Fringe: The Transformation
By fred | February 4, 2009
(S01E13) Last week as the most stand-alone episode of the series so far, with a case that probably wasn’t even connected to the Pattern in any ways, and so as we could have been expecting, this episode was a return to the original form(ula) of the show, exactly as we’ve known it for many episodes already.
We open with a new scientific aberration of some kind, then cue to a family moment - even though lately it’s not Peter & Walker whom we call on for that, but Olivia and her guests, serving no other purposes yet – before they’re all called in to the site, where Broyles is waiting for them.
Yep, this is exactly the Fringe we used to know from last year, there was even the part about Olivia coming up with something to Broyles, so that he could tell her it’s nothing new, he’s been working on such things before, here let me show you something… And while I’m sure many will have been happy about this, or at least the whole serialized aspect of things, I gotta say that that wasn’t really the case for me, especially with the way it went down.
Because to be even more like what we used to get, they even brought John back as well! It’s a great convenient plot device: Olivia suddenly has a “flash” and remembers something of John’s life, so she can know who the bad guys are and what’s going on – or at least have some serious clues about it. And when that first occurred, I gotta say that I didn’t like it, it felt way too easy a way to get them on the right tracks.
The good news was that Olivia decided, of course, to go back in the tank and go meet John again, and that eventually led to putting an end to those meetings in dream land and flashes of somebody else’s memories. As Walter told her, now her brain is going back to normal, and John’s memories are fading away. So at least something good came out of this whole thing.
Because I am clearly not a fan of making John a good guy in the end, and given how Hicks did help them to get Conrad I guess there’s no question, even though it is not and cannot be official, that John wasn’t really a traitor, but a good guy after all. And if you remember the pilot, when Olivia chased him after he killed someone at the hospital, and when he basically did the best he could to kill her (except she managed to avoid the crash, and he did not), well that was clearly because he was an NSA undercover agent, and that requires killing people, such as your FBI of a wife to be, of course.
Still some pretty good things took place :
* The actual transformation (on the plane) was pretty cool, I almost wished we got to see more of it! The same cannot be aid about he “transformation” of Olivia’s niece…
* Olivia told Charlie how she got her information, and he just went with it, no questions asked. Pretty cool, we don’t really know where they come from, but I guess he really does trust her a lot – obviously.
* Peter is getting outside of the lab, and putting to good use his experience dealing with bad people. It might not have been going the right way in the end, he still managed to work it out very well. Plus, it’s always nice to see him do something else than babysitter, something he hasn’t been doing much lately, has he?
* Speaking of, Walter is usually the God when it comes to (fringe) science, of course helped by the fact that most the things he met were based on his past work. This might have changed, but it was also cool to see him being fooled by a “better” scientist than he was, or at least that’s how it went down with the time constraint he had.
Plus, he was still convinced Olivia and John couldn’t talk in her dreams, that she could only observe. Of course, he doesn’t know John is still “alive” somewhere at MD, and I’m assuming that’s why he & Olivia could talk that way… (I just hope that means he might still “come back” later on!)
* Astrid had some things to say again this week, but to be frank “go with your guts” doesn’t seem very insightful, or something Olivia really needed to make her decision.
* Alright, Peter cares and worries about Olivia, we get it. No really, when it was about getting Hicks back with the risk of him transforming into a werewolf of some kind I get it, plus it puts his father (and Astrid) at risk, too, but his stare in the FBI building and all, really? I mean, she’s an FBI agent and something tells me she didn’t wait for him & Walter to chase bad guys and put herself in risky situations…
* If you missed him, The Observer was standing on the soccer field (up on the left), before the plane crash. Which, I guess, might be really the only reason we had that scene thrown in there.
What did everybody else think ? Happy that MD is back ? Glad that John’s memories are finally of the past ? Wondering where’s the cow ?
