Line #6 Fridge/NUMB3RS


1	!!FridgeBrilliance
2	* Why does Charlie have so many chalkboards just laying around the house? Enough to basically re-wall the garage with? Professors and teachers don't take their chalkboards home with them... but remember that Alan owns the house, and he's a retired City Planner/Architect. They frequently DO have chalkboards and drawing easels and such in their homes to go over projects on. Combine that with Alan having to raise Charlie-the-prodigy from a young age, and it's no wonder the house is filled with things to write on and erase over and over... otherwise, little Charlie would have gotten into the drafting paper and written all over the walls!
3	** Scientists, like artists, have a preferred mediums when doing their work: some like using computers, some like using models, some do field tests, and so on. Meanwhile Charlie went to an old-school university like Princeton that likely use chalkboards and was at a fairly formative age. Given the "Epps Convergence", which apparently put him on the map in the scientific community, was done at Princeton, Charlie probably uses the chalkboards to channel the original inspiration for his first great work.
4	** There's also the Fridge Tearjerker: when his mom got sick, it was stated that Charlie lost himself in solving p vs [=PN=] because he couldn't cope with the situation. Those chalkboards are likely left over from that time.
5	* In the YMMV, it has been noted that the series undergoes seasonal rot after season two due to a larger emphasis on television drama over actual math concepts. But if you think about it, the emphasis on television drama over mathematics actually supports the series saying "everything is numbers". It's no surprise that the writers would run out of applicable mathematics concepts for a crime drama and would instead focus on television drama.
6	* In "Soft Target", the director's assistant makes a comment about how stopping the drills would be akin to "turning the ''Titanic''". It initially appears to be an AnalogyBackfire -- except that the assistant turns out to be behind the sabotage, specifically because he sees flaws in the program. Maybe the actual reason he made that analogy was that he ''did'' think the drills were a disaster waiting to happen.
7	* In "Longshot", Colby asks Liz for advice regarding Don and how he handles things. At the time it seems like he's asking for advice regarding his mistakes in "The Mole", but if what he says in "Trust Metric" is to be believed, he and Kirkland were probably already working on the plan that would require Colby to get busted too. What Colby was ''actually'' trying to feel out wasn't how Don was going to move past the earlier mistake, but rather how he was likely to react to the future incident.
8	* Why is Charlie's spelling so bad? Because he skipped five grades in ''all'' his subjects despite only being gifted/advanced at math. He probably missed a lot of basic or intermediate English from the grades he skipped, not to mention he would've been completely out of his depth in high school English and so probably didn't learn as much there either. Then he gets to Princeton and one has to imagine that the vast majority of his studies would've been centered around mathematics and related sciences, and given that it's at the college level, whatever English courses he did take to meet minimum requirements would still be advanced beyond the point of those basics.
9	* In "Brutus", Charlie is so opposed to the idea of Larry going to space that he initially goes into a fairly deep denial, insisting it's not going to happen, which seems like a fairly extreme reaction. It starts to make a lot more sense, however, when you consider Charlie's age: statements in other episodes suggest Charlie's birth year as 1975 or 1976, which puts him right in the age range to have been one of the thousands of young children who watched the ''Challenger'' disaster on live TV. He probably has a subconscious fear around the idea of space travel that's informing his reaction.
10	* Creator/SophinaBrown plays who plays Nikki in Seasons 5 and 6 appears in the Season 2 episode ''Scorch'' as a member of a suspected EcoTerrorist group; at first this seems like a case of YouLookFamiliar until you consider the timeline. It's possible that ''was'' Nikki but undercover for the [=LAPD=].
11	** If it ''wasn't'' Nikki undercover, it's also possible that the girl from the EcoTerrorist group was the "Sarah" that the guy from "Animal Rites" mistakes Nikki for. The two causes have enough overlap that they could have come into contact in the past, and it would explain how the mistaken identity happened -- it ''is'' an uncanny resemblance, after all.
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13	!!FridgeHorror
14	* In "Nine Wives", Josephine Kirtland's father is stated to have been exiled (along with Josephine and her mother) because he didn't approve of the cult leader's sexual interest in Josephine. At first, it seems like a simple case of a father trying to protect his child, but then we learn that Josephine's mother is also her half-sister, meaning that Josephine is the product of father/daughter incest. Was Josephine's father trying to protect her, or did he just want to keep her away from the cult leader because he wanted her for himself?
15	** What makes it even worse is that it's only a matter of time before Josephine figures this out too. She'll have to go through the rest of her life knowing that there's a pretty significant possibility her father would have forced her to marry him if he'd had the chance. What's more, even if her father's motives ''were'' entirely innocent, she'll probably never know it; from her point of view, the more sinister explanation will always be a possibility.
16	** Also, if Josephine's father ''did'' intend to marry her, that raises the question of what he might have done to her before his death. Given the value the cult places on girls being virgins when they marry, he probably didn't outright rape her, but he may well have been grooming her at the very least.
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18	!!FridgeLogic
19	* Why the heck is the FBI investigating car crashes in LA? Or murders not serial killer-related)? Because Don's run are part of the ''Violent'' Crimes Unit meaning any crime such as robbery that has assaults or deaths occur get bumped up to them.
20	* Issues regarding the plots of the criminals are often filled with this as well. How is it even remotely possible for bank robbers to play minesweeper with banks? How is it possible that The Tipping Point can be applied to a sniper spree in LA? Wouldn't a prison check a fuel truck to see if it is full before allowing it inside the prison?
21	** The first two are explained in-episode. The "Minesweeper" reference was an analogy for "they use what they find in one place to decide where to go next"; it's not making an exact mathematical parallel, but rather using the game to illustrate a point. As for the Tipping Point, that's specifically an observation of human behavior, and Charlie explains the relevance pretty clearly. The fuel truck does cross into IdiotBall territory at the very least, but it's the kind of error that could conceivably happen in real life.
22	* Charlie's calculations occasionally hinge on the people he's after being as smart as he is. Apparently, random criminals can intuitively make the mathematically ideal move when planning a crime. During the bomb plot in Season 1, for example, Charlie needs detailed maps of the city and help from both a physicist and a city planner to have all the information needed to find the ideal location for a dirty bomb. The bombers put it in that exact position.
23	** Well, he was specifically looking at variables that people intending to use a dirty bomb would be looking at, things like wind speed and population density and even then, he could only narrow it down to two likely place. The city planner contributed by providing the final location because he's familiar with what the places are actually like.
24	** What was made worse was that in that episode it was the same plot as ''Die Hard 3'', in which it was a robbery that used a terror threat in order to serve as a distraction. The problem was that it required the FBI to figure out where the bomb was planted without a threat ever being given. While Charlie was obviously able to figure it out, there was no way for the thieves to know this ahead of time.
25	* How does Charlie input the sometimes hundreds of thousands of data points he needs for his equations in a single night?
26	** With a hell of a lot of coffee?
27	** In cases where the information is already in digital format, there's probably some kind of computer program he could use to transfer them all into the equation at once.
28	* The discussion of covering sets in "Hangman". Charlie remembers the case well enough to know exactly [[LaymansTerms what analogy]] he used, but he asks Don, David, ''and Colby'' if they "remember when we used covering sets". The problem? The original episode they used that in was "Trust Metric". Colby wasn't working with them for that one; he was the ''target''. That's a pretty big thing for Charlie to forget, especially given that he evidently has ''some'' very clear memories of the case.

Context Fridge / NUMB3RS