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| Saturday, November 8, 2008 02:13 PM |
| On the Viewer - Fringe (Season 1, Episode 6 - "The Cure") |
 by Fëanor |
I actually saw this episode quite a while ago, but haven't gotten around to reviewing it until now. But luckily there's been no new episode in the meantime, so I haven't fallen behind!
This one opens with some poor lady getting dumped out of the back of a van in the middle of a street. She looks unwell, but manages to stumble into a nearby diner and sit down. The waiter is an almost impossibly nice guy; he sees she's in a bad way, offers her a bowl of soup, and quietly calls in a local policeman to help her. She can't remember quite what's happened to her, only that people kept her somewhere, hurt her, and gave her medicine. The cop, in his attempts to help her, freaks her out further, and then all the sudden everybody in the diner is screaming in pain and bleeding from the eyes. The girl, clearly the cause, begins to exhibit the symptoms as well, and then, just to put a point on the scene, her head blows up.
Great opening! Sadly, it's mostly downhill from there. Walter, Olivia, and friends show up at the scene the next morning. Walter finds the woman was somehow in remission from an incurable disease, and that she's extremely radioactive. The girl's doctor denies knowing how she could have been cured, and denies knowing anything about radiation treatment. Meanwhile, Olivia's been in a bad mood all day, and Charlie knows why: it's her birthday, and as we'll learn later, bad things happen on her birthday. (I'm getting the vibe that Charlie might be one of those guys who's stuck being a best friend to a girl but who'd really like to be more. But then again, they're clearly setting up a romantic relationship between Olivia and Peter, so maybe I'm seeing things.)
Turns out another girl has disappeared who also had the same incurable disease as the first girl. We cut to the missing girl where she's locked in a lab and people are doing experiments on her. We cut back to Walter's lab where he blows up a papaya to demonstrate what happened to the people in the diner (good old Walter). He explains the woman's blood was full of tiny capsules that administered radioactive treatment to her via timed release. This cured her, but also made her a candidate for weaponization; if all the capsules are detonated at once, she irradiates everybody nearby, boiling their brains in their bodies. Lovely!
Anyway, there's an unsettling sequence where Olivia barges into the dead girl's wake seeking more information, and another powerful, if slightly cliche, sequence where a dude gives up the name of who's really behind it all, but then immediately shoots himself. It turns out the guy behind it all is a very important, and seemingly untouchable, scientist and drug company executive named David Esterbrook. Olivia again goes barging in, accusing him, but he seems quite confident she has no case against him. Peter finally confronts Olivia about how weird she's acting, and she reveals some seriously twisted family history: her stepfather was abusive to her mother, so one day Olivia finally shot him, but couldn't bring herself to kill him. He disappeared after he was released from the hospital, but now every day on her birthday he sends her a card, just to let her know he's still out there. That is messed up.
Anyways, they figure Nina at Massive Dynamic must know secret and terrible things about David Esterbrook, but she probably knows them via illegal corporate espionage, and so won't be able to tell them. Peter decides to try and get the info from Nina anyway and goes to see her personally. Some interesting and disturbing stuff comes out at their meeting. Nina reveals she used to be quite close to Walter. She also says Peter has had dealings with a tribe in Peru who happen to have access to a naturally occurring alloy she needs. So, she promises to help him in return for a favor to be called in sometime in the future, no questions asked. He agrees. But what the hell was he doing with a tribe in Peru? And what is she going to ask him for? And what the heck did she do with Walter? Is she really Peter's Mom?? Ew.
Anyways, Olivia gives Peter the address of the secret facility where David is doing his crazy experiments on the poor missing woman, and in the meantime Walter has helpfully manufactured a cure, so Olivia and Charlie and a SWAT team crash on in. Of course, as the SWAT team's coming in, the technician activates the radiation in the captive woman's blood, so she only has moments to live. But even though she's in the process of blowing up, Olivia manages to get her to take the antidote, which somehow saves her (more on that later). Next Olivia goes to arrest David Esterbrook. He's still confident he'll beat the rap, but Olivia doesn't care; she just wants to arrest him and take him outside, because she let slip to some reporters what was about to happen, and she wants to get a picture of Esterbrook in cuffs in all the papers. Nice. Of course, her boss isn't that happy about it, but it was a bad-ass move. Interestingly enough, it was also very helpful to Nina and Massive Dynamic; their competitor's stock goes down, and theirs goes up.
So there are some cool things in the episode, and some interesting suggestions of other things that will be revealed in the future. But I'm having my same problem again with suspension of disbelief. I'm willing to buy that tiny radioactive capsules in a person's blood could cure an incurable disease, and I'm further willing to buy that such a cure could be used to turn someone into a living weapon - because it seems vaguely plausible, and it's just a cool idea. But the idea that Walter could figure this out and then come up with a cure all in one afternoon, and that that cure would then save a person whose radioactive capsules had already burst... That seems a little too ridiculous to me.
So, definitely not my favorite episode of Fringe. I'm still sticking with the show, though, because it's keeping me intrigued and entertained. |
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