Entertainment

'Scorpion' Finally Went There With Walter & Paige

by Sydney Bucksbaum
CBS

Spoiler alert! This story contains major spoilers from Monday's Scorpion, "Something Borrowed, Something Blew." It finally happened! After three seasons, all that will-they-won't-they buildup between Scorpion's Paige (Katharine McPhee) and Walter (Elyes Gabel) finally paid off in an episode fans have been waiting for, "Something Borrowed, Something Blew." In the game-changing hour, genius Walter confesses his feelings for Paige at Toby (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and Happy's (Jadyn Wong) wedding, only to shockingly hear Paige's own tearful confession of love for him back after long believing that she didn't feel the same way about him. The couple wasted no time in finding a closet to consummate their feelings immediately ... only to have their entire team embarrassingly discover them partially undressed and fully in the midst of a hot hookup.

To borrow Cabe's (Robert Patrick) words, "Well it's about damn time!"

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The secret's out on their new relationship, and Walter and Paige are excited to see what the future holds for them, romantically speaking, as the CBS drama heads into the final two episodes of Season 3. But in the last scene of the episode, as a tropical case gets the team to join Toby and Happy on their "honeymoon," something went wrong on their private plane, and Happy warned the team that their plane is going to crash. Happily ever after might not be in the cards for any couple anymore, let alone Walter and Paige.

But that ominous cliffhanger didn't stop Bustle from getting McPhee and Gabel to break down the exciting new development for Walter and Paige's relationship. However, according to Gabel, fans shouldn't assume that their closet hookup means that Walter and Paige are officially together just yet.

"We still don't know that they're getting together permanently," Gabel tells me over the phone while McPhee listens to his explanation. "That's a point of me being contrary but we don't know what's going to happen in the next episode. It's not set in stone."

Both Gabel and McPhee found out that Walter and Paige were finally going to confess their feelings and hook up only an episode before this one, and they loved how the big moment played out when they got the scripts.

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"We always kind of knew that it was going to happen," McPhee says. "I think it's more exciting that it's less about how we thought that it was going to happen and more just how the writers were going to decide to pull it off. That whole scene in particular is really romantic the way that Paige says to Toby that he needs to chill out in his vows because he knows how Happy is. She's not a big talker or a feely person. And then he ends up being the one who's at a loss for words and Happy takes over and surprises everyone with this really heartfelt speech."

She continues, "And I love how that scene just keeps going from one interaction to the next really smoothly. I loved the way it was written. And then Walter decides not to let this moment pass him by and tells Paige the way he feels. It definitely fulfilled my imagination and satisfied how I would have liked the scene to happen. The writers always kill it with those big family scenes with Team Scorpion."

This is hardly the first time Scorpion flirted with the idea of getting Paige and Walter to confess their feelings for each other, but after three seasons of near-misses, Gabel was glad the writers waited until now to make it happen.

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"Those scenes are always peppered in, because on Scorpion, you're always going to die," he says. "What I mean is a joke but also serious, because when you're faced with the inevitability of saying goodbye and your imminent death, the good thing is that they try and hit those beats, suggesting that there's something unresolved or unsaid. Even in the first season when they had that fire episode, there was that tension."

While audiences may have wanted Walter and Paige to get together sooner, Gabel believes that it would not have had as big of a payoff as it does now.

"I have faith in the model of this type of a TV show and what it does," Gabel says. "It puts down all the track on the rails so you can get to that station rather than if you basically got what you need after 10 episodes, then what's really going to keep the audience? The audience watches the show for a multitude of different reasons but if and how Paige and Walter get together are the biggest. What's going to keep people enthralled i fit happens in just a short amount of time? We always knew that was coming, but I knew that it would take this amount of time for it to happen."

As for how Paige and Walter are going to navigate being in a relationship moving forward, both McPhee and Gabel aren't saying, but they did reveal that this is a new situation for both characters.

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"They're not quite sure. That's what they're discovering in the next two episodes," McPhee says. "Paige pretty quickly becomes a bit amused, which is a polite way to put it, by Walter's lack of tact as far as a boyfriend goes. That's a new and different role for him. They're definitely going to have to figure it out. Paige is already like giving some hints and making comments like, 'Oh boy, this isn't going to be as easy as I thought.'"

And expect this new coupling, along with Happy and Toby's marriage, to have some interesting effects on Team Scorpion as well.

"We're all in new territory," McPhee says, while Gabel agrees, adding, "It will be interesting to see, won't it?"

"I think that Toby and Happy have their own set of challenges," McPhee continues, "and everyone's probably a little bit in the back of their minds concerned about if each of these couple's individual issues will become everyone else's issues. Really there is no way around it because it is like a giant family."

Gabel adds, "Why I think it's going to be interesting is that we can pit two relationships or these two teams against each other. We'll have those kinds of politics. I think that's going to be really fun. It's definitely moving into a different chapter of the show. It was always going to happen and now we get to see how it really plays out."

If it's going to be anything like "Waige's" hot closet hookup, then the long wait Scorpion fans had to endure will be totally worth it.