Hiatus

So, this whole blogging thing hasn't worked out quite like I planned. I've lost all but 1 of the original team members, and I'm starting to feel overwhelmed. Additionally, what happened after I began my career in the music industry has repeated itself here -- blogging about TV has actually made me enjoy TV less. I will be taking a brief hiatus in order to regroup and think about what I want to achieve with this blog, then will (hopefully) come back stronger, and with a redesign. In the meantime, however, Hans Blix has expressed interest in continuing to write about Lost. So stay tuned, and thanks for sticking with us.

Also, after last night's Fringe I've decided that Astrid is bad news.

And maybe Charlie is too.

Fringe S1E12: The No-Brainer

Grams and Pacey, reunited! The woman who played Mrs. Warren is Mary Beth Peil, who played Grams on Dawson’s Creek. Though she looks younger in this than she did on that show. Funny how makeup works.

In this episode, a gaggle of seemingly unrelated folk are exposed to a computer virus that liquefies their brains, causing the matter to dribble out of their ears. Disgusting, but the juxtaposition of old and new technology was interesting, going from Olivia playing Operation with Ella, to Walter asking about floppy disks, and finally to the super-intelligent bad guy of the week, Brian Dempsey. Dempsey is a tech genius who has fallen on hard times, and is understandably bitter. Less understandable is his decision to murder those he feels have wronged him via a complicated computer virus. How the virus kills is never really explained, nor is what relationship the car salesman and Olivia’s niece Ella had to Dempsey. I think the writers hoped we might not notice.

In other news, Peter snags an envelope addressed to Walter and reads a letter, then crumples it up and tosses it out. Sneaky little Astrid retrieves the letter, and gives it to Olivia. Turns out its from Mrs. Warren, mother of Carla Warren, Walter’s assistant who died in a laboratory fire and whose death sent Walter to the institution. Peter is worried that his father’s fragile mental state can’t handle meeting Mrs. Warren, whom he is sure will blame Walter for the death. Instead, she just wants to share her pain and learn more about her daughter’s life. And, for the first time, we see Walter’s empathy toward an outsider. It’s nice.

Olivia’s character has really comes leaps and bounds, especially due to the introduction of her sister and her niece. She is fun and silly around Ella, whom she obviously adores. I also loved the moment when the car salesman admitted that he went to strip clubs, and asked her not to judge him. She’s much more likable now. Not so good, however, is the flirtation between Peter and Rachel, largely because Rachel is so obviously not above board. We’ll see. The only good this about it is seeing Joshua Jackson’s roguish charm on full display. Yum.

I recently read the Five Reasons Why The Fringe Team Is The Worst Department In The FBI, and the hilarious #2 was “They Refuse To Check Out Massive Dynamic Despite The Fact Massive Dynamic Is Obviously Involved In All This Shit.” Amen! WTF ever happened to Massive Dynamic? The pilot episode of Fringe introduced the original team who worked on fringe government projects: Walter Bishop and William Bell. Why, then, has there been no mention of William Bell since? It makes no sense.

I continue to enjoy Fringe. However, when it comes to building a larger framework within which all of the episodes to date fit, I’d say the show is failing miserably.

Fringe S1E11: Bound

“Hey, guess what just happened? Finding out that my father's giving drugs to bugs just became a typical moment in my life.”

1. I expected Mitchell Loeb to be a bad guy for some time, at least a full season. But he’s already done! It was chilling when he told Olivia that he had kidnapped her to save her. Whenever someone says, “You don’t understand what you’re doing!” on shows like this, it never ends well.

2. Did Nina have anything to do with the abduction? And how smart was Olivia to hide the canister when she escaped? It’s almost like she knew what would happen…

3. I don’t remember Harris, have we seen him before? Because now he’s investigating the Fringe division, and he has a serious hatred for Olivia.

4. Olivia continues on the road to humanization with the intro of her sister, Rachel, and her niece, Ella. Ella’s father is out of the picture, and Rachel totally knows what Olivia does for a living. I’m not saying she’s evil, but I imagine she’s not all sweetness and light.

5. Magic 8-Ball?

6. Development as far as an Olivia-Peter relationship, if only that Walter suspects something is brewing. And feels free to chat about it, openly.

7. Olivia has started to reply more on kicking ass than her gun, which is nice.

8. The slug is a mutation of the common cold!?!? How gross! Although fabulous when Walter gave it decongestant.

Fringe S1E8: The Equation

“What’s up, Chachi?”

A woman who uses flashing lights to hypnotize her victims kidnaps a musical child prodigy. Several other geniuses have been abducted and then returned, only to go insane. One of them, Dashiell Kim, is a patient in the asylum from which Walter was recently sprung. So, Walt goes back in to glean information from Kim. The warden (who I think is the sheriff from Roswell) is mean and threatens to force Walter’s permanent return to the institution. Peter makes vague threats. Olivia doesn’t end up catching the bad guy, who does something weird with an apple.



* There is much discussion online about the apple. The prevailing thought seems to be that the equation rearranged the molecules of the safe so our mystery man could reach through its wall to retrieve the apple. Hmmmm.

* What was going on with Walter’s hallucinations of himself, quite sharply dressed, when he went back into the institution?

* Peter is now so protective of his dad, I love it! One of the best moments of the night was Walter expressing frustration at his failure to get info from Kim, and asking Peter “is that what it’s like to talk to me?” Peter’s sweet smile could have melted an iceberg.

* Ben was supposed to have woken up from a coma and suddenly have the ability to play the piano. All of the people who were kidnapped, including Ben, were trying to solve the same equation (each musical note corresponds to a number, etc). So…did someone do something to Ben while he was in the coma? Also, the focus on Peter’s piano playing thus far has been a little weird. Is this why they’ve been doing that?

* The fact that they kept switching between calling the kid “Ben” and “Bean” was really distracting.

* Peter tells Olivia to keep an eye out for a red castle and she looks up and sees a red castle? Seriously?

* I’m getting kind of irritated with the number of plot points introduced and then abandoned. I know they’ll come back eventually, but still. Where is Nina? What happened to Massive Dynamic’s supposed involvement with the Pattern? What’s with the mole couple from the last episode? Who is this Joanne Ostler woman, why was she presumed dead, and who in hell is the apple man? Is the next episode going to move along as though none of this has happened?

* Why do I not care as much as everyone else about trying to spot the Observer in each episode?

* Olivia fought dirty when she was kicking the crap out of Joanne, which somehow makes me like her more.

Next week: something crazy happens.

Fringe S1E7: In Which We Meet Mr. Jones

“Hello Peter, this is me, your father. Walter Bishop.”

An agent named Mitchell collapses from what appears to be a heart attack, but when the doctors open him up there is a horrifying gray-slimy-thing-with-tentacles-that-look-like-teeth nestled around his heart. Good god. Walter has never seen it before, but research leads him to one David Robert Jones and a “scientific terrorist” cell called ZFT, apparently one of several. Jones specializes in genetic weapons.

Olivia plans to confront Mr. Jones so he will tell her how to save Mitchell. But he’s in a German prison. Off to Germany! Where she reconnects with tall-dark-and-sexy Lucas and is instantly awkward and all smiles. Meanwhile, back in the states, Charlie calls Broyles and informs him that there is a mole in the agency. Broyles is in Walter’s lab at the time, and when he says the name “Joseph Smith” Peter looks surprised, then guilty. Hmmmmm.

Mr. Jones will not help Olivia unless he can ask Smith a question, but unknowing agents shoot Smith in the head first. Of course this is no problem, don’t worry at all, because Walter can hook up his son to the dead man so they can chat. He mentions that Peter has a low tolerance to electrical stimulation, and Peter suddenly remembers Walter experimenting on him as a child. He is not happy.

Back in Germany, Lucas asks Olivia to stay the night. She protests weakly. At his flat, they talk about why their relationship didn’t work out. Then they make out and tear at each other’s clothes for a spell before she gets a phone call and excuses herself, leaving Lucas addled and sexually frustrated.

In the Harvard lab, Peter eventually gets the answer to Mr. Jones’ question, and Jones tells Olivia how to save Mitchell. And I become absolutely certain that Broyles is the mole, underlining his name several times on my little notepad, only to learn that Mitchell and his wife are in on the whole thing. Oh, and the answer to Mr. Jones’ question -- and apparently the reason the Mitchells orchestrated this whole crazy situation -- is “Little Hill.”

Some notes:

* The Observer was at the airport when Olivia arrived in Germany. That doesn’t seem like such an interesting thing to observe.

* I never cease to be amused by Walter calling Astrid everything but her name – Astro, Asteroid, etc. Hilarious!

* Although I emitted an audible squeak when Peter called Walter “daddy,” I am nevertheless irritated that Fringe provided my most-anticipated moment via a drug-induced hallucination. But I did enjoy Peter buying his dad gum (adorable), and Walter’s absolute delight at working with his son, as well as the line “You may have found your true calling…working with me.”

* Olivia is definitely getting better week by week. They’re writing a much more sarcastic tone for her, and when she sassed Broyles it was awesome.

* Peter only gave Olivia the Pacey look once this ep, so no romance for now.

* Broyles’ face when Walter started talking about fruit cocktail was priceless. I imagine the gag reel from this show must be pretty great.

* The Alias reference (page 47) was a nice touch, especially since I can’t stop comparing this show to that one.

Fringe S1E6: The Cure

“This is upsetting because he’s the friendliest of fruits.”

Sorry for the late post; yesterday was … interesting. But on to this Fringe, where more questions abound. A girl in a diner emits radiation and melts everyone’s brains. Or something. It all leads back to a drug company called Intrepus, run by Digger from Gilmore Girls. Digger’s a bad dude, and in the end Olivia takes him down.

Olivia received a fairly ridiculous back-story in this episode. Apparently her dad used to beat up her mom, so finally a 9-year-old Olivia shot him. Twice. But he didn’t die, and every year on her birthday he sends her a card “just to remind her that he’s still out there.” Every year Olivia regrets that she didn’t finish the job. Really? Olivia regrets that her very young self didn’t kill a person? I find that rather hard to believe.

Meanwhile, Peter and Walter have fallen into a warm, comfortable routine (albeit one that involves Peter being occasionally driven crazy by nonstop humming). To stop Digger, he goes to Nina for help. She does help, but now he owes her a favor back. And she says something ominous about how she and Walter spent quite a bit of time together in their younger days. Now, on a show like this I take that as a subtle suggestion that Nina is possibly supposed to be Peter’s real mom. A similar insinuation was made on Alias, with the end result being that Sloane was not Sydney’s father even though he did have an affair with Irina. What will Fringe do with it?

Also, Olivia is supposed to be 28. For real?

Fringe S1E5: Power Hungry

“You were hoping for something more specific, maybe?”

Fringe is getting consistently better week to week. Walter is fantastic as usual, Peter is subtly opening up, and even Olivia is improving. Last week I commented on her lack of personal life being a detriment, and this episode actually addressed that a bit, giving her some nice interactions with fellow agent Charlie and having her show actual emotion. Yay Fringe!

The story this week centered on Joe, a delivery guy who just happens to cause electronics to go on the fritz when he’s upset. While delivering a package in an office building, to a girl he has a crush on, he gets mad in the elevator and sends it plummeting to the basement, killing everyone on board. Except him. Oh, and we see The Observer just before the crash. Meanwhile, Olivia tells Charlie that she saw John. She knows it’s a hallucination. Charlie tells her to roll with it; it’s a manifestation of her guilt and confusion about everything that happened. Across town, Walter tells Peter the man who tortured him looked familiar. He is frustrated that he still can’t access parts of his mind. Peter gives him the sweetest look and says gently, “You’re doing fine.” Awwwww.

The continuity of this ep is all over the place. Peter, who was tortured in the last episode, is still all fucked up; they even put rope marks on his wrists. But Astrid, who refused Walter’s apology in the last episode, is all smiles now. Grrrr.

While examining the bodies in the elevator, Walter realizes they were all electrocuted before the elevator hit bottom. Back in the day, he worked on a project to make humans trackable to homing pigeons. Each human being has a unique electromagnetic signature, and the idea was to augment the field in order to track people. However (of course), it had dire consequences. Broyles tells Olivia about Jacob Fischer, a biotechnology expert wanted in several states who lured in subjects via “the kind of commercials you see on TV at 3 AM” and then performed unspeakable tests on them.

I’m still not so sure Broyles is a good guy.

While Olivia is reading up on Fischer, the lights go out. I know I compare Fringe to Alias too much, but I wouldn’t mind if the show gave the impression that Olivia could actually defend herself without a gun. She seems sort of … weak. Anyway, she sees John again. He is reassuring, asks her to trust him, and says he truly loved her. Past tense. Interesting. John says she is on the right track and that soon he will prove that he loved her. It’s kind of creepy. He gets into an elevator and it actually moves, going down. Olivia races down the stairs, but when the doors open the car is empty.

However, Olivia sees the “maximum capacity” sign and does some research. She goes to see Peter, explaining that someone walked away from the elevator crash while Walter does a weird little dance in the background. Suddenly, Walter shocks Peter. Cute! His dance was to create electromagnetism. Meanwhile, Fischer tracks Joe down, takes him to a lab, and does things that make him scream his head off. After searching Joe’s apartment, Walter uses a cassette tape that Joe touched, which then became magnetized, to show pigeons how to track him. It sounds stupid, but it was actually kind of fun. Olivia is concerned about the pigeons’ welfare. Peter says, “We’re putting GPS chips on pigeons to track a man who can control electricity. This is your fault, right?” They’re so adorable.

Moments later, Olivia sees John again. He moves inhumanly fast but he kisses her, and that kiss seems real. He says, “I didn’t betray you, I wasn’t the one.” Peter interrupts and John disappears. Peter saw nothing. They follow the pigeons to a warehouse, and Olivia asks if Peter will have more faith in Walter if the scheme works. Peter says no. But he totally means yes. They save Joe, who just wants to go home, but he has to be tested and whatnot.

In the end, Walter tells Olivia she doesn’t seem herself. He knows she’s been seeing John. When she was in the tank, part of John’s consciousness crossed over and this is her brain’s way of working through it. But moments later, Olivia sees John again out on the street and follows him to an underground lair full of boxes and files. It turns out John was conducting his own investigations into the Pattern. And (so cliché) Olivia finds an engagement ring among John’s belongings.

Hmmm. Is Olivia’s mind really just working through something, as Walter & Charlie said (albeit for different reasons)? Or does this have something to do with Massive Dynamic? Since they have John’s body it would be a pretty huge coincidence if it didn’t. And speaking of MD, where the hell has Nina been? She and Olivia had that loaded “everything we do leads us to each other” conversation … and then suddenly it doesn’t anymore? And finally, am I going to have to wait until the season finale to hear Peter call Walter “dad”? I think so.

Fringe S2E4: The Arrival

“Morning! Morning!”

We meet a new character tonight, a creepy bald guy whose eating habits reminded me (embarrassingly) of Roswell – in the first scene he eats a roast beef sandwich smothered in pepper, Tabasco sauce, and jalapenos. My kind of man.

On to Peter & Walter, still the most intriguing part of the show. Peter continues to be irritated by his father’s idiosyncrasies. Walter continues to keep Peter up all night by reciting the chemical compounds of root beer. Peter wants out, and tells Olivia as much. This will be his last case, even though she tries to sway him by admitting that Walter will not cooperate without Peter by his side. Walter tells Peter (again) that he is squandering his intelligence and his education. I loved Walter’s overeager “Morning!” to everyone at the base. Was that because he drank too much homemade root beer? He tells Peter to open his mind or someone else will open it for him. Surprisingly threatening, for Walter. And telling, considering what’s about to happen.



This week the gang finds a glowing cylinder that Walter recognizes, but remains silent about. Olivia gets a static-filled late-night phone call from John Scott, but when she tries to trace it there is no record of any call. Broyles reveals a man they call “The Observer,” who is the aforementioned bald guy and appears in a series of crime scene photos from the site of every weird happening connected with the pattern. The Observer has been documented at three dozen scenes. Oh, and some other weird guy is going around town killing people with a gun that blasts energy rays.

Walter becomes increasingly agitated, and refuses to talk about the cylinder. He’s not so sweet and dopey anymore. After screaming at Peter and stabbing Astrid with a syringe, Walter meets with The Observer, who thanks him for hiding the beacon and says he’ll have answers soon. Once the government tracks Walter down, they take him into custody. A furious Walter tells Peter not to be like his mother, always questioning his judgment. I am really curious to find out what the deal is there. But anyway, that’s the last straw, and Peter walks out. He calls someone and asks for work, and right then the Energy Killer appears. Look behind you Pacey!

The Energy Killer tortures Peter to find out where Walter hid the cylinder. There was a lot of dramatic buildup to this – Walter saying cryptic things about Peter intuitively knowing where the thing is, mixed with Peter begging for his life – all with a rather disappointing outcome. Energy Killer uses some weird device to read Peter’s mind, and takes him back to a time when his family was happy. He then finds out about Walter’s many hiding places, and thus discovers where the cylinder is. Isn’t this basically regression therapy? It doesn’t have some “fringe” explanation, like Walter and Peter’s minds bring connected.

In the end, Olivia shoots the Energy Killer in the back. The cylinder explodes, and then vanishes. The Observer appears before Peter, reads his mind, and then shoots him. Peter crumples to the ground.

But after the commercial, we see that he’s fine. Walter apologizes to Astrid for the whole syringe gaffe, but she won’t make eye contact. Peter is now a believer, and willing to do anything for the cause. More importantly, he finally has some sympathy for his father. Walter tells Peter a rambling story about how they were in a car accident when Peter was young, and they were on the verge of death when The Observer rescued them. He read Walter’s mind just as he did Peter’s, and Walter knew that one day he would be called upon to return the favor. Today was that day.

At the same time, Olivia goes home to an empty fridge. She gets slightly better each week but she still doesn’t have much of a personality. One thing that might help is if we saw more of Olivia in her off time (a la Sydney and her friends), but at the same time I’m starting to get the impression that the writers are keeping her a blank slate on purpose. Anyway, she eats dry cereal and whiskey for dinner, and when she looks up John Scott is standing before her. WTF?!?!

Fringe S1E3: "Am I required to keep him alive?"

“The Ghost Network”

I don’t know if I was just in a bad mood after the painful hour I spent watching 90210, or if it was the fact that my mother called ½ way through and I missed some stuff, but the central story didn’t do much for me tonight. Basically, some guy named Roy is drawing tragedies that he sees in his head, and then they happen. Walter figures out that he is tapping into the “ghost network,” which is of course one of his old projects, and Roy was a test subject. Walter explains something about how spectral waves transmit information, and Roy’s brain is picking it up. Blah blah blah, they stop a bad guy.

And now, some thoughts on the characters and their relationships:

Although it’s corny, I can’t wait for the moment that Peter finally calls Walter “dad.”

Walter, who we learn is self-medicating with homemade psychotics, tells Peter that “lack of commitment” is his problem. I feel like he said a similar thing in the last episode, so I assume it is significant. Walter continues to be the best character on this show. John Noble is a fantastic actor, and I love Walter’s dichotomy– he is a genius who can perform brain surgery, but he struggles to answer a cell phone.

When Peter and Walter are in a restaurant, Peter notices a guy following them and confronts him. The guy, who is taking pictures of Peter, tells him that he was supposed to inform them when he got back into town. When Walter asks what happened, Peter says something innocuous about how the guy was harassing the waitress. Walter gives him a knowing look. WTF is Peter’s secret? It better be good.

Peter says his mother is “a story for another time.” My guess is something’s up there.

Olivia goes to Nina at Massive Dynamic for help identifying a chemical compound, and casually comments how strange it is that everything leads her back to MD. Nina’s counter? “I could say the same about you.”

Broyles takes the evidence they find to Nina, who then uses it in her quest to extract information from John Scott’s body. Both Broyles and Nina exist in quite the little gray area. What is their true relationship?

This show really needs to step it up with the character of Olivia. She has all the personality of a blank piece of paper.

RELATED NEWS
It’s called suspension of disbelief, people: Popular Mechanics debunks Fringe’s science.

Fringe S1E2: "All of this connects to the magical man-baby how?"

“The Same Old Story”

People seem to be giving up on this show quickly – at least, people I know. I found this episode entertaining, but did notice a drop in quality from the pilot. “The Same Old Story” was all over the place, lacking a specific focus and under-developing several main characters. The best part of the show, so far, is the fractured relationship between Walter and Peter. When Peter sang his dad to sleep at the end … oh my.

We open on a guy and a hooker lounging in bed. The guy is creepy and steals off to the bathroom with a set of surgical tools. Suddenly, the hooker starts screaming bloody murder as her stomach ripples grotesquely. Creepy Guy drives her to the hospital and abandons her. The doctors ask how long she’s been pregnant, she insists she isn’t, there is a huge ripping noise, and she dies. The doctors cut out the baby and look horrified. By the time our intrepid team shows up, the baby has aged into an old man and died.

Frankly, this episode did not go the way I anticipated, which is good as far as the surprise factor but I liked my way better. After John Scott’s betrayal, Olivia is conflicted. She doubts her intuition, and she doubts the outcome of every case she and John worked on together. She becomes obsessed with the idea that Creepy Guy is a serial killer that she and John hunted. Since the killer’s MO didn’t match the first scene, I figured Olivia was just wrestling with her own personal demons to the detriment of her work. Alas, it turns out that she is correct.

After less research than I would have liked, the team learns that an old colleague of Walter’s named Penrose had engineered a “son” by tinkering with human growth hormone. Government experiments in the seventies attempted to grow an army of young men that would rapidly age to 21 years and then stop. However, the “stopping” proved to be a problem. Creepy Guy has to use other people’s pituitary glands to keep himself young. In the end, they vanquish him simply by interrupting his attempts to extract a victim’s gland, and he ages and dies in front of Olivia. The whole thing was a little blah. Much more interesting were the small, suggestive moments throughout.

Peter is an interesting character. There have been several hints about his weird past, but seeing as he is basically supposed to be a regular guy (albeit a genius) I find it interesting (if somewhat unbelievable) that he can collect evidence at a crime scene, shoot a gun at another human being with no hesitation, and rig a makeshift defibrillator in less than a minute. In this episode Walter casually says to Olivia, “If you’ve read my file, then you know the truth about Peter’s medical history.” She looks blank, and Walter quickly backtracks. There is much buzz in the blogosphere that Peter was “engineered” much like Creepy Guy. Walter’s comment, combined with the throwaway line earlier in the episode when he says, “95% of babies are born with blue eyes. Yours were green,” lends some credence to that, though I have my doubts.

Walter was underused in this episode, which meant it was less humorous than the pilot, but there were some interesting bits I’m not ready to speculate on yet: Walter had no memory of them re-opening his Harvard lab, yet he remembered where he hid his car 17 years earlier. Penrose saying that Walter “knows things no one in power should know,” and Walter’s subsequent comment that “the pitfall of a scientist is differentiating between god’s domain and our own.” And JJ Abrams sure does love shows that revolve around father issues, so I’m curious to see how the Walter/Peter relationship will develop.

Also learned in this episode: Bionic Arm Woman (Nina) is connected with Broyles in what looks like some sort of board-member capacity. She offers Olivia a job at Massive Dynamic, which O. refuses. Broyles then tells Olivia that though Nina knows about the pattern, certain knowledge is classified beyond her level.

Finally, we come to the end. While Peter is singing Walter to sleep, there is a shutter-flash image of three bodies lying on what look like hospital beds. Unable to rewind and pause live TV, I don’t have much to go on here. More engineered human beings? A Walter flashback, or real-time? I’ll just have to wait and see. If you have any speculation, please leave my poor TiVo-less self a comment!

Fringe S1E1: “Be careful what you wish for.”

Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD! If you didn’t see the premiere, it will air again on Sunday. According to EW it averaged 9 million viewers, which is not great, but not terrible.

First off, let’s get the obvious Alias comparisons out of the way:
1. Smart, accomplished, feisty, rule-breaking federal agent: check
2. Dying/dead lover: check
3. Sexy partner with a shady past: check
4. Mad genius who could easily be either good or evil: check

Despite all of this, Fringe brings something new to the table. One, it is very, very funny. A nice mix of eerie ambiance and tongue-in-cheek humor. Quite good. Two, it marks the return of Joshua Jackson to my weekly routine, so I will follow it to the ends of the earth. I especially like the “location marks,” which is hard to describe but if you watched it, you know. Like most J.J. Abrams’ shows, it appears to be a fun & mysterious ride, and it is important to hop aboard from the beginning. However, it is also one of those shows that I feel like a raving lunatic recapping.

THE MAJOR PLAYERS



Olivia Dunham, sassy FBI agent.



John Scott, another FBI agent and Olivia’s lover.



Walter Bishop, mad scientist.



Peter Bishop, high school dropout with a genius IQ and father issues.



Phillip Broyles, inscrutable FBI agent and Olivia’s boss.

And William Bell, mysterious billionaire owner of Massive Dynamic.

THE RECAP
We open on a plane, where a guy shoots himself with an insulin pen and then everyone on board melts. It’s graphic, and pretty sickening. In the next scene, we see the very same dude hanging out in the background as federal agents swarm the plane. Hmmmm. Olivia has a negative first encounter with Broyles, the agent in change of their team. Broyles sends Olivia and John to check out a lead at a storage facility, and John is exposed to flesh-eating bacteria, which puts him in a coma and turns him into the human equivalent of the Visible Man doll. The special effects are great.

Desperate to save John, Olivia uncovers a connection to Walter Bishop, a mad scientist genius who specialized in “fringe science” for the government but was locked in an insane asylum for experimenting on human test subjects. She tracks down his son Peter, who she blackmails into helping her spring Walter from the asylum. She learns that in the seventies, Walter shared a lab with William Bell, now-billionaire owner of science & tech company Massive Dynamic. This smacks of the Dharma Initiative, and in fact there is a “commercial” for Massive Dynamics later in the program. Not my thing, but whatever.

Walter tells Olivia the fact that they can see through John’s skin is “not good.” For those in the know, Walter reminds me immensely of the character David Cronenberg played in the third season of Alias. We learn that Olivia was bluffing about having info to blackmail Peter with. BUT the bluff worked, so he clearly has some sort of shady past. The two also hit it off hardcore, so I’m thinking John’s got to die in order for the show to work the sexual tension.

Walter “connects” Olivia’s brain to John’s so that he can “tell” her what he saw at the storage facility. He has had luck questioning corpses this way in the past. “He wants to give you a drug overdose, put a metal rod in your head, and put you naked in a rusty tank of water,” Peter says in disbelief. Walter’s reply? “Well no, I don’t want to. I’d rather not. It’s just that I can.” And the delivery is impeccable.

It seems pretty clear at this point that the mystery guy is going to be related to this William Bell character. Turns out he’s twins, and one, named Steig, used to work for Bell. Olivia goes to Massive Dynamics and has a creepy interaction with a woman who pulls the skin off her forearm to expose a bionic arm. In this moment, the show crosses the line between “crazy but I’ll roll with it” to “utterly ridiculous.” The woman says mysterious things about “the pattern.”

Olivia talks to Broyles, who has decided she is worth something after all. He dangles a series of recent unexplained occurrences in front of her, refers to them as “the pattern,” and offers Olivia a spot on his top-secret team, saying she can “bring anyone she wants.” SD-6, anyone? She refuses. Meanwhile, Walter has figured out a way to save John, who comes out of his coma. Olivia questions Steig, who claims his work on the plane was done for the FBI. She finds an evidence tape Steig has hidden and discovers his FBI contact is none other than John! I’m actually surprised; I was expecting it to be Broyles.

John kills Steig and there is a big chase scene that culminates in his death. All that work saving him from flesh-eating bacteria, for naught. Though I knew John had to die, this is a tad anti-climactic. Before he bites it, he says to Olivia, “Ask yourself why Broyles sent you to the storage facility. Why you?”

In the end, Olivia decides to join Broyles’ team and asks Peter and his dad to stay in Boston – Walter’s experiments with Bell were just the beginning. So, I guess next week Peter will suddenly be a field agent or something. The final scene shows Bionic Arm Woman ordering a Massive Dynamics employee to “question” John’s corpse. Duh duh DUM!