Bookclub!

This week, our assignment was to watch the two episodes “August” and “Snakehead” 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 and the subsequent bookclub 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 finale, see you after the cut!

While all of us are not getting our re-attached head fix yet, I’d like to point out, once again, that the guy who plays the bad guy with the re-attached head plays Longinus in the Heath Ledger television series Roar. It’s not very good, mind. The writing is on par with Hercules or Xena and the special effects aren’t quite as good as we saw on those shows. But, hey, if you want to see Longinus taking on a bunch of Picts headed by Heath Ledger, it’s not like you’ve got a wealth of shows to choose from. The Longinus sections are pretty good, as these things go. They’re on par with the Autolycus episodes of Hercules… or, I suppose, the Observer Episodes of Fringe.

Of which “August” is one.

We open with HOLY CRAP IT’S THE OBSERVER wait, no, not *THE* observer, it’s merely *AN* observer… there’s more than one of everything, I suppose, and this observer is observing a youngish woman on a college campus using Observer-level tech. The interaction between the observer and the guy collecting for veterans was interesting too… the guy gave the observer a pin despite the observer not donating and when the observer said “thank you”, I got this weird “he’s consistently surprised by and fond of humans” vibe off of him. Well, after leaving his notebook behind, he quickly breaks some of what I assume are bylaws of The Observer Code by trying to kidnap the girl he’d been watching, by shooting someone who tries to intervene with some sort of force field gun, ignores a security guy who shoots at him, and starts a car with his thumb (which makes me presume that the car is not his… or, I suppose, it *IS* his and he has thumb ignition installed… but, seriously, I doubt it’s his car).

Cut to Olivia disappointing Ella by cancelling their play date at the amusement park because, of course, she gets the call about the observer kidnapping someone… she gathers the team together and they’re looking at glossies of their own personal observer. So there being more than one observer will be a surprise for them, I reckon. Which, seconds later, it is. They look at the footage and, golly, they see that the Observer caught a bullet with his bare hands. Walter looks guilty. For the first time, I’m wondering if he knows about the Observers beyond the whole “one of them is my friend and saved me and Peter from the lake” thing.

When we cut to the Observer again, we see him tying up his… let’s call her a “victim” at this point… to the bed. They do that creepy talk-at-the-same-time thing that Observers do. “It will be safer if you stay quiet”, he says which he probably intends to be comforting but comes across as turning the creepy up to 11.

Olivia and Broyles hammer out that the victim, Christine, has nothing particularly interesting about her at all while, back in the lab, we hammer out that the codes in the Observer’s notebook have no repeating characters at all. I mean, this post, the one you’re reading right now has, tops, 52 different letters, ten digits, and maybe fifteen different special characters. That’s 77 different characters (the overwhelming of which are limited to around 40ish of them and they’re repeated all the time). The observer’s notebook has 1200 characters and *NONE* of them repeat. Walter, of course, is translating one of the pages without Astrid or Peter noticing (yep, I forgot that he could read Observer… He knows a lot about them).

Jump to Massive Dynamic and meet up with Brandon (who will, apparently, be a recurring character). He gives a dump of some of the info (I presume Massive Dynamic isn’t giving up *EVERYTHING* they have) he has on Observers. First off, the symbols from the book also show up in tons of disparate places across the globe. Like on ancient statues from India or China or wherever. (So the language has so many symbols because of precision, maybe?) Also, the observers show up a lot in history. Pictures from prior to WWI, etchings from the Revolutionary War, a painting of Marie Antoinette getting shortened… bald guys in the crowd. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that these guys are Observers. I’m a bald guy. I’m sure I’ve inadvertently appeared in any number of tourist photos by merely walking along a crowded path. People could easily point to me in the background and say “it’s an observer! In jeans! And a Hawaiian!” Well, maybe not, but the point stands. Let’s shrug and run with it anyway. In response to Olivia’s guessing that they’ve been around forever, Brandon makes one heck of a leap and says “or maybe they’re not limited by our perception of time”.

He then gives us a little demonstration of the difference between our linear understanding of time (time is a river running through a plastic tube) and the Observers’ (time is frozen, forever, all there at once for them to see the whole thing). Now, I know why *WE*, the audience, would want/need to know this but I don’t know how Brandon got there from just seeing bald guys photobombing history.

Anyhoo, we jump to an Indian restaurant where there is *OUR* Observer spicing up his food with a different Observer yet (an older Observer) and then there’s *ANOTHER* Observer entirely (oh, a younger one) who comes in and says “there is a situation with August”. Given what we know about the Observers so far, for one of them to say “there is a situation” probably requires a crapstorm of nigh-Biblical proportion. August is the Observer we saw in the opening scene and he’s kidnapped someone who was supposed to be on a particular flight. “He has created an irregularity. We will need to repair it.”

Whoa.

They say that they need to call Donald and our Observer calls him and we then see a fat guy pull out an Observer phone and look at it, he goes to his car and pulls a printout off of a dot matrix printer of Christine. He loads a gun.

Now, I just want to say that I love how the Observers have this mix of new tech and old tech. Binoculars that look like old-school opera glasses, dot-matrix printers, that sort of thing. (For some reason, I’m reminded of Mr. Jones building a jammer in the interrogation room…) I like how they seem to have all sorts of really kickin’ tech.

Olivia and Peter are at Christine’s apartment talking to her friend who is subletting the place while Christine is going off to Italy for the summer (or so we thought). We see a picture of her as a child with her family (the last picture before her family was killed) and, yep, there’s an Observer photobombing the shot all the way in the back, there. Olivia gets a copy of the itenerary to Italy just in time for us to jump back to the Hotel where Christine breaks the footboard of the bed she’s tied to just as August returns to the room with some Chinese food. This next scene is really good… August says “I thought you might be hungry” and then he looks at her arms where the rope rubbed them raw and he says “you’ve hurt yourself” as if he had no idea that might happen and as if he really, really wished it hadn’t happened. “Why are you doing this?”, she asks and he says “It would be easier to show you” and he turns on the television to the news.

Cut to Peter and Olivia talking about Olivia disappointing Ella that morning and Olivia remembering her mother… they went to a movie when she was a kid and with the popcorn and the big curtain in front of the screen and the spectacle of everything, Olivia remembers saying “this is the best movie ever!” before the movie even started… which, of course, is a much better memory than the one Ella will have about today. This story is interrupted by the news that a plane to Italy has crashed and Peter says “hey, Christine was supposed to be on that flight” just in time for us to jump to the hotel room where August tells Christine “you were going to die”.

Now, imagine being Christine there for a second. That has to be the weirdest feeling in the world.

August gags her (back to creepy!) and leaves.

At the lab, Walter is still translating the book but is interrupted by finding out that the substance in the Observer’s book was juice from a particular hot pepper… just in time for us to cut to August joining up with Observers at the restaurant. “Well, it appears you have been busy” the old Observer says which tells us that Observers have sarcasm. Or that’s irony. Caustic wit. They have that. August explains that Christine is unique and should be saved. “They are all unique”, he’s told (which is kind of awesome, actually) and August points out that what he’s done has been done before (looking at *OUR* observer!) and it’s pointed out that they were just cleaning up a mistake that they themselves had made. August says that he sees Christine as significant and the other observers are all in agreement that August’s view is faulty but, hey, it’s cool. They’re in the process of fixing it now.

Which is creepy.

At the lab, they’ve narrowed down the type of hot pepper to one of three importers and one private buyer with no name but an address… and Olivia and Peter are in the car. Walter ditches Astrid by sending her to the store and leaves as well…

Jump to Donald visiting August’s apartment and finding one of those Stephen King cymbal-playing monkeys. Creepy.

…Jump to Walter showing up and talking to August. “Please don’t take my son”, Walter says. Interesting. “That is not why I called you here. I need a favor.”

Cut to Olivia and Peter showing up at August’s apartment just as Donald rips out a page from the phone book… and there’s a taut little scene involving the monkey in the sink and Donald getting the drop on Peter. Peter’s okay, of course, after a little kung fu action but Donald gets away before Olivia and Peter can catch him.

Back to August who is telling Walter that he has no idea how to save Christine. They can’t run, because the other Observers will find them. He can’t merely stop the assassin because they will send more assassins. The other observers see Christine as no consequence and since Walter knows how to think about these things maybe he can come up with something. Walter points out that he only came up with the other thing because he missed his son. If, however, you *MAKE* her important… she won’t be unimportant anymore. Which is less tautological when Walter explains it.

Back to August talking to Christine where he asks Christine if she trusts him. Which is a really weird question but imagine being in her position. She says she does. August unties her and tells her to do what he says.

We’ve got an action scene that involves Donald shooting August, August giving Peter the force gun, Peter shooting Donald with the force gun, then Olivia shooting Donald with her real one. When we return to where August fell, we only find his hat… and visit the hotel room where we find Christine hidden behind the bed where she asks about August… just in time for us to cut to our Observer driving August around while August explains what he saw in Christine. “She crossed my mind. She never left it.”

That’s as good an explanation of love as I’ve ever seen.

Our Observer tells August that Christine is special now because she’s responsible for “the death of one of us”. (So *THAT* is why he didn’t dodge Donald’s bullets!!!)

Cut to the lab where we’re debriefing Christine and where Walter gives Christine a little teddy bear… apparently saved by August when Christine’s family died. Which results in Peter asking about Walter talking to the Observers and Walter waving it away.

Broyles and Olivia talk about Donald’s gun and how it’s tied to a string of unsolved murders and how they have no info on Donald at all… and August’s gun is non-functional. Olivia asks for the rest of the day off… and we cut to her and Ella at the amusement park riding a roller coaster which, I thought, was a nice ending until we see the Observers watching them.

“It’s a shame things are about to get so hard for her.”

Creepy.

Now, *THAT* was a great episode. Perhaps my favorite up until this point. When I first met the Observers in first season, I thought they were silly gimmicks… now? They’re something that I look forward to well above and beyond the ability to yell HOLY CRAP when I see them.

Which is why the next show is a bit of a letdown. Snakehead.

Monster of the week, I hope you didn’t eat anything because we’re going to be talking about parasites. Big ones.

This episode didn’t really do much for me. It was Walter-heavy, which was great, but almost entirely devoid of anything close to moving the plot. The high notes: Walter still has it. He gets lost in Chinatown and almost immediately finds himself a girlfriend. Because he got lost in Chinatown, he gets a tracking chip installed in his neck. The former is only of interest to those Walter fans in the crowd (of which I am one!) but the latter seems like something that is going to be big at some point in the future.

I really have little else to say about the episode, sadly. We went to all this trouble to go over into the other universe to talk to William Bell to get a warning about a shapeshifting guy played by Longinus himself… to jump off to a shocking number of stand-alone episodes that don’t move the story that much (except, of course, August’s episode which I absolutely *LOVED*).

But I just checked the schedule and see that *NEXT* week we get back to the story…

So… what thinks did you thunk?