TV Verdict

After a holiday hiatus, Fringe comes back on the air; just in time to have Lost take everyone’s attentions away for the next four months! But that’s okay. It just gives Fringe the chance to expand and grow further into its myriad of conspiracies and double-crossings and keep getting more and more improbable.

Episode recap and spoilers below.

Ep 11: “Bound”

Olivia is captured by the men working for enigmatic criminal David Robert Jones and imprisoned in an unknown location, wheeled about in a gurney and given a spinal tap. Unknown to her, her tormentor is none other than co-worker FBI Agent Loeb. Ever the wily one, Olivia escapes, only to have the FBI descend on her and arrest her for unknown reasons—but not before swiping some odd-looking test tubes from the underground facility.

When Olivia regains consciousness, she finds herself handcuffed to a hospital bed, facing an old enemy: a former Marine she helped convict of sexual harassment. Unfortunately for her, this man is now in charge of Homeland Security’s review of the Fringe Division, so going forward, he’ll be making her life miserable (and enjoying it).

Meanwhile, Walter and Peter investigate a gigantic slug-like creature that emerged unexpectedly from the mouth of an immunologist giving a lecture in front of his class. It appears that the creature is a super-sized form of the common cold, and bears a striking resemblance to the material Olivia rescued from the lab prior to her daring escape. Someone is killing all the country’s experts on infectious diseases with the sniffles. Only Walter appreciates the irony, the scamp.

As Oliver puts together the pieces of her abduction, she realizes Loeb was her captor, and heads over to his house to investigate. As luck would have it, he runs into her wife, Samantha, and the two have an awkward conversation, right before the guns start coming out.

Well, wouldn’t you know it; right after I praise Fringe for introducing us with some identifiable, recognizable villainous characters, they get exposed and arrested by the FBI. Easy come, easy go. Still, watching Agent Loeb get nailed was pretty fun in its own sort of way, especially his reaction at the end of the episode. The big payoff, of course, is the revelation that maybe, possibly, perhaps Loeb and his misanthropic band of Pattern-fellows might actually be helping Olivia? Maybe they’re the good guys? If so, then who are the bad guys? You probably should have seen it coming, if you’ve been paying attention to the way logic works on Fringe (it doesn’t). A great reveal all the same.

On the plus side, we get a new “villain”, although “irritating annoyance” seems to be a more accurate description: Sanford Harris, an ex-nemesis of Olivia’s and the unlikely Homeland Security overseer sent to ensure the Fringe Division dots its periods and puts lines through its dollar signs. His contempt for our heroine is visceral and frontal, which makes his addition to the show a puzzle. Fringe, after all, gets its jollies from being deceptive, elusive and backstabbing. A lousy boss… isn’t this a bit transparent?

Quite the good episode, even considering the improbably foolish premise! Still, watching a giant slug-like thing crawl out of a dude’s mouth? Very Cronenberg. I approve wholeheartedly.

Ep 12: “The No-Brainer”

Olivia entertains her niece and sister at her home, prior to being called into work to investigate a young teenager whose brains spontaneously liquefied in his skull. Puzzled, the Fringe team discover the death of a car salesman from the same affliction, but are unable to make a connection between the events. Both men were using their computer at the time, and both hard drives are unexpectedly fried. Peter uses some black market connections to recover some data, and lead Olivia to the location of the next computer virus attack: her apartment.

Walter hypothesizes that a computer program, using a nasty combination of sound and audio, can in effect attack the human brain—a computer virus that human beings can catch. Worse, it appears the creator of the virus has full access to the computer, including the webcam, and is watching Olivia. Meanwhile, Peter tries to keep an old lady from talking to his father, but is unwilling to share with his co-workers who she is and what she wants with Walter.

Ugh, where to begin? First of all, this episode is ruthlessly plagiaristic, essentially lifting an idea directly from “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson, a novel that any Powerbook-wielding sci-fi scriptwriter would no doubt have in their possession. So there’s strike one. Strike two in “The No-Brainer” is the absence of a good paranoid conspiracy; instead, it’s just some nutjob with a computer writing viruses to get back at people who ‘did him wrong”. And it’s Frank Sobotka to boot! I like actor Chris Bauer as much as the next man, but casting him as a genius computer programmer is like casting DJ Qualls as a professional wrestler. Also, who clicks on pop-up ads? Forget exploding brains—that’s the most unrealistic element of Fringe thus far.

Plus, it’s just a stupid idea, and one we’re pretty much sick of by this point, having seen every Japanese horror remake in the world. Ooh, killer computer. There hasn’t been an idea tossed out by Fringe yet that I’ve been insulted by, until now, because (shocking revelation) computers don’t work in this fashion. I detest how lazy writers manage to create situations where computers can do all kinds of horrible, terrifying, amazing things simply by a few keyboard clicks (except for the movie Hackers, which was 100% accurate). Maybe I’m letting my previous IT career cloud my suspension of disbelief here, but there wasn’t a single bit of logical sense in this episode.

In an episode about brains being literally turned to goo, it’s horrifying that the most amicable element is a small, toss-away subplot involving Walter and the mother of a former lab assistant who died in an fiery accident still yet unexplained, prior to Walter’s incarceration in the nut house. This is far and away the weakest episode of Fringe we’ve seen yet.

So, one good episode and one bad episode are in the bag. Hey, every show is bound to stumble now and again. What upsets me the most about “The No-Brainer” is how horrible Fringe becomes without any trace of the Pattern, or weird eyebrow-less men in black, or ruthless mega-corporations or rogue FBI agents. When you take all the elements of Fringe away that make it, well, Fringe-like, the remnants are like a bad X-Files episode—like the ones towards the end of the series, right before it got itself canceled. It’s awful. It’s almost an argument for an indefinite delaying of revealing any secrets of any kind, simply to give the show some backbone.

Here’s hoping next Tuesday’s episode, “The Transformation”, puts things back on track.

©2008 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Craig Blankenhorn/FOX