This week, our assignment was to watch the episode “Brown Betty” 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, 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!
I should open by saying that Fox was doing one of its promotions again. “Fox Rocks!” The basic idea was that the shows this week should incorporate music. I understand that Fox suggested something as mild as the radio being on in the background a lot, a bad guy driving a getaway car while listening to a rock and roll song on the radio… that sort of thing. The Fringe writers, instead, said “OH WE’LL MAKE A MUSICAL EPISODE INSTEAD!!!”
Which, of course, should make all of us apprehensive… but, honestly, I was charmed.
It was a bit of a breather after the last few intense episodes *BUT* it also did a good job while resting to explain to us how Walter sees the predicament that he is in. Well, when he’s stoned, anyway. Essentially: he created the situation, he lied about having created the situation, he was in the wrong when he created the situation despite his best intentions, and because of that, he deserves to be left to die by his son who no longer loves him anymore… and now he’s waiting to. Whoa.
Poor Walter.
Now, the episode itself was full of a lot of little fun things that could very well be technically true:
Peter tells Olivia that Walter tested on 147 children.
Nina Sharp is a bad guy.
Olivia was looking at a picture of John Scott and, presumably, pining.
The Observers (“The Watchers”, of course) work for Nina Sharp… or, at least, should be assumed to be malicious.
The coffin scene shouldn’t have reminded me of Ishmael in Moby Dick but it did.
When the torpedo thing from Season 1, Episode 5 showed up, I was reminded of exactly how much Walter knows about stuff that we still don’t know about. He knows what that torpedo is. The fact that it found Peter and Olivia is a hint as to what it is. Goodness help me, I have no idea… but that scene made me sit up and take notice.
The two games of operation, one with Walter and Ella, one with Olivia and Peter, was a nice touch.
Ella fixing the story was, no spoilers, a great double-twist.
All in all, a silly, fluffy episode that could be skipped pretty easily… except for all of the things that it tells us about Walter.
So… what thinks did you thunk?
It made me miss Scott again. I’d sort of forgotten him by this point.
I actually hadn’t watched this episode through. I *totally* wasn’t in the mood for it when it originally came up. Knowing that it fell out of the timeline, more or less, I figured that I would go back and watch it, but didn’t until now.
Clancy enjoyed the music a great deal.
Maybe we need to revisit the John Scott relationship.
I had assumed that Olivia had had… and I’m looking for the right words here… a number of relationships in her past that would not be particularly surprising one way or the other to the average viewer of the show, given her college and post-college history.
Now I’m thinking “she didn’t date much” to the point where John Scott was the first person with whom she exchanged the “l” word.
I should be ranting about yet another show that did not progress the main story arch, but I liked this one. I was nice to peek into Walter’s mind and see how he viewed what has happenned.
I also feel there was some serious foreshadowing in this as Jaybird mentioned above. I do wonder which ones are true. The one that I wonder about the most is Peter saving Olivia from death. Is that how he will come back, through his feelings for Olivia?
Without getting too much into spoilers, I’d say that feelings are part of the fundamental problem here.
But we’ve got a heck of a bumpy ride before us before we even start talking about that sort of thing.
I was hoping it would not be solved by next episode. I am still thinking Peter will go over to the other side for a little while.
Oh, you won’t *BELIEVE* what’s coming up.
This episode is delightfully trippy. The first time I watched it, my mom and I had rented the last few episodes of Season 2, because I’d stopped watching partway through and then started again with Season 3 and was confused. Our reaction to this one was basically “….What.” It’s just so nonsensical.
And yet, amazingly, the writers manage to take what feels, most of the time, like a joke episode, and make it incredibly emotionally poignant. It’s very well done. Aside from the fact that John Noble really can’t sing, which is kind of distracting.
Also, singing corpses. What.
There are things you can get away with when you tell a story within a story that could never, ever fly in the original story. Walter is telling emotional truths, after a fashion.
When it comes to the singing corpses, that gives an example of Walter not understanding what is and what is not cool. Or, I suppose, showing us exactly how far ahead of the curve he is.