The last three episodes of the offbeat police procedural "Numb3rs" have featured a curious secondary story line.
Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz), the casually brilliant mathematician at the show's core, has decided to apply his mathematical skills to the most unlikely, and unworthy, of causes: the winless basketball team of CalSci, the university where he's a professor. This is a hapless bunch: short, uncoordinated, untalented. But Charlie believes that, as with all things, this is a problem that can be best addressed by number-crunching.
Charlie is aided in this fool's task by his father, Alan (Judd Hirsch), and his mentor Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNicol), making for a comic trio of flat-footed rationalists trying to dissect a game that's as much about art and luck as skill and form. Shooting free throws underhanded, they decide, is a far more reliable choice than the traditional method, and they name plays with mathematical lingo, much to everyone's confusion.
"What's the worst that can happen?" Charlie asks. "We lose for the 10 to the 23rd time?"
Get it? -- 10 to the 23rd power is part of Avogadro's number, the number of atoms in one mole. What a cutup!
Can science alone sustain? That it can would seem to be the core principle of "Numb3rs" (CBS, 10 p.m. Fridays), now in its fifth season. Charlie's firm grip on the outer dimensions of mathematics -- a Gaussian filter here, a Hermitian matrix there, maybe a Mersenne Twister or some hidden Markov models for good measure -- is the engine upon which this show chugs along.
Typically, Charlie applies his mathematical skills to helping his brother Don (Rob Morrow), an FBI agent -- and, naturally, a skeptic -- solve crimes, seemingly all of which, it turns out, can be reduced to math problems. Combining a "House"-like intellect with a sometimes "Monk"-like difficulty in expressing it, Charlie is the only character who appears to be in motion on this show. He is awkward and often charmless but also the lone spark.
Judging by how his crime-fighting adventures play out, though, he is certainly an unsuccessful hero. As often as not, his wild-eyed hypothesizing lands actual cops in danger and has to be constantly revised on the fly, as if officers in distress are begging for more refined algorithms. Last month, Charlie decided to undermine the trade in a new drug called Hawaiian Ice before it became an epidemic, but his mathematical models didn't consider that drug dealers might be greedy and rob one another.
