Advertisement

‘Fringe’: This one’s for the ladies

Share

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

‘Fringe’ goes two for two when it comes to getting girls into their bras and panties in prime time. Last week, it was series star Anna Torv in her skivvies. This week it’s a guest star stripper who undergoes a sudden and accelerated pregnancy and dies a grisly death all before the opening credits.

The plot involves a test tube child grown up but suffering from the side effects of rapid aging. His solution is to seek out strippers and call girls, drugging them and extracting part of their brain (the pituitary gland) to munch on. Before they die, the women get strapped down and their mouths forced open with a mean-looking dental device, their eyes wide with fear. Screaming women dying painful deaths. This means that ‘Fringe’ can safely add movies such as ‘Captivity’ and ‘Hostel 2’ to its lengthy list of influences.

Advertisement

It looks as if Abrams and crew are working hard to win over the female demographic.

After the promise of the first episode, this one comes off as a disappointment. And not just because of the trashy paperback quality of the main story.

It may be a bit premature to say this, but it appears that the heart of the show, Dr. Bishop and the mysterious villains at Massive Dynamic, represent the laziest sort of deus ex machina for the writers. For two episodes in a row, Dr. Bishop has been able to do a cursory examination of the facts and pretty easily draw a connection to all the spooky work he conducted before his incarceration. In this case, he’s able to examine one body and with a quick look back at his old research, knows the motives and methods of the murderer. And unsurprisingly, Massive Dynamic has constructed just the little device to solve the mystery: an electronic pulse camera.

The pulse camera gets hooked up to the dead woman’s optic nerve -- after the eye has been pulled out of her head, of course. (The series is already living up to suggestion No. 4 from last week.) Let’s all pay attention in the coming weeks to see if they use this thing on every dead body they come across. If not, then it’s true that this device is just a crutch to keep the plot moving.

Meanwhile, the episode’s biggest shocker is the strong suggestion that Peter (Joshua Jackson) is some kind of clone. At least that’s what I took away from the cryptic last shot of three bodies that looked a lot like Peter lying on gurneys in an unidentified medical room and Dr. Bishop’s reference to Peter’s odd medical history. But forget about getting a definite answer; this episode doesn’t give one. I suspect we’ll get lots of hints and ambiguity on this subject before we learn anything concrete.

The same can be said of the mysterious organization that Agent Dunham’s boss, Broyles (Lance Reddick), runs along with Massive Dynamic’s Nina (Blair Brown). Last week, it seemed that the men and women of Massive Dynamic were the bad guys. This week, it seems like they’re either morally questionable good guys or a little of both. And do they really know what’s behind ‘the Pattern’ or are they as clueless as Dunham and co? Again, don’t expect many answers on this front either. But unlike ‘Lost,’ which has always been skillful at making its unanswered questions fun to puzzle over, ‘Fringe’ has so far succeeded in asking lots of questions before we’ve had a chance to care about the answers.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

Advertisement