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| Friday, October 15, 2010 07:04 PM |
| On the Viewer - Fringe (Season 3, Episode 4 - "Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep?") |
 by Fëanor |
Spoilers! Look out for them!
Oh man, that is a great episode title.
Peter and Olivia get their kicks analyzing everybody in a restaurant. But then Peter skips out on an obvious chance to get laid. Looks like alt-Olivia's falling for him!
Senator Van Horn drives his own limo and buys lemonade at a kid's stand? OK then.
Woah, wasn't expecting that car crash! Thanks for the jolt of adrenaline, Fringe!
Broyles knows Van Horn - but so does Newton! Newton sweeps in with gun blazing and tries to kidnap him, but when Broyles tries to stop him, he just shoots Van Horn in the face - revealing that it's not Van Horn at all, but a shapeshifter! Exciting opening! How long has Van Horn been a shapeshifter, I wonder? Hmm.
Yay, Walter taking over Massive Dynamic! Nina doesn't seem to mind. And oh no, he's giving a speech to the employees. Thankfully Peter gets him out before he takes his pants off. I think a lot of people will be quitting this afternoon.
Who's this sugar-hating woman Walter's working with? Where's Astrid? Very upsetting.
Newton tells alt-Olivia she'll fail - he thinks Peter already senses she's not his Olivia. I like the tension between them. Newton's an interesting character.
Yay, Astrid's here! Her name was wrong on the access list: Astro. I'm guessing Walter's to blame.
Walter asks if she brought everything on the list, and Astrid holds up a porn magazine and a picture of George W. Bush. "I don't want to know," she says. Walter asks which one upsets her, and she says, "Both."
Olivia lies and says it's Rachel on the phone - which brings up a good question: where is Rachel? How's she going to react to the alt version of her sister?
I like the moment when Olivia thinks Peter's found the truth about her in the Senator's desk.
Newton asks a shapeshifter to go get the Senator's body. The shapeshifter's got a family, but Newton wants him to become someone else, and leave no traces behind. That's cold, man.
Walter: "Pretending to have an emotional connection caused a real one to form."
Yeah, Newton's shapeshifter agent isn't going to get a new identity and wipe out his family like he was told. He's made too much of a connection. Very disturbing yet sweet scene between him and his son. You're not quite sure at first if he's going to murder the child or not.
I know exactly what Walter's thinking when Astrid mentions the Stegosaurus! It has its brain in its tail! He figured out where the shapeshifter's brain is. Unfortunately, he got into the elevator with the other shapeshifter. This could go badly.
Walter: "I'll be right back. Don't eat my pudding."
Uh oh, Newton was right! Peter does suspect Olivia.
Peter: "He left his pudding. Something must be wrong."
Slight continuity issue here: the show established in an earlier episode that the shapeshifters have to change identities really often or they get sick and start to fall apart. So how has this guy kept the same identity for 5 years?
Kinda sad to see Newton go out that way, even though he was a bastard. He was an interesting guy. Him committing suicide intercut with alt-Olivia having sex with Peter was a truly unsettling and nauseating sequence. I guess alt-Olivia thought she could regain Peter's trust by doing him? Well, it could work, I suppose...
So, it turns out the title of this episode wasn't just a clever reference. Like Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" it's about the sometimes thin line between machines and humans. If a robot is a perfect simulation of a human in every way, how do you distinguish it from a human? If you can pretend to do a thing with perfect accuracy, aren't you, for all intents and purposes, actually doing that thing? Deep stuff. Good episode. |
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