"Everything is numbers." - David Krumholtz as Charlie Eppes
Numbers: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jude Clement
Admit it - you don't like math. Unless it involves a calculator or a set of figures low enough that you can use your fingers and toes, you don't want any part of it. Watching other people do math might sound a little boring, but the millions of fans who have made NUMB3RS a hit know that with the right graphics and intense storylines, even mathematics can be exciting.
Special Agent Don Eppes (Northern Exposure's Rob Morrow) works in the F.B.I.'s Los Angeles office, foiling kidnappers, stopping terrorist plots, and tracking down murderers. His brother Charlie (David Krumholtz) is a mathematical genius who began multiplying four digit numbers in his head at age three and headed off to Princeton at age thirteen. When Don takes on a case involving a serial rapist who has now begun killing his victims, Charlie convinces his brother that the criminal can be caught using mathematical principles. Don is skeptical at first, noting that most attempts at predicting a serial killer's next target have failed. But Charlie has a radically different idea. Inspired by a lawn sprinkler, he's sure that with the right data it would be much simpler to compute the killer's home base. After a few false starts, Charlie's idea actually helps crack the case, and soon the brothers are working together to solve other crimes.
To several of Don's colleagues - including his partner Terry Lake (Sports Night's Sabrina Lloyd) and new recruit David Sinclair (Dark Angel's Alimi Ballard) - the mind-boggling math just doesn't add up, but they are thrilled by this new weapon that they have to fight crime. Don and Charlie's widowed father has his doubts regarding this new development. Alan Eppes (Taxi's Judd Hirsch) thinks that the work is too dangerous for Charlie, and that the brothers' complex relationship won't survive working together. Physicist Larry Fleinhardt (Ally McBeal's Peter MacNicol), Charlie's colleague and best friend, feels that the mathematician is wasting his talents doing police work. Charlie does have the full support of his assistant, Amita Ramanujan (Navi Rawat). He also has a slight crush on her, but feels that he can't act on it because he is her advisor.
As one might expect from producers Tony Scott (Man on Fire, True Romance) and Ridley Scott (Kingdom of Heaven, Gladiator, Thelma and Louise), the series is visually striking. The use of different film stocks, black and white imagery, computer graphics, and other visual tricks gives the series a uniquely cinematic look.
These techniques are used to their fullest effect in the living illustrations of mathematic principles. As Charlie explains his idea to Don and the other agents, film footage and computer imagery give visual interpretations of what he's saying. In "Vector," Charlie explains how a disease can spread from a "patient zero" to the population at large. At home, we see a box with a person standing in it drawn in the center of the TV screen. That person is patient zero. She coughs and is then colored red to indicate that she is infected. Four other people walk into the room, and two turn red when they too become infected. The four people go to other boxes that pop up on the screen, continuing the cycle of infection. The sequence is visually stunning and easy to understand. "Counterfeit Reality" shows the difficulties of creating an exact reproduction of something by showing a jogger following in another person's exact path on the beach. Even if the jogger lands in the footprints, his unique weight and stride prevent him from totally matching the person he is trying to follow. An explanation of how computer data is erased is succinctly illustrated with a field of quarters that randomly flip from heads to tails ("Sacrifice").
As interesting as these illustrations can be, it's all still mumbo jumbo. Charlie's jargon is the mathematics equivalent of Star Trek's techno babble, except that even the most math-adverse among us have at least heard the terms algorithm and vector. Since it's really impossible for the writers to totally explain exactly how (or why) Charlie's calculations are important to solving the cases, the crimes are less interesting than they could be.
Still, NUMB3RS is often engrossing, especially in its complex portrayal of the Eppes family. We learn - almost casually - that before he moved back to Los Angeles, Don lived with a woman. Their relationship was obviously quite serious, but he failed to mention it to Charlie ("Counterfeit Reality"). Don once immersed himself so deeply in his work that he rarely saw or talked to his family ("Man Hunt"). He came home to be near his family when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Charlie, who in many ways was his mother's favorite, was so distraught by her impending death that he couldn't even visit her. Instead, he spent his time in the garage manically trying to solve an unsolvable math problem, behavior he repeats when information he provides leads to a deadly shootout with formerly peaceful bank robbers ("Uncertainty Principle"). And Alan loves to play golf with a disinterested Charlie because, as Don observes, "it's the one thing he can teach you" ("Noisy Edge").
Guest stars in season one include Anthony Heald (Boston Public), CCH Pounder (The Shield), J.K. Simmons (Oz), Rainn Wilson (The Office), Alyson Reed (High School Musical), Douglas Sills (Broadway's The Scarlet Pimpernel), Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother), Susan Egan (Disney's Beauty and the Beast), Tom Irwin (My So-Called Life), Molly Hagan (Herman's Head), Lou Diamond Phillips (Wolf Lake), David Marshall Grant (The Lazarus Man), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (3rd Rock from the Sun), Bruce Davison (Kingdom Hospital), Ethan Embry (Dragnet), Gloria Reuben (E.R.), Bill Smitrovich (Life Goes On), and Max Martini (Harsh Realm).
The packaging is simple yet quite effective. The thirteen episodes that make up season one are divided onto four discs. Each green-hued disc is adorned with - appropriately enough - its identifying number. The discs are housed in a green foldout case that looks like a cross between graph paper, computer circuitry, and math homework. The four discs attach to two panels - both panels hold two discs, one on top of the other, in a figure eight pattern. Other panels of the foldout case list the episode titles, original airdates, and plot synopses for each disc. The case slides into a plastic sleeve dominated by a photo of Don and Charlie. Because parts of the plastic sleeve are clear, the foldout case shows through, producing a 3-D effect.
The full motion DVD menus are both eye-catching and easy to navigate. Viewers can play all episodes or choose them individually. The episodes are divided into chapter stops, but there are no scene selection menus.
One of the discs does contain a minor glitch. Upon choosing "Counterfeit Reality," viewers are given the option to watch the episode with or without a commentary track. Either way, a totally different episode gets cued up. "Counterfeit Reality" is still accessible, however, by using the "play all" feature and skipping ahead to the correct episode.
