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| Sunday, October 5, 2008 09:19 AM |
| (Last updated on Sunday, October 5, 2008 10:28 AM) | | On the Viewer - Fringe (Episodes 1-3) |
 by Fëanor |
While I was catching up on Terminator, I was also checking out this new Fox show, which is vaguely like The X-Files. It opens up with a horrible face-melting plague hitting a flight from Hamburg to Boston. Called in to investigate are FBI agents Olivia Dunham and John Scott, who have a little secret romance going on. The task force investigating is taken over by Homeland Security Chief Phillip Broyles, who doesn't like Olivia, due to the fact that she prosecuted a friend of his for sexual harassment years back. So he sends her and John to investigate a pretty weak lead at a storage facility, but when John randomly starts opening storage compartments, he finds a secret lab and the dude apparently responsible for the horrible plague. He runs after him, but dude sets off an explosion that knocks Olivia down, and critically injures John, infecting him with some version of the skin-melting plague. He only has a few days to live, but Olivia is determined to save him, and finds the only guy likely to know how to fix skin-melting plagues is a literal mad scientist named Dr. Walter Bishop, who has been in a mental hospital for the past 15 years or so, and can only be accessed with the permission of his immediate family. So Olivia has to fly to Iraq, find Bishop's son, Peter (who's nearly as brilliant as his father), and convince him to come back with her. She does so via blackmail; Peter apparently has a shady past. They get Walter out, but he's a weird one. He studied various types of fringe science years back, along with the guy who shared his lab, William Bell. Bell went on to run Massive Dynamic, a multi-million dollar company with its fingers in everything. Dr. Bishop figures he can cure John, but only with a detailed list of the chemicals that he was hit with. The only guy with that list is the suspect, whom no one has seen but John. Luckily, Bishop knows of a crazy experimental procedure that can connect Olivia's mind with John's. They do it, it works, and now she knows the face of the suspect, whom they identify as Richard Steig. They find his last employer was none other than Massive Dynamic. There Olivia meets with executive director Nina Sharp, who gives her all the information they have on Steig, and asks Olivia if she thinks he's part of "the Pattern." Olivia doesn't know what that is, and Nina says oh, your clearance must not be high enough. Hmmm...
They get Steig, but Olivia is unsuccessful in her attempts to interrogate him, so Peter slips in and illegally beats the information out of him. Awesome! They're able to make a cure and give it to John. Broyles is impressed with Olivia's work and tells her this event isn't the only crazy, fringe sciencey thing that's happened recently; there are a bunch of them, all part of the Pattern. He says he can give her unlimited resources to investigate these events. She's not interested... until the big shocker ending, when she finds out that John is involved. Then she decides to pull Peter and Walter in as part of a permanent team. There's also hints that maybe she was picked for this assignment on purpose, and that Massive Dynamic is doing some shady stuff.
Conspiracies! Intrigue! Crazy science! It's fun stuff. Sadly, most of the characters are pretty dull, especially the main character, Olivia, but the show's saving grace is Dr. Walter Bishop. I realize he's written precisely so that I will like him and find his quirkiness amusing, but... I can't help it! I like him and find his quirkiness amusing!
The second episode, "The Same Old Story," opens up with another horrible crazy thing happening, which is how I assume they all will start. In this case, dude has just had sex with a woman in a hotel room and is now about to inject her with something, when something starts happening in her belly and she starts screaming. He dumps her at a hospital where it becomes clear that she has suddenly become extremely pregnant. She dies on the table, and the doctors are horrified as they pull the baby out. It grows incredibly fast and dies a few hours later as an old man.
Next we get a look at the secret committee that's investigating the Pattern. It includes Broyles and Nina Sharp. They hope their new team (the Bishops and Olivia) will be more successful than "the last one." Huh. Sharp wonders if Walter Bishop's work is somehow at the root of the Pattern, which is an idea that will continue to come up as the show goes on. Every anomaly they come across seems to have some connection to an experiment Bishop worked on in his lab with William Bell. And every anomaly they investigate seems to have some connection with technology, employees, or processes at Massive Dynamic.
Anyway, there's more Walter Bishop wackiness (a patient at the hospital always used to sing "Row Row Row Your Boat" every night, and now Walter can't get to sleep without it; also he's trying to sleep on the floor in the closet; and he's totally fascinated by the car's seat warmer), and then Olivia and the Bishops all show up at the hospital and check out the old dead baby. Walter wants to keep examining it, so Peter and Olivia go to the hotel where the woman was last seen and Olivia realizes quickly that it has many of the characteristics of crime scenes she's seen before, when she and John were investigating a serial killer case that they never solved. (More connections!) The killer would pick up women, drug them, and take out part of their brain. What they eventually discover is that this killer came out of experiments on aging performed by Bishop and his research partner, Dr. Penrose. They discovered a way to increase the speed of aging as part of a plan to grow soldiers, but hadn't found a way to stop it at the desired point. The killer is aging rapidly, but has found a way to slow it down by stealing women's pituitary glands.
But that's not the only crazy science in this episode! The team finds another of the killer's victims, and in order to find out where the killer might be operating now, they put together a crazy apparatus that shoots electricity into the dead victim's eyes and brain and transmits the last images she saw to a computer monitor. Somehow they triangulate the image (using only one point??) and discover the warehouse she must have been killed in. Peter and Olivia head to the warehouse and find the killer in the midst of another operation. While Olivia chases the killer, Peter stays behind to try to help the latest victim, who has gone into cardiac arrest. Over the phone, his father talks him through putting together a makeshift defibrillator and using it to revive the woman. Wha?!
Anyway, the killer dies of old age and that's that. But a few other interesting things happen: Nina offers Olivia a job at Massive Dynamic (she does not accept), and Walter hints there's something weird in Peter's medical history, and we even get a quick glimpse of what must be Peter's past: him sealed in a tube next to a couple of other guys in tubes. Huh...
So yeah, this episode kept me interested, thanks to the funny bits with Walter Bishop, and the intriguing hints of more conspiracies and secrets to be revealed. But whereas I was willing to suspend my disbelief for all the crazy stuff in the pilot episode, now that they're piling even more crazy stuff on top of that, it's getting harder to maintain that suspension. I mean, I can't believe they did the old "the last thing somebody sees is imprinted on their eyes" trick. And then the triangulating the location of the warehouse from that, and the putting together the homemade defibrillator? Not to mention the main premise of the episode, with the rapid aging and the old man baby. I mean, I guess I'd be willing to accept one crazy thing per episode, but to have to swallow a whole pile of them at once is pretty hard.
Things didn't get any easier in the next episode, either. "The Ghost Network" opens with the usual crazy horrible thing happening, but this time some poor dude is somehow seeing it in a vision. A man gets on a bus full of happy, unsuspecting people, puts on a gas mask, releases gas from a cylinder, grabs a backpack from a woman on the bus, and walks off. The gas turns into a solid, trapping and killing everyone inside. We cut away, there's more wackiness with Walter (he's medicating himself! He can't remember what Olivia just called about!) and more hints about Peter's shady past (some dude is following him, and he threatens the guy and tells him not to reveal he's back). But they end up getting to the scene of the crime and deciding that whoever did this attack was showing off (otherwise, why not just use a regular old bomb?). Meanwhile, turns out dude from the bus didn't find what he wanted in that backpack. The guy who had the vision in the beginning, Roy, has another one, of a woman bleeding from her hands. Eventually the team meets Roy and discovers that for about nine months (as long as Broyles & company have been aware of the Pattern) he's been having visions about Pattern events and drawing them or making detailed models of them before they happen. It's a cool idea, but in my opinion their explanation ruins it. It turns out Walter did experiments about using some new frequency as a ghost communications network that no one else would be able to listen in on. Roy is actually some poor dude Walter experimented on years ago, and he has metal fillings in his blood which are allowing him to listen in on the ghost network that Pattern agents are using to communicate. But the metal is in the wrong part of his brain (his visual cortex), so he's seeing images instead of hearing words. They move the metal and now he's able to pick up the words the Pattern guys are saying to each other. Turns out the thing they wanted was actually hidden inside of backpack woman's hand. Dude got it out and is at a train station to hand it off. Olivia and company get there in time to get the item (a small glass disc), but the guy kills himself. The item is a mystery, but after Olivia gives it to Broyles, Nina ends up with it, and she and her secret team at Massive Dynamic think they can use it to decrypt some kind of information that they're getting out of John's corpse. Woah.
So yeah, more crazy stuff. I really didn't think the Ghost Network thing made any sense. If Roy is just experiencing synesthesia, and seeing words that the Pattern guys are saying to each other, then how has he been able to make such detailed drawings and models of things like the Hamburg flight? Surely the Pattern agents aren't describing things in great detail over their Ghost Network. I actually would have found Roy's visions easier to believe if they had been actual psychic events. That being said, there were some interesting concepts here. I like the continued feeling of there being a large conspiracy all around, of Broyles and Nina not being trustworthy at all, and of Walter Bishop himself and his work perhaps somehow being at the heart of everything. It was interesting having one of Bishop's old research subjects turn up, have a part in their investigations, and almost recognize the old guy. It's also interesting and odd that every time Olivia goes to see Nina (which she ends up doing every episode), Nina reveals unsettling bits of information to her, always acting like, "Oh, I thought you knew that." In this case, she reveals to Olivia that there are other cases of attacks like the one on the bus that Broyles didn't tell her about; she confronts Broyles, who eventually passes along the files. But Broyles and Nina are clearly using Olivia as a pawn in some larger game.
I'm definitely enjoying Fringe. It's great to have an exciting new sci-fi show on TV with people investigating terrible murders, weird science, and giant conspiracies. And like I said, I love Walter Bishop; he's just so weird and creepy and hilarious. But the show doesn't try very hard at all to make its weird science believable. In fact, in many cases if you even think about it at all it stops making sense. I'll probably watch at least a couple more episodes of the show, but I have a feeling it'll eventually do something so stupid and ridiculous that I'll have to stop watching.
To wrap up this post, I present to you a collection of some of my favorite Walter Bishop quotes. Most of these are from the first episode.
Walter Bishop: The only thing better than a cow is a human! Unless you want milk. Then what you really need is a cow.
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Peter Bishop [to Olivia]: The man who just got out of the mental institution wants to give you a drug overdose, stick a metal rod in your head, and then put you naked into a rusty tank of water.
Walter Bishop: No, I don't want to. No, I'd rather not. I'm just saying I can.
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Walter Bishop: [to Olivia] You should probably strip to your underwear. [to Charlie] Hello.
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Walter Bishop [about a car's seat warmer]: I've never seen this feature before. It warms your ass. It's really wonderful! |
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