|
|
| Wednesday, April 28, 2010 01:32 PM |
| On the Viewer - Fringe (Season 2, Episode 19 - "The Man From the Other Side") |
 by Fëanor |
Beware spoilers!
We open with a guy and his girlfriend sitting in a parked car, getting high and listening to Rush. Suddenly there's an explosion in the supposedly abandoned warehouse nearby. The guy gets out to investigate and says he'll be right back. Ah, the geeky, Fringe version of a classic, archetypal horror/sci-fi scene. I'm glad this version of the scene does not include an attempted rape, as so many of them do.
Stoned dude is just smart enough to poke the creepy, pulsing mass with a shovel instead of with his finger.
Uh oh! Shape-shifters are back!
Damn! Walter was just about to tell Peter the truth about his past when Olivia called. The rules of TV drama demand that Peter can only find out the truth in the worst way possible, but that only makes it more difficult to watch Walter try so hard to tell him the right way.
Olivia: "Walter, have you seen anything like this before?"
Walter: "I think I may have. It looks awfully familiar. Ah, yes. It reminds me of a beanbag chair I once owned in 1974."
Walter thinks the creepy, moist, organic, interdimensional pod the shape-shifters left behind is "harmless enough"??? What in God's name would lead him to believe that?
Apparently Newton and the shape-shifters take their orders from someone called "the Secretary." Intriguing.
Walter: "But as they say in Finland..."
Walter, Astrid, and Peter [in chorus]: "...there's more than one way to roast a reindeer."
Walter: "I need six car batteries, a voltage transformer, and several yards of ten gauge electrical wire. Oh, and a corpse. Any corpse will do. But it shouldn't be dead for more than two days."
They've pumped an android shape-shifter embryo full of electricity and are now watching it develop by candlelight. Ah, Fringe.
Before it died, the shape-shifter took Walter's hand and said, "I'm sorry." That's unsettling. Did it know the Walter on the other side, and mistake this Walter for that one?
Newton just called 911 to report his own heart attack before taking a pill to induce it. Crazy! And clever. Since they didn't have Daniel Verona's identity to help them get into Boston General, Newton faked his own death so he'd be taken there himself.
I love this concept: that they could set up three harmonic rods in each universe, activate them, and then when the universes are in sync, whatever's within the rods will be exchanged. And I love the way our heroes worked out where the rods must be, and therefore where the center of the triangle is in our universe. Mad science!!!
Broyles actually mentioned the morgue specifically as the location of the harmonic rod. How would he know that's the part of the hospital where the rod would be? Seems like a slight continuity issue. But whatever.
Woah! Olivia took a rather large and dangerous guess there, killing a cop just because the other cop called his sergeant on his cell phone. What if the walkie talkie system was just down that day?
That was a bad-ass move on Walter's part, running through the gunfire and driving the SUV onto the bridge. But why was it necessary? How come only the three of them are here at the bridge? Why isn't there another team of agents on the other side, shooting at Newton? The FBI couldn't spare anybody else?
Ah, here come the other agents. It's about time!
Despite all their hard work, Newton somehow succeeded in bringing someone else in from the other side and escaping with him. But who was it? Walternate, perhaps? And why wasn't the FBI able to chase them down?
Meanwhile, Peter figured out the truth about himself on his own, when the vibrations from the other universe didn't kill him. "I'm not from here, am I?" As expected, he doesn't handle the revelation well, and he's pretty pissed at Walter.
I'm still trying to figure out why Walter and young Peter were able to cross between universes so easily and with no ill effects all those years ago, but whenever anybody does it now, it's this horrific ordeal. Was Walter's doorway that much better than the technology they have now? If so, why?
The man Newton pulled in from the other side is the mysterious Secretary. But we still haven't seen his face. And now Peter's run off. Argh!
I had a few quibbles with plot believability and continuity in this episode, but overall it was clever, eventful, inventive, exciting, and effective, and a great setup for whatever's to come. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
