Fringe: The No-Brainer
By fred | January 28, 2009
(S01E12) This one turned out to be a pretty odd episode, or at least my reaction to it was somewhat odd I think. When you look at it, and given what I’ve been saying about the show for a little while now, I feel like I should have liked it a lot better than I did, because in some aspect it did exactly what I had been waiting for, hoping to see in this show.
And I liked that, I really did. But the thing is that at the same time, it got to be not as good an episode as usual on other aspects, and quite frankly when you were listening to some of the dialog we got to hear this week, one had to wonder what the Hell was going on, because if that’s not bad writing I don’t know what is, really. Don’t get me wrong though, as I said, there were both bad and good things in there, and one shouldn’t focus on one while forgetting or minimizing the other.
Yes I’ve been complaining that the show didn’t seem to be able to do standalone episode, not really. To make things good and interesting they always had to resort to serialization one way or another, and I wished they would manage to break away from this, and this week they did. Sure the episode opened as always with a new case, but we didn’t then jump at Walker & Peter sharing a moment while Olivia knocks on the door or calls them, to come visit the latest crime scene where Broyles is waiting for them.
No, this week was a little different and it was (at least on my part) greatly appreciated. Also, this didn’t feel like your usual Fringe case. I mean, was it even part of “The Pattern” ?? I didn’t spot the Observer, but I may very well have missed him. Regardless he was there or not, there was no link to the Pattern, or Massive Dynamics, or anything like it. Not even anything coming from an old experiment of Walter’s or something derived from his work. Nope, this was just a normal guy, some computer genius who got angry and decided to take revenge killing people, through computers.
That was good, and yet I feel this actual plot wasn’t really one of the best. It didn’t feel very inspired to me, not to say quite realistic. I mean, it’s one thing to forget about what you know and accept there are crazy fringe scientists out there who can walk through walls or tele-transport themselves, but that anyone can write a computer virus that somehow infects your brain and kills people like that ?? Really ? (Plus a ~650MB is awfully wrong for an actual program, especially in the virus department…)
Adding to that how there seemed to be convenient plot holes all over the place, and that didn’t help either. For instance the fact that Ella didn’t had anything, no damages whatsoever and wasn’t even crying, probably just because she was Olivia’s niece – cause other than that, there wasn’t really any reason, were there? Speaking of which, why the Hell did he kill that car salesman ?? Was there ever anything said about that, expect that they didn’t know why he got targeted ??
I really hate the Harris character. It feels like they brought him on just to add conflict when we had enough bad guys to worry about anyway. And i mean how dumb do they think the viewers are? When he tells olivia to do the interrogation his way, was there any shot in hell that it was gonna actually work. I really loved how daniels (broyles) stuck up for olivia in the end. Speaking of daniels, this was a “WIRE” filled cast if i ever saw one, daniels, sobotka and chris. I love it.