Detecting Puzzles and Patterns in Numb3rs: No One Escapes "Scott Free"

Abstract

Detective fiction has an ambiguous presence: it is simultaneously a puzzle that challenges the reader and a narrative form with predictable generic characteristics. Even while being involved in a contest to find the solution to the crime before it is revealed by the fictional detective, the reader is still comfortably lulled by both the knowable conventions of the form and the sense of order these confer. A world is created in which crimes can be solved within the boundaries of the text, and in the case of television crime dramas, within the time frame of an episode. These qualities have lent detective fiction the reputation of being both escapist and unrelated to the real world. In the television series 'Numb3rs', producer Ridley Scott exploits both this presentation of crime as a solvable puzzle and the audience's desire for the program to divulge the motivations for the crime. If the detective and the viewers are able to construct a pattern and find a solution, then the crime becomes knowable; it is no longer an arbitrary (and thus frightening) event. To achieve this cathartic effect, Scott brings crime dramas to reality by embedding the solutions in real-world examples of mathematical patterns: that is, in "numb3rs." Furthermore, he uses computer-generated imagery (CGI) to present such patterning in highly visual terms, including graphs and data as they apply to observable and everyday human behaviors.