life, liberty and the pursuit of geekiness

Numb3rs cut from 22 to 16 episodes. I suppose that means the end is nigh.

I know I haven't been watching it much lately, but still. SADFACE.

Title: Non-Fatal Error
Pairing/Characters: Charlie, Don, Alan
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Frenemies (5.10)
Summary: On reflection, going out to the crime scene hadn't been one of Charlie's brighter ideas.
Notes/Warnings: Concrit welcome as always. Slightly non-applicable title.

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Charlie was busy concentrating on not throwing up in front of Marshall Penfield, but he knew without looking that it was Don's hand on his arm, by the unhesitating invasion of his personal space, the pressure that was calculated to be just on this side of hurting.
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Title: Suspension of Disbelief
Pairing/Characters: Charlie/Amita
Rating: PG
Spoilers: 5.06, Magic Show
Summary: Charlie sees the magic. At any rate, he sees something, and maybe that's good enough.

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Charlie was very carefully not saying What's the point of owning a sexy blue convertible if you're going to sit at ten below the limit all the time? That was one of the things Don had more than once told him never to say to a girlfriend, generally adding a rider insulting Charlie's own driving skills.

Anyway, he had the impression that he'd already managed to irritate Amita over the case, and he wasn't quite sure how. Take it apart and see how it works was at the root of the scientific impulse, after all, and he would have expected Amita and Larry of all people to see that. Instead, Larry had gone all mystic over what was essentially a clever, pretty toy, and Amita was being gently tolerant, which was unexpectedly stinging. Amita usually didn't have to make those sorts of allowances, because she thought the same way he did, and Charlie had gotten used to it. Gotten spoiled.
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The Thirty-Seventh Hour

Pairing/Characters: Charlie, Don
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Up to 5.08
Summary: Don and Charlie, sleep-deprived, traumatised, worried and guilty respectively. Still, things could be a lot worse.
Notes/Warnings: I am assuming in writing this that Thirty-Six Hours took place in its originally intended point in the timeline: just before Charlie got his clearance back, between 5.03 and 5.04.

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Title: Symmetry
Pairing/Characters: Charlie, Don
Rating: U
Spoilers:Up to 5.03
Summary: Don and Charlie aren't as different as you might think, not when they're pushed. Takes place after Blowback.

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Symmetry

( Fic here! )

Five US is showing the current season of Numb3rs (only 10 weeks behind the Americans, what gives?), which reminded me that I've never done a review of the last eppesode.

First of all, website source code is not the same as program source code. HTML is a markup language, basically putting tags around things. Okay, there's scripts, but I still don't think that that would be enough for Amita to analyse like that. It beats me how anyone can do sufficient research to put in lines about method calls and object oriented code and not realise this. Also, any astrophysics program will most likely be written in Fortran, which nobody would ever use for anything web-based. For my peace of mind I shall pretend that Amita cracked into Vanguard's code repository, or that there were scripts on the website that she recognised from her work in astrophysics. (By the way, the analysis is just about possible, given a large enough code sample or a small pool of authors, as long as they aren't writing to a 'house style'). And why would they write the website's address on the walls? Not exactly the way to keep it a secret from Tooner and co. And, no, Marshall, it's not computer code, it looks Greek-ish to me.

Tooner was wonderfully creepy, in a skinny ginger sociopathic way. I liked the way he kept taunting Vanguard and the FBI, until he finally over-reached himself. Also, his car. No wonder he killed the guy who dared to copy him. I liked the showdown at the end too, with the searchlight, and the Vanguard leader laughing, and the shot of Don from above, just standing there after he's shot Tooner. (Poor Donnie.)

Charlie finally found out about Don going to temple. I loved Don's *panic now* expression when Charlie asked about it, and how un-snotty Charlie was about it. I suppose he's had years and years of Larry, so perhaps belief in God isn't something he's going to be obnoxious over. Although, he generally does use 'interesting' as a synonym for 'wrong'.

Charlie's haircut: this. Although if it were a bit longer at the front, it wouldn't be so bad.

The Charlie-and-Marshall rivalry is always fun. It's great that they get as much bickering mileage out of burgers as they do out of mathematics. And Larry and Amita were so hilariously long-suffering. The truce was kind of sweet (Charlie's little shy smile after they shook hands <3). But Marshall's not allowed to call Charlie 'Chuck'! Only Don gets to do that!

Top humour moments of the eppesode: adrenaline makes Marshall itch, and Colby and David doing Cheesy Voiceover Guy. They sounded almost exactly like the Cheesy Voiceover Guy who actually does the voiceovers for the Numb3rs promo clips. :D