EW Ken Tucker: 'Fringe' recap: Baby, baby, sweet baby

by Ken Tucker

This week’s Fringe should have come with an advisory: DO NOT WATCH IF YOU ARE PREGNANT. The harrowing pregnancy of the alternative-universe-Olivia was the coursing vein running through the episode titled “Bloodline.”
Early on, it was disclosed that Altivia was a likely carrier of “viral propagated eclampsia,” a condition, we were told, that usually resulted in the death at birth of either the mother or the child. (The other Olivia’s sister had died in childbirth from “VPE.”) Eclampsia is an acute complication of pregnancy; a propagated viral form of it is, thank goodness, something that exists in the minds of Fringe writers who know how to unnerve viewers effectively.

The kidnapping of Altivia, the needle injection that would speed up gestation of the fetus, the race to find her by Lincoln Lee, Charlie Francis, and our favorite cab driver, Henry (Andre Royo) — all of this made for a swift, tense episode. Once Altivia’s tracking device was removed, Lee suspected an “inside job,” a phrase that would be repeated later in the hour by Walternate, in an attempt to throw Lincoln off the trail of clues.

Fringe used this alt-universe episode to establish a strong new bond between Lincoln and Charlie. They’ve mutually acknowledged that Lincoln “has a thing for Liv” (he would later declare his love for her when he thought she was dying). And after Walternate told Lincoln that the baby is his grandchild, as well as a few mind-blowers about the “other” Olivia, they agreed they need to wonder “what else we don’t know.” It’s a good set-up, to have these two agents working together (with the alternate-Agent Farnsworth, unwittingly/wittingly/instinctively sussing out information they need). Once Altivia had been diagnosed with VPE, she was scheduled for “the procedure,” which I assumed was an abortion to save her life. Thus Walternate’s staged kidnapping (for that’s what it turned out to be) prevented yet another prime-time abortion, with all the controversy that can attend such an operation on network television, but with Fringe, this wasn’t a cop-out — it was a way to heighten the stakes for everyone involved, not only Altivia and her son (for that’s what it turned out the baby was).

“Bloodline” was a beautifully modulated hour, written by Alison Schapker and Monica Owusu-Breen, that took care to establish the anxiety felt by Altivia and her mother, Marilyn (Amy Madigan) about the pregnancy, freighted as it also is by the fact that the father is not the Alt-Olivia’s boyfriend Frank, but Peter Bishop. Marilyn’s barely-held-in-check disapproval, balanced by worry over her daughter’s health, was enacted well by Madigan.

So let’s tote up some of what we know. Walternate had forbidden any experimentation on children, which we’ve interpreted in previous episodes as a humanitarian impulse. Brandonate reminded us that “Peter is uniquely suited to power the machine”… but is that still true, if he has a son whose bloodline is potent enough to make the same connection to the machine? And why would Brandonate have phrased it this way, if the plan was already in motion to get the baby birthed and confirm its DNA potential? He and Walternate must have had a theory that Peter is not unique in this sense, that his heir could “power the machine,” no?

Indeed, we can still interpret Walternate as a not-evil man — after all, as alternate-O said, she and the baby’s lives were both saved because “the virus didn’t replicate as fast as the pregnancy.” But the elaborate kidnapping to gain the baby’s blood sample was necessary… why, exactly? To distance Walternate from whatever happens next in the assembling of the great machine?

I’m still so flushed with relief that Fringe has been renewed for a fourth season that I’m going to let you sort things out as far as the future is concerned (on our side, did Peter come down with sudden, inexplicable urge to go out and buy some cigars to pass around to his dad and the gang?). As far as this week’s episode is concerned, I was shaken and moved, as well as amused (Astrid’s reaction to Sec. Walter Bishop being grandfather to Agent Dunham’s baby: “Oh. I see.”). Have at it below, please.

Fringe benefits:

• The Observer, with his “It is happening” communication to his fellow Hairless Wonders, was busy standing still, witnessing history.

• The birth date of Altivia’s son on the blood-sample card is “14/02/11″; assuming over there they print dates in the European manner, flipping the month/day as we do it, that would make this… Valentine’s Day?

• In the alt-universe, Francis Ford Coppola directed Taxi Driver.

• Also, “Opus the Peahen,” as drawn by “our” Berkeley Breathed and as opposed to Opus the penguin, is read by a chuckling Henry in his cab.

• Over there, a new season of The West Wing has started! I wonder how the ratings for Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip are these days…

• Charlie had a date with Mona, that cute “bug girl.”
http://watching-tv.ew.com/2011/03/25/fringe-bloodline-season-3-episode-18/

'Fringe': Save this show! A guide (and a plea) for new fans.

Mar 11, 2011

10:07 AM ET
by Ken Tucker
The bonds of family, the ecstasy of romance, the exhilaration of intellectual inquiry, and a secret government agency working to protect you from all kinds of crazy, weird stuff. If I told you there was a TV series featuring all of that, plus great acting and superb action sequences, wouldn’t you want to watch that?

Sure you would. And people who are watching Fringe now know it’s doing something rare: It’s a TV show working on all levels, characters with which anyone can identify, imaginative scripts, crackling dialogue, and a positive message (boiled-down: All you need is love). It’s the kind of show that, every time you finish watching the latest installment, you want to see its next episode right now.

A new episode of Fringe, titled “Os,” airs tonight, and as I explain and exhort in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly on sale today, you’re making a mistake if you miss it.

But if you’re not watching Fringe – and in case you haven’t figured it out yet, this is a passionate please-save-Fringe plea to you and to the dear, intelligent, how-much-flattery-do-you-need folks at Fox — here’s what I suggest: Forget everything you’ve heard about Fringe. Banish the notion that you’ll be confused by the serialized nature of its storytelling, that it’s too deep into its mythology for you to catch up. It’s not.
Because like the best TV, Fringe works on a number of levels, and one level is, it’s highly entertaining, accessible stuff. All you really need to know about Anna Torv’s Olivia Dunham and Josh Jackson’s Peter Bishop is that they’re brave investigators for the FBI’s Fringe Division, seeking to solve the mysteries of our world, which may be in jeopardy from another, alternate version of our world. And, by the way, Peter and Olivia are in love in a manner that’s so glowing with passion yet so challenged by emotional roadblocks thrown in their way, they make Romeo and Juliet look like Phil and Claire Dunphy.

And all you really need to know about John Noble’s Walter Bishop is that he’s a brilliant scientist who’s also emotionally fragile, playfully eccentric, and a junk-food junkie (it’s unlikely any other genius has referred to Pop-Tarts as “delicious strawberry-flavored death”). Oh, and by the way, Noble deserves an Emmy for his extraordinarily delicate, wide-ranging performances.

At its big, red, throbbing heart, the show tells the story of a love so powerful, it crosses universes: When Peter was seven, he died. His brilliant-scientist father, Walter, having discovered that there was a parallel universe containing doubles of everyone here, transported himself to that Other Side and brought back that universe’s Peter, to love and to cherish. In doing so, he created not just a rift in the universes (which are now dangerously, explosively out of balance), but also a rift between father and son (when Peter discovered who he really was, and grappled with the idea that he belonged to another Walter, a “Walternate”).
This is the bare-bones version of Fringe, which is creatively capacious enough to also take in the dual nature that resides in every one of us; arcane conspiracy theories that end up as eerie realities; and the over-arching idea held by every regular reader of Entertainment Weekly that we can experience everything – politics, art, philosophy, and cures for loneliness — through the culture around us.

From The Twilight Zone to Battlestar Galactica, the sci-fi/fantasy genre has been downbeat, dystopian, pessimistic, and bleak. In that context, who can blame viewers leery of Fringe, after seeing all those Fox promos in which the heroes yelp variations on “Our whole universe may end!”? We get enough of that kind of message on other channels, like Fox News and MSNBC. Successful, hit TV shows, all hits of any pop-culture kind, have one thing in common: Reassurance. They make you feel that, when you get up off the sofa, you’ve not only been entertained and, at best, mentally stimulated, but you’ve also been assured that life goes on and the future is sustainable.

This positive, utopian, optimistic message is the one Fringe delivers; it’s just that it comes wrapped in a package that some people have too quickly pigeonholed as “dark,” “gritty,” “complicated,” and “it might make my head hurt.”

I’m not going to guilt-trip you and say that if you don’t watch Fringe, you’re helping to create an atmosphere in which daring new shows won’t make it onto future network schedules. Instead, I’ll be sad that you’re not sharing in what could be the best puzzle-pieced epic since Lost, and the best portrait of a fractious family since Frasier, or M*A*S*H. Because right now, Fringe is promising you nothing less than the world – two of ’em, in fact.
http://watching-tv.ew.com/2011/03/11/fringe-fox-save-this-show-cancellation/

EW: Jeff Jensen: 'Fringe': Cool new promo teases cameo by 'Lost' dude. PLUS: Is 'Fringe' preparing for the end? -- EXCLUSIVE

Mar 3, 2011 01:33 PM ET
by Jeff Jensen

It may be a down week for Fringe, but Fox is trying its best to make sure we don’t forget about its Friday night sci-fi saga. The network’s promo department — which has been turning out cool, clever work for the buzz-y, but ratings-challenged, cult fave all season long — has produced another must-see 90-second spot, this one an atmospheric summing up of the season’s War of the Parallel Worlds story that points to a cataclysmic climax. I’m convinced the commercial also contains a few Easter Eggs. At least one is easy to see: Hurley! Yep, Lost alum and Face of Weezer Jorge Garcia — who has been cast in a new J.J. Abrams-produced series called Alcatraz – will be making a cameo in next week’s episode, playing (SPOILER ALERT!) a Massive Dynamic employee. The spot also includes quotes from certain critics who’ve praised Fringe’s fine third season, as well as one nutty media person known for being a crazed fan of the Bad Robot brand of cryptotainment. Behold:

With no new Fringe to preview or ponder this, let’s process last week’s outing, “Subject 13,” which contained major revelations about Walter Bishop’s backstory and begged some big questions. How come Olivia and Peter can’t remember their childhood encounter in the tulip field after she went all Firestarter? And given how tight Olivia and Walter were during her days at The Bishop School For Gifted Youngsters (despite all that cruel, frightening, Paranormal Activity-esque testing), how come the Cortexiphan-enhanced world-hopper doesn’t have greater recall of her mad scientist father figure, who tried to make her troubled homelife a little better by bullying her abusive stepfather into good behavior? Here’s my current theory: Remember how William Bell extracted memories out of Walter’s head? I think Bell performed similar mnemonic lobotomies on Olivia and Peter, as well. The clue: That video footage of Walter trying to trigger Olivia’s latent abilities. Do you remember for whom Walter was making those videos? William Bell. We heard Bishop ask his former partner if he would review the tapes and look for things in Olivia he might missing. I think Bell did see something, something he could needed to utilize or exploit, be it for righteous or self-serving purposes, and doing so required mind-wiping Olivia and Peter.

I thought “Subject 13″ was extremely significant to the larger Fringe saga in another respect: It seemed engineered to help bring the series to an end should Fox ultimately decide to not renew the show. For me, the big picture Fringe story is about two things: 1. Walter and Peter repairing their fraught father-son relationship; and 2. Olivia and Peter making sense of their peculiar connections to multiple worlds of Fringe-y weirdness so they can move into the future as fully-realized individuals, and possibly together as a couple. I think Fringe can effectively accomplish both narrative missions in the remaining episodes of the season — especially in the wake of “Subject 13.”

Before last week’s episode, Walter possessed a moral ambiguity that was tough for Olivia and Peter (and us) to forgive. As recently as the Feb. 4 episode “Concentrate and Ask Again,” Peter was guilt-tripping Walter for the human wreckage caused by his Cortexiphan testing. But now we know that Peter and Olivia don’t know — or for some reason can’t recollect — the whole story of their shared past, as well as Walter’s motives and heart. We used to think Walter wanted to keep Peter for himself and his wife after saving the boy’s life in order to replace the son he lost. Now we know that Walter was desperately trying to return Peter to his home world and his true parents, and that Walter was trying to cultivate Olivia’s powers not to make her into some kind of super-soldier for a future war, but to re-open the portal between worlds and send Peter home. Yes, Walter and his wife deceived Peter about his origins, but we learned they did so in large part to help Alterna-Pete stay both sane and breathing. Given Peter’s dangerous angst over feeling so profoundly alienated from his fake family and fraudulent Green Lantern/Los Angeles Dodgers culture (do you think he was prepared to die if his plunge into “the world at the bottom of the lake” didn’t work?), Walter and his wife felt their only recourse was to basically browbeat him into believing a lie. And they paid a dear price for that.

I really enjoyed “Subject 13.” And it was a great showcase for John Noble, who deserves serious consideration from Emmy voters. I’m going out of my way to emphasize my love for the episode because I fear what I’m about to say may sound like a criticism. It’s not — it’s just an observation. As I saw it, “Subject 13″ effectively reduced the tricky, defining tensions of Fringe into one big horrible misunderstanding — one that has produced profound, destiny-shaping pain for many people that can’t be easily forgotten, but becomes easier to forgive once everyone knows what we know. Especially Peter and Walternate. If Peter knew that back in the day, Walter was doing all he could to give him back the life he was supposed to have — a life that he would have lost, anyway, if Walter hadn’t saved him — then I have to think Peter’s frosty regard for a man he refuses to call “Dad” would finally, permanently thaw. As for Walternate, we must now wonder if this “over there” Javert would reconsider prosecuting his miserable war against the “over here” world if he understood the mitigating circumstances of Walter’s motives. He won’t, of course — at least, not until his master plan has proceeded past the proverbial Point Of No Return.

Regardless, in the battle between endearingly misunderstood father figure Walter and toxically bitter wife-neglecting Walternate, “Subject 13″ made it easier for us to pick a side — and easier for Fringe to resolve its grand epic, if need be, with a concluding sweep of episodes in which secrets will be revealed and sins will be forgiven, culminating with a series finale that will give us what was inevitable from the beginning: A heroic, redemptive, sacrificial death for Walter Bishop.

But I hope I’m wrong.

Thoughts?
http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/03/03/fringe-promo-jorge-garcia-lost/

E! Jeff Jensen: 'Fringe' scoop: An exclusive peek at this Thursday's new episode (Thanks, Giants!)

Nov 2,2010, 10:22 AM ET

On behalf of Fringe fans everywhere, I would like to thank Edgar Renteria and the rest of the San Francisco Giants for putting the Texas Rangers out of their misery and winning the World Series last night. By eliminating the need for a sixth and seventh game, the Giants insured us that Fox will indeed be able to air a new episode of the acclaimed sci-fi drama that was four episodes into its so-far sensational third season before it was rudely interrupted by the so-called America’s Pastime. (Sorry for my sarcasm. But with apologies to Tim “The Freak” Lincecum, Fringe is the only freak-of-the-week drama I want to be watching right now.)

When we last left the story three weeks ago, Peter Bishop and Olivia Dunham took their romance to the next level by finally going horizontal — except the Olivia Dunham in question is actually “Bolivia,” Olivia’s genetic doppelgänger from the imperiled parallel dimension currently at war with our own. Peter can’t tell the difference between Earth A Olivia and Earth B Olivia. Or can he? Here’s a theory for you: What if the super-smart ex-con man has long had suspicions about his FBI agent girlfriend, but he’s been trying to deny them out of fear of sabotaging his happiness with Olivia? And what if the ironic consequence of having sex with Bolivia, of taking their relationship to a deeper, more intimate level, is that Peter has the epiphany that his suspicions are actually correct? (I knew there was something strange about you, but I was never able to put my finger on it. But now that I’ve had my fingers all over you, it becomes clear to me that you’re an impostor! How dare you come over here and take advantage of me like that! Now… can we do it again?)

It will be another week before we get any more intel on the Peter-Bolivia drama, as Thursday’s episode focuses on the drama unfolding on Earth B. The Olivia Dunham of Earth A has been brainwashed by “Walternate” into thinking she’s actually Bolivia (to buy Walternate some time to study her and figure out how she’s physically capable of toggling between parallel worlds) and going on missions with Bolivia’s cohorts in Earth’s B’s own version of Fringe division. (None of them know the truth about Olivia except their supervisor, Broyles. Should he get a funky alt-world name, too? If only this Broyles had an English accent, we could call him … London Broyles!) But Olivia is beginning to crack — her brain is coughing up visions of Peter, trying to convince her that her life is a lie — and the drama intensifies in this week’s episode.

For a sneak peek at this week’s episode, check out the exclusive clip below. I’d tell you more about it, but due to one of those weird tech things, I actually can’t see it myself until I actually post this. (I can explain parallel worlds to you, but I don’t know jack about this video embedding stuff.) And then, after watching the episode on Thursday, make sure you come back here for Ken Tucker’s recap. Glad to have Fringe back — and again, thanks to the Texas Rangers for making it happen. Your lack of clutch hitting is totally appreciated!

http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2010/11/02/fringe-returns/