This week, our assignment was to watch the episode “The Plateau” from Season Three 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 Three season premiere episode is here and the posts dedicated to the following 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 episode, see you after the cut!
Wow. Let me just start by saying that this was one of my favorite episodes up to this point. (Maybe behind White Tulip.)
We opened with the Rube Goldberg machine started by a silly little ball-point pen on a mailbox. A guy goes to pick it up after it falls which results in a passing bicyclist swerving to not hit him which results in a minor accident with a fruit stand which results in WHAM a pretty lady being hit by a bus.
Red Credits mean that we’re in The Other Universe.
So Our Olivia thinks that she’s really Fauxlivia and Broyles is in on it but Charlie and Lincoln aren’t in on it… which strikes me and Broyles as an accident just waiting to happen. Why is all this subterfuge necessary? Well, because Our Olivia can jump back and forth between universes without much incident and all of the stuff that Walternate has figured out to send over has “consequences”. Shudder.
Apparently, people need to carry inhalers for Just In Case mini-fringe events involving all of the oxygen going away temporarily that last short enough that an inhaler will get you through the emergency in this universe. Jeez… no wonder they hate us. On the upside, they have medical treatments that allow someone who had 2nd and 3rd degree burns over huge amounts of his body a couple of weeks ago to be out and about out in the open with little more than an admonishment that he needs to be back in the healing chamber in 8 hours. Sure, he looks like Freddy Krueger today, but a week ago he looked like a cenobyte. In a couple of weeks, he’ll probably just look unlucky. Aaaaaand he has a crush of Fauxlivia.
At the scene of the accident, they find a pen and have a short utilitarian conversation of the nature of “when is the last time you saw one of *THESE*?” Apparently, pens aren’t used in sufficiently advanced civilizations. Everybody uses, shudder, their iPads or something. Note: not their phones. They still use phones like phones over there. Establishing that the pen is a novelty, they figure out that the guy on the bike swerved to avoid the old guy bending down… and he was probably bending down to look at the novelty that is the ball point pen. “It’s like the pen started a chain reaction.”
Olivia, during all this, notices Peter across the street… but when she looks again, he’s gone. Given the fact that the Peter in our universe is all moony over he-doesn’t-know-it’s-Fauxlivia, I’m guessing that this would be a Scorpius Peter.
Anyway, Charlie and Lincoln Lee have a short conversation about whether Fauxlivia really is Fauxlivia or maybe she really is the *REAL* Olivia. Well, they don’t say *THAT* part of it, but they do have a conversation discussing the two Olivias and which is which and maybe is maybe… just in time for Linc to notice a pen at an *EARLIER* crime scene also involving a bus accident. Other Astrid (apparently, this Astrid has been given the nickname “Bad Astrid” by folks online… I dig it) gives the odds of this happening by chance as “diddly squat” and while people are arguing over exactly how weird it is that pens would be at both accidents, it’s pointed out that someone has, once again, gone and gotten themselves hit by a danged bus. Seriously, people. Look both ways.
Some quick investigating tells our Fringe Team that a dog ran into the middle of the street and the bus swerved and hit someone who is recovering from the hit even as they look around… until Olivia notices a pen rolling in the middle of the street and realizes that the thing hasn’t happened yet. WHAM an ambulance hits a guy. Olivia, noticing this, deduces that the conductor of this orchestra of chaos must be standing around watching his concert and jumps to the conclusion that it’s the weird guy on the overpass.
Which is pretty bigoted.
Anyway, he throws a bike on the street below, she pulls her gun on him, and he casually drops over the side of the overpass onto the roof of a van that swerved to miss the bike on the street.
So… I guess, technically, if she was looking for a guy who was pretty good at setting up rube goldberg machines at will, she found one.
As the show progresses, we find out that the weird guy used to be considered mentally handicapped until he was signed up for a Flowers for Algernon kinda Hail Mary long shot medical treatment at a hospital that employed all of the people who ended up getting hit. Our Fringe Team interviews folks at the place that treated the guy and not only does Olivia see a Scorpius Walter, the team finds out that the medicine took… and it looks like it *REALLY* took. We see the guy who used to have an IQ of 56 reciting pi to a thousand places while doing calculus. “That was Milo after one treatment”, we’re told. “We gave him five.”
So we learn that Milo can see all of the million different things that could possibly happen… we see, from his POV, the different branches that any action could lead to… just in time to see Fringe investigating his sister.
Now, I’ve got a question. I can appreciate that they know that Milo is behind the accidents… but, really, what do they have? “Milo put a pen on a mailbox”? No jury would convict. Heck, no prosecutor would take this before a grand jury. He’d take the proverbial ham sandwich before the grand jury before he’d try to indict Milo.
In any case, Olivia and Charlie (wasn’t that the name of the guy from Flowers?) find Milo exactly where he knew they would, he puts together yet another intricate rube goldberg machine plan that involves him running away, there being an air quality problem, Olivia taking a hit off her puffer… then WHAM getting a ton of bricks dropped on her head.
Except, of course, Olivia is the one person in the country who doesn’t have “GRAB YOUR PUFFER” as second nature which allows her to avoid the ton of bricks and catch a confounded Milo. By shooting him in the leg. Ah, I guess he was running away. Anyway, we hammer out the following: Milo’s state is irreversible. Olivia’s boyfriend is going to North Texas to deal with a smallpox outbreak. Scorpius Peter is capable of not only giving important explanations to Olivia about why she *REALLY* forgot to use her puffer but he is also capable of smooching her. Now, if they could put *THAT* in a pill, they’d make a billion dollars.
Man, I *LOVED* this episode. Milo was the most sympathetic unsympathetic antagonist I’ve seen since the cancer episode of X-Files, we learned even more about the other universe, and got to spend time with Charlie, and Bad Astrid, and Scorpius.
So… what thinks did you thunk?
So, why did Olivia not shoot the guy when he was on the top of the bus? Isn’t she a crazy good marksman? Done, end of episode. 🙂
Past that, I really like how the team seems to be much more well adjusted in the alternate universe than in the real one. Olivia is so closed mouthed in the real one while Fauxlivia can banter. Yet Fauxlivia can shoot a guy in the back of the head, sigh.
“Now, I’ve got a question. I can appreciate that they know that Milo is behind the accidents… but, really, what do they have? “Milo put a pen on a mailbox”? No jury would convict. Heck, no prosecutor would take this before a grand jury. He’d take the proverbial ham sandwich before the grand jury before he’d try to indict Milo.”
You are thinking this is our universe. We have already seen that there are much less rights for people in the Red universe. I doubt this guy will ever see a trial.
Without getting too political, I think we can safely say that cops (even Fringe cops) still need to fill out paperwork for shots fired in the other universe.
Couldn’t she of just shot him in the leg?
Center of mass. You shoot to stop. None of this trick shot stuff. That’s for television.
She already did the trick shot while gasping for air and running. 🙂
THIS PRESS CONFERENCE IS OVER
She thinks she’s someone with an Olympic medal in marksmanship, remember.
Now, I’ve got a question. I can appreciate that they know that Milo is behind the accidents… but, really, what do they have? “Milo put a pen on a mailbox”? No jury would convict. Heck, no prosecutor would take this before a grand jury. He’d take the proverbial ham sandwich before the grand jury before he’d try to indict Milo.
It’s a great point…assuming the Other Side has due process for things involving Fringe events. They may regard them the way we do terrorism.
Also, I would totes pay for an imaginary Joshua Jackson to make out with me.
This is an awesome episode, even if I find the imaginary-Peter thing a bit of a cheat in terms of the show finding a way to let Olivia know she’s herself. And the pen being a Fringe even is a good way to slip in another illustration of how the red-verse differs from “ours”. The consistent differences between how technologically advanced it is (Lincoln’s healing, not using pens) and how much worse a place it is (aside from the frequent Fringe events and ambering, the US has smallpox outbreaks) make it an interesting place. I suppose it makes sense – the red-verse thinks it’s at war (or at least, the US does; given that the “centre” of the tears in reality is Reiden Lake, the rest of the world may be less affected), and war tends to bring faster advances in technology.
The whole story about Flowers-for-Algernon guy (and the parallels are very strong, down to getting more dickish as he gets smarter – btw, why is “smart = mean” such a common assumption in TV-land [see Dr. House]) is very sad.
I was watching some of the cast & crew commentary, and one of them mentioned that this episode is basically a monster-of-the-week one, except on the Other Side. That seems apt enough – but because it’s “over there”, and Olivia’s there, it’s more than just that as well.
This is as good a time as any to mention that Fauxlivia’s boyfriend is basically perfect, which was already pretty apparent in the final two episodes of last season. Fauxy has no idea how lucky she is. (Also, it’s pretty clear that the scriptwriters wrote him out of town at least partly to avoid things getting creepy between him and Olivia, she he doesn’t know she’s not his girlfriend and she also doesn’t know she’s not his girlfriend, and that’s just a recipe for all kinds of wrongness.)
It’s weird. During Season 2, monster-of-the-week episodes bugged the crap out of me because I WANTED TO GET BACK TO THE MYTHOLOGY, DANGIT!!!
Season 3? When I see the Red Credits, I lean forward, I yell “It’s an Over There episode!” to Maribou in the next room, I can’t wait to see what it’s about, and, seriously, I don’t care if it’s MOTW.
Are you watching Season 3 for the first time now?
Kind of. I never watched it on the television when it aired, but I am caught up with the boxed sets.
“smart = mean” such a common assumption in TV-land
It’s more like “smart = unemotional, or a Vulcan-like stranglehold on your emotions”, and thus such a person would assume that everyone else ought to do the same. And somehow, that means that they’d be intentionally mean. (And given the behavior of psychopaths who feel no emotion, they have a point.)
On the other hand you have BBC’s Sherlock, who is sometimes unintentionally mean because he was so smart as a child that he couldn’t socialize properly, and thus doesn’t quite “get it”.
I’d say that they see less importance for “protocol” and put more emphasis on “signal”… so they tend to communicate like, say, a text message rather than like a conversation in a hallway.
Instead of:
“Good morning”
“Good morning”
“How are you?”
“Fine, and you?”
“Doing well. Hey, I was wondering about the Smith Report…”
You get:
“I need the Smith Report.”
This can be off-putting.
I have that problem, I need to actually have formulas I use when talking to someone so I don’t just jump straight to whatever it is I want to talk about.
psychopaths feel emotion, generally. they just have a hard time caring/empathizing with other people’s emotions. THAT said, learned behavior, folks.
It’s a bitch learning things that other people know instinctively, but you gotta do it.
I have met a few geniuses (180+ IQ), and of them only one has decent social skills. Purely anecdotal, but because of this I had no problem with how he was acting. Top that off with him start at a very low IQ, I can see where he went easily.
One of the interesting things I learned from some of the management theory papers I had to do at university was that there’s an upper limit to how smart a manager cna be before it reduces their effectiveness. If a manager is more than 20-30 points higher than the people they’re managing they have a harder time empathising with their staff, and that makes it harder to do their job.
Really smart people live in a slightly different universe from everyone else, and that make it that much harder to actually understand other people.
… I have a friend who’s a consultant. He makes a living by pissing people off.