I finished Scorpion but I’m thinking about many things about the series. Specifically, I noticed that in the pilot, the team seemed to function quite well with each other. They communicated and were clear with each other. There’s even that moment where Sylvester tries to offer to drive Walter but is obviously nervous and Walter smiles at him and tells him that he needs him at the diner with Toby but thanks him and calls him pal. 

They’ve known each other for years before this. I think Walter knew Toby the longest, which was like seven years. They were friends for nearly a decade before Paige came along. But somehow things started getting more heated as time went on after Paige came along. Walter became more antagonistic at times, rather tense and snappish. Toby had moments where he would just randomly antagonize Walter or Sylvester, when that wasn’t as prevalent in the first episode. It was like the more they learned to fit in with the world, the less they got along. 

I think personally, Paige’s presence is what ultimately led to their demise. She took it upon herself to criticize every little thing, which the others of course were monitoring always. They were always there to see every misstep that Paige corrected, and they wrote it down as fact. Her word was law. She gave them a booklet of how to critique each other, when they spent nearly a decade together before. Accepting each other and dealing with certain flukes and flaws with minimal problems. But the second she came around, things got better and then got much worse. They got better also because of government funding, remember that. But I’m talking socially, and how they all turned on each other.

You could offer a lot of theories on this, but I’m thinking more in terms of Walter. Because while the others have some positive change in their social skills, Walter changes in different ways. He accesses empathy to an extent and works on tone and trying to be patient and understanding. But as this work goes on, I think it became more difficult for him to keep up with the development of the others. 

Paige was essentially teaching Walter how to mask better.

If you don’t know what autistic masking is, it’s when an autistic person learns, practices, and performs certain behaviors and suppresses others in order to appear like the people around them. It’s a survival technique, sometimes it’s automatic for survival and adaptation purposes and other times it can be learned. 

So, Walter performs these behaviors in a way that Paige deems what being a ‘normal human’ is like. The problem is that these behaviors are not natural or automatic to people with autism. It can be an extremely draining experience. And Walter was just expected to be like that, forever, always. Like once he learned it there was no going back, no ‘regressing’ as Paige and Walter put it. But it’s not that simple. And I honestly think that the more time went on, the more stress Walter was put under. He gets into a relationship with Paige, and he has to be good all the time, he has to be emotionally competent and sensitive and in touch with Paige’s needs. In the later seasons, we see Walter try to do things like the others and fall short or get criticized for even trying. Like the episode with the conch, where he tries so hard to be good only for everyone to tear him down. Even when he’s doing practically nothing, Paige insults him. 

My prediction is that slowly, Walter was starting to burn out and that weighed heavily on everyone’s relationships. And eventually, in a realistic scenario, he would have burned out and shut down. 

Watching Scorpion. It's amazing!!!! From what I've understood so far:

"mentally enabled" means mentally ill genius

I'm headcanonning Happy with schizoid pd (I'm only on season 1, any headcanons may be disproven or change later, this is just what I think so far)

Toby has NPD and possibly ASPD

Walter is autistic (also I think he has PTSD and possibly ODD)

Ralph is autistic

Sylvester has OCD and "more phobias than you can shake a stick at"

Also, as for what I think about everything so far? I think on the whole the representation is done pretty well, although there are some main features of autism that they haven't shown on screen as of yet for Walter (stimming, sensory overload/issues, stuff like that). Also, they seem to say that all "mentally enabled" people can't connect emotionally easily and tend to have low empathy. I hope they make it clear at some point that actually many autistic and mentally ill people actually have high empathy, and that lack of empathy doesn't equal lack of emotions or of compassion.

I love your analysis of Scorpion. I think Paige's problem was that she saw herself not as a part of the team, a liason, but as an outside mother/teacher figure and thus superior. I also think Walter put her on a pedestal in a way and encouraged that idea she had of herself by asking her to be their liason.

Honestly this is a great take. Walter and the others kind of put her into a power position over most of them and it did get to her head a little. It was interesting how quickly she went from like "social liaison" to "team manager". Like we never really heard why they described her like that in the later seasons, but they gave her a lot of power which didn't make sense considering Walter was team leader and more fit the manager position. She was more of a mediator/communicator for them, or at least that was what her job was meant to be. Instead, she just became another team member that didn't really help them socially or anything.

She frequently referred to everyone as 'children' and I remember there was a time she was talking (to Toby, i think?) about her being good at raising a child genius and she said something like "well I have five" or something like that. Which I found a little odd considering the fact that she was so into Walter. She infantilized him when it came to emotions and social situations and talked down to him, but at the same time sought him out in a mature romantic relationship. It just doesn't make sense. I guess it's that whole thing where men tend to be stereotypically babied in relationships and the girlfriend is forced to pick up the slack or whatever. It's just weird. Walter had emotional problems, but he wasn't a child. And it was really odd to me that in their last moments together, she basically said he was still a child emotionally and wouldn't grow anymore. Which doesn't make sense because if that was obvious from the get-go, why date him lmao. But he's honestly not all that immature, he's just lost on social rules and how to connect emotionally (just as so many autistic people are). He tries his best to rectify his mistakes and works on growth, everyone just dogs on him for it.

Paige and the rest of Scorpion whenever Walter fails to express emotions in a neurotypical way:

In the episode Faux Money Maux Problems... Veronica tries to claim that her style of parenting (IE: roping her young daughter into her cons) was what made it possible for Paige to succeed in situations like this case. Paige vehemently disagrees and obviously (rightly so, because her mother was neglectful and abusive in these terms) still has a problem with her mother’s treatment of her as a kid. 

Throughout this episode, Walter tries a new approach to the team. He tries to be more patient and accepting of other’s contributions and repeatedly offers encouragement so that everyone understands that they are integral to the team. Everyone all shows unease and disapproval with this attempt, which doesn’t make any sense considering they’re always calling him selfish and arrogant. Toby points out that the whole thing won’t last because Walter would eventually snap.

However, Walter snaps because he’s got four minutes to save everyone and when he comes up with a plan everyone immediately sets to telling him it’s a terrible idea. They all partake in the “virtual conch” and interrupt him, which is not what that method is about in the slightest. They spend the whole episode shitting on his idea to be kinder and more considerate, then talk over him. And then when he finally snaps and declares Scorpion a “Logical Dictatorship” everyone rolls their eyes and goes along with it. And Walter’s plan works, as always. 

Then, at the very end Walter is obviously still agitated about the whole thing. And he’s giving a lecture to two agents about the history of currency. And is giving them what Toby dubs a ‘dressing down’. Sylvester sought Paige out to help, asking her to interfere and stop Walter from committing an act that could possibly cause problems for Walter and the team. However, she suddenly cites her mother’s way of ‘sink or swim’ parenting and deems that she’s been working with Walter for two years and with their ‘foundation’ he needs to figure it out himself.

But that’s literally... Her job? She’s supposed to interfere when the team ruffles feathers or commits social faux pas. Walter is perhaps the biggest contender of these situations, and she just suddenly has decided to just let him figure things out. With the same frame of mind that Paige herself expressed disdain for her mother having??? How does that make sense? Also, that’s LITERALLY YOUR JOB!!! You can’t just not do your job and say you’ve done what you can. Just because Walter is more difficult than some of the others socially and emotionally doesn’t mean she can just give up on him. Which she basically starts to do in Ice Ca-Cabes where she confronts Walter for not being more emotional towards Cabe when he might be dying. AND WALTER APOLOGIZES FOR THAT! It’s not Walter’s fault that he has these issues, and it’s Paige’s job to explain things to him and point things out. It’s what she was hired for, she can’t just say ‘Oh well, I’ve done what I can’. Jesus.