light.
2. The ‘B’ storylines (aka the Eppes family dynamics)
While the show usually begins with the crime, or the “A” storyline, then segues into some scenes between Charlie Eppes and his brother Don and/or their father, the “B” storyline is just as–if not more– engaging than the main story thread. According to Wikipedia (best line ever to segue into rambling, don’t you think?) the show “focuses equally” on the relationship between the brothers and their father and their crime-solving adventures. This is erroneous. The Eppes family dynamics are, as far as I’m concerned, one of the primary reasons Numb3rs even made it past the Pilot (that, and the math. Math is all-powerful.).
The specialsauce in this particular equation is the utterly awesome (again, in the original meaning of the word) Eppes brothers’– oh, let’s just oversimplify things and call them, very neutrally, “issues”. Charlie’s precocity, and the resulting shift within the family to accomodate him, has created the dynamic on which the show basically rides. In short, there is tension. Charlie wants Don’s approval the way little brothers do, and Don has to find some way to fit everything about family life– his father and brother– back into his own. There are some really lovely scenes with the brothers; one of my favourites is the spaghetti bending in season two. (“Did you know,” Charlie begins, “that if you bend a piece of spaghetti it will always break into three or more pieces?” Fragmentation theory. Math stuff, he says by way of explaination.)
3. Charlie Eppes
Charlie may be th
e implied hero in the show, the genius mathematician who can put a spin on crime-solving, but he isn’t any brooding Shakespearean protagonist. He’s got the look of a wild-eyed professor– a mad scientist, if you will– and has the hair to prove it. He is also, very objectively, as cute as a basketful of brown-eyed Labrador Retriever puppies– the formal word for which is ‘adorkable’. Like I said, very objectively described. Other, alternately amusing and awesome (in the original meaning of the word, not to be confused with the slang for ‘cool’), traits that he possesses are a) his inability to spell very, very simple words, b) his tendency to become testy when challenged, and c) his little-brother admiration for Don. a) Case in point: Charlie may be an honest-to-god genius and a real whiz at math, but he cannot spell. An eight-letter word for ‘egotistical’? ‘Conceited’, Charlie says quite smugly, and to prove it to his father, who tells him it’s a nine-letter word, he spells it: C-O-N-C-E-T-E-D. And it’s actually the second time in the series his inaptitude for spelling is shown; he can’t spell ‘anomaly’ either. b) His ‘math fight’ with a rival and fellow mathematician Marshall Penfield with can be construed either as UST or– the interpretation that I prefer– egocentricism, which should never be this funny, but is. c) There is another reason for the ‘puppy’ characterization. This is it.
4. Larry Fleinhardt
Anyone who has ever, ever used th
e word ‘pecuniary’ in speech, raise your internet hand. No? Well, there is one character in the show that I utterly love for a) his sesquipedalian musings, b) his impressive repertoire of facial expressions, c) his dress sense, d) the things he does with Charlie (not like that). a) his using of the word “defenestration” was, I think, the thing that first earned my absolute admiration. And then he has to continue with his illustrous vocabulary and all, using a word that has me applauding in sheer delight at least twice an episode. When coupled with perfect diction and gesticulating (aka Peter MacNicol’s brillance), Larry’s lines– and Larry– are the two things that I’m completely enamoured with (other than Charlie, and Charlie’s many math t-shirts). b) and c) would take far too many screencaps to express, but take my word for it. d) Their experiments, that is, not what they are doing in numerous NC-17 fics. This experiment is one of many, but I chose it because it involved sledgehammers, a nail bed, and a Larry wielding the abovementioned sledgehammer.
5. The humor
I absolutely cannot watch comedies (or anything, for that matter) with laugh tracks, because it annoys me to no end that the viewers are basically being told when to laugh: like, ‘hey, this is funny, right here. It is now necessary to laugh.’ It’s like one of those placards that’s held up to tell the audience what to do– APPLAUD, LAUGH, BE SILENT. The humor in Numb3rs is nothing like that. There is the occasional clunker, of course, the unfortunate joke that falls flat, but for the most part, Numb3rs carries off the humor/drama balance very well, and even the supporting cast get good lines. In fact, IMO, they often get the best lines.
One of the lines that’s become the show’s staple is the one in which the FBI agents have to, very sheepishly, express their ignorance at whatever the hell Charlie’s rambling on about. The number of ways this has been done is amazing in itself, because I haven’t yet seen a repeat of the same line. Charlie goes on about matrices; Colby (a member of Don’s team who finally found his brain in the third season, but has a very fine bone structure) deadpans, “Yeah, that’s what I would have done, too.” Another of what seems to have become a running joke on the show is Charlie’s messing with others’ food in order to explain a mathematical idea: he pours water in Megan’s popcorn (around 0:35 or so in the video, linked), thereby ruining it completely in his demonstration of laser swath mapping. He smashes someone’s bran muffin to demonstrate the creation of a debris field.
There really isn’t a better way to explain this point, so I’m going to link a couple of videos: 1) Charlie driving (Fact: Charlie has a learner’s permit, which was revoked. Spelling and driving may just be the two things that faze the otherwise completely able genius.) 2) The aforementioned Spelling with Charlie videos; 3) Larry and Colby Play in a Sandbox
Then there’s the drier, darker humor, the one-liners used to mark the transition from one scene to the next. Unlike Horatio Caine’s very unfunny and often overly dramatic one-liners, Numb3rs‘ are usually in good taste, occasionally trite, but mostly well-written and executed. In one scene of Don!angst he, in attempting to illustrate the difficulties is work poses to relationships, deadpans, “You come home, and someone says, ‘How was your day?’ and you’re like, ‘Well, I saw a decapitated kid, how’s yours?’“
6. David/Colby
Standard-issue weapons? Check. Kevlar? Check. Often (neglected but) necessary snark? Check. I mentioned above that the supporting cast gets the best lines, and, snarkwise, they certainly do.
Colby: [David asks Colby to climb up the trellis] Yeah. Colby, go down the elevator shaft. Colby, jump in the bay. Hey, Colby, climb the Sixth Street Bridge.
Now, Colby may not be the sharpest tool in the shed (not like that), but he’s got enough snark to power a four-person household for a year. After he found his brain near the end of season 2, it just gets better. And David? While he’s usually relegated to expositing, he isn’t just Don’s right-hand man. I could start swooning right about now, because I love David, but it would proceed to mar the entire effort with my bias. So, all you have to know is that Colby is okay, occasionally awesome, and that David is perennially awesome. Also that I really need a new word to abuse.
I suppose I should also admit that I am a slasher (rather lackadaisical, but still) where these two are concerned– hence the introduction as David/Colby rather than David and Colby. Yes, that slash matters. No, it’s not shorthand for ‘or’.
7. The montages
I mean one particular montage, actually, to Nico Stai’s “Maybe Maybe”, in the last four minutes of “12:01″.
The subject matter being juxtaposed is the foremost thing that catches the attention– first, the basketball game (which, by the way, is Charlie and Larry’s attempt to break CalSci’s losing streak which is, oh, several decades unbroken?), then the execution of a mob boss, and the capture of his son for the murder for which he’s being executed. It’s all very casually stated here, and difficult to comprehend if all you’re seeing is the 2-minute montage, but I love how it fits in with the whole episode, providing a solid, sad final note. It’s difficult to feel sorry for the mob boss being executed: even though he didn’t commit the crime that got him the death penalty, choosing to take the fall for his son, there is this knowledge that he’s caused the deaths of so many other people. Is this justice, nonetheless?
8. The fanfiction
You knew this was coming. The fandom’s small, so the volume of fic is admittedly much smaller. As in every fandom, however, there are several authors with impressive oeuvres.
In a matter of weeks, I’ve bookmarked 78 fics and read half. (If that doesn’t say something about my time management, I don’t know if anything ever can.) There’s Reciprocity, which is probably the best AU ever written, in which Charlie is deft agent rather than inept mathematician, and contains possibly one of my favourite math metaphors: “d/dx(n)=n^-1: It’s not math. It’s reciprocity: inversion and upheaval, the world upside-down from what it seems to be. The derivation of normalcy upended.” Another (shorter) fic, Belief, centers around Charlie’s childhood (or lack thereof, considering he went to Princeton at 13), the La Brea tar pits, and basketball.If I allow myself to go on this may turn into a history of all the fantastic Numb3rs fic ever written, with summaries, favorite lines and, uh–god forbid– analyses (although it’s quite difficult to launch into literary discussion about a fic titled, “The Llama Song, or A Discourse on Brothers in Seven Parts, plus Duck“).
9. Fractals in broccoli (1:28 of this video)
Yes, I may just be running out of reasons. I’m disappointed you noticed. But this still counts as a reason on its own and not an extension of 1, the math. The ninth reason involves non sequiturs. Larry, the master of non sequiturs and Lengthy Poetic Musings that go nowhere, brings the gems to the table. Case in point: the many Physics Department competitions always seem to encompass an unbelievably large sphere of skill and/or silliness– there was, I think, a food fight (involving using grapes as lethal projectiles), a paper airplane folding competition, and a poker tournament. The poker is the least surprising.
10. Because in Mac vs. PC, the Mac always wins
