Brothers & Sisters - The Science Fair - Recap

(Here's Desi's recap of Brothers & Sisters: The Science Fair)

Tonight on Brothers & Sisters, the men unite to help Paige build her science fair project and beat the kid whose architect father built him an earthquake simulator to enter. All I remember about my fifth grade science fair was that my best friends and I slammed two-liters of Mountain Dew and promptly found ourselves in the bathroom, so my hope was high that at least Paige would have a better showing than I did.

In the middle of science fair drama, Scotty and Kevin find out if their sperm make it to blasts that could eventually be their baby. Waiting for the doctor to come in, Kevin is twitchy and Scotty tells him not to be weird. I love Scotty. They find out that they have eight blasts: five of Kevin's and three of Scotty's. I don't understand any part of reproduction.

Justin goes to talk to his dean about being on probation, who points out that even the students who can come back from probation rarely pass their board exams. "A degree without a license is useless," the dean points out. Justin takes the reading list anyway, but being drafted as part of the team to help Paige with her project, he begins working on that instead. Rebecca gets on him that he should probably start working his way through the list, and he says he's thinking about quitting med school altogether.

Thank Father Gokey, Ryan resigned from Ojai. Saul goes to Holly to apologize again on Ryan's behalf and to try to talk her out of pursuing an investigation against him. Saul thinks that Ryan giving Kitty his bone marrow makes what he did to the wine barrels a forgivable offense while Holly feels otherwise, since without an investigation they won't get any compensation. For the first time, I can say: Saul Holden, I hate you.

Nora's pseudo-ex Simon makes a resurgence in the Walkers' lives this week, too. Nora tells her daughters that he had called and left messages and tries to keep it from them that he showed up unannounced to the house, telling incongruent stories about why he'd been out-of-touch. Fed up with his lies, Sarah googles him to find that he'd been in Boca Raton with another older woman, Marilyn Wiseman, appearing to donate to his cause. Nora won't hear any of Sarah's arguments that the guy is a deadbeat, and she agrees to try to drop it.

Ominous businessman and Ryan's former accomplice, Dennis, shares a lunch with Holly. She's debating selling her interest in Ojai to him to distance herself from the Walker family, and she makes him an offer that she knows would be too high. He shows interest in it anyway, which makes Holly question whether Dennis is just that devoted to get revenge on William for screwing him out of the company or if he knows something about the value of the business that she doesn't.

Paige's science-fair idea is to build a battery using citrus fruit to power a small LED light. Gradually, it grows from powering a light to a radio to a dancing robot at the hands of Kevin. The goal is to beat Henry and his architect father, who built an earthquake simulator, and Paige's booth is adorned in full-fashion: stacks of perfectly lined up lemons, the dancing robot, a poster with well-placed information. Oh, and a disco ball. Sarah manages to knock over the project while she tells Nora about what she found in her google stalking, sending lemons rolling down the aisles of the fair and Paige running off to hide in the hallway. RIP, dancing robot.

Rebecca directs Justin to a booth where the student had put together a presentation about learning disabilities. Having heard how often he studies and how hard he works on his schoolwork to still be on probation, she thinks that he should get tested to see if there's something medical going on.

As Sarah tries to reassemble the decorative lemons at Paige's booth, another father comes up to help. NOOOOOOOO! NO LOVE TRIANGLES. #SIGNGILLESMARINI. But they bond over the trials of raising tweens and as he drops a hint that he's also divorced, they'll go on a date next episode.

Kevin finds Paige in the hallway and he apologizes for taking over her project. He tells her that when he was her age, he was made fun of a lot, and that he didn't want the same to happen to her. He gets her to go in and present her original idea of powering a battery which wins her an honorable mention. The next day, she and Sarah make up after a heart-to-heart.

Nora and Simon make a decision to try again, but he's flying off somewhere the next day. She invites him over for lunch before he flies out, and Sarah accidentally crashes the lunch, setting in motion one of the best Brothers & Sisters scenes I can remember. Nora mentions that her new friend, Marilyn Wiseman of Boca Raton, had a daughter that went to law school with Kevin. She mentions that she hasn't known Marilyn very long, but had spoken with her on the phone the day before and learned that she had been close with Simon, too. Someone rings the doorbell, and Nora tells Simon that it must be the detective who has come to question him about the charges Marilyn had decided to file after waking up to an empty bed and emptier bank account. Sarah tells Nora that she's acting like a Bond girl, to which she replies "I'm not like a Bond girl, I'm like Bond!" Saul stumbles out of the pantry, and Nora points out "There's the Bond girl."

I think we are finally rid of Simon, save for maybe some courtroom drama. I wouldn't mind seeing him go down in flames. (I feel the same about Ryan, but he's still listed in the credits, so my hopes for that aren't so high.) The previews for next week show us that Kitty is in the midst of another big decision -- one that, apparently, she's not told Robert about. I don't think I'm the only one who hopes that that decision will bring our boy Gilles Marini back to Pasadena (but more likely, she's going to run for some political office.) Oh, and my conjecture for Justin's character: he'll be diagnosed with ADD or some other learning disability, be put on Adderall or an equivalent and become an addict again. Maybe we can get Dr. Drew to make a cameo as his addiction specialist?