‘Numb3rs’ crunch

The last three episodes of the offbeat police procedural “Numb3rs” have featured a curious secondary story line.

Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz), the casually brilliant mathematician at the show’s core, has decided to apply his mathematical skills to the most unlikely, and unworthy, of causes: the winless basketball team of CalSci, the university where he’s a professor. This is a hapless bunch: short, uncoordinated, untalented. But Charlie believes that, as with all things, this is a problem that can be best addressed by number-crunching.

Charlie is aided in this fool’s task by his father, Alan (Judd Hirsch), and his mentor Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNicol), making for a comic trio of flat-footed rationalists trying to dissect a game that’s as much about art and luck as skill and form. Shooting free throws underhanded, they decide, is a far more reliable choice than the traditional method, and they name plays with mathematical lingo, much to everyone’s confusion.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” Charlie asks. “We lose for the 10 to the 23rd time?”

Get it? -- 10 to the 23rd power is part of Avogadro’s number, the number of atoms in one mole. What a cutup!

Can science alone sustain? That it can would seem to be the core principle of “Numb3rs” (CBS, 10 p.m. Fridays), now in its fifth season. Charlie’s firm grip on the outer dimensions of mathematics -- a Gaussian filter here, a Hermitian matrix there, maybe a Mersenne Twister or some hidden Markov models for good measure -- is the engine upon which this show chugs along.

Typically, Charlie applies his mathematical skills to helping his brother Don (Rob Morrow), an FBI agent -- and, naturally, a skeptic -- solve crimes, seemingly all of which, it turns out, can be reduced to math problems. Combining a “House”-like intellect with a sometimes “Monk”-like difficulty in expressing it, Charlie is the only character who appears to be in motion on this show. He is awkward and often charmless but also the lone spark.

Judging by how his crime-fighting adventures play out, though, he is certainly an unsuccessful hero. As often as not, his wild-eyed hypothesizing lands actual cops in danger and has to be constantly revised on the fly, as if officers in distress are begging for more refined algorithms. Last month, Charlie decided to undermine the trade in a new drug called Hawaiian Ice before it became an epidemic, but his mathematical models didn’t consider that drug dealers might be greedy and rob one another.

It’s enough to shake faith in the potency of hard, rigorous analysis and provable hypotheses. Proponents of evolution should be worried: “Numb3rs” might be coming for them next.

Fortunately, as uncertain a champion as Charlie is, he’s surrounded by a largely helpless set of teammates. Don is like Stallone in the later “Rocky” movies -- words appear to be obstacles around which his mouth cannot fully maneuver. Often, he speaks purely in blunt-trauma phrases. In a recent episode featuring a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence, he wonders -- soundly, it should be said -- “Is there any way to actually tell if the thing is alive or whatever?”

FBI agent David Sinclair (Alimi Ballard) rarely looks something other than perturbed, and his partner Colby Granger (Dylan Bruno) generally lets his very square shoulders do the talking for him.

There are bright spots. Charlie’s girlfriend Amita Ramanujan (Navi Rawat), his former doctoral student and now his girlfriend, is sharp enough to know when to keep him quiet. And as Larry, MacNicol appears to be engaged in one long comic bit, essentially a slightly sandpapered retread of his turn as John Cage on “Ally McBeal.” (Hirsch appears perpetually confused here, as if he’d wandered into the show from a neighboring production and not yet figured out how to escape.)

As for the basketball team, it finally notches a win, but only after CalSci scores a couple of midgame ringers, Jordan Farmar and Pau Gasol of the Lakers. Is it still good science if you’re cheating?

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