Bookclub!

This week, our assignment was to watch the two episodes “The Equation” and “The Dreamscape” from Season One of Fringe. (You can read the Television Without Pity Recaps here and here, while the AV Club has their recaps of the episodes here and here. The post dedicated to the Pilot episode is here and the subsequent episode posts are here, here and here.)

As always, here are the ground rules: nothing that we have seen so far is considered a spoiler, anything that we have not yet seen should be considered a spoiler. Crazy nutbar speculation is *NOT* a spoiler, but confirming or denying said confirmation would be.

Here’s my idea for spoilers: please rot13 them. That’s a simple encryption that will allow the folks who want to avoid spoilers to avoid them and allow the people who want to argue them to argue them. We good? We good! Everybody who has seen the two episodes, see you after the cut!

Ah. An opening to the show that is okay to eat during.

I suppose it’s just as well, however, because if you’re yelling at the television, you won’t enjoy your food either.

So the guy not only pulls over to help the lady in distress, he looks under the hood? This is one of those capers that has too many points of failure for me. I mean, I don’t know if I’d pull over in the first place (caper fails right there) and, if I did, I’d call for a tow on her behalf and I’m outta there. It’s not like the dad is even a mechanic. This is writer-fail, here. If the dad was a mechanic in his day job (and how hard would it be to have him be one?), you have just explained to a schlub like me why he was inclined to pull over and help. It’d be like if they had a lady on the side of the road saying “one of my file systems won’t mount and it was mounted before the power outage!” and I could see pulling over and saying “well, we just need to run a fsck on hey, what are these green and red lights?”

Maybe the fact that he’s a widower (we establish that in a couple of scenes) is sufficient… I guess…

Anyway, we have ourselves a kidnapping.

During the briefing, we find that we have ourselves a pattern that may be part of The Pattern (“maybe we should have called ‘The Pattern’ something else”, the writers casually mention in the breakroom). Folks have been kidnapped before, they show up a few days later, and they come back insane… but they all mention the lady and they all mention the green and red lights.

One thing we find out is that Ben is a musical savant following a coma. Hrm. For only one song. Hrrrm. And, yeah, dad’s a widower. Hrm. And the the mom’s death was related to the coma Ben fell into. Hrrrm.

Walter, of course, worked on green and red lights back in the 70’s. The work was, of course, highly theoretical. He wasn’t able to get them to do what he wanted them to do but, I’m sure, he left enough notes lying around for anyone inclined to pick up where he left off… and we see him demonstrate on Peter that this week’s phased cationic pulse can not only make him black out, but, in a really, really funny scene, it’s demonstrated that Peter can be made to follow suggestions to do things like cut off his sleeves. (This is one of the things that you’d think that they’d bring back down the road. Spoiler through first 8 episodes of Season Three: gurl qba’g.)

Thanks to the dad’s description, we’ve got a positive ID on the kidnapper who is, of course, legally dead and has been since about eight months prior to the first kidnapping. Well then.

Walter remembers, through a series of leaps that I think are supposed to be funny but sound like they could have come from a story told at one of my family reunions, that he had a friend back at the asylum who told him about the red and green christmas lights. Road trip! Except, of course, it seems that the guy is a “1027”, which means “criminally insane with knowledge of state secrets”. Is that a thing? (Googles… No. It, apparently, is not a thing. I mean, I’m sure that it *IS* a thing, it just doesn’t seem to be a thing to the point where they’d have a number designation for it in real life.)

Hrm, apparently he was obsessed with an equation to the point where he killed his wife over it. We have pictures.

We have a brief interlude where we see the kidnapper, kidnappee, and mom.

Everyone else looks at the pictures and is horrified by the body. Walter, of course, notices the equations all over the wall. Luckily, the television in the corner is showing the kidnapped little boy playing that song he’s obsessed with… and the equation could be rephrased in musical notation… right? Sure! And how could they both the boy and Walter’s friend have been working on the same equation? We establish that “Curious minds often converge on the same idea.” (This is one of the things that you’d think that they’d bring back down the road. Spoiler through first 8 episodes of Season Three: gurl qba’g.)

We jump back to the kidnappee and mom and he asks if this is heaven. This is how the writers set up “pulling the rug out from under everybody”.

We jump to the asylum and are now talking with William Sadler (WOO WILLIAM SADLER!). Is he going to be a new semi-regular? (Spoiler through first 8 episodes of Season Three: ab.) As it turns out, William Sadler is irritated that Dr. Bishop had been removed from the hospital and refuses to let Olivia talk to Walter’s old friend… Walter, however, can come back and ask the questions on Olivia’s behalf… (note: it’s a trap)

So now we jump to Olivia and Peter arguing in front of Walter about whether Walter is going to go back, however temporarily, to the asylum. Walter shows a surprising amount of fortitude by saying that every minute wasted is another minute of danger for the boy… and, yes, he’s going back. Good for him.

Walter and Dash sit together and Dash is eating the butterscotch pudding. Awesome. It doesn’t take long before we start a riot and have Walter thrown back into his old cell. Walter, Olivia, and Peter are the only people who seem surprised by this.

We go back to Walter in his room and we see Walter come in and say “Welcome Back, Walter”. I admit to thinking “my god, they’re going to do a switch of the two Walters” when I first saw this episode. (This is one of the things that you’d think that they’d bring back down the road. Spoiler through first 8 episodes of Season Three: gurl qba’g.) As it turns out, this is just a hallucination on Walter’s part.

We can’t get Walter out without a Court Order and we can’t get a Court Order until tomorrow. Bummer.

So now we get a scene with Peter and Olivia where, for the first time, Peter’s past really gets established. They always told us that he was a conman but they never really *SHOWED* us that he was a conman. Until now. He explains how most folks use aliases and explains how he used stuff like “Peter King” and “Peter Knight” instead of “Peter Bishop” and figures out that the kidnapper, Joanne Ostler, was likely to use names like Joanne Hyatt and Joanne Ritz (which, of course, gets a hit immediately). This is an example of good writing.

We jump to Joanne Ostler in the basement with the kid and mom and we see the leash yanked for the first time. Mom starts bleeding from the face if the kid can’t finish playing the song.

Back at the asylum, we see Walter extract the explanation that the woman promised everything the person ever wanted… but then took it away when the equations couldn’t be solved… and we cut to Ostler and the kid. The kid is hooked up to a bunch of diodes all over his head… and we cut back to find that these things happened in a red castle… which is then dismissed as the rantings of a loon. Sigh. This is one of the heralds of bad writing.

We see Peter and William Sadler engage in some light alpha male bravo sierra before picking Walter up who talks about how his friend ranted like a loon about red castles.

We call Olivia who is turning up red herrings and she takes a call from Peter who makes a joke about red castles.

There is, of course, a red castley looking thing behind Olivia as this phone call takes place. She turns around. She sees the red castle. Sigh.

She and Charlie go inside, there are hallways with exposed pipes and everything and they split up. Sigh. Olivia finds the boy with all the diodes taped to his head… and Ostler is in there too! They fight to a stalemate (rot13 for Maribou and anybody else who has made it through all of Season One: erzrzore jung V fnvq nobhg Wbua Fpbgg’f svtugvat fxvyyf riraghnyyl oyrrqvat vagb Byvivn’f fxvyyfrg? Guvf vf jung V’z gnyxvat nobhg urer) and Ostler is outta there. Olivia gives chase, Ostler turns around and presses a button.

Christmas lights.

Charlie wakes Olivia up (that particular plot point getting used one last time was a nice touch) and we cut to see Ostler bring a notebook to the guy who had the parasite! The mole! I suppose I should look up his name. Mitchell Loeb.

Mitchell Loeb has an apple, a safe, a computer, and some wires. Loeb locks the apple in the safe and set up the wires on the back of it… while he gives a speech about how numbers run everything, he pulls the apple through the wall of the safe. Seeing that what he did worked, he shoots ostler in the chest. Dang. He makes a call.

The show ends with the kid and the dad being reunited in the FBI offices which should make us sigh in relief… though I personally would have swapped the last two scenes around, myself… given the next episode.

 

The next episode is, of course, The Dreamscape. In this episode we OH MY GOSH THERE’S THE OBSERVER.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. A harried guy runs into a meeting room where everybody is ticked that he’s late… we jump ahead a little bit to see him close and everybody who was ticked is now really, really impressed. Everybody leaves the room leaving harried guy there to clean up. Harried guy then notices a little moth in the room which, when it flies next to him, cuts him. After a fight that involved harried guy being cut on the neck (OUCH) we finally slap the moth down and confirm that the wings are, in fact, razor sharp. We then see two more moths fly out of a grate and around him and then the guy LOOKS DOWN THE GRATE instead of throwing his jacket over it. Of course, a swarm of moths surround him and begin to cut him to ribbons… he runs and jumps through the window down, down, down into the parking lot. Next to the parking lot is a sign.

Massive Dynamic.

Of course.

Olivia, who is apparently getting all dolled up for a group date gets interrupted by a phone call telling her to show up. “I quit”, she says. Broyles tells her where to show up. Olivia ceases getting dolled up.

She shows up at the parking lot where Walter is noticing that while there are many cuts from the glass, there are other cuts underneath the shirt (and there are no cuts on the shirt). (An aside: this should have been my first clue. I spent the first 20 minutes watching this show and waiting for them to talk about the moths again.) Olivia sees John Scott in the crowd.

Olivia interviews Nina and Nina offers Olivia a job again. Why? What is Nina hoping that Olivia won’t end up finding working at Massive Dynamic that she will at the FBI? (Or vice versa?) After offering the job, Nina explains that some of the people they hire can’t take the stress and jump out the window. Which is not the best “come work for us!” speech I’ve ever heard. Anyway, we’re now searching Harried Guy’s house and finding that he had an impressive array of medications and he collected butterflies (or, at least, had them on his wall). Maybe they weren’t moths in the first scene. Maybe they were butterflies. We also find a plane ticket for something coming up soon which tells us that, no, he probably didn’t jump out of depression. Wait, it’s a ticket for Nebraska. Maybe he did. Olivia finds the word “Monarch” in a day calendar and looks up at the butterflies on the wall which start flapping their wings.

Walter is being Walter back in the lab but the takeaway is that the wounds came from within and the guy was on an impressive amount of medications. Peter gets a phone call from an old… let’s say it’s an old girlfriend from his conman days. They set up a meeting.

Olivia is googling butterflies (see??? butterflies!) and goes to bed to hear her computer reboot. She gets up and finds an email from John Scott on there and it gives her an address. (Now here’s what I’m wondering: is the email real or is it from her subconscious? If it’s real, who sent it (if it wasn’t sent by her)?)

We go to the address and find all sorts of things there… including frogs. What the heck?

We go to Charlie and find him wondering what the heck is the deal with the frogs. You and me both, Charlie. Olivia pulls Charlie aside and asks for some PTO (at my job, if I am called in for an emergency while I am getting all dolled up, I get PTO automatically). The phone rings and Astrid tells us that the guy jumped out of the window because of the frogs. (It is at this point that I realize that I will never again hear about the moths/butterflies from the first scene.)

Peter and the ex are in a diner. She opens with “you look older” and that reminds Peter of Walter saying “I thought you’d be fatter” and she expresses surprise that he saw his father. What this quick scene did was establish that Peter spent a *LOT* of time complaining about his father during his conman days. We establish that the ex hangs with a rough crowd that feels it has a score to settle with Peter. Peter feels likewise.

Back to the lab and we see Super 8 footage from the 70’s where Walter has a guy under a psychoactive drug and we go on to see Walter technically not exactly torturing him, kinda. Walter is holding an ice cube. The wigged-out guy is convinced that Walter is holding a hot coal. Walter touches the guy with the ice cube. The wigged-out guy blisters. What does this have to do with the frogs? (“Toads.”) Well, they secrete a drug that can act as a phased cationic pulse and make the drugged person actually physically respond to a fear stimulus as if something were “really” happening. So Harried Guy would be cut all over his body, for example. No moths required. “So whomever these frogs belonged to may be the killer.”, Olivia says. The frogs, of course, belonged to John Scott. She and Walter discuss this and Olivia wants John Scott out of her head. This, of course, involves… The Tank.

Peter is stalking his ex? Creepy.

We now hammer out what going back into The Tank is supposed to do. Olivia is seeing John because part of his memories crossed over in the Pilot episode. They’re part of Olivia’s subconscious now. By bringing them to the surface, she can expell them. This involves LSD. Of course.

With the help from Astrid reading from scripture (I think this was to allow Walter to give the line that he was religious once but he’s not anymore), we guide Olivia to a memory of a restaurant… her first date with John. She watches them interact and watches dream Olivia get up and go to the bathroom or something. Real Olivia sits in the booth and rambles about love for a second before letting the cat out of the bag. “Mark Young (Harried Guy) killed himself yesterday.”

AND JOHN LOOKS RIGHT AT HER EVEN THOUGH THEY’RE IN A DREAM.

They flash to a different memory. She’s at the railyard and she sees John Scott, Mark Young, and two other guys. Mark Young runs off in that direction with one of the other guys, John Scott stabs the other other guy… and this freaks Olivia out and she aborts out of the tank.

Facial reconstruction software allows us to recreate the face of the last of these guys who are still alive (Hey! Why didn’t they interrogate the butterfly guy?) and we hammer out that this was likely a sale of this weapon-grade LSD on the black market. Nasty! After a brief interlude where Peter stops stalking his ex long enough to beat up her boyfriend (dude, that’s not going to help in the short, medium, *OR* long run), we see that Nina has delivered all a heavily expurgated number of Harried Guy’s files… and something rings a bell and she digs out the day planner and dials “MONARCH” on a telephone… which connects us to the last of these four guys still alive.

Thanks to the resources of the FBI, we get the info on this number, it’s a cell phone, it belongs to a guy named Morales, and he’s a high-end dealer on the black market. This calls for a chase scene! The scene ends with Morales being hit by a car and taken to a hospital where he demands immunity and protection from Massive Dynamic… and, in exchange, he’ll talk about *EVERYTHING*. He says that he didn’t kill Harried Guy, Massive Dynamic did. He didn’t come up with ZFT, Massive Dynamic did.

Olivia is *STOKED*. She leaves her star witness alone to tell Nina all about the awesome stuff that is going to happen once he testifies.

Meanwhile, back at the hospital, we see John Scott walk into Morales’s hospital room… and proceed to kill him. The nurse walks in and watches Morales in there, all by himself, but his throat opens up as if it were opened by a knife.

Awesome scene. Not for the violence, but for the terror that John Scott inspired. The scariest thing in Morales’s mind? John Freakin’ Scott.

Anyway, Broyles calls Olivia and chews her up this way and down that way for yelling at Nina. Oh, and to tell her that the witness is dead.

We cut to the bad side of town and Peter’s ex tells a guy who looks like a conman’s associate that “Peter Bishop is back in town.”

And we go back to Olivia getting ready for bed just in time to get one more email from John Scott which says: I SAW YOU. IN THE RESTAURANT. (Seriously, who is sending these?)

 

The show is doing a great job at this point of establishing an internal mythology, setting Walter up as “just crazy enough”, Peter is finally establishing his streetwise chops, and Olivia is having some seriously weird things happen to her. Massive Dynamic is establishing itself as The Evil Corporation, Broyles is establishing himself as a boss who can only cover for so much, and John Scott is the scariest dude on the planet. I am seriously digging this show.

So… what thinks did you thunk?