FRINGE: Over There, Part 1

Wow – where to begin??!!! What a killer episode. I loved every minute of it and cannot wait until next week to see how it all ends!

The Grass is Greener Over There

Walternate has taken Peter back to his home universe and I have to say, I can see no reason why Peter would want to leave. Over There, Daddy Bishop is kind of a big deal and Mommy Bishop is ALIVE! Not to mention that they live in a gorgeous house in a world that seems much cooler than the one in which Peter has spent most of his life. The scene where Peter reunites with his real mother was sweet but kind of confusing emotionally because you had to wonder which mother Peter was remembering when he looked at her. A combination of both, I guess. Either way, it is clear that Peter is thrilled to be in her company.

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FRINGE: Northwest Passage

At times this season, I have been feeling that maybe FRINGE was becoming a little too formulaic for my liking. Opening scene – something weird happens, ACT 1 Team Fringe arrives, ACT 2 Back to the lab, ACT 3 Dangerous pursuit/mystery solved, Closing scene – character development or shocking piece of info revealed. As much as the formula might work well and be easier for the more casual viewer to follow, it is the episodes that don’t fit the mold that keep me tuning in for more. “Northwest Passage” was a nice mixture of both. It stayed true to the formula, but shook it up a bit by changing the location and players. The case had a tidy solution or a very complicated one, depending upon your perspective. Best of all, in the last few minutes, we were treated to yet another big reveal!

Peter from Boston

Peter has fled cross-country and is on the road to nowhere, in an attempt to get away from Walter and sort through his feelings. He meets an interesting waitress at a diner and they plan to meet at his motel after her shift ends. She never shows up and Peter is set to leave town when he passes the diner and sees that it is now a crime scene. He speaks with the local sheriff, who wants to hold him as a suspect. While giving her his alibi, Peter spots Newton in the crowd and begins to get extremely suspicious when he hears over the police radio that the waitress was found with part of her skull removed. He immediately asks the sheriff to find out if her temporal lobe had been removed. Oddly enough, the sheriff does as he asks and finds that Peter is correct. They go to the police station where she learns that Peter works for the FBI. She assumes that Peter is in town to track the brain-removing killers, but he says that he thinks that the reverse is true.

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Fringe – Peter Bishop is Dangerous?

Please forgive me for the spottiness of my FRINGE postings as of late. Life has been throwing way too many curve balls at me, causing me to be completely behind on just about everything that I should be doing. The list of things that should take priority to this post is long, but I just couldn’t resist sharing my excitement that what I’ve been waiting for all season has finally occurred – Peter has learned the truth about his origin!!!

• My prediction was wrong – we didn’t have to wait for the season finale for the big reveal and we won’t have to wait until next season to find out how Peter handles the news. Woo-hoo!!

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FRINGE: Olivia. In The Lab. With a Revolver.

This episode had me at the title. Who doesn’t love CLUE??!!! OK, maybe not everyone is a board game geek like me, but someone on the FRINGE writing staff must surely be – MONOPOLY references in “Jacksonville” and a Sam Weiss/Olivia Dunham CLUE match tonight – makes me want to revisit all things Parker Brothers! Excitement aside, I thought the title was rather misleading. Coupled with the FOX teaser of “Next on FRINGE, the end brings a new beginning”, I thought for sure that the final scene was going to involve a big showdown in Walter’s lab, involving a gun-wielding Olivia. Not so much. Oops – getting a bit ahead of myself by skipping straight to the end. Better start with all of the other good stuff that happened before that!!

Olivia. In her Living Room. With the Candlestick.

Tonight’s case was a combination of sad, disturbing, and gruesome all at once. One of Olivia’s former Jacksonville daycare classmates, “Neil”, became deathly ill with cancer. While hospitalized, a man had come to visit Neil and told him about the experiments with Cortexiphan. The man led Neil to believe that what had happened to Neil as a child, would help him to fight his cancer. However, after the man left, the cancer became worse until one day, Neil inadvertently transferred it to his own sister who happened to be another one of Walter’s test subjects. Neil transferred his cancer to her by touching her. In exchange, he received positive health benefits from her, which temporarily sustained him.

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FRINGE: Peter

Who would have thought that an episode entitled “Peter” would be possible without a single moment of Joshua Jackson? More to the point, who would have thought that I could enjoy a Josh Jackson-less episode so much? I see “Peter” as being the origin episode of FRINGE. Even though it presented us with a series of new things to ponder, it more than made up for it by answering some key questions that are central to the show.

Big Hair, Big Answers

It seems that Olivia has kept Peter’s secret to herself, at least for the time being. Walter comes to her place, bearing a package and an explanation. As he flashes back to 1985, the big hair and the big revelations begin. What we learned:

Walter vs. Walternate

Back in the days when Walter and William Bell worked for the U.S. Army, they had developed a window to the other world. It enabled them to see at any given location, what was happening in the exact same location in the alternate reality. In addition, although they had kept it a secret from the government, they had been working on a device to open a portal between worlds.

Peter was suffering from a terminal illness and Walter was spending all of his time in the lab trying to find a cure, just as Walternate was doing over there. Walter was using the window to watch Walternate because the technology on the other side is more advanced and Walternate was more likely to be able to develop a cure than Walter was. Unfortunately, the young Peter of this world died before a cure could be discovered, setting off an important chain of events.

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FRINGE: Jacksonville

When I saw last week’s preview, I got all caught up in the excitement of the “Winter Finale”. Winter Finale = big exiting episode with major happenings = good thing!! Right? Not entirely. Not when it means that there is not going to be another new episode until APRIL!!!! Forgive my rant, but I long for the days when shows had just “season finales” and not “fall finales”, “winter finales”, etc. I don’t need to get all geared up multiple times a season. I have this problem with forgetting to breath during critical segments and I end up breathless by the time a commercial break rolls around. (For real.) So one finale per season is quite enough for me, thank you very much. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy tonight’s episode – I completely did. I just hate having to have the “momentum deferred” all the way until April Fool’s Day – is that some kind of a sick joke?

Glimmer Man

MANHATAN [sic] — The opening event is what at first appears to be some sort of quantum tectonic event, which causes a building to collapse, killing everyone in it except for one man. He ultimately dies, but not before he answers a few questions for Walter, including “which buildings were attacked on 9/11” – the Pentagon and the White House. This information and the fact that the man has his own duplicated head protruding from his chest (not to mention various extraneous limbs), lead Walter to deduce that something far worse than a seismic disaster is afoot. What has actually happened is that a building from the other reality has collided with itself in this reality. Based on the properties of alternate reality item exchange, Walter predicts that a building from this reality will have to get sent to the other reality to counter balance the arrival of this building.

To figure out which building is in danger of vanishing, Walter needs Olivia to return to Jacksonville with him, to the sight where he and William Bell performed experiments on her, or, more accurately, on young “Olive”. Olivia, much to Peter’s dismay, agrees to be Walter’s lab rat once again. This particular experiment, as per the usual, involves an IV infusion of drugs (Cortexiphan, maybe others) and various wires hooked up to the brain. The goal is to get Olivia into a highly emotional state and then pull her back into consciousness. She should then be able to identify otherworldly objects because they will have a “glimmer” to them. That ability will be transported back to NYC where Olivia can take a peak around the city and find a glimmering building which can then be safely evacuated before it goes poof.

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FRINGE: The Bishop Revival

Has anyone else geeked out as much as I have and read the “Fringe” comic book series? If so, you would have already known what was revealed in this episode – that Walter’s father was a Nazi scientist. Plus, you’d be privy to some insider scoop regarding the killer and how he came to be in present day Boston – more on that below.

When Blue Blood is Bad

The Fringe team is called into action when 14 members of the same family all die of suffocation while attending a wedding — even though there was no lack of oxygen in the room. Before she dies, one of the victims, a Holocaust survivor, notices a short man with glasses standing in the room. She appears to be both shocked and horrified by this man’s presence.

Back at the lab, Walter examines one of the bodies and finds the blood inside to be blue, indicating a lack of oxygen. Using this information and a single cinnamon scented candle that Peter found at the wedding, Walter postulates that a heat source (the candle) was used to release a toxin into the air, which only affected a select set of individuals. As he begins to examine the molecular structure of the toxin, he is startled to see a seahorse pattern in it, the signature of his father.

The man formerly known as Robert Bishoff was a Nazi scientist who played on the side of good by selling secrets to the Allies and attempting to hide potentially dangerous discoveries from the Nazis. He smuggled his research by recording it on the pages of German books. Those books had been in Walter’s possession, but Peter sold them in an attempt to lash out at his father, back when Walter was in St. Claire’s.

Walter fears that the killer has gotten his hands on Grandpa Bishop’s research so the team begins to track down the buyer of the books. In the meantime, another similar killing occurs. This one targets individuals with dark hair and brown eyes. It becomes clear that the toxin can be used to target specific groups, based on their genetic make-up.

The buyer of the books turns out to be a false lead, but the team does manage to find the real killer’s evil laboratory and figure out his next move. Unfortunately, the killer has left behind a hot beaker full of badness with Walter’s name on it and Walter nearly dies. As they always say, payback is, in fact, a bitch and Walter concocts his own toxin, which he releases at the World Tolerance Initiative summit, taking down the bad guy before he strikes again.

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FRINGE: What Lies Below

When I was kid, my sister used to get a lot of nose bleeds. I don’t remembering my mom panicking about it. She would just tilt my sister’s head back and hold her nose closed with a towel until the bleeding stopped. This would SO not happen in my house today. If one of my little ones ever randomly started bleeding from the nose, particularly from just one nostril, I’d be calling 911 or rushing them to the ER. I won’t deny that I have the unlucky combination of an over-active imagination and a healthy dose of hypochondria, but anyone who watches even half the TV that I do, knows that bleeding from one nostril surely spells doom. Tonight’s episode completely reinforced this message. Peter, bleeding from one nostril, equals bad — VERY BAD!!!!

How to Treat a 75,000 Year Old Virus

A man is visiting an oil company, with the purpose of selling competitive secrets to one of its executives. He shares an elevator with a bike messenger on the way up to his meeting. As he exits the elevator, he begins to look ill. Blood begins to run from his nose and he falls to the floor. The bike messenger tries to revive him, but cannot. The man’s face takes on a cracked appearance and some sort of red mist sprays from his mouth as he dies.

Peter and Olivia are called to the scene. Walter and Astrid arrive a short while later, just in time to see the bike messenger die at the front door, in the same manner as the man from the elevator. Walter immediately recognizes the potential spread of a harmful virus and calls for the building to be quarantined, even though Peter and Olivia will be trapped inside. Shortly afterwards, the CDC arrive and begin to take over the investigation, but Walter will have no part of being excluded, especially once Peter becomes infected (by accidentally coming into contact with the dead man’s blood).

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FRINGE: Johari Window

I love the Thursday night pairing of Bones and Fringe. Tonight was not the first time this season that I’ve thought that a Bones/Fringe cross-over wouldn’t be that far of a stretch. In the past few months, we’ve seen our friends at the Jeffersonian investigating chicken men, bodies of ash, and most recently, possible aliens. I’m all for Hodgins being King of the Lab, but I’m pretty sure that even he would be willing to give it up to Walter Bishop. This, of course, has nothing at all to do with the fact that it would open up the possibility of having David Boreanaz and Joshua Jackson appear simultaneously on my small screen. Surely, I can’t be the only one who has thought of this? OK, enough with my wishful thinking…on to the episode!

Project Elephant

In the late 1970s, Walter was involved in a military project that was exploring the idea of camouflaging soldiers by making them become invisible during action. The soldiers themselves would not actually go from being visible to invisible. Rather, those around them, when exposed to a particular electromagnetic pulse, would have their optic nerves impacted in a way that kept them from seeing the soldiers. The inventor of the idea was a friend of Walters, a man named Edward Cobb.

Present day: a state trooper picks up a young boy on the side of a road. The boy’s facial features appear to be perfectly normal at first, but a few minutes later when the cop glances at him in the rearview window, they are massively malformed. Two adult males with similar facial features come to the station and kill the state trooper and two others. They take the boy, but not before the cops have already taken a photo of him that they inadvertently leave behind as evidence.

We learn that the military testing went very wrong. Prolonged exposure to the pulse caused a genetic mutation amongst all of the people who were unfortunate enough to be within a certain radius of the testing. Edward Cobb’s wife and daughter were two of those who were harmed. Cobb chose to stay behind and carry out his vision of creating “invisibility” by perfecting the electromagnetic pulse. Once he did, he offered the townspeople a choice – they could embrace their deformity and live freely wherever they wanted, or they could be confined to the town and have their condition permanently hidden from themselves and the others around them.

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FRINGE: Unearthed

I cannot believe that an entire month has gone by since I last posted something for Fringe! Let’s just say that something “suddenly came up” which caused me to miss the final two episodes of ’09. That, in addition to regular holiday madness, kept me from getting caught up until just last week. I’m definitely sorry to have missed hearing your thoughts on “Grey Matters”. It was by far one of my favorite episodes to date. Poor Walter and his stolen brain tissue!!! Feel free to discuss it below, but for now, let’s focus on tonight’s episode, “Unearthed”.

Welcome Back, Charlie
The plot involved a 17-year-old girl who comes out of a coma, only to be possessed by the spirit of a murder victim who is seeking vengeance against his wife (since she contracted his killer). I saw “The Exorcist” at much too young of an age and to say that I was completely terrified by it is an understatement. I’ve always found vomit spewing/head spinning/man talking little Linda Blair to be more frightening than Freddy Krueger, Jason, and Mike Myers combined. This possessed chick was no Linda Blair, but she was pretty darn creepy. Thankfully, with the help of Team Fringe, she was restored to a nice normal hormonal teenage girl by the end of the episode. It was a solid episode, complete with the nice balance of funny moments, gross moments, and eerie moments that we’ve come to expect.

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FRINGE: August

First of all, can somebody explain to me why this episode was entitled “August”? I’m guessing that the reason is either (a) completely obvious and just escaping my little brain for no apparent reason or (b) a very minor detail that I failed to catch, likely because I could barely hear the TV over the noise of my husband tearing into our latest DIY project. Help me out — PLEASE!!!

One Less Watching
This episode had not one, not two, but FOUR Observers in it! This makes it difficult for us to continue to refer to Walter’s follicallly challenged friend as “THE” Observer. From here on out, I will call him O1…not to be confused with O2, the star of the mysteriously titled “August” episode.

O2 was observing the 1989 San Francisco earthquake and witnessed a little girl lose both of her parents in the bridge collapse. Her bravery touched him and he experienced feelings, an ability which the other observers appear not to possesa. For the next 20 years, he observed her, even though to the other observers she appeared to be unimportant. On the day that she was meant to die in a plane crash, O2 kidnapped her to prevent it from happening. By doing so, he broke an important rule of observing – he altered the natural order of life.

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FRINGE: Of Human Action

Grrrrrr…this episode has completely caused me to get a song stuck in my head – Nerf Herder’s “5000 Ways to Die”. It’s not exactly a classic so I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t know the lyrics. The ones that are now on repeat-play in my brain are “get in your car and drive real fast/up in the attic with a shotgun blast/take a bath with a clock radio/vodka and valium overdose”. Great – add that to the fresh visual of death by hot coffee over the head/face through a glass door, and I should have some really great dreams tonight…

Twists and Turns
Nothing is as it first appears in this episode. Initially, we are led to believe that two used car salesmen kidnap the son of a Massive Dynamic scientist and hold him for ransom. One of these men seems to be able to hypnotize people and cause them to violently kill/harm themselves or others.

By mid-episode, it becomes clear that it is really the teenage boy, Tyler, who is the kidnapper and the one with the power of mind control. The two car salesmen are his innocent victims. Tyler stages the kidnapping to get money from his father to use to start a new life with his mother…a mother who his father had led him to believe was dead. Tyler kidnaps Peter along the way and the two compare bad daddy notes (more on that later). Peter is eventually able to stop Tyler, with the help of Walter and the rest of the gang.

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FRINGE: Earthling

Can I just say that I was really creeped out by the opening scene of this episode? Maybe it struck a chord because today is my own wedding anniversary and the thought of my husband planning a nice surprise for me and then turning to dust in front of my very eyes is beyond horrific. Or maybe it is because my television inexplicably turned itself off in the middle of the day yesterday (probably should have been doing something more productive anyway)…either way, the first few minutes were pretty darn scary for a TV show!

Russian Fringe Science
The body of the husband that turned to dust opens up a case that rings a bell with Agent Broyles. Broyles had seen a similar phenomenon four years ago in DC. Multiple people, linked to a particular hospital, had turned to dust. At that time, Agent Broyles had received a call from an Eastern European man who said that the murders would end if Broyles could find someone to solve a particular formula. Broyles was unsuccessful in obtaining a solution, but the murders inexplicably stopped and he thought it was over…until now.

The team learns that the murdered husband had been at Latchmere General Hospital, visiting his mother, the day of his murder. They begin their investigation there, looking specifically for an Eastern European employee who had previously worked at the DC hospital where the previous murders had occurred. They find a suspect named Thomas Koslov, who is a night nurse in the coma ward.

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FRINGE: Dream Logic

My apologies to Gretchen and FRINGE fans. This has been sitting in a ‘drafts’ folder since the 17th.  Can I blame the pain meds? – Kath

It is 8:00 Friday night and I just got around to watching last night’s episode of Fringe, thanks to a long list of things including (but not limited to) my husband, baseball, and my own ridiculous inability to stay awake while watching TV from the comfort of my own bed – even for my most favorite shows! For those of you who were anxiously waiting to hear my thoughts on the show (Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?), I apologize!

I’m Yawning Just a Little Bit
After last week’s killer episode, this one left me feeling just a little bit flat. Someone mentioned in a previous comment section that they found the show to be “uneven” and I tend to agree. I think all of the episodes are solid, entertaining, well acted, etc., — but the momentum seems to pick up at a crazy pace one episode and then settle in almost as if nothing major had happened by the next. This episode addressed the repercussions of last week (Olivia killing Bad!Charlie) and also advanced one of the most compelling storylines (Walter kidnapping Peter from the other universe), but most of the hour was spent on a stand-alone, non-Pattern (Observer-less) case. I understand the logic behind wanting to keep the show more accessible to the casual or new viewer but it ultimately makes it less compelling to the hard-core fan base.

In a Nutshell
What I’m learning from Fringe is that it is never a good idea to sign up for experimental medical research of any sort. In this particular case, individuals with sleep disorders enrolled in a clinical trial in which a wireless transmitter was implanted into the portion of their brains that controls sleep. The test subjects were all happily relieved of their sleeplessness, but the doctor conducting the research was actually robbing them of their dreams. In fact, he was essentially mainlining their dreams — to the point of complete addiction. To feed his own addiction, he was using the chips to stimulate dream activity in his patients while they were still awake. This basically caused their dreams and nightmares to come to life, which in turn led them to do all kinds of bad things, including killing people. To make matters worse, it ultimately kills them of sleep exhaustion.

The Dream Team

OLIVIA —

Olivia goes back to Sam to return her bowling shoes and to thank him for helping her solve her problem. He points out to her that she has other problems and that her life is basically a nightmare. She reluctantly agrees and he gives her another task which involves collecting business cards from people wearing red, circling one letter from both their first and last names, and then deciphering an anagram from those letters. The solution is “You’re Gonna Be Fine” – the same thing that Charlie said to her during her very first week with the FBI.

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FRINGE: Momentum Deferred

I’m going to be honest and admit that it was hard for me to make the decision to watch Fringe at its regularly scheduled time tonight. If it weren’t for this blog, I would have been glued to The Office for the big JAM wedding extravaganza. It’s not that I don’t consider Fringe to be must watch TV – I definitely do — but my Thursday night TV line-up is way too crowded! Please, Fox, move Fringe back to Tuesday nights so that I (and the other viewers who are dropping off like flies) can give it the time and attention that it deserves!! That being said, I now don’t regret my decision to postpone the Jim/Pam love fest one little bit since “Momentum Deferred” was completely AWESOME!!! So many questions were answered, that I hardly even know where to begin!

He’s Baaaaaaaaack!!!!!!!!!
Last week I was wondering when we would get to see good old William Bell again and I am happy to report that we did not have to wait all that long. He was back tonight, albeit just in Olivia’s memories, but on screen long enough for the big reveal of what it was that he told Olivia during their time together “over there”.

Here are the facts, as I understand them:

• Walter and William had been trying to create a “guardian” — someone who could protect the gate between universes.

• It is difficult for humans to cross from one side to the other/not many can do it successfully.

• Bell is unable to leave the alternate universe for reasons yet to be disclosed.

• Those “over there” who are waging the war have created hybrids (part organic material/part machine), i.e. the shape shifter soldiers, which can cross over more successfully than humans.

• The hybrids have already crossed over and are referred to as “The First Wave”. They are searching for someone, a leader, who can open the door between universes.

• The leader’s body has a symbol on it (looks kind of like the Greek letter omega or a pair of headphones, depending on your perspective). Olivia needs to find it before the hybrid/soldier shifters or a “storm” will be coming. Bell doesn’t elaborate on what the “storm” is, but Nina later explains to Olivia that it is Bell’s theory of what will happen if the gate is opened – the two worlds will collide and only one will survive.

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