‘Scorpion’ Postmortem: Elyes Gabel and Katharine McPhee on Why Waige Took So Long to Get Together
It took an event as momentous as two of their own getting married to make it happen, but happen it did. Walter and Paige finally — out loud, in the presence of one another — admitted their love for each other. And in typical over-the-top Scorpion fashion, they sealed the deal not with a kiss but with a wild make-out session in a broom closet that the rest of the team walked in on. We talked with Elyes Gabel and Katharine McPhee about their lip lock and what made the wedding feel special to the cast.
The festivities don’t go off as planned, of course. A crisis in Wyoming means Happy and Toby miss their own ceremony, but Paige steps up and pulls together a wedding in a matter of hours. Even though it’s at the very last place Happy wanted, it turns out to be the best possible Scorpion wedding.
“I found that night to be particularly enjoyable because we got to do goofy dancing… which I later regretted, watching back,” McPhee says with a hint of embarrassment. Gabel says that night shoots can “get into a place of delirium” when the cast and crew are working split shifts, so if everyone looks a little bit extra loose on the dance floor, that may be where it came from.
But, insists McPhee, “That’s our show’s sweet spot, really.” After the action and explosions and cave-ins, “I look forward to those types of scenes. They’re less about the mission and more about the family.” Gabel agrees, “I had a nice moment where I looked all around at the cast and was, like, ‘There is harmony with what everybody is playing, what each character is playing.’ And it felt quite connected, actually.”
The goofiness and the familial closeness of the moment may have been the carrot that led to Paige and Walter getting together, but there was a stick as well. Everyone on Team Scorpion feels protective of Ralph, but nobody more than Walter, and being called a coward by the tiny prodigy stings him deeply. “There’s no more sobering feeling than being admonished by a child and them telling you where you’ve gone wrong.”
Gabel likens Ralph to an Obi-Wan — someone who, in many ways, is Walter’s equal. “He’s still a child in so many other ways, but for him to subvert the position of [Walter] being almost the patriarch in that place — it really turns the screw.” Add to that the fact that Ralph isn’t an outside observer: His anger is deeply felt because “he’s got a huge amount of skin in the game.” Walter sends Paige away to protect himself from all these emotions, but as her son, Ralph sees the damage done every day. “For me, as the actor playing it, I really felt the weight,” Gabel says. Not even Cabe has the power to get to Walter like that. Ralph is “pretty much the only person that can really do that apart from Paige.”
McPhee says that “in the beginning, having a child makes a relationship complicated,” and Ralph made it harder for Walter and Paige to get together. But over the years, that dynamic has changed and, as we close in on the end of three years, “He ends up being the easiest thing because he loves Walter so much.”
The couple has established a rhythm for so long now — will that remain, or will their chemistry be completely overturned now? There’s no doubt in McPhee’s mind: “It will change 100 percent. I think that what’s going to keep people tuning in every week is the curiosity of knowing that they’re together now, and how does that affect them and the situation they’ve been in for years?” The question is how will it change? “I’ve always been curious about people who’ve been friends for a long time, and then they’ve dated other people and always stayed friends, and you hear their story about how they never saw anything, and then suddenly they get married and have kids,” she says. She’s fascinated with the idea of people who have an attraction but don’t act on it, and it looks like she’s going to find out what it’s like along with the rest of us watching.
Scorpion airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on CBS.
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