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| Friday, November 28, 2008 05:41 PM |
| On the Viewer - Fringe (Episodes 7 & 8) |
 by Fëanor |
Spoilers!
"In Which We Meet Mr. Jones"
This one opens with an FBI team raiding a truck and finding nothing. But there was seven pound weight differential in the container. What's seven pounds? All the sudden the agent in charge, a friend of Broyles' named Mitchell, falls over in what looks like a seizure. When the doctors cut him open, they find a really creepy, centipede-type parasite wrapped around his heart. Broyles calls the team in to take a look, with the hope that Walter will recognize the parasite. He does not, which is a bit of a change; so far pretty much everything has directly related to some experiment he did back in the bad old days. As Broyles tries to compliment Walter, Walter responds with a few of his weird, apropos nothing Walter comments that we all love so much. Then he gets very excited about examining the parasite, and as usual demands that they take the guy back to his lab at Harvard. There Walter shows his usual cold disregard for the health of his patient and goes to examine a tissue sample of the parasite while his son deals with keeping the guy alive after the parasite reacts by curling tighter around the guy's heart. Walter notices a particular code that keeps recurring in the DNA, and Astrid uses her cryptography skills to guess what it might really mean. One of the possibilities is ZFT, which Olivia recognizes from John's case files. When Olivia brings this to Broyles, he reveals that there's more about the Pattern he hasn't been telling her, and that ZFT is a cell of the Pattern that traffics in scientific progress. A suspected member of ZFT, Jones, is in prison in Frankfurt, and although getting into see him is difficult to impossible, Olivia thinks she can do it, because, it turns out, she has an old friend who's connected in over there. But she's going to have to work quick because Peter and Walter discover the parasite is growing and spreading, and their patient has only a day to live. When Olivia arrives in Germany to meet her old friend, Lucas, it quickly becomes clear that he's more than just an old friend - he's an old flame.
Broyles comes to the lab to check on their progress and gets another Walterism from Walter. He mentions to Peter that Walter is really pretty messed up, and Peter gets pissed and blows up, essentially saying, "Don't you think I know that?!" Broyles gets a call about a Joseph Smith, who appears to be connected to ZFT somehow, and orders a raid of his address. Just then, in Germany, Olivia learns that she can see Jones for fifteen minutes the next morning, but he'll only talk to her if he can speak to Joseph Smith. She tells Peter this, and he realizes it's the same guy Broyles and his SWAT team are going after, so he races to catch up with the team to let them know Smith must be taken alive, but he's too late; Smith is shot dead right in front of him. Olivia gets the bad news and prepares to go home, but then Lucas asks if she'd like to stay the night. When Peter calls to reveal that they might be able to salvage the Jones/Smith thing after all, she decides to take up Lucas' offer. Walter's plan for making the dead man talk involves zapping the body with electricity. (He reveals he did something similar with Jimmy Hoffa for the FBI. Heh.) As Walter is setting things up, Peter realizes his father used to do experiments like this on him when he was a kid. Walter is sheepish but does not deny it. They have such a twisted relationship. It only seems more twisted when, due to the fact that the dead guy was shot in the head, Walter has to change the process and hook Peter up so he can be the dead guy's ears and mouth. Drugged and goofy in preparation for the experiment, Peter smiles and calls Walter "Daddy," and Walter smiles back wistfully. It would be sweet if it weren't so messed up. Anyways, Olivia and Lucas talk about how their relationship went wrong because Lucas was scared, and Olivia tells him what happened with John, and then they are just about to have sex when Peter calls with an update. After the interruption, Olivia decides the thing with Lucas is a bad idea and goes back to her hotel.
The next morning, Olivia meets with Jones and tells him he can ask one question which Olivia will relay to Smith via phone, and then she will pass him the answer. In return for this, he will tell her how to get the parasite off of Mitchell. Jones wonders aloud if he and Olivia are being manipulated by others, who've infected Mitchell and set all this up for some reason. Time is running out on Olivia's visit with Jones, but Walter and company are having trouble getting anything out of the dead guy, and meanwhile their other, living patient (Mitchell) is having a seizure. During this tense craziness, Jones notes that the people he works with are loyal, and asks Olivia if she can say the same. Anyway, Jones' question for Smith is "Where does the gentleman live?" As the guards are escorting Olivia out, Peter finally gets an image in his mind from Smith in response to the question: a series of vertical lines. Walter realizes the bullet to Smith's brain has destroyed his ability to process horizontal lines, so Peter has to insert them in the right places himself, and finally comes up with an answer: "Little Hill." Olivia relays it to Jones, who looks surprised but pleased, and who then gives her a formula for a liquid which, when injected into the parasite, will cause it to drop off harmlessly. Walter whips some together and it works as promised.
Later, on her way back to the airport, Olivia nervously ponders Jones' comment about loyalty. Meanwhile, Lucas offers to check his sources for more on Jones and his friends, and she agrees. So now Olivia will have yet another recurring love interest.
Back in the US, Broyles asks the recovering Mitchell if he knows anything about another mole, someone with higher clearance than John Scott, but he professes ignorance. Mitchell's concerned wife, Jessica, shows up, and we see their private conversation. It quickly becomes clear that Mitchell and his wife are the ones who manipulated this entire situation just to get that bit of information out of Jones - the thing about Little Hill (Jessica managed to be in the lab when the experiment with Smith was being performed, so she overheard it there). But what does it mean? Only time will tell.
An interesting episode that opens up more about Olivia's character, and more about the structure of the Pattern, and of course reveals that there's another mole in the department. There are some tense and exciting sequences, some amusing Walter moments, and the great scene with Walter, Peter, and the dead guy. So, a pretty good episode, but not great.
"The Equation"
This is definitely one of the better episodes. It opens with a single father driving his kid home in a rainstorm at night. The kid is named Ben, and he's busy composing music in the backseat; from what the father says, it's clear this is something he's pretty obsessed with. Dad pulls over to help a lady who's car is broken down at the side of the road. He calls a tow truck for her, then takes a look under the hood and sees a couple of flashing red and green lights. They seem to mesmerize him. Someone touches him, and he turns around. It's the tow truck driver. Much time has passed; the rainstorm is over, the woman's car is gone - and so is Ben. She's taken him away. It's a creepy opening scene, and reminiscent of The X-Files in its heyday.
Broyles tells the team about the event, and reveals that there have been a series of other cases very much like it, but the other victims were all academics. All of them eventually showed up later, but driven insane. This sparks something in Walter's memory, but he can't think what at first. A talk with Ben's Dad reveals Ben became a musical prodigy after waking up from a coma that he fell into after a car accident, the same accident that killed his mother. Since then, he's been obsessed with one particular piece of music. The guy who plays Ben's Dad and the woman who plays his sister are both quite talented actors, and help sell the drama of the story very well; this scene with the two of them is powerful and effective, and they're so concerned and upset and hurt and afraid that it nearly brings a tear to your eye.
Back at the lab, Walter says he remembers an experiment he performed attempting to affect people's minds using flashing lights. Peter asks if that was for some secret military project, and Walter says no, it was for an advertising firm. The firm wanted to make people open to suggestion so they'd buy whatever was advertised. Walter's experiment was a failure (it just made people sick), but he thinks someone made the concept work by adding the alternating red and green colors. He demonstrates by having Peter look at some flashing red and green lights. Peter wakes up thinking no time has passed and the experiment has failed, only to find that quite some time has passed, and that in the interim he has cut the sleeves off of his own jacket, apparently under hypnotic suggestion from his father. Nice!
Finally Walter remembers that the man who told him about the lights was a friend from the institution, Dashiell Kim. Turns out Kim was a previously undiscovered victim of the same string of abductions, as he was also taken away by the woman only to come back insane (in fact, he killed his wife). Kim was obsessed with trying to solve an equation and it turns out that when the equation is transformed into music, it's the same song Ben is obsessed with completing. Woah. The team decides they need to talk to Dashiell to see if he has any more info on the woman and where she took him, but it's difficult to get in to see him. The head of the institution, Dr. Sumner (played by William Sadler, who's pretty much been typecast as asshole characters like this one), doesn't want Dashiell seeing new people, and is still chafing from the fact that they took Walter away from him (he thinks Walter has no business being out in the world), but he agrees to allow Walter, and only Walter, to talk to Dashiell. But this means Walter will have to go back into the institution. When Olivia broaches the idea to Walter and Peter, Peter is offended and says there's no way his father is going back to that place, but Walter sees that it's their best chance of saving the boy, and although he is afraid, he agrees to do it. This scene, and the subsequent scene where a nervous Walter walks back through the gate into the institution, is very powerful, thanks in large part to the excellent acting of John Noble. Unfortunately, when Walter tries to interrogate Dashiell about the woman and the equation, Dashiell clams up and then starts to get very upset. Walter gets angry and attacks him, and then fights the guards when they try to pull him away. So Sumner sedates him, puts him back in his room, and refuses to let him leave. Olivia threatens to get a court order to get Walter back, and Sumner tells her to do so. She can't get it until the next day, however, which means Walter has to stay the night. It's a nightmare scenario for him, and right away he begins hallucinating, seeing another version of himself welcoming him back. Very creepy and disturbing.
Meanwhile, thanks to Peter's ingenuity, they get a P.O. Box on the woman identified as the kidnapper, and Olivia and Charlie head out to scour the area in the hopes of finding something. Also, through all this we've been seeing scenes of Ben and his kidnapper in an underground factory-type area. Ben is being forced to work on his musical composition. He's rewarded with a visit from his dead mother, but when he can't seem to get any further on the song, the kidnapper causes his mother to become injured horribly in front of him, threatening to take her away again. Pretty awful. Walter finally gets Dashiell to talk, and he tells him a similar story, about being shown his heart's desire, only to have it taken away when he couldn't solve the equation. He also speaks of being taken to a dungeon in a red castle, which Walter, in frustration, dismisses as pure insanity. Peter comes back to get Walter and accuses Sumner of treating his father poorly. But Sumner says he knows about Peter's questionable past and says he's not a fit guardian for Walter. He plans to try to get Peter removed as his father's guardian. But Peter says Sumner has no idea what he's capable of. Eee. That could come back to haunt them later. When Walter meets Peter, he's sad and dejected, and feels like it was all for nothing, as he was able to get nothing but gibberish out of Dashiell. "Is that what it's like when you talk to me?" he asks his son. It's a very poignant moment. Later, back at the hotel, Walter tells Peter he needs space and wants his own room. Peter tells him he was brave for going back to the institution, and Walter smiles, touched. This subplot was a very powerful sequence that really helped further develop Walter as a character, not to mention his relationship with his son, which has really changed in interesting ways over the course of the series so far.
But, of course, Walter's work has not all been for nothing. Peter calls Olivia where she's searching the neighborhood of the kidnapper's P.O. Box and he mentions the red castle to her. She sees an old carousel nearby that looks like a red castle and she and Charlie bust in. They go into the basement, split up, and Olivia finds Ben hooked up to a device; Ben saw his mother because the kidnapper had been putting images in his mind with this device. Olivia and the kidnapper fight, Olivia chases her down the hall, and the kidnapper activates green and red lights on the wall, hypnotizing Olivia until she can escape. Damn! Thankfully, she leaves Ben behind. Later, we see the kidnapper meet up with that guy Mitchell from the previous episode. Turns out she managed to get the completed equation out of Ben before Olivia found them, and Mitchell uses it to activate some kind of contraption that allows him to reach through the solid wall of a safe and remove an apple from inside. Having confirmed that this worked, he calls someone to tell them so, then shoots the kidnapper dead.
So it turns out all of this was over a formula that lets you put your hand through a solid wall. That's... weird. Also, a pretty horrifying possibility was introduced here: that the creepy psychiatrist guy might take Walter away. It was actually hard to watch Walter go back in that place, and even harder to think of him being taken away and maybe put back there against his will. I guess I really care about these characters, and that means this is a pretty good show.
Overall, one of the better episodes of the series so far. And now I've got another one to watch! Time to catch up... |
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