Fringe: Someone In The Writers' Room Saw A Documentary On Progeria
This week's Fringe opened in a motel room, where a man and a woman who clearly don't know each other have just done sex. The man excuses himself to go to the bathroom where he opens a bag full of surgical tools and begins filling a syringe with Mountain Dew syrup. The woman meanwhile continues talking on the bed, unaware that she is about to get Hostel'ed to death. But as the man puts the final touches on his perfect crime, the woman starts screaming. Something is moving in her stomach. She crawls outside and is screaming in the parking lot, so people come out to see what's happening. The man drives her to the hospital and now her stomach is just bursting. He drops her off at the emergency room and drives away. She's wheeled in for an operation and everyone is talking about how they are going to induce labor and then she dies and then they cut her stomach open and all the surgeons start puking. Cut to commercial. It's a truly great opening sequence, perfectly setting us up for an hour of plot holes and disappointment.
To keep things short and sweet, it turns out that the would-be murderer is afflicted with some kind of rapid-aging disease, and he murders women for their pituitary glands to slow/stop the process. When the Fringe-Files team arrives at the hospital they discover that the dead woman's baby has grown into an old man in died in a matter of hours. Always practice safe sex when you have science sperm, you guys. Now it's a race against time to catch the murderer before he kills again. Well, until he kills again again, because halfway through the show they find another dead body. But OK.
Chasing a man baby with turbo sperm is a fun enough idea. But in this show's over-eager attempts to create an alternate conspiracy universe, it keeps falling apart. Last week there was shared dream state. This week they attach a special laser camera to a dead woman's eyeball that allows you to rephotograph the last thing she saw? And then feed that image, in this case a bridge, into a computer so that you can triangulate the warehouse where she was murdered? (You cannot triangulate the warehouse where she was murdered.) Perhaps the funniest part of all was how this rapid aging process can take a fetus to old age in four hours, but the killer has managed to keep himself at a healthy looking 32. That is a healthy looking 32 UNTIL he starts getting chased by Scully Olivia, at which point his hair turns gray, he becomes a hundred years old, and he dies. Oh wow, she chased him just in time! I also liked when he was dying and complained that the scientist who created him should have just let him die. Um, you spent the whole episode picking up women in the bar and gruesomely murdering them. Why don't you let yourself die, science grandpa?
Oh, Fringe. I want to like you so much, but so far I am not liking you so much. Too silly! Don't sweat it, though. It's not like I don't spend all day watching things I don't like.
Posted by Gabe at 2:15 PM in New TV Shows
Tags: Fringe | JJ Abrams
so yea... i was definitely live... um... imdb-message-board-chatting this show last night...
all i can say is walter has the best lines from last week's "i just pissed myself... just a squirt" to this week's "it warms your ass".
and the dementia-riddled genius-simpleton voice makes everything he says that much funnier.
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That capturing an image of the killer from the dead person's eyeball experiment was a subplot in The Alienist when they were trying to catch a serial killer. However, the experiment failed. That was over 100 years ago, though, so technology has probably advanced.
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Wasn't that also how Artemis Gordon found out it was Bloobath McGrath who killed the scientist in Wild Wild West...oh, how sorry I am to know that.
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I like to imagine that you are really Candice Bergen but you use the name "Murphy Brown" so you can comment anonymously about Will Smith vehicles on blogs.
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