After a season that featured a scorpion boy, a smoke monster, and a four-foot worm, Fringe ended the first half of its second year on an episode that was fairly light on the gross-out/weirdness factor.
But it was a "mythology" episode, which I'd been missing, and it really didn't disappoint. We got a lot more of Walter and Peter, which I'd like to think the show is turning into the central characters.
Compared to them, Olivia just isn't as compelling or sympathetic, and even though the writers set up some sort of "chosen one" story arc for her last season, that seems to have gone on the back burner this year.
And that's fine. It's far more to see Walter's guilt over taking Peter from the other dimension, and to witness his slow climb back to lucidity.
Several episodes have dealt with the fall-out of Walter's 17-year stay in the hospital, but this one did it the best, and brought forth an idea that the show has only really hinted at. As Olivia put it, going crazy made Walter a better person.
And we sort of got a glimpse of that tonight, as Newton's brain experiment turned Walter into his pre-breakdown self, and we saw a brash, arrogant man, not a sweet, goofy man-child. I'm glad that -- unlike the victims in tonight's episode -- Walter's mental illness isn't something that could be just switched off. Hopefully, the show will continue showing us Walter's journey to reach a mid-point between those two extremes.
Other thoughts:
- This is kind of clever: Tonight's villain (and, I suspect, the season's Big Bad) is named Thomas Jerome Newton. That's also the name of the title character in the book The Man Who Fell to Earth. In the movie version of that book, Newton was played by David Bowie. Bowie's real name is David Robert Jones, same as the villain from last season of Fringe.
- And as played by Sebastian Roche, Newton is pretty good. And thankfully, the writers have given him a motive for wanting to open the door between the two worlds, as the one he comes from is apparently dying of something called "the blight."
- I have to say, William Bell has been kind of disappointing.
- Usually, Fringe will introduce some sort of crazy idea, and Walter will explain how it could work...in theory. (Emphasis on those last two words). This week, Walter basically was the case, so there was no explanation, making the idea (putting someone else's brain tissue in another person's brain, then keeping it alive with anti-transplant rejection drugs) seem even more outlandish than, say, whatever caused the baby to age 70 years in a few hours last season.
- And that's it for Fringe, 2009. It hasn't been perfect, but it's seldom been dull. Here's to all that is weird.
Tom Coombe
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