Fringe - Season 2 - Episode 14

Fringe again finds me a watching a product of Bad Robot, J.J. Abrams' production company, and a show he created with other heavyweights Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who wrote the two recent live-action Transformers movies.

Fringe in many ways is reminiscent of The X-Files, what with the FBI, an overall conspiracy (struggle between parallel universes, as opposed to aliens and human collaborators vs. good humans) and "monster of the week" stand-alone shows. Abrams and company have even thrown in TV sets on occasion showing footage from The Mulder and Scully Show.

"Jacksonville" is the last episode of Fringe till 1 April 2010, because FOX wants to run some silly looking reincarnation show called Past Lives. This episode gets its title from the location of a research facility where Denethor, Steward of Gondor (John Noble) -- er, Walter Bishop, Scientific Genius -- and Mr. Spock/William Bell injected kids with a drug called cortexiphan to see if they could look into the parallel universe. The only one who could detect it was Olive -- and our current heroine, FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham!

A great opening scene, with some clues that the maroon brick building holding an architectural firm isn't in our New York City. First, they spell the borough "Manhatan," which is not a continuity error. Then Prez from The Wire (Jim True-Frost, playing architect Ted Pratchett) gets some "real" coffee from a coworker. (A bit sad that True-Frost didn't get to meet up with Lance Reddick, who was another cop of distinction on The Wire and is now Olivia's supervisor on Fringe.)

A clue that coffee is a valuable commodity in this universe, I said to my friend, Cross-Eyed Julie, who said no, considering the cheap coffee they serve in a lot offices, but I maintained that we were in the other New York. Another clue is that this firm just happened to have the Defense Department contract (or one of the contracts) to build a "new" Pentagon (!).

And sure enough, there's an earthquake, and suddenly Prez has three arms and three legs, a beam poking through his shoulder, and later, as seen in his torso, what looks like the face from his double from our New York.

Olivia, Peter and Walter seem to instantly appear in the Big Apple from their base in Boston; I've always wondered about this quick travel thing; a flight from Boston to New York would take an hour if there are no delays, but still, this show sometimes stretches reality when it comes to their travels.

When the crew first looks at the crooked and cracked-up building, Walter notes that they are seeing a merger of two structures from the two universes. Inside it gets gory, as they find more mergers of the corpse kind, people with freaked out, terrified faces with all kinds of random body parts sticking out from places where they normally don't belong.

Prez is the only survivor. Walter questions him -- what year is it, who's the president of the U.S. and what buildings were destroyed on 9/11? Prez says, 2010, Obama and the White House and the Pentagon. Bingo! He's a survivor from Over There, where the twin towers of the World Trade Center still stand tall! We know from Season 1 that those things are true, and a new White House was being built, so there is also a new Pentagon underway. Prez was also married in Bizarro-Earth, where he was a bachelor on Our Earth.

Later at Walter's lab, he has Astrid start going through the artifacts shipped over from the Manhattan (with two Ts, 'cause it's our NYC borough). She is grossed out at Prez's merged body, a surprise, considering all the worms, parasites, germs, etc., she has seen in the laboratory.

So Astrid starts to rummage around in the inanimate stuff. She finds a silver dollar with Nixon on it, which causes Astrid to have an "ugh" moment. Reminiscent of Allan Moore's Watchmen, where Nixon was honored by the USA and was in his fourth term as of 1985. The discovery of an odd little double-decker car causes Walter to have an "a-ha!" moment.

He digs back through his old files, finding a picture of a car merged with the statue of John Harvard, founder of the university bearing his name. Harvard the school thought MIT had pulled some weird prank on them, but Walter tells the team that Mr. Spock and he successfully sent a Chevy Monte Carlo to Bizarro-Earth, and another car came back to ours. That vehicle is the one in the files, a 1986 sedan with a CD player, which wasn't an option on any automobile in Our Earth back then.

Walter came up with a theory -- when one object goes to the other universe, another must go back to the other in order to maintain the balance between the two. This means, he adds, that another building will disappear from Manhattan very soon and reappear in Manhatan in Bizarro-Earth. To know which building it is, he insists they go down to Jacksonville, Florida, to the facility where Little Olive and 30 other kids were guinea pigs for Massive Dynamic. Returning there could get Olivia's power restored to detect objects from Bizarro-Earth that have crossed over to Our Earth.

In the snap of a finger, the team is at a building that looks like a redressed Vancouver daycare center with a dead palm tree out in front. Inside there's almost no dust in the place, considering it's been shut down for 30 years. Walter tries to get Olivia to try and pick out the Bizarro-Earth toy that has been placed among a pile of other ones. I figured it was this really ugly looking doll, as I asked myself, could Our Earth really produce such a hideous looking thing?

And whaddaya know, it was the doll, which Olivia selected after Walter shoots her up with cortexiphan and she has a dream sequence thing, where she meets her younger self, played by cute-as-a-button Ada Parker.

Olivia chastises Walter for experimenting on her and the other kids, and he does say he is sorry. He is not the same Walter Bishop he was. That guy was a ruthless researcher who sought results at all costs, no matter what happened to anyone and how much money it cost. That was the guy who traveled to Bizarro-Earth and abducted the double of his son, Peter, after he died as a small boy, and replaced him with Bizarro-Peter -- our current team member, who doesn't have a clue about his true identity.

Walter realizes it's fear that triggers Olivia's power to detect Bizarro-Earth items, but she is so good at channeling that emotion into her work and her anger, that she no longer can see the items.

The FBI and emergency services from Our New York are trying to track down the building that is destined to go to Bizarro-Manhatan. Massive Dynamic staff is also on hand for scientific assistance. Walter, Olivia and Peter arrive, where Broyles has a frantic team set up. Walter suggests locating buildings that have the same mass as the architectural building that came to Our New York.

Meanwhile, Olivia begins to feel fear when she gets close to Peter and realizes that she gets that way about being intimate with anyone. She goes out driving and gets A Feeling that she is near the structure that will make the quantum leap. She lets Peter and Walter know that it will have a glow to it.

Among the canyons of Manhattan, it is the Brayson Place Hotel that is all aglow, and it is evacuated just in time before it just vanishes into the ether, leaving a gaping hole in its place. Olivia saves the day, of course!

In a conspiracy theory "official" explanation, news services report that the Brayson was the target of an "unscheduled controlled demolition," which to me recalled one of the biggest World Trade Center 9/11 explanations. Many 9/11 truthers and conspiracy theorists maintain that the towers were knocked down not by jets, buth with carefully placed and detonated explosives.

At episode's end, Olivia goes over to Peter and Walter's place to take the younger guy out, but she hesitates when she sees a glow around him. Now she knows that he's from Bizarro-Earth! Walter pleads with her not to divulge this secret, and we are done till spring.

With the arrival of crocuses and little leaves on the trees, the circumstances of Peter's entry into Our Earth should be revealed in the episode to be shown in April. Appropriately, it's called "Peter."

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In my previous post, and the first in this occasional blog where I write about TV shows I watch, I believe I actually got a comment from David Lawrence XVII, an actor probably best known for playing Eric Doyle the "Puppet Master," a villain in Season 3 of Heroes who could control anyone as if they were marionettes. He thanked me for trying to get his name right in my Lost recap, which I have fixed to have his name just right.

Lawrence's stage name is a joking salute to the fact that he was the 17th David Lawrence to register with the Screen Actors Guild. You will see him again in upcoming episodes of Lost, as he is currently driving a cab with the fugitive Kate, who hijacked the vehicle holding, Claire, freshly arrived from Australia.