Technorama

The Fringe producers never cease to amaze me. Don’t you just love what they did to Broyles in this picture? Wait until you see some of the others! No spoilers, I promise.

From last week – Peter ends up 15 years in the future. C’mon, you know they’re not going to leave the show on that time line indefinitely – OK, it worked on Eureka.

Every commercial break on this one was a WTF moment – although I found the overall story a bit predictable from the ending of last week’s show where Peter lands in a post-apocalyptic New York. Some of the details in between were nice smacks upside the head, but the makeup department forgot to age most of the characters 15 years, apart from Walternate’s white hair and Olivia’s neice (rrrrraaarrrr).

The basic premise of the story (without ruining it) is: When Peter jumped in to the machine in 2011, it set up a chain of events that destroys the other universe and in doing so, starts to tear ours apart. That’s when things really get bad – at least for us. Walter is locked up (for reasons I won’t share here) and Peter needs to convince Broyles to let him go so he can assist with decoding some evidence they found at one of the fringe events.

So what else can I tell you without giving away some of the awesome surprises. Cars and phones don’t look too different in 15 years. I was hoping that Walter would have made them fly, but I suppose with all the efforts going to stop holes in the fabric of space/time, we didn’t have much time or money to live like the Jetsons. Unless, there’s some crazy way that we can fix all this… You’ll just have to watch and find out and then you’ll be curled up in a fetal position on the floor like me until the fall.

Rating: 9/10

This week’s Fringe had some crazy stuff going on (well that goes without saying, right?) After last week when Peter tries to go inside the machine and gets zapped, Walter stays by his side only to wine and complain to Astrid that he’s done all he can when she prods him to get back to the lab and try to help solve the problem of freakishly random dry lightning strikes between New York and Boston.

Sam, the bowling alley guy, states that “things should have happened like this” which indicates he knows some kind of prophecy about the machine. Later in the show in tells Olivia that he’s from a long line of “Sam Weiss” who dug up an ancient document, found a box that looks like a piece of the machine, and a “key” to possibly turn off the machine that was started on the other side. Hmmm… a whole lot of educated guesses in this show that turn out to somehow be more-or-less correct. Seems like the writers may have been sliding a bit on this one when it came to the story line, but when all you have is three main characters – how many oddities can you really expect.

Well that’s where things take another turn – when Sam and Oliva put the pieces together, they find that SHE is part of the solution to get Peter back in to the machine. In order to do that, she has to use her mental telepathy (remember how she turned off some lights to diffuse a bomb?) Only this time she needs to reach through to the other universe and turn off the shield to the “other machine”. BTW, there’s a great little clip of Sam’s bowling skills while they retrieve the key!

While Sam and Olivia are chasing down parts to bring down the machine’s force field, Peter wakes up in the hospital a little dazed. He wanders off practically unnoticed because the hospital is so busy with burn victims from all the lightning strikes. He gets in a cab and tells the cabbie he wants to go to an address in NY while he’s still in MA! $800 later he’s there and finds his way to a pawn shop to pick up an old silver half dollar (for luck.) He’s still a bit dazed as he makes his way to Liberty Island and asks to see Walter Bishop, the Secretary of Defense. ???!!!! He must have hit his head harder than we thought.

Unknown to Peter, Walter has convinced Broyles that Walternate’s machine must be operating out of Liberty Island and does nice 3rd grade science experiment with magnets and iron filings to convince him that he should bring our machine to the same location to mitigate the damage. How convenient that everyone arrives at the same time – that could be a Fringe event of it’s own. 🙂

So all these things tie together at the end of the show when Olivia succeeds in telepathically turning off the machine in the other universe, Peter hooks into the machine, and we’re bombarded with a montage of Peter remembering Olivia, Walter, and then getting zapped 15 years in to a post-apocalyptic future where he sees the complete Freedom tower and a plaque memorializing the victims of 9/11. That leads us to believe this is our universe, but one of the uniformed people who helps him has a patch on his jacket that says “Fringe Division”.

They’re going to leave us with another cliff hanger for the season and I haven’t got a clue how they’re going wrap up any of this – or they’re building to a big whopping “NOOOOOOO!” and we’ll have to wait all summer to get resolution.

There were some good moments in this show like the scene when Astrid gives Walter a kick in the pants to get back to work, or Walter telling Olivia he believes in her abilities. However, there were a few “random and odd story bits” that I thought fit to bit a little scattered. Perhaps I won’t understand those for another episode or two because they are part of a larger over arcing story line.

Rating: 8/10