Craig Blankenhorn/FOX
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, make yourself a raw roast beef sandwich with jalapenos and watch last night’s Fringe.
Well, that was interesting; after announcing upfront that Fringe was going to be strictly a procedural and giving us three episodes that fit that mold, the producers give us an episode that is anything but. Questions are raised and not answered, the central mystery of the episode—what the hell is that humming torpedo-egg thing?—is not answered, and the series introduces a creepily X-Filesian character (I’ll call him Baldy), who has figured in Walter and Peter’s lives and promises to continue to.
I can’t say the episode got me unambiguously on board Fringe. But it did finally offer the promise of making Fringe a series I actually feel motivated to watch every week. On the negative side, the whole Fringe device of human-bodies-as-recording-devices—in this case, Peter somehow unwittingly giving up information he doesn’t even know—is becoming predictable. (“But Walter, that conversation took place five years ago, and he’s been dead for twelve hours!” “That doesn’t matter! I can decrypt the audio from the tissue in his fingernails. Now bring me a blue-raspberry slushie, a digital recorder and a moose!”)
But what a sci-fi series like Fringe needs to distinguish it is a kind of intangible, distinctive weird factor, and Baldy brought that in spades, at least. Maybe he’s assembled from the parts of 40 other sci-fi franchises—down to the Roswell aliens’ Tabasco jones—but he catches my eye and makes me want to know more, from his ability to parrot Peter to his curious speech to his right-to-left Korean/Martian script.
More important, it returned the story to Peter and Walter, which is the one throughline that can make Fringe involving on both an emotional and sci-fi level. (The business of Peter suddenly deciding to stick with the investigation because he met Baldy was an obvious plot contrivance, but a necessary one, since it was becoming increasingly implausible that he would stick around.) And any episode that’s focusing on them is an episode that doesn’t involve yet another visit to Massive Dynamic for an infusion of massive plot explication.
For the first time since the pilot, my interest in the show has actually increased, but maybe this is just me working hard to find a reason to stick with a show I wanted to like. Let me know if you thought differently. Meanwhile, I have to go download some old family pictures from my optic nerve into iPhoto.
