Copyright © 2010 by Sarah Stegall.
Fringe
“Olivia. In the Lab. With the Revolver.”
Thursdays, Fox, 9/10c PM
Written by Matthew Pitts
Directed by Brad Anderson
Warning: this review contains some spoilers. If you’d rather not know what the episode is going to include, bookmark this page and read it after viewing.
“This odd little family unit we’ve got going here—I don’t want to jeopardize that.” —Peter
That odd little family unit is definitely in jeopardy, but Peter Bishop has no idea of it. He’s like a man standing in the path of a speeding truck, wearing headphones, musing on what a lovely day it is. He has no idea of the disaster bearing down on him.
“Some truths do more harm than good.” —Olivia
Olivia is still wrestling with the decision over whether or not to tell Peter his true history. Honesty, and her respect for Peter, compel her to do so; her fear for his emotional health holds her back. She seeks guidance in all the wrong places—Walter, Nina Sharpe, even Sam the Pinball Wizard from earlier episodes. She decides she must tell him—and then he comes out with that little gem at the top of the page and she turns 180 degrees. How can she upset Peter’s world, now that he’s finally found some stability, some happiness? She says this to Walter, who does his own 180, and says he’s decided to tell Peter the truth himself.
“I’ve done enough damage and it’s time to start putting things right”. —Walter
This is one fine moral dilemma, and I’m not sure anyone is thinking straight. Olivia wants Peter to be happy, but she’s smart enough to know no one can be responsible for another person’s happiness, and certainly not by lying to them. Walter—well, I’m not sure Walter thinks at all. This hyperrational man seems to have the stunted emotional responses of someone on heavy drugs, which may not be far from the truth. Having lied for decades to his son, what does he think Peter’s reaction to this level of betrayal is going to be? I am dying to find out.
Plot? What plot? Was there a case in this soap opera? Oh, yeah. There was. And it wasn’t half bad. It wasn’t the stunner the last two weeks have been, but it wasn’t bad. It starts with lawyer Miranda Green (Diane Kruger, National Treasure, Inglourious Basterds) interviewing a very sick man, who appears to give her a case of cancer by skin contact, one which develops in a matter of minutes to a full-blown horror. The Fringe team is called in to look at her body; Walter diagnoses a case of cancer-by-contact. More victims turn up, each of them having been visited by the man Miranda was interviewing, and each of them dead of near-instant cancer. While Peter and Olivia try to connect the victims, Walker gets his usual exercise—jumping to conclusions.
Adding a lunatic like Walter to the investigation team of Fringe was a master stroke. I thought at first that he was there merely for comic relief. Now I see what a timesaver it is to have a nutjob/genius on your side. Only Walter Bishop could get away with jumping from cancer to contagion to energy transfer to tantric sex, and get away with it. He gets to do all the absurd connections that Mulder used to make on The X-Files, while not sacrificing his “credibility”. Meanwhile, Olivia, Peter, and Astrid get to look competent and normal, while taking advantage of Walter’s “insights”. It’s a great ensemble, which works better than I thought it would.
Olivia finally makes the connection among the victims through a similar intuitive leap. While playing “Clue” with her bowling guru, she realizes that the victims were all on the list of children at the day care center in Jacksonville that she carried away in that episode. All of those children, like Olivia, had been part of Walter’s Cortexiphan brain-drug experiments; one of them is even Nick Lane from an earlier episode, whom Cancer Man was asking about. What a fabulous bit of continuity, which integrates this “standalone” story seamlessly into the mythology. Finally, after a thrilling fight in Olivia’s apartment, the Cancer Man winds up in a “drug-induced coma”, just like Nick Lane in “Bad Dreams”. Apparently, the antidote to Cortexiphan derangement is a coma. Bad news for Olivia Dunham.
There’s no sense of the revelations in this mythology having been shoehorned into whatever arc the writers are planning. In fact, I begin to hope that there is an actual plan behind this mythology. Mention of “the Pattern” from Season One has dropped off, and I’m happy to forget about this plot device. I am glad to be dealing not so much with a shadowy conspiracy a la X-Files, but a combination of human error (the Cortexiphan experiments) and physics (brane theory). It is such a relief not to have to force myself every week to believe a government could keep a lid on secrets like this every week. It is entirely plausible that a deranged individual (Walter) or a powerful multinational corporation (Massive Dynamics) could do so. That’s a more realistic platform on which to build this show, and makes it easier for me to swallow ideas like chi, chakras, and tantric sex energy giving someone cancer.
As usual, the unreal aspects of the show were nicely balanced by the absurd and whimsical. I loved Walter discovering a fan in the Providence coroner. Walter making taffy was amusing, but baking Miranda’s skin in the oven was sheer black humor. The in-jokes were even cuter this time around, as Miranda was played by Joshua Jackson’s real-life girlfriend. That’s especially cute considering that Anna Torv’s real-life husband, Mark Valley, played her onscreen boyfriend John Scott in Season One.
All in all, this was an excellent episode that combined not only enough connection to the “mythology” for hard-core fans, but a case interesting (and horrific) enough to interest new viewers. The show is still top-heavy with secrets that new viewers have to learn, which makes it hard to attract a new audience. I’d like to see a few more standalone episodes—except that I can’t wait to see Peter’s reaction to Walter’s news.
Fringe came in second in its timeslot on Thursday night, which is excellent news. The audience dropped from 6.7 million to 6.1 million in the second half hour, but overall it garnered a 2.3 rating and a 7 share against repeats of The Office and Grey’s Anatomy. It’s already been renewed for a third season, but you can never have too high a rating. This year and next, it will be me, on the couch, with the TV remote in my hand.