Numbers: Season 3

Numb3rs, now deep into its fourth season, is my favorite Friday night television show, and within the top three for the whole week. And, I have to admit, those three rotate pretty regularly based on individual episodes.

The series is produced by Tony Scott (Top Gun, True Romance) and Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner). It was created by husband and wife team Nicholas Falacci and Cheryl Heuton, who still contribute many of the scripts. With this many families involved in the series, it's no wonder relationships feature at the core of the show every week.

The general conceit of the series is that the FBI uses mathematicians and math to solve crimes and catch criminals. When I first saw the series advertised, I was interested in David Krumholtz (University professor Charlie Eppes) and Rob Morrow (FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Don Eppes). Krumholtz has been in movies and television since he was a kid, and Morrow was a centerpiece in the outstanding Northern Exposure.

I tuned in that first season not really knowing what to expect. Then I was completely blown away by the layered plots and introduction of mathematical concepts that made me wish I'd at least picked up a minor in math while cruising through college collecting the bits and pieces of my Bachelor of Arts in English.

But at the heart of this series are the relationships between the characters. As brothers, Charlie and Don are immediately and irrevocably as different as siblings can be. Charlie is a certified genius and Don is a hard-edged, no-nonsense FBI team leader. They fight and argue and strive to understand each other, and viewers are as gripped by the mysteries of their relationship as they are the cases the FBI works on.

Season 3's episodes "Hardball," "Finders Keepers," "Takeout," "One Hour," and "Burn Rate" all focus - to a degree - on the brothers' understanding of each other. "Hardball" deals with the possibility that Don could have been a professional baseball player, kind of a roads not taken episode. "Finders Keepers" reveals that Charlie has a higher security rating that Don does, which causes surprise and a little jealousy that gets in the way of things. "Burn Rate" pushes up the heat between Don and Charlie as their difference get in the way of developing the case for a time.

Judd Hirsch adds to that as Alan Eppes, their widowed father who tries to figure out the middle ground between his two sons. But, instead of merely being the Father Knows Best character that you would expect, Alan ends up learning as much as his sons do about life and relationships.

Again, "Hardball" comes immediately to mind as he counsels Don and Charlie about their relationship with each other. "Spree" winds up the tension between Alan and Charlie over the house they live in. Alan's expertise as a city planner helps solve the cases in "Traffic," "Blackout," "Waste Not," and "Under Pressure." Alan has problems of his own in "End of Watch."

The FBI team has changed a little over the four years that it's been on television, but it has boiled down to three main characters. Megan Reeves (Diane Farr) is a behavioral specialist. David Sinclair (Alimi Ballard) and Colby Granger (Dylan Bruno) are special agents. Sinclair was always law enforcement, but Granger was military - and something else which plays a big part in this season of escalating personal tension.

Megan's kidnapping in the season's two-part opener, "Spree" and "Two Daughters," really pushes the team to the wall as they struggle to figure out what's going on and to get her back alive. Her psychological profiling skills are prevalent in "Traffic," "Brutus," "Killer Chat," and "Nine Wives."

Sinclair's background is featured in "Contenders." Granger's past explodes onto the team in "The Janus List."

But Charlie's college comrades bring a lot to the party as well. In this season, Charlie and Amita (Navi Rawat) get closer and she becomes a full-time professor at the college. Their relationship gets exposed more through the season. Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNichol) hooks up with Megan, which has everyone dumbstruck - and, truthfully, maybe the fans as well, but Larry is such a nice guy and so nerdy you have to love him. Unfortunately, we only get him half the season this year. According to the episodes, he's on a space station middle, but we know he was starring in 24 this year as well.

There are even part-time co-stars that change the whole tilt of an episode. Lou Diamond Phillips has won a spot in my heart as Agent Ian Edgerton, a tactical sniper who has been part of the show since its inception. You can always count on those episodes being pure rock and roll at some point, and he delivers in spaces in the two-part opener.

Will Patton is another of my favorites. He returns again in this season's "End of Watch" and has starred in one episode so far in Season 4. He plays police lieutenant Gary Walker, a hard-nosed old school guy who faults Don for his team. However, Don and Gary find a deep friendship in each other.

But the episodes bring so much more to the viewer. A history of art and Nazi theft in "Provenance." Steady Motion Algorithm, Partial Differential Equations, Data Mining, Dantzig-Wolfe Decomposition, Euclid's Orchard, Statistical Textual Analysis, and dozens of other mathematical processes and skills are unveiled in easy to understand demonstrations for the armchair mathematician.

If you haven't seen the series, start watching. Within an episode or two, you'll be hooked. But if you, like me, love the chance to sit down, watch the show, and reference the math on-line while you've got the episode paused, you'll have to pick up this newest DVD set. The emotions of the relationships run high this season, and the stakes are raised all the way around. But the crime-solving, equation-writing, rapid-fire pace of the series totally shines in this collection.

Of course, I don't own the third season on DVD so I cannot say what the special features include or how well they worked, but I did watch the entire 3rd Season when it was on television and, true to form, it remains one of the best shows on television. The characters all work really well together and the stellar "family" trio of David Krumholtz, Rob Morrow, and Judd Hirsch again work their magic in this well-written and well-acted third season. As much as this show is about the FBI or mathematics (and the great connection the two can have in common), it also is about family, in the literal sense but also in regards to people you work with. Ultimately, you care about these characters (especially if you have seen the other two seasons, but isn't required) and the differences their jobs and their lives create between them. The subject matter is heavy at times (and not recommended for children) but some of the other "heavy" episodes aren't anything they aren't already exposed so could make this show fresh by its bringing mathematics away from just geeks and making it interesting for all kinds of people.

This is the thinking person's show! Great season with a surprising cliff-hanger. Outstanding music used. Just hope it can entice some students to take math more seriously.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 35 reviews  4.6 out of 5 stars