Bookclub!

This week, our assignment was to watch the two episodes “Night of Desirable Objects” and “Fracture” from Season Two 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 Season Two season premiere episode is 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 finale, see you after the cut!

The Night of Desirable Objects is our first episode this week and we begin in a cornfield where the radio talks about people disappearing mysteriously before we see someone disappear mysteriously. This was another episode that felt like it was ripped from the X-Files. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I was just getting into the whole “other universe” thing!

We establish the following:

Fake Charlie is watching Olivia.

Olivia compares her visit to the other universe to a dream she can’t remember.

The guest star this week is the guy from Never Cry Wolf. That movie was really, really good.

Olivia’s senses are seriously heightened.

“Night of Desirable Objects” is, apparently, a fishing lure. It is not, however, a fishing lure in real life. I googled.

When Fake Charlie types back and forth with the other universe, I’m wondering who is typing at the other end (but that’s because I’m caught up through the beginning of 4th Season), but, the first time I watched, I just knew that it was “the other side” and that was good enough for me.

Nina visits Olivia and has a lovely conversation about what it was like for Nina to lose her arm and how a doctor (Sam Weiss) helped put her back together. Nina actually came across as human rather than someone who had an agenda. This, of course, made me wonder what her agenda was.

The scene where the baby’s coffin had a hole dug out and a tunnel underneath the grave? That was the creepiest thing I think we see all season.

It turns out that the mother had lupus and the baby was genetically modified by the father (scorpion DNA, mole rat DNA) to survive the mother’s inhospitable womb. The theme of “I wanted to do something good but abused science and ended up doing something monstrous” is an interesting one for this show. In the past, hasn’t the general attitude toward science (or “science”) been downright celebratory?

Olivia and Charlie talking like old friends was a great scene. We saw Olivia being troubled and being comforted by Charlie, which is nice, except Charlie is Fake Charlie which is really sinister. Great scene there.

Peter’s interaction with Walter where Peter tells the story of the failed fishing trip and the original “Night of Desirable Objects” fishing lure was a nice little story. Did it happen before the transfer or after? How much of Peter’s resentment is to his other family?

Meeting Sam Weiss (It’s Uncle Eddie from Grounded for Life!) was a treat. “Have the headaches started yet?” “No.” “They will.” He then gets her some bowling shoes. This is a really nice touch… The idea that there are people out there who know about the two (or more?) universes and who are, for example, working at a bowling alley is intriguing. I get the distinct feeling that, if he wanted, he could easily have a sinecure at Massive Dynamic as a “technical advisor” or something equally lucrative but, nope, he’s sweeping lanes and handing out shoes.

The final scene with Fake Charlie typing back to The Other Side was a great cliffhanger to leave us on… but I found myself wishing that we spent more time on *THAT* storyline and less on the X-Files stuff. Ah, well. They can’t all be winners.

The other show we watched was “Fracture”. Now *THAT* was a Fringe episode!

Our cold open is with a couple of police officers where one is running in to get some coffee and, while he’s in there, the cop driving the car gets a phone call on his cell and answers “Yes, Colonel”, he gets told that it’s on, and the cop abandons his partner and goes to the train station as instructed to take a suitcase from a guy who, otherwise, hasn’t done anything (also as instructed). The cop pulls his gun and physically yanks the suitcase away from the guy and, as he walks away, the televisions in the train station start flickering and the cop freezes, starts crackling like he’s made of ice, screams to the uncaring sky, then explodes.

Welcome to Fringe.

This was a great episode. It established the following:

The conversation in the bowling alley between Sam Weiss and Olivia was great. The discussion about tying shoes that wasn’t about tying shoes at all was absolutely brilliant (I’m a bunny ears afficionado myself). The little story about how he taught Nina to eat french fries grabbed me. Explaining how many little things are involved in our every day activities is a neat trick that the writers don’t use often enough. They used it perfectly here.

The scene where Walter and Peter were arguing over whether to get a new apartment was nice. Jokes about a singing nude Walter aside, Walter’s finding a problem with every apartment they come up with communicated Walter’s fear of changing a good thing. I liked that. Walter’s mood being brightened by the attack because “this means bodies”? Oh, that Walter! Once we get to the scene itself, we find Peter willing to take the tapes to a guy who knows a guy and we find Walter licking what he thinks is shrapnel. “Salty”.

Without getting too deep into issues of international terrorism, if I were going to put stuff in a bomb, I’m sure that some of it would probably be “salty” on first blush but that’s because the usefulness of the active transport function of potassium and sodium for the stuff I’d *REALLY* want to get out there for everybody to experience because I couldn’t count on them to, say, lick my deliverables.

Anyway.

Peter finds a badge, Walter finds a crystalized ear and we’re back to the lab.

There’s a nice little story in the lab from Walter where he talks about how he got lost and found the best apple fritters while trying to find his way back. The writers really excel at putting things like that in the show. It makes me want to talk about a little cafe I found wandering around Montreal or a little place in Muskeegon, Michigan that had the best french dip sandwich I’ve ever encountered, anywhere. Places you stumble across and become yours. Of course, there are so very many wonderful things that by finding the perfect apple fritters, he very well could have missed out on the perfect strawberry malted. Life’s like that sometimes too.

Where was I? Oh, it turns out that the cop was injecting himself with… something. Like 47 needle tracks something. So Olivia and Peter go and visit the cop’s wife where Olivia has a migraine flashback (“They will.”) of the Bell visit that freaks her out and makes her need to puke. We follow her to the can and watch her look up and notice a loose tile, behind which is the cop’s gear that he used to inject himself with… something. Turns out that he was a vet. Had a couple of tours in Iraq. This is notable because our next scene is in the Midwest where we see a nice lady shoot up between her toes and the shot makes her foot crystal for a second… then back to normal. The next scene has the Colonel talking to her and telling her that, yep, she’s got an assignment too. Project Tin Man is back in effect.

Olivia and Sam Weiss get to talking and, it turns out, the headaches are part and parcel with the flashbacks. He wants her to keep score for a kid’s league that’s coming in. “How will that help me?” “For starters, it might teach you some patience.” I love Sam. Now, of course, he’s completely abusing his role as healer to help (force) her to become a better person but who *DIDN’T* go through that phase?

Back in the lab we find out more about the injections, more about cyanogen chloride (this is real, I googled it), and read the name Tin Man for themselves (it’s classified, of course). Peter does some fast talking of Broyles and gets a private flight to Baghdad, twenty Gs, and a fake passport and I’m thinking “your tax dollars at work” but, hey, it’s television. Seriously, if even 20% of this stuff was accurate, there’s a lot dumber stuff we could be pouring money into than Fringe division.

In Baghdad, we talk to Ahmed about getting in touch with the doctors for Project Tin Man but it turns out that Ahmed and Peter have a history and, apparently, it’s acrimonious. Which brings me to maybe the one thing that bugs me about the show. They do a lot of telling rather than showing when it comes to the past of the various characters, it feels like. Peter keeps talking about how awful his childhood was and how monstrous his dad was… but all we’ve seen from Walter is how much he doted on Peter. He remembers Peter’s favorite foods, his favorite toys, and jumped across a universe to steal a duplicate after the original died. Maybe Walter was a jerk but we’ve seen evidence for him being well within acceptable tolerances for wacky dadhood (maybe Walter did the mad scientist thing to the hilt but, jeez, you should hear the stories some of my friends tell about their dads and still they’re capable of being much more civil (if not downright congenial) with their parents than Peter is with Walter). Here with Ahmed, we hear about how much of a snake Peter is… but, at the end of the day, Ahmed is totally willing to find the doctor.

Walter blows up a watermelon. That was kinda cool. Astrid, of course, complains. Anyway, they’ve found out that a certain frequency of radio wave makes lights flicker and watermelons blow up.

The doctor tells Olivia and Peter about the bad stuff that happened with Project Tin Man, the bad stuff that happened to the soldiers, and about a bad man called Colonel Raymond Gordon. Back to Warshington! At the briefing, we find out that everybody associated with Project Tin Man is accounted for except for the lady flying out (to intercept another guy with a briefcase) and, of course, Colonel Gordon who went rogue a few months back. Jump to the train station where all of our team and all of the black vehicles in the district show up and we have a nice little tense scene where we find out that we can’t, in fact, jam the signal and that means that we have to find the Colonel and turn off the signal ourselves… which involves Peter tackling him and punching him in the face a couple of times (which was surprisingly credible… before I saw the scene, if you asked me if I thought that I could watch Joshua Jackson punch a guy without giggling, I think I would have told you “probably not” but he carried it off!) and Olivia using her cane to break the signal emitter.

That was a tense and exciting scene there. They’re getting good at this.

Back in the lab, Peter finds an ad for an apartment nice enough for Walter to agree to move into. Back at the bowling alley, Weiss tells Olivia that he’s going to find her a perfect bowling ball and so, of course, she pulls a gun on him and tells him to knock off the oblique crap and FIX HER and he points out that she walked a good 5 yards without her cane in order to point a gun directly at his head which totally wins the argument (he takes it better than I would have) and invites her to come back tomorrow. Back at the FBI, we see Broyles interviewing the Colonel who starts talking about “them” and how “they” are watching us, gathering data, and how they’re going to use it to destroy us… cut to HOLY CRAP IT’S THE OBSERVER who is receiving a briefcase from a courier (the one we saw earlier at the second train station!). The briefcase contains…

Pictures of our team… mostly Walter. Wow.

Wow.

What a great episode!

So… what thinks did you thunk?