The Morning After: The Muses Dance and Sing

Overall I was in-between on this episode. I like the shock of the Fringe Science stuff, but I found their use of it in this story line to be less effective and more distracting. In general though, I agree with your “self-indulgence” point and overall they pulled it off well.

Could help but think of a Glee/Fringe crossover episode with all the singing. Walter could have made the whole fake pregnancy storyline a lot more interesting.

Agreed, fun little episode, maybe not necessary, but fun to see how Walter views his (stoner) world.

I enjoyed it, but I found it really weird (and not in the normal Fringe way). I had been expecting a whimsical musical episode, and this was not that. It was sort of a magical realism/film noir/in-story roman a clef – quite the mixture. I did enjoy that the song seemed to spring out of desperation (except for Broyles), and the weird combos of old and new technology were nice (although set design of this sort is better done on Caprica).

Why I finally found it satisfying, though, was that they took a throwaway – “we need a week where nothing really happens”/”let’s get one of our characters high” – episode and grounded it in the emotional journey of Walter Bishop. Seeing how he sees himself – such a villainous destroyer of all good, albeit with the face of an angel – was really touching and sad in a way that, obviously, Ella couldn’t get. So poor Walter hears the happy ending that he isn’t ever expecting, and maybe doesn’t deserve. Lovely.

I couldn’t agree with you more. Considering Fringe has the bad habit of having episodes where they drifted away from the main storyline by putting in a monster-of-the-week scenario, it was nice to see them do something different.

And yet we still were able to see, thanks to John Noble, the emotional distress that Walter is going through.

Plus it was just fun. Singing corpses! They took one episode to do something whimsical, and they did it well. It wasn’t “Fringe the Musical”, which could have been horrid. I understood it was a fantasy from Walter’s childlike point of view for a child, but emotionally grounded in his own reality.

I loved it, and considered it good sign for the strength of the show to pull a ‘strange’ ep in it’s second season. Without Lost last week it was the best I watched next to Gravitys second outing…

I finally got around to watching this and I didn’t like it. It was as if the writers split up the different scenes and didn’t communicate. One scene would have total Raymond Chandler dialogue, and the next would be played straight. Then the next would be weird for weird’s own sake.

It did have some nice moments though. I just wish it would have been all out noir.