Bookclub!

This week, our assignment was to watch the episode “Jacksonville” from Season Two of Fringe. (You can read the Television Without Pity Recap here, while the AV Club has their recap of the episode here. The post dedicated to the Season Two season premiere episode is here and the subsequent bookclub posts are 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 episode, see you after the cut!

Remember the guy who ran the elevator in The Hudsucker Proxy? Well, he’s now working in an office in Manhattan and he has a cousin in Hawaii who sends him coffee beans. While discussing this latter fact with an officemate, the power flickers and they hammer out how there have been all kinds of micro-quakes over the past few days and the guy says that they’re some side-effect of global warming (no politics). His officemate is going home, he’s staying late to look at blueprints, and the microquakes are getting stronger… To the point where the lights black out and when they come back on his shoulder is in a load-bearing pillar (or vice-versa… it’s not a situation that we really have a handy phrase for) that wasn’t there a minute ago, and he’s got 4 legs and 4 arms. He screams and we have our opening segment.

Welcome to Fringe.

Olivia calls Peter and tells him that he’s won an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City which is kinda lame but it sets us up for Peter telling Walter “We’ve won a trip to New York City” and Walter gets excited and says “I’ve never won anything before!”

It’s the little things that keep bringing you back, isn’t it?

Now we’re in the car and Broyles is driving and Walter is surprisingly cranky explaining that it probably wasn’t an earthquake (the difference between winning a trip and merely having to go as part of your job can change your entire morning) and he says that a small comet was more likely. (If I had to guess, I’d say that this episode aired prior to the East Coast Earthquakes… yep, this episode aired on February 4th, 2010 and the earthquakes happened on August 23rd, 2011. Kinda creepy that they were so close though, huh?) So we pull up to the building and it looks a little off. “Rearranged”, Walter says.

We go inside and we see bodies that have been similarly rearranged. Disturbing fusions of bodies and body parts. In the “previously on Fringe”, they showed Nina hitting the two snowglobes together. This is the body version of that. The paramedics start freaking out because they’ve found a survivor and it’s the guy with the pillar in his shoulder. He’s asking for water, he’s asking to speak to his wife, and they’re asking him questions about what happened and he doesn’t know anything that we don’t already know. There were little earthquakes. Dogs were barking. When they establish that the guy isn’t married, never was, they start asking questions. “Who is president? What year is it?” “Obama, 2010” (no politics) “When the terrorists attacked on September 11th, which buildings did they attack???” the guy answers “The Pentagon. The White House.” (no politics) and quietly passes on. Walter opens the guy’s shirt and he’s got a second face in his chest (“Quaid! Start the reactor! Free Mars!”) and the second face gasps and passes. Walter closes both sets of eyes… and he’s going to need the body(ies) back in the lab.

We get back to the lab and this body seriously freaks Astrid out so Walter asks her to start looking through the boxes for stuff that seems out of place. We find a double-decker car, Nixon on a silver dollar… and Walter freezes. Astrid asks what’s up and Walter says that he now knows what Newton (YAY!) did and he just remembered what’s going to happen next.

Has Walter ever remembered anything that made you say “yay! Walter remembered something good!”? I can’t think of anything.

Walter gets the team and explains some stuff that happened way back in 1986. They sent a car over to the other universe… and, 11 minutes later, a car came over here from the other one. How do they know that the car was from the other universe? It had a cd player. I googled, the first consumer CD player came out in 1982, but wikipedia says nothing more than “late 80’s” for car cd players. They should have used “mp3 player”, if you ask me. Anyway, we hammer out that if we send a car over there, a car from over there comes back. Things *WILL* balance out.

And they just sent sent a building over here.

Some back of the envelope calculations tell us that if it took 11 minutes for a car, it’ll take a day and a half for a building… and the clock is ticking. So all we have to do is evacuate the building, right? Well… yes. But we don’t know which building it’s going to be. Well, maybe we do. When stuff comes over from the other side, it has a bit of a “glimmer”. Wait, isn’t the building on this side? Never mind, when the fabric of the two universes rub together, the glimmer starts showing up… but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Well… Olivia can.

Everybody else on the show (and everybody at home says), “Wait. What?”

So let’s have a commercial break.

We reiterate that Walter experimented on Olivia when she was a child, he gave her cortexiphan, and she was the first to demonstrate the ability to see things from the other side. “We *GAVE* you the ability”, Walter says which had me begin to mumble something to myself about running science experiments on kids but Peter starts yelling what I was mumbling so I can get back into the show. Olivia, irritatedly, points out that she can’t see the glimmer anymore and Walter tells her that he can get her to do it again… but they first have to go to Jacksonville.

Before we can ask “wait, why do they have to go to Jacksonville?”, we have Olivia explaining to Broyles that, no, seriously. They have to go to Jacksonville because all of Walter’s stuff is there. Broyles asks what he can do and so we reiterate the earthquake thing (global warming!) and Broyles mentions that he’ll have Nina and Massive Dynamic help out. I suppose that we might want to someday talk about the difference between Season One Massive Dynamic and Season Two Massive Dynamic but today is not that day.

So we pull up to Jacksonville Family Daycare which is still in the strip mall and ghost town deserted. Walter opens the lock (5-20-10, though he doesn’t remember the significance) and we go inside and there’s a lovely moment of alienation. If you’ve ever returned to an old middle school or elementary school, you’ll remember it. The “these cubbyholes/desks/rooms used to be bigger” thing going on and the stuff you remember thinking was one thing when you were a kid now looks almost completely alien when you look at it as an adult. Olivia is walking around and looking at things and you see this alienation all over her face. In the next room, Walter points out that there are a ton of items in the room from “the other side” and asks if she can “see” any of them. Nope. Nothing shimmers.

Walter starts digging through his old boxes of files for some inspiration (uh-oh). She goes outside to freak out about how she doesn’t remember any of this and stops by a height chart. “Olive D” is at her waist. On the swingset, she tells Peter that she remembers none of this and that’s probably for the best. Walter comes out and tells Olivia to get ready… and we cut to him putting diodes all over her head and hooking her up to some more Cortexiphan. I’m guessing he also has her tripping but people must have written letters when they said “LSD” out loud all the time during the first season so he’ll leave that assumption for those of us out here.

Walter has Olivia open her eyes in her trip and she’s in a forest. “There’s someone else here.”

Olivia’s heartbeat starts speeding up and Peter asks Walter if Olivia is all right. Give credit to the writers for the next line: “No, but she’s not supposed to be.”

In the trip, Olivia finds the someone else and it’s a little girl who is freaking out and doesn’t want to do this anymore. Olivia asks her her name and the girl says “Olive” and Olivia tries to comfort her but the girl disappears… only to reappear in some diabolical form. Olivia wakes with a start and chews Walter out for testing this stuff on kids.

You know, the show does a pretty good job of making Walter quite sympathetic on a regular basis that it’s very, very good that it reminds us that Walter did stuff like treat children as guinea pigs. Now, this seems to lean in the whole “Walter is/was amoral” rather than “Walter is/was immoral” from my perspective (like he had grown *PAST* the petty moralities of the backwards pre-Scopes mindset) but it’s good that our own moral categories for Walter get shaken up and re-arranged from time to time. This segment did a good job of that.

Cut to Nina out in NYC and she hears a bunch of dogs barking and she calls Broyles and lets him know that it’s on.

Cut back to Jacksonville and we see Olivia trying to catch a nap on a child’s bed (her own?) and Broyles calls her telling her to get the others and get back. She walks in on Walter watching a tape where he’s talking to Olive (it’s the same tape we saw before) and Olivia wants to know what happened to inspire that tape. We find out that Olivia started a fire with her mind soon after seeing the other side… and that inspires Olivia to go off on a tear again about how unethical it was what happened. Walter spends about a half second defending what he and Bell were going for before succumbing to her (pretty good) argument about how unethical it is to experiment on defenseless children… which, of course, is the bell that Walter needed rung. Olivia saw these things because she was scared. Say what you will about Olivia, she’s not scared anymore. She is past that now.

So how do they make Olivia scared again? Danged if they know.

So we go back to Massive Dynamic and try to figure out how to guess the proper building, whichever it might be, based on barking dogs and little earthquakes (here we go again). We have an interesting discussion about exactly how impossible it will be to figure out which buildings it’s going to be because of mass issues… lofts have relatively little mass, you see, due to being without walls. So size will not necessarily rule any particular building out (except, Walter helpfully points out, the Empire State building). Walter’s watch beeps letting us know that the building could jump over to the other side any minute now… leaving approximately a kabillion buildings that it might be (including buildings that just couldn’t be evacuated without killing more people than a switch would). This, of course, leaves Olivia feeling like she’s totally failed… which has Peter give her some half-hearted comfort and he attempts to swoop in for a smooch but Olivia realizes “Hey! I’m scared because I failed!” and so she runs upstairs to the roof and she sees a building shimmering in the distance!!!

Jump to the car where they’re trying to figure out where and which one and they hammer out that it’s the something something Hotel and they make the call to have it evacuated and they pull up just in time to see the earthquake causing a self-evacuation (aren’t you supposed to stand in a doorway?) and Olivia finds the building manager and hammers out that, yep, that’s everybody and she tries to get him as far from the building as they can get in half a second but that’s not particularly far and so the building starts making this giant sucking sound and pulling her and the building manager toward it and it gets louder and louder and then… silence that tells us that everyone is okay.

Cut to the office where they’re watching the news and, in response to the newscaster telling us all that it was an unscheduled controlled demolition (isn’t the other word for that “terrorism”?), Broyles tells us that “you’d be surprised at what you can make the general public believe” which is our “make you take just a little more blanket tonight” moment from the show.

Cut to Walter and Peter at their place where Walter is getting a game of Monopoly ready (Astrid’s coming over, I guess) while Peter tells him that he and Olivia are going out on a date to celebrate. Walter is childishly delighted that Peter is going out on a date (which is nice) and then the doorbell rings and Peter tells Walter, not unkindly, that he doesn’t want him to get the door and would like Walter to go somewhere else, actually. (But he’s getting Monopoly ready for Astrid!) Open the door and, yay! It’s Olivia! Peter says he knows a place a couple of blocks away (they can walk!) but we see Walter see Olivia see that Peter is shimmering. Peter says “I’ll get my coat” and, as soon as he’s out of sight, Olivia looks at Walter and Walter looks at Olivia and, his voice breaking, says “Please don’t tell him.”

WOW!!!! The cat is out of the bag for pretty much *EVERYBODY* now!

That was a great episode. A little bit of cross-dimensional terrorism, a useless trip to Jacksonville (I’ll wager that we’ll be seeing that school again), we have it hammered out some more that Walter used to be a Monster (and still has some latent inclination to defend his previous Monstrosity), and Olivia knows that Peter is actually Peter II. “Repeter”? No, we’re not going to call him that.

So… what thinks did you thunk?