FRINGE 2.13 - "What Lies Below"

WRITER: Jeff Vlaming
DIRECTOR: Deran Sarafian
GUEST CAST: Geoff Pierson, Conrad Coates, Nathassia Malthe, Demore Barnes & Nicolas Von Zill

[SPOILERS] I'm continuing to have difficulty getting excited by Fringe this season, but it's particularly frustrating how its standalone episodes seem to have settled into a loose formula that's just being repeated. We all know that Walter's (John Noble) capable of solving whatever you throw at him, eventually -- he may even have helped create the problem before conveniently forgetting about it –- so it sometimes feels like the show's becoming too predictable. Why not let Walter be flummoxed by something one week, and for Fringe Division to just fail? Or for someone other than Walter to solve the week's problem?

"What Lies Below" was relatively humdrum at times, certainly for the first act, but it managed to get over its shortcomings and became a decent instalment. The story began with a mysterious man from the Netherlands entering an office building with a bleeding nose and promptly dying as he vomited a cloud of blood. Fringe Division arrived to ascertain how the man died, with Olivia (Anna Torv) and Peter (Joshua Jackson) later becoming trapped inside with the workforce after Walter orders the building to be quarantined as an infection apparently spreads. The CDC arrive to seal the area, with no-nonsense Arnold McFadden (Dexter's Geoff Pierson) assuming control of the situation from Broyles (Lance Reddick), meaning Walter and Astrid (Jasika Cole) must find a way to identify the bizarre contagion and create a cure before the people inside die...

There were a handful of good ideas in this episode; from splitting Peter and Walter up (to let Walter face the prospect of his son dying, again[*]), to the fact the virus apparently demonstrates a kind of survival intelligence. As alluded to in Walter's dialogue, Jeff Vlaming's script felt like it had taken an interesting piece of trivia (that Rabies can be destroyed by simple H20, so it makes the infected frightened of water) and embellished the idea of an "intelligent virus", so that this episode's supervirus made its victims crave to be amongst large groups of people to spread itself much faster.

Overall, there were some cliches with McFadden's character being a by-the-book pain who plans to have the infected killed by sending in an armed task-force, and a few silly moments (not least how Walter managed to destroy a 75,000-year-old virus using the contents of a fridge), but this wasn't too shabby when all's said and done. Sci-fi stories about deadly diseases always offer something fun to chew on, and "What Lies Below" had its entertaining moments of gore and a fairly tense climax. I just feel like Fringe is struggling to astonish and grip us in these standalone stories, perhaps because they all have to involve some pseudo-scientific explanation, whereas the often-evoked X Files had a much wider net to throw.

21 JANUARY 2010: FOX, 9/8C

[*] Yes, they haven't forgotten one of this season's plot-threads; that people will find out Peter was actually stolen from the alternate-Earth by Walter to replace his real son. Astrid now knows something's up, so I'm sure she'll eventually piece together the puzzle.