How grateful do Fringe's producers have to be to John Noble?
No matter how weak or uneven an episode is, Noble elevates it, either through humor, gravity, or both.
Take this week's installment, the third in a string of fairly disposable self-contained episodes.
It actually started off with a very unsettling opening, in which half the guests at a Jewish wedding are killed by suffocation.
And it featured an interesting villain: a super-polite Nazi who may or may not have been over 100 years old. (Politeness and charm aside, he was still no Hans Landa).
Still, the episode lost me in a few places, the final showdown, which took place at something called the "World Tolerance Conference." It was a bit too on the nose, like having a superhero fight a villain called "Captain Racism" or something.
We get it: the guy was a Nazi, believed in a master race. But why not just attack the subway? Or set one of your sterno bombs off at Harvard? It's not like the FBI wouldn't know it was you.
The saving grace in all this: Walter, Walter, Walter, who showed a range of emotions this week.
We got silly, goofy Walter at the beginning, trying to fix Peter up with Olivia ("Do you think she'll call me 'Dad'?"), followed by serious, angry Walter after he learned Peter had sold the German novels, followed by deadly serious Walter, killing off the Nazi with his own formula. And Noble sold it all. Why doesn't he have an Emmy yet?
Other thoughts:
- Astrid didn't even flinch when Walter called her "Ostrich." I guess by now she's used to him not knowing her name.
- I was away last week and didn't get a chance to write about the previous Fringe, but to be honest, it wasn't that impressive. It did manage to move the overall story forward a tiny bit by having Astrid hear Walter say he couldn't allow Peter to die again. And I liked the concept of a virus being smart enough to know when to spread.
- Next week -- a return to the show's mythology storyline, and some really freaky stuff involving the alternate universe and ours coming together. I'll try not to make "When Worlds Collide" the title of my post.
Tom Coombe
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