Bookclub!

This week, our assignment was to watch the two episodes “Midnight” and “The Road Not Taken” 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, here, here, here, 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!

We begin with Midnight, another wacky-thing-of-the-week episode that opens with a standard “we know that someone is going to die!!!” spot. The television news is on talking about a victim and the killer’s method involved a knife. We see a suave guy getting ready for a night out and putting a knife in his pocket. He uses his evil English accent to lie to his girlfriend on his cellphone before going into a nightclub where he HOLY CRAP IT’S THE OBSERVER I mean he uses a series of evil English accent lines on various chicks before he finds a willing victim.

Who, in the next scene, kills him.

A brief aside: there’s this thing that they did there with the guy lying to his girlfriend before getting killed… it’s like the folks at home can think “hey, if he had stayed faithful, he’d still be alive right now” and everybody feels some vague sense of Cosmic Justice the way the Brothers Grimm used to do it… but think about this. It could have just as easily been some guy who is finally going out again after some horrible breakup (or being widowed!) who decides, hey, Life is for the Living! Who goes up to her and ends up without spinal fluid.

Then again, it’s not like that couldn’t have been used to fit some really old-school moral as well.

Which brings us to Olivia. Rachel (Olivia’s sister, remember?) has friends over to explain this new-fangled dating thing called “Two Singles Together”. It’s for people who want to have a relationship without ever interacting with the other person. Apparently, the old-school moral of the show is “don’t date anybody, ever”. We interrupt this moral to see Rachel being served divorce papers.

Olivia gets a phone call to take her to the crime scene where we see Charlie explain the basics. No signs of forced entry, no fingerprints. Walter looks at the guys neck and his wacky moment this week begins when he starts talking about shrimp cocktail. (I’m allergic to shellfish, myself.) Walter then mentions the bite marks and Peter asks about vampires and Walter waves that away by saying that vampires don’t exist. I’m tempted to say REMEMBER THIS LINE because I’m sure that a vampire episode will be forthcoming but I’m halfway through 3rd season and haven’t seen one yet. So… maybe Walter is on to something.

Anyway, in the next scene, Olivia brings Broyles up to speed and he has a good line about how it used to be a given that the killer was human instead of just being an option. There was a really, really good scene where Olivia asks about Broyles’s divorce lawyer. “You talk to your kids, but never your wife”, Olivia points out. Broyles sends the info to Olivia and tells her that he hopes everything goes well for Rachel. Both of these folks have eyes and ears and the ability to put two and two together. This was nice characterization. Too many cop shows have detectives oblivious to everything that doesn’t have a sign on it in order for some supporting shmoe to give an expository speech. It’s nice when they turn the subtlety up to a 3 or so and explain “no, our characters are actually not dumb”.

Walter is singing in the lab. This is rarely a good sign. He gets the results back from Astrid and it turns out that there are traces of syphilis in the killer’s saliva. Peter asks “oh, why didn’t I wear gloves?” which is up there with “oh, look, something in the lab that looks edible… therefore I will eat it” from last week. Note to Peter: 1. Don’t eat things you find in the lab. 2. Wear gloves.

Anyway, we find out that this particular strain of syphilis has been extinct for decades and is only available through mail order… and the companies that have been ordering it have been ordering all kinds of wacky diseases. I know what you’re thinking. “WHY IN THE HOLY HECK CAN YOU BUY SYPHILIS THROUGH THE MAIL???” and so the show has a CDC person there who explains to everybody at home that scientists can do this for their research.

Oh. Well okay then.

We establish how, in this case, it’s *NOT* okay and assemble a SWAT team. We use the SWAT team to enter a house where a guy in a wheelchair is dissecting a medium-sized animal. This is one of those things that I wouldn’t mind having turned upside down on the television one day… a team kicks down a door to find a guy doing the newspaper jumble or something. No, they’re either at the wrong house or it’s a guy using a bonesaw.

The interrogation goes poorly until ZFT is mentioned… at which point the guy offers his help in exchange for getting his wife back and gives an address.

The guys deliberate over this to give Olivia the chance to point out that this is a lead that, if they followed it, they could use to get information on ZFT. Of course, the guys didn’t look at it that way until that was pointed out. This is interrupted when the address that the guy gave turns out to be a Chinese Restaurant that had been flagged as using waaaaay too much electricity. “They could be running a lab”, it’s pointed out. *MY* first thought was that maybe they were growing but that’s something that the cops would use a SWAT team for as well.

The SWAT team pep talk is interrupted by a call from Rachel who points out that her soon-to-be-ex-husband wants full custody of the kid. Olivia does a very good job of being a supportive sister who is about to raid a Chinese grow operation. They don’t find the guy’s wife and they call him and tell him that… he says that he knows, but the restaurant has what he needs. In a fridge are 5 vials of X-83 or something like that. Yep, all five vials are there. (This was a missed opportunity, if you ask me. They could have easily had 4 vials and then we could have had a plot that we could have come back to if we needed.) Olivia is ticked that she was lied to… but the guy says that his wife wasn’t kidnapped, she was dosed with this X-83 stuff and he needs it to make an antidote.

At the wheelchair guy’s house, Walter and Peter are going through the sciency stuff and they find a video tape of the couple in happier times…

Cut to the wife killing another poor sod. (He points out to her that she’s “burning up”. This syphilitic disease raises one’s temperature.) She seems to regret the murder, for what that’s worth. He must be a single guy trying to get back on the horse. Or a widower.

We check out the videotape in front of everybody in the interrogation room and the wheelchair guy is actually running around like an idiot and his wife is actually not killing people and drinking their spinal fluid. This was three weeks ago, apparently, and so this raises questions about why things were so different then… and, of course, the answer is the ZFT. The guy promises that he will help but first he needs to cure his wife and to do that, he’ll need a lab.

Luckily, we have one.

Walter shows his lab off to the other mad scientist (“I also have a cow!”) and they find out that the cheaty guy from the first scene’s car was found, stripped… which gives Peter an opportunity to demonstrate his hoodlum bona fides by mentioning his chop shop friend. We meet the friend who, after a handful of veiled threats, points out where the car was when he found it.

Cut to the lab and the mad scientists are working out a way to kill super syphilis with super penicillin. They exchange pleasantries and it turns out that wheelchair guy knows who Walter is. Walter smiles sadly and says that that makes one of them. They then discuss the ups and downs of memory loss, the possibility of the existence of the soul, Judgment, and Walter lets out that he and William Bell used to share a lab.

Cut to where the car was lifted and Peter and Olivia find another body drained of spinal fluid. Seriously, they really jerked us around by having the first victim be a bit of a slimeball. The other three guys are, what? Guilty of making out with a hot chick they met at a club?

Back at the lab, we’re just in time to see the first experiment with the serum on a rat. Which fails. While the serum is failing, we hammer out that the poor victims have hand stamps from a dance club downtown. Which means that we now cut to the club and Olivia and Peter are there with a thermal imaging device. There’s a cute interaction between Peter and a clubgoer that gets kiboshed by Peter telling the truth. “I’m looking for someone with syphilis.”

At the lab, we hammer out that spinal fluid could be the missing ingredient for the serum and wheelchair guy yells that his is the only compatible one. Walter hesitates but wheelchair guy promises that another 25ml would be safe. After the extraction, wheelchair guy is put back down next to his videocamera…

At the club, Charlie shoots the wife with some tranq darts. Good old Charlie.

We drive back to the lab with the wife in the back seat (?) and Olivia and Peter discussing Rachel’s divorce. Peter: “I never liked that guy.” So Peter is either macking on Rachel or setting up a jealousy kinda thing. I don’t know which would be more interesting if they were willing to run with it. Valerie, of course, wakes up long enough to get tranqed again… and we’re in the lab strapping her to a table before she wakes up again. We inject the serum and her eyes turn from blue to green. Oh, and her husband is now dead. Bummer.

Walter, however, gives Olivia a videotape. The videotape has a last message from Wheelchair guy in which he points out that while he didn’t know everybody in ZFT, he did know that it was being funded by…

William Bell.

 

Our next episode is The Road Not Taken.

We begin with Broyles giving a recap of the season to a bunch of agents. They all have gross pictures (from the events of previous episodes) to look at as well as copies of the ZFT. He breaks down “The Pattern” in less than a minute. While this is happening, we see a woman fail to hail a cab and then catch a bus (after asking if it goes past a hospital). Back at the briefing, we figure out that the point of the task force is to find actionable evidence linking William Bell to the ZFT. The young woman on the bus starts steaming up her bus window and the newspaper being read in front of her starts to smoke and smoulder. She screams to be let off of the bus, gets off, runs a short ways before catching on fire and exploding.

Nice opening.

Back at the lab, we see Walter explain to Peter that he thinks that the ZFT was written on this very typewriter and he shows how the ‘y’ is hinky and off-kilter. Oh, it looks like Walter didn’t write the ZFT, but William Bell did. Huh. Well, it doesn’t get much linkier than that. Walter points out that there are many references to a chapter on ethics and how this chapter didn’t make it into the manuscript everyone’s handing around. (Walter is seriously freaking out here.) He’s certain that he can find the ethics chapter and how it will exonerate Bell.

Cut to a phone call that tells everybody to go to New York City and look at the charred body of the poor woman from the opener. “Spontaneous combustion”. Olivia says that she’ll have the bodies taken back to the lab. “Bodies?” everybody asks and we look down and we see two bodies… and it flickers… and we see one body.

Back at the FBI, we see Nina go in to yell at Broyles telling him that Massive Dynamic pays good money on counter-intelligence and all kinds of red flags are going nutzo in the last little bit. Broyles overplays his hand, if you ask me, by telling Nina that they think that William Bell is behind some of the biological attacks. Nina overplays hers by saying that William Bell is “travelling”.

Back at the lab, Walter and Peter are getting on each others’ nerves because Peter took apart the electron microscope (dude, that’s not like taking apart the remote control).

We jump to see Olivia walk into Broyles office and she makes a joke about him changing his furniture around and he just stares at her. She says “okay, fine, here’s the info about the victim” and Broyles asks about the info of the *OTHER* victim and shows a picture where there are, yep, two bodies. We flash for a second and all of the furniture is back where it belongs and we see Broyles walk into his office and ask Olivia for a status… she gives a confused version of what she just said… and Sanford Harris is back.

Sigh.

Sanford Harris yells about how Massive Dynamic is the US Government’s biggest defense contractor and to knock this stuff off IMMEDIATELY… Broyles, of course, dismisses the demand and tells Olivia to keep looking for evidence.

Back in the lab, we remove the poor woman’s jaw and Astrid goes to see if we can find a match from the dental records on file. Her use of the word “file” gets Walter to wondering where he might have hidden a copy of the ZFT in his filing system (cars, houses, safety deposit boxes). Peter, being absent, is once again getting on Walter’s nerves by taking apart his geiger counter. That doesn’t matter though because Astrid has a match.

Olivia and Charlie end up going to the victim’s apartment and it’s a single person’s apartment that’s so depressing that Olivia doesn’t bother defending it. They find a check for thirty large and also find that the bathroom has been torched (and there are fire extinguishers in the tub). I’m reminded of Left-Eye (too soon?).

In the lab, we see Walter and Peter getting on each other’s nerves again as Walter sent Peter out for some Frankenberry cereal (did you know that Frankenberry’s voice was the same guy who did Snarf? It’s true!) and all Peter was able to get was Not Frankenberry. (In 2010, they started phasing out Count Chocula, Frankenberry, and Boo Berry and it’s only available around Halloween now… but this episode came out in 2009! Way to slack off, Peter!) Anyway, Olivia comes in and explains that the bathroom at the apartment was torched… which, according to Walter, changes everything. We’ve moved from spontaneous combustion to pyrokinesis. Peter does what he can to explain that such a thing is impossible for some reason (still the first season, I guess) and Walter gives a demonstration of exciting particles and ends up throwing Not Frankenberry all over the lab. This causes Olivia to ask “how did she get this ability?” and Walter nods. That’s the real question… to be interrupted by a call from Charlie. They traced the check.

The address associated with the check is a barely furnished office. Still has an answering machine though (remember those?) they press play and listen to the poor woman leave increasingly panicked messages. Olivia looks out the window and sees that Boston is on fire and looks like a warzone… until Charlie interrupts her and everything’s back to normal.

Olivia goes back to the lab and starts talking about these flashes to other realities. Walter asks about drugs (that’s our Walter!) and Olivia, kinda irritated, says “no”. I mean, how many times has she dropped acid for us? Well, maybe that’s what makes her certain this time. Walter explains that maybe what Olivia is experiencing is a kind of deja vu. Deju vu, he explains, is an experience of what might have been. Since every choice creates an alternate universe, deja vu is a glimpse into this other universe. (Personally, all of my deja vu experiences have felt like I’d recently (like, in the last week or so) dreamt something like this happening.) Olivia wants to know “Why Me?” and Walter gets really sad and says he doesn’t know. Olivia wants to know if it’s related to Cortexiphan and Walter gives her a small pep talk saying that if it’s findoutable, she’ll find it out. Astrid interrupts to point out that she’s found a website that contains info on another person who spontaneously combusted and/or pyrokinetiked… and he’s in Malden.

It’s Clint Howard! (Fun fact: the guy who plays Lincoln Lee in 3rd season is married to Dallas Bryce Howard!)

Clint Howard is playing Clint Howard to the hilt. He explains that the picture he posted was taken in Budapest and Massive Dynamic is killing people all over the world. Why? Because of Khan. The Khan from ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan’ Khan. Massive Dynamic has experimented on a whole bunch of people and now William Bell is activating them. The guy in Budapest? One of the test subjects. He’s not *TRYING* to kill them, you see… it’s just that they’ve all been test subjects and now it’s time to turn them all on. Not everybody can handle such an event. We close out with Clint Howard explaining that he’s Spock, son of Sarek. Sigh. Live long and whatever.

We cut to Nina talking on her cell to a Prime Minister somewhere, get call waiting, *TAKES THE CALL*, then dumps the Prime Minister off of the phone. She then tells her driver to get her to her helicopter.

We cut back to the office where Harris (ugh) tells Olivia to submit for a psych evaluation. Well… it’s difficult for me to see this as 100% driven by malice here. (85%? 80%? Sure.) Anyway, Olivia and Harris yell at each other and Harris points out that the psych eval is a direct order. Olivia tosses it.

We then have another shimmery event and Olivia is back in Deja Vu world where she asks Charlie about the case and Charlie asks her if she really cares about a couple of burnt twins with all of the other insanity going on… Olivia answers in the affirmative and Charlie gives her a file (if he didn’t care about it, why did he have the file in his hands?) and we flash back to real world and see that Olivia is looking at a file with only one victim… she has a moment of insight and asks if there’s a twin they could look up.

There is. And she lives in town.

We cut to in town and the twin answers the door. It’s the lawyer who still owned an answering machine. Uh-oh.

When Olivia and Peter get to the house, the door is open and there are not only signs of a struggle (scortch marks by the window) but there are also signs that this happened very recently… a cup of coffee is still hot. The Feds show up and Peter and the Feds are getting on each others nerves because Peter wants to cut the window out. Why? Well, remember all of that equipment Peter has been cannibalizing? He’s been making something that can “read” Walter’s water-damaged records and have them make music again. Maybe the window has been similarly etched with a recording of what recently happened! Before we think about it too much, we should just say that that is this week’s “phased cationic pulse” and allow it.

Anyway, the machine shatters the glass. But that’s okay! There’s a digital copy of the glass! They play the noises, get rid of background noise, hear the twin yell for the lawyer to go away and hear the lawyer call someone up and say that he’s got her. We replay the tones made by the phone and, yep, the phone call goes directly to Harris.

Crap.

So now we move on to trailing Harris. We’ve got Olivia following Harris and Charlie following Olivia. They trail him down to a warehouse district somewhere and see Olivia and the agents kick down a door… the twin is in an observation room strapped to a table, the Lawyer in standing over her, and Harris is talking through an intercom saying that we need to hurry up because “he’s getting impatient”.

The Feds are going through the warehouse and they start getting attacked by security. Olivia shoots one of the guards, and shoots the Lawyer and starts to help the twin when Harris (ugh) locks the door of the observation room and waves from behind the glass. SHOOT HIM!!!! Oh, the glass is bulletproof. Oh well. Harris explains that they needed to activate the twin and either the twin will be active or she’ll blow up solving two problems at once. He’s awfully smug for a guy who has just been found out and is attempting murder on a subordinate, if you ask me.

Olivia gives a quick pep talk to the twin walking her through her pyrokinesis. “You can control this. Just focus the heat away from us.” Harris is talking on the phone and the twin focuses on him… he blows up.

Well. That turned out better than I could have hoped.

Now we have the denoument. Peter and Walter are at a diner and Peter gets up to use the can. Olivia darts in and shows the pictures she found at the warehouse and asks exactly *WHAT* was done to her and the other kids in the Cortexiphan Trials. Walter almost breaks and trembling answers that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember.

Nina shows up to talk to Broyles with pictures (and pictures and pictures) of the Observer. “You know what happened the last time he showed up this often?” Broyles, apparently, does.

Cut to Walter in his lab. He’s listening to music and he finds the ethics chapter. Hurray! He turns to talk to Astrid about it and HOLY CRAP IT’S THE OBSERVER, no, wait, he wants to talk to Walter. It’s time to go, the Observer says. Walter acquiesces and gets his coat.

Nina is going to her apartment where she takes an elevator up… and there are two guys in skimasks when the elevator doors open… and one of them shoots her.

 

HOLY COW WERE THESE TWO EPISODES GOOD!!! Well, except for Clint Howard. He’s creepy. But the rest of everything? WOOOOOOW!!! Next week’s episode is the Season Finale.

Dunno about you but I’m *HOOKED*.

So… what thinks did you thunk?