Thirty-Six Hours

Lousy episode. The producers allowed their left wing bias to distort the plot.

This episode was based on the runaway train wreck twenty years ago in the El Cajon pass in California. That happened because the weight of the train was miscalculated and other technical problems with the brakes.

In this fictional version, the brakes were OK, the train would have stopped in time except for the callous disregard of safety by the rail operator (railroad president) who deliberately sends overloaded trains down the tracks. The plot looks at a mobster as a possible culprit for a while then clears him. That is so the FBI agents can chat among themselves, explicitly equating normal business ethics with those of the Mob. This happens long before the businessman is fingered for the crime.

To add to the air of the surreal, the passengers trapped in the crashed train are rescued by FBI special agents, the regular cast, instead of by Fire and Rescue personnel. This being Hollywood, they do not wear hard hats or firefighters' helmets or fire resistant clothing as they crawl inside the wreckage. That would keep the viewers from recognizing the actors. Dumb and offensive.

Some of the best episodes of Numb3rs are the ones where they try something a little bit different from their usual crime-solving procedural, and this episode is a great example.

Two trains are involved in a head-on collision, and amid all the carnage six surviving passengers are trapped in a car while toxic chemicals are leaking into the air. As some of the team members try to track down the cause of the crash, the others are involved in a tense race against the clock to save the trapped passengers.

Charlie unleashes some robots to help the team map the lay of the debris, as well as the injured humans, in the train car, but as the tension mounts and the clock counts down, tempers flare and patience runs thin.

There is less humor and interplay among the main characters than one normally expects from this show, but most of the time I was too busy biting my nails to notice.

I am so tired of disaster movies that I decided to stop watching them. So this episode of Numb3rs didn't hold much interest for me. All that monotonous process of trying to save the lives of those involved in the accident, has been repeated countless times. Things turn badly, some die and a few who almost die are finally rescued by the heroic actions of some courageous individuals. I've seen it all!

The case is an interesting one and apparently based on a real train wreck under suspicious circumstances. The initial scenes are quite good, but when the FBI guys get into the toxic environment with no protective gear (not even face masks) it slips into absurdity. It's like the cops who discover a three week old bloated body and don't even say anything about the smell. They need to be there facially. Anyway, we need a little ore reality, even for a weekly TV show.

I stayed up late to watch this mess on H&I, but sorry I wasted the time.

A train dispatcher certainly uses a computer to line a route for a train, but there are interlocks to prevent exactly what is depicted in this episode. It's automated, so the second train would not have gotten a signal to proceed until the first train had cleared. (At slow times the dispatcher could line a route for miles and take a nap and there would be no danger.)

But this show didn't even give a nod to reality because there were no signals, they just had the engineers screaming at each other on the radio to get out of the way. Yeah, sure buddy! If they hadn't died, they surely would've been fired immediately. I can not suspend my disbelief for that nonsense.

Then Charlie shows up with his swarmbots which can magically climb over metal lattices, random debris, and other unknowns inside a rail coach despite being only about 6-8 inches long. But where in the world did all that clutter come from? It's a hollow metal tube with seats. It's not stuffed full of all that garbage that they showed.

I didn't pay much attention to the drama fabricated by these overly smart whiz kids, but I did wonder why they didn't just break out their industrial strength Sawzall and cut a hole in the passenger coach next to the victims? I mean, if they can go dashing into a HazMat hot zone without the IC noticing (what unified command??) and without breathing apparatus, I guess there's really no danger of explosion after all.

Bleh, what waste of electrons and an hour of my life that I'll never get back.