Surfing SF: Fringe – “Subject 13″

These Fringe spoilers have no effect, just like joy, exhilaration, anger, and loneliness…

 

If I am occasionally harsh on TV shows, it is because I know the heights that great shows can reach. Sometimes I feel like all those who have been lucky enough to be put in a position to make a television show have to do is care enough, and great things will happen. Great shows can take me places nothing else can (well, I don’t have a girlfriend right now, but you get the idea). Shows that squander their opportunities make me want to put a hole through the wall. But when they get it right… I ate half a bag of Hershey’s Kisses before I came down from tonight’s tremendous episode of Fringe. Darn it, Fringe, you’re making me fat!

 

“Subject 13” was something of a sequel to last year’s “Peter”, another episode that consisted nearly entirely of flashbacks to the 1980s. While this episode lacked “Peter”’s perfunctory attempt at a modern-day framing story, it added flashes sideways to the Alternate Universe, where Walternate and Peter’s actual mom are still mourning the loss of their son. Our Walter may have originally intended to take Peter right back, but now he finds he can’t. Peter’s tried at least once to kill himself and keeps insisting that this isn’t his world (The Dodgers are supposed to play in Brooklyn, darn it!). If only one of these Cortexiphan kids Walter’s experimenting on in Jacksonville would figure out how to cross over between worlds…

 

As if on cue, cute kid Olivia Dunham sticks up her blonde head. In the midst of her Step-Dad giving her a black eye (for staying up to read A Winter’s Tale?), Olivia suddenly finds herself running through a field, standing in the shadow of a hovering zeppelin. After she draws this blimp in class, Walter realizes what’s happened. He does a series of tests (recorded on by Walter on his “new Betamax”). In a virtuoso sequence, he tries to provoke every emotion he can think of out of Olivia, but nothing seems to work. So he turns out all of the lights just long enough for Olivia to freak out, then turns them back on for her to find a dead classmate on the floor.

 

Don’t worry, the kid’s not really dead, but it’s enough to cause Olivia to burst into flames and end up in a field filled with white tulips (I’m not actually sure what happened here, but it was pretty spectacular). It’s Peter who finds her, and their emotional connection is immediately apparent. Peter decides he’s not going to get to go home, and though Walter does send Olivia home to her Step-Dad, he also threatens the guy in an attempt to prevent any further abuse, in the process perhaps closing off his one method of traveling between worlds. And thus a war began because Walter just couldn’t bear to see Olivia get hurt.

 

And oh yeah, Walternate found out about the alternate universes because Olivia crossed over without realizing it and told him. Sha-Bam!

 

Bits:

-The white tulips made me think of another great Fringe episode called, you guessed it, “White Tulip”. I’m not totally sure what the connection is, though.

-I kept waiting for another shoe to drop with the Mrs. Bishop character in this episode, but it never quite did. Leaving the door open for another flashback episode, maybe?

-Did we know that Massive Dynamic was called Bishop Dynamic in the alternate universe? Or that Walternate first gained notoriety by constructing some sort of alternate version of the Star Wars program?

-Also worth noting, the US space program is based in Jacksonville instead of Cape Canaveral in the AU.

-Considering what I was afraid Walter would do to evoke a response from Olivia, tricking her with the fake dead kid actually is not that bad in comparison.

-Kid drawings on TV never quite look like kid drawings from real life to me.

-Akiva Goldsman, one of the most famous screenwriters in the world, co-wrote this episode with two others. I actually enjoyed it more than most of Goldsman’s recent films.

 

So, did “Subject 13” make you fat, too? Let us know in the comments.