‘Fringe’: A real ‘No-Brainer’

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‘The No-Brainer.’
What an aptly titled episode. It refers to our gross-out science of the week: a computer virus that can liquefy a person’s brain and make it seep out his or her nose in a way that reminds me all too well of my allergies.

Though, to me, the title has another significance to this episode as a whole. For a show that I’ve grown to like for its out-there concepts and science, this seemed kinda unimaginative. An unemployed computer programmer creates software that can download itself onto a computer and melt the viewer’s mind. His first victim is the son of the man who fired him. This guy created the murderous program, hacked into the FBI system to find out who was investigating his case and, apparently, is willing to sleep at his workstation. So the question is, why was he fired in the first place? This guy knows how to arrange 1s and 0s to make it seem like a hand is reaching out of the screen to turn your gray matter into fondue. You’d think he’d be able to get hired making something for the Wii or XBox 360. Or, if he’s really desperate, Playstation 3.

Look at his victims. He targets his old boss’ son, his wife’s new husband and a car dealer. Like he went down modern psychology’s list of most stressful life events. And now that I think about it, why did he kill the car dealer? I don’t think they ever really explained that. I could go back and watch ... but ... bleh.

The one promising aspect of the episode was the woman who showed up looking for Walter. Peter worked hard for the first 50 minutes to keep her at bay. Her daughter died in the accident that led to Walter being committed. Peter doubted his father’s ability to handle the conversation, but finally he allowed her into the secret lab. Oh, yeah. Here we go. A little insight into Dr. Bishop’s early questionable experiments and his fall from grace ... or whimsical memories of the young intern’s smile. That’s it? I kept waiting for Walter to let slip something like ‘she’s not completely dead’ or ‘she became one hell of a zombie.’ Hard to believe that this mother knew the exact number of years and months it had been since the accident but was satisfied by Walter saying he missed her.

But hey, maybe the minds behind ‘Fringe’ wanted to take the title ‘The No-Brainer’ to the extreme and all of this was planned. I’ll just believe that and wait for next week.

Astrid Action - My favorite supporting character got a little more face time tonight. Her computer-science minor let her shine in explaining a few things about the fried hard drives. Of course, that didn’t last very long, and Peter took the drives to some guy who wanted his lucky quarter back. Apparently, the back room of this guy’s shop is much more capable of tracking the virus’ source than any Harvard lab. Whatever gives our lab assistant more chance to get on the screen. Keep her coming.

Spot the Observer - I didn’t see the Observer in this episode, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he took this week off. Not a lot to observe or, as a commenter in the watching live thread of Fringe Division said, ‘Missed the first half hour. I like the show and all but it is apparently formulaic enough for me to figure out what is going on without seeing the first half.’

-- Andrew Hanson