FRINGE 2.15 - "Jacksonville"

WRITERS: Zack Stentz & Ashley Miller
DIRECTOR: Charles Beeson
GUEST CAST: Jim True-Frost, Sarah Edmondson, Ryan McDonald & Ada Breker

[SPOILERS] No sooner has it come back from Christmas hiatus than Fringe is going off-air again, to help Fox find a timeslot for new series Past Life. That's very disappointing and certainly won't help the show's ratings, if you ask me. Still, this "winter finale" was one of the stronger episodes we've had since December, if only because attention returned to some of the mythology's key ideas: that being from an alternate universe are trying to merge the two existing realities, and that Olivia (Anna Torv) has special mental powers that should prove invaluable in the fight to prevent dimensional apocalypse...

We start with one of Fringe's typically arresting teasers, where a building in Manhattan was rocked by earth tremours while an architect worked late, eventually leading to the entire building shaking apart. Amidst the rubble, the poor man found himself impaled on a wooden beam, but more frighteningly had apparently grow an extra arm and two additional legs! Fringe Division were called in, to find the entire building contains dead people with various physical deformities, although Walter (John Noble) was quick to deduce the truth behind what happened: the building had actually traversed dimensions, and the people inside merged with their alternate-Earth counterparts, resulting in death for most of them.

It's not long before the team realize this season's recurring villain, Newton (X), was behind the whole experiment, and Walter reveals that the universe ("multiverse", surely) demands balance – so, a building of equivalent mass will vanish to the other dimension within 35 hours. Fortunately, there's a way to detect which building need to be evacuated, as the children Walter and William Bell experimented on in the '70s with the drug "cortexiphan" proved able to detect "glimmers" in objects from the other side (quite why these glimmers appear on objects destined to be sent to the other side is glossed over...) Anyway, seeing as Olivia was one of Walter's most promising guinea pigs as a kid, he decides to take her back to the scene of his experiments, Jacksonville, and replicate his tests to elicit her ability in adulthood.

"Jacksonville" was undoubtedly a fun episode, as most of Fringe's stories dealing with its mytharc tend to be. But the most memorable aspect of this story was in reminding us that, despite being written as the absent-minded professor archetype, Walter Bishop wasn't too far from a Joseph Mengele character back in the '70s. He may appear to regret his actions now, but that doesn't excuse the fact he was a rather frightening man who basically pushed the frontier of science at the cost of his own humanity in many ways. The moment when Olivia was given a drug-induced nightmare to stir up a sense of fear and sharpen her perception (in some superbly-directed sequences in a spooky forest), was most unforgettable for her simple, understated response to Walter after waking up ("who are you?") and remaining prickly around Walter for experimenting on children.

In retrospect, "Jacksonville" didn't really reveal anything we didn't know already – it merely gave us some visuals to place alongside the notion that Olivia (or Olive) was experimented on, and what the stakes are if Newton's team succeed in bringing the world realities together on a universal scale. I'm assuming their technique will have to be improved, to prevent a total mess of deformed bodies and "rearranged" buildings. The final act of this episode was very enjoyable, with Olivia apparently having failed to access her latent abilities, but then realizing that her fear of not preventing a catastrophe is what can educe a response, and eventually helped her detect to New York structure destined to be sucked through a dimensional rift to restore equilibrium.

Plus, the episode ended on a compelling note, as Olivia's ability allowed her to see Peter as a shimmering visage and immediately deduced that he's from "the other side", with Walter quick to implore her not to tell him. It'll certainly be interesting to see what happens when Peter's made aware of his true origins, and if Walter will be able to justify what he's done. After all, as alluded to in this episode with the architect, his wife will never know what happened to her husband – so it seems likely that Peter has family in the alternate-Earth who likewise think he just vanished as a child.

Overall, this wasn't quite as dramatic as I think it was intended to be, but I still feel Fringe's mytharc is a more engaging and imaginative part of the show than its more formulaic plots that involve bizarre viruses and mutants. However, coming so late in the season, I'm still not feeling anywhere near as gripped by the show as I was last year, as it feels like its revealed its hand too soon and doesn't quite know where to go from here.

4 FEBRUARY 2010: FOX, 9/8c