Fringe 1.03 Review: He Hears Things
Original Air Date: September 23, 2008
“The Ghost Network” is another twisty episode that’s not at all what it initially seems to be about. On the plus side, it begins and ends with Olivia’s supposedly dead former partner and lover John Scott; I’m glad to see he still figures into the underlying conspiracy story.
On the minus side — and call me picky, but this is an increasingly sorer point for me — the jarring backdrops that look nothing like Boston whatsoever are beginning to pull me out of the story at the worst possible moments.
A mysterious bad-guy meet-up at South Station, and all I can think about is how unlike South Station the setting on the screen is. A visit to Peter and Walter’s old home in Cambridge, and the only thing I can focus on is how not a single section of the real Cambridge remotely resembles what’s shown on-screen.
Why choose a region with such a distinctive, immediately recognizable look and then not try to replicate it a bit more accurately (and don’t bother telling me budget concerns)? The bland backdrops of Fringe are definitely detracting from this viewer’s overall enjoyment of the show. The atmosphere is completely off, and as anyone who’s ever lived in or visited the Greater Boston area will tell you, the region is all about its unmistakable environment and local flavor. What a miss on the part of the showrunners.
Complaints about settings aside, the series once again presents an episode that’s fairly intriguing but that still doesn’t live up to the promise of the extended pilot. In the middle of morning rush hour, a businessman puts on a gas mask and unleashes a vapor into a bus filled with commuters, right before stealing one woman’s backpack and exiting. As Peter observes when Team Olivia arrives to investigate the passengers now suffocated and frozen in a solid substance like “mosquitoes in amber,” the stunt was clearly staged to attract attention.
Walter later determines the released substance contains three compounds marketed exclusively by Massive Dynamic. So, it’s so not surprising when the team stumbles across Roy McComb after his priest alerts police that Roy is seeing Pattern-related disasters before they happen, including the bus incident. Roy was a test subject for Walter and Massive Dynamic founder William Bell, aka Belly, twenty years ago when they were partners working on the so-called ghost network.
Say what? No, it has nothing to do with the paranormal, which is why the episode’s title is deceptive. Simply put, the network is a way to communicate using a spectrum of waves not yet discovered by traditional scientists. Roy’s psychic ability is a result of the metallic substance left in his blood twenty years ago, which has made him like a receiver now that someone else has perfected the ghost network; his brain is overhearing the calls someone else is making.
The best part is they don’t know Roy can hear them discussing issues related to The Pattern, which gives Team Olivia the opportunity to listen in, too, after Walter rewires Roy’s brain in a hokey scene featuring a hokey magnetic neurostimulator Walter hid in the walls of the previously mentioned Cambridge house. Better gadgetry, people, please!
Too bad we never find out what the woman on the bus, undercover DEA agent Evelina Mendoza, had hidden underneath the skin on her palm, because, once again, all of the bad guys either kill themselves or each other before the truth comes out. Yeah, conspiracy-themed shows tend to be frustrating like that, but it doesn’t make the constant teasing and lack of follow-through any less irritating.
How cool is it, though, to see John Scott’s head hooked up to a computer after we hear Nina Sharp’s lab rat report they’ve been pulling information from his disk for the last twelve hours? So, what do you think? Does John just have a disk inserted in his brain or is he, like, a robot or something? Yet another piece in a huge puzzle — thank goodness the show’s ratings continue to be strong enough to pretty much guarantee it will stick around long enough to finally (hopefully) provide some answers.
1 Comment
I was really hooked to Fringe with the pilot, but lost interest in the second episode. Maybe it’d be a better movie?
Anyway, near the end of this episode I felt a little more hooked. Perhaps it’s getting back on track now.