Fringe: Nope, Take the Quick Way Home

All of season three so far leads to... this?! Fauxliva goes back to The Other Side. Olivia, aided by alt.Broyles, comes back to Our Side. And no one gets hurt. Well, except for alt.Broyles who for helping Olivia gets replaced by a shape-shifting doppelganger. Everyone is back where they should be, albeit with a bit more information about the other's dimension.

Here's a nagging question... given that Olivia and Fauxlivia were basically improvising their respective ways home by the end, due to a series of complications, how did they both manage to do it within a couple of hours of each other? Oh, right. 10 cc of dramaticexpediencium.

Honestly, this has to be the most anti-climactic climax since Fringe began. The Olivia of two worlds story fizzled this week, faster than the John Scott or Newton storylines.

Cue the outraged message-board geeks who were counting on some Torv-on-Torv catfight action.

Fringe: Take the Long Way Home

10 random thoughts and questions about last night's Fringe, "The Abducted":

1. One of the Candyman's victims is alt.Broyle's son? How convenient!
2. Fringe Division been working this case for years, but only Olivia can crack it? How convenient!
3. Candyman isn't a serial killer, more of a serial... drainer?
4. Why do all serial killers and kidnappers have a second full apartment hidden behind a closet of the the apartment they live in?
   
5. The joining-of-the-dots between the Candyman's speech then the church, then the Candyman's lab and the minister require big leaps of logic.
6. If all the bad guys are after is life-force from children, why does the minster attack the alt.Broyles family?
7. Of course Olivia saves the alt.Broyles family in order to set up that alt.Broyles will save her from Walternate in an upcoming episode. I wish the the writers weren't so heavy-handed with the foreshadowing.
8. Why does Henry the taxi driver help Olivia a second time? She's never paid him for the very long cab ride she had when she first met him. He seems too altruistic, without justification. Hmm, maybe this is subtle foreshadowing...
   
9. Having been to the DOD lab only under supervised conditions, Olivia knows how to set up the sensory deprivation tanks, and find the right drugs to administer to herself, all in the space of five minutes? I know she has a photographic memory and high intelligence, but the other times she was at the lab, surely she wasn't privy to the settings of the tank or the combination of drugs administered. Yeah, yeah, dramatic expediency...
   
10. Fauxlivia: busted! Peter, sleeping with her: disgusted!

The jig is nearly up for Fauxlivia...

Fringe,"6955 kHz," was one of those stories in the series that plods along in service of a greater story. I'm feeling like I felt once I knew Walter was going to cross over and grab young Peter from the Other Side: a couple of steps ahead of the writers. That's not the most enjoyable vantage point to watch a story from.

Not much new happened in this episode, and all the characters got to do the usual things they do:

• Walter smoking dope? Check.
• Astrid decoding something not by hard work but by sheer luck? Of course.
• Peter observing everything but saying nothing until he has all the facts? Affirmative.
• Nina bringing out some device Massive Dynamic has made or studied which "coincidentally" ties into the investigation? Roger that.
• Broyles delivering exposition? Confirmed. Poor bugger, that's all he ever gets to do. One episode last season gave him a bit of a back story including a failed marriage. But that story ended up being told by his character rather than shown.
  
• The whole gang solving something in a few short days that has eluded hackers and crackers and cryptologists for decades, possibly centuries? Of course.
• Imaginary Peter telling the Real Olivia on the Other Side* some ominous truth? Yep.
  

Which isn't to say "6955 kHz" was a bad episode. For once, the threat of the week didn't maim, mutate or mutilate anyone, a nice change. Weirdo book collector Markham made an appearance, which always injects some humour. And Anna Torv is doing a great job playing one Olivia pretending to be another. Her performance is quite understated. Even though we as viewers have the benefit of knowing it's "Fauxlivia", Torv gives the impostor some subtle tics and facial expressions the real Olivia doesn't have. As an actor, she's thought it through. She and John Noble (Walter) seem to be enjoying playing two variations on their respective characters this season.

Fringe is very good sci-fi TV, but like most serialized US shows, it tends to have too much filler. I don't think TV in general has learned how to properly tell a long story in weekly installments yet. Perhaps the media and the format precludes it. Dexter season 1 came close, but it was based on a novel. The long arc of Dexter over five seasons and counting, isn't very cohesive. Things that in a long novel wouldn't be tolerated--plot holes, subplots that start and stop abruptly, and inconsistent characterizations--are rampant.
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*Yes, this does sound like nonsense if you don't watch the show.

Fringe: "Amber 31422"

An lot of setup just to start to get Olivia thinking about getting home, wasn't it? Not awful, but it has to be the weakest of the "That Side" episodes so far.

Fringe: Not to be Negative, Man...

In early issues of the Doom Patrol (DC Comics), The Chief recounts how Larry Trainor became the Negative Man.

CHIEF: I know how and why you became an outsider--a strange one! Disaster struck as you tested the K2-F, the experimental rocket plane that flew higher than any manned aircraft had ever gone... You lost ground contact... blacked out! For hours your jet skimmed through the still uncharted wave belts of inner space until it suddenly began to nose downward..."

Larry crash-lands the plane, only to find that a "negative energy being" has merged with his own body.

The Negative Man looks like this...

In Fringe, season 2, episode 6, "Earthling", A man sent to space came back with a dark entity in him. Walter learns that the man and the entity are connected and cannot be separated. The entity looks like this:

Swipe or homage? Discuss.

Fringe - another "homage"

Challengers of the Unknown No. 1 (April-May, 1958), DC Comics:

This is how the thieves get in... beamed through the walls...

Fringe, season 1, episode 10: Thieves steal scientific equipment. They enter and leave undetected. How? Beamed through the walls, of course!

I'm digging all these swipes. More as I find them.

Fringe, s03e04: Fringe Lite

This episode felt like filler. I was jolted from my torpor only by the few false starts, wherein Peter says something that could be interpreted as him having figured out that Fauxlivia has replaced Olivia, but then those comments turn out to be about some other things, and Fauxlivia heaves a sigh of relief.

I'm still not sure why Fauxlivia was put in charge of the other-dimension's forces on this side when it has been shown time and time again that Newton was doing a pretty decent job and was extremely capable and single-minded (in this episode he kills agents who deviate from the mission). Now he's just a pile of goo/mercury and Fauxlivia has upped her resolve, giving herself to Peter physically in an attempt to keep him distracted. M'eh.

Despite a few comedic moments with Walter and Astrid, and a couple of tiny revelations about the Shape-Shifters, this episode didn't do much for me. The idea that "Shape Shifters could be impersonating people in power and could have been doing so for years" is a such tired sci-fi cliche, it no longer instills the intended dread in viewers. Well, at least not in this viewer.

Fringe-tastic Four?

You can't tell me that someone working on Fringe isn't a long-time fan of Marvel's Fantastic Four comics. Earlier, I wrote about the similarities between The Observers and The Watcher, both in their appearance and their motives.

Here's another, from the latest episode, season 3, episode 3, "The Plateau", set mostly in the alternate universe. In this episode a character named Milo seems to know when a single, small event will create accidents resulting in specific deaths.

LUCAS: Someone is causing these accidents or purpose.

ASTRID: You're asking me if it is possible for a person to use a ballpoint pen to set off a chain of events that culminates in someone getting killed by a bus, twice? There's no way.

LUCAS: What if someone calculated the variables?

ASTRID: Thirty-seven people in the intersection, twenty-two cars, four trucks, two buses, going speeds of five to ten miles per hour... and that's just to start. In total, we are talking about a hundred and twenty variables in a dynamic system of differential equations. I can't solve that kind of problem, much less manipulate the outcome to my advantage.

But, of course, Milo can.

In Fantastic Four #15 we are introduced to a character called The Mad Thinker, who describes his abilities thus:

Aside from The Mad Thinker's enhancing his own thinking with a Kirby Super-Computer, quite similar to Milo, no? So how are these similar characters defeated? Well, similarly.

In the case of Milo, Olivia does something that Milo cannot predict, ignoring a warning to use oxygen. as Peter-as-imagined-by-Oliva says, "Because you didn't know the protocol... you did something that he couldn't factor in."

In the case of the the Mad Thinker...

I'm not pointing fingers at the writers of Fringe, accusing them of ripping off Lee/Kirby. On the contrary, I'm rather enjoying finding all these parallels. To paraphrase Walter, "I believe [takes a bite of red licorice] that these coincidences are not coincidences at all."

Fringe: Walter smokes Brown Betty, tells story

I rather liked "Brown Betty" with Walter's recasting of the Fringe regulars as noir-film characters to tell an allegorical story. I wish they'd gone all out with the noir aesthetic, but realize they probably couldn't due to budgetary restrictions. Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson seemed to be having fun playing a different riff on their characters. Disappointingly, Lance Reddick and Blair Brown (Broyles and Nina Sharp), played their roles exactly they way they always do. I don't know if this is a fault of the writing or the actors, and it didn't take away from my enjoyment of the episode. How can you not enjoy an episode with singing corpses? Only Walter Bishop would come up with something so bizarre.

I also liked that the Observers were called the Watchers in Walter's fable... a nod to the Marvel Universe? This doesn't seem unintentional. There many nods to the Fantastic Four comics in Fringe.

I was reminded of The Prisoner episode "The Girl Who was Death" while watching this. Both tales use a story-within-a-story setup, where the story being told reflects and adds our appreciation the outer story.


Oh, I also thought the episode "White Tulip" from two weeks* before was a terrific time-travel yarn. It had an unexpected emotional payoff and an antagonist who, if you look at the timeline, never meets our protagonists, yet nonetheless interacts with one of them. It's not very often we get something an unexpected ending on TV that doesn't feel tacked-on for shock value or that isn't a setup for upcoming episodes.

Can someone give Peter Weller a regular role in something please? His conversation with Walter was riveting.

* Sure, I wrote "two weeks before" but I really watched this "White Tulip", "The Man From the Other Side", and "Brown Betty" in one sitting. I prefer to watch week by week. I think that preference is embedded in my pscyhe, having been a pre-VCR child and teenager. Until I'm caught up, however, three episodes of Fringe at a go isn't a bad way to spend an evening.

Fringe... here comes Alternate-Peter

Annnnd, two episodes later, Walter Bishop, ca. 1985, abducts Peter from the alternate dimension. My prize is in the mail, etc.

Dear Fringe, Enough foreshadowing already!

Please, Fellow Viewers of Fringe, please tell me that you were far less than surprised when it was finally revealed that Walter Bishop had taken an alternate-universe Peter as a child to replace Peter from this world who died when he was a boy.

I haven't gotten to this point in the series yet, to this big "reveal". I've just finished watching "The Bishop Revival". No one has told me that this revelation will happen and I didn't read about it on some sci-fi blog, but Come on! you'd have to be six bucketfuls of dumb to miss this. Hints have been dropped--Thud. Thud! THUD!--by Walter and by other characters and through visual clues throughout the series. Forget about being destroyed by a collision with the other dimension... our world will just crack under the weight of all this foreshadowing.

Which leads me wonder... All these hints and two FBI investigators (one who doesn't miss a trick), and Peter (who has been shown to be super-observant) don't follow up? What the what?!

Still hooked on this damn show, though.

A couple of requests

(1) If you read something that inspires you to reply, positive or negative, please do so. Nice to know there are people reading.

(2) I'm posting about Fringe as I watch it and I'm still on Season 1. So please, don't tell me there are 17 dimensions, all of which contain a Walter Bishop, or that Oliva and Peter are siblings, or whatever. Thanks muchly.

Fringe theories...

In Fringe season 1, episode 20, when Robert Jones threatens to open a portal between this and another dimension, the Observer, who claims he cannot interfere in the affairs of man, leads Walter Bishop to a device which is used to close the dimensional rift.

In Fantastic Four #48, when Galactus threatens to consume Earth, the Watcher, who claims he cannot intervene in the affairs of man, leads Johnny Storm to a device, the Ultimate Nullifier, which is used to banish Galactus from our world.

Coincidence? Homage?

Fringe

Well, it isn't quite as good as I'd hoped, but still compelling, and miles better than The X-Files. It's just a bit too convenient that all the cases involve extrapolation on the decades-old work of Doctor Walter Bishop. Has no one done any new research into horrible ways to kill people since?

Also, how does Dunham shake off the effects of LSD so quickly? She's been dosed and put in that tank twice so far, and both times, within seconds of emerging, she's completely lucid. Dramatic expediency, anyone?

I've heard the series becomes far more interesting once Leonard Nimoy shows up.

Best episode (of the ones I've seen so far): "Safe" in which subplots start to come together and the mysterious Mr Jones is sprung from his cell in Germany using a device built decades ago by (wait for it!) Walter Bishop.

Aw, Dammit...!

Just when I think I'm immune to the lure of TV sci-fi because, you know, most of it is complete crap, I watched the first two episodes of Fringe. Now I fear I'm hooked. This just might be the show X-Files never was, but had pretensions of being.

Gah!

Gotta go. Three seasons to catch up on...