Fringe: The Equation
By fred | November 19, 2008
(S01E08) I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this show, as I explained last week. And as a matter of fact I’m even not sure how I felt about this episode, I don’t know if it was a really good one or not. I’ve said many times that this show failed, so far, to create real excitement within each episode, that it always relied on the same old formula to construct all episodes, which does leave a big mystery part out of the equation, as well as having this tendency to fall back on serialized plots to try to create a sense of excitement.
And at first look, this episode wasn’t different than the rest. It started like any other episode of Fringe and it didn’t seem to be going any place new, but then something happen. Something that we hadn’t seen so far, and that - confused as I am about the show - I couldn’t really tell if it was a great thing or not, and I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it, though I might lean towards great.
We opened the show with a new mystery that the gang started to work on, and somehow Walter knew about it, he couldn’t really place it but he had memories of experiment linked to what happened that night, he remembered about the red and green lights. But what was new is that it wasn’t from Walter’s past of a scientist, or, not entirely. Sure, he had actually work on such a project himself - thought not for the government but some advertising agency - but it was a complete failure.
Apparently though, it only failed because he didn’t know the key was in colors, in red and green to be precise. But if Walter really knew about this, if he knew about the colors, it was because of Christmas. The red and green lights of Christmas, Christmas means Jingle Bells, which means Dashing and here we are : Dashiell. Dashiell was a “roommate” of his, back in the institution, and he was the one who told Walter about those red and green lights.
By the way, I didn’t like how he did do whatever he did to Peter, using those little lights. At least the woman was using bright flashing lights, you could see the red and green flashing into the guy’s eyes, whereas with Peter it’s like he could have easily been looking around or missing them if not paying attention… I wished they had used different lights, cause it felt cheap that way.
Anyways, Dashiell. Now this could easily be seen as a not so subtle attempt to plant future big drama, as we clearly saw that Dr Sumner wasn’t happy with Walter being out, he almost orchestrated the whole thing so he could get Walter back in, and he made no secret that he would do his best to get him back there — probably for the season finale or something.
But it could actually get worth interest if we were to find out that he’s actually being part of it, that he maybe works for The Pattern (whatever that means), or just MD, and is trying to stop Walter from getting in their way – as he clearly does week after week.
Either way, it made for some real powerful moments as Walter had to go back in that awful place, and he really didn’t want to. Now two main things took place during his stay there : first, he got to see what it was to try and talk to someone who was locked in his own (crazy) mind, what it was to try to reach and fail to understand what the person was trying to communicate, and when Walter asked Peter if that was how he felt, talking to him, was a very emotional moment.
