FRINGE - “The Ghost Network”
Season 1 - Episode 3
This poor guy named Roy was one of Walter’s old experiments. They were working on a new spy-proof way to communicate, a psychic frequency energy band that would be sort of like if your radio had a switch for AM/FM/Brainwaves. Apparently someone got it working during Walter’s incarceration, because Roy’s been having visions of Pattern-related events before they happen. He’s a human wire-tap for the communications of whoever’s pulling these dramatic stunts, the most recent of which opened our episode with an attack by these nameless bad guys on some nameless woman and a failed attempt to steal something from her. Of course before Walter figures all this out, they think Roy’s psychic or something, and they don’t realize right away that the target of the attack was an undercover agent. Still a step ahead of our team, our nameless bad guys are able to recover their objective—some kind of important glass computer chip—from the body of the agent right out from under Olivia’s nose.
Walter time! He connects Roy to some wires and the team is able to listen in on the next meeting of the bad guys, where Olivia does what she always does: saves the day in the immediate sense with the recovery of the computer chip, but fails to make progress on the big picture when the guy she caught throws himself into traffic before they can get any answers. They turn the chip over to Broyles, who turns it over to—*DUN-DUN-DUUUUUUUNNNNN*—Nina Sharp. Who hands it to the lab tech, still working on the body of none other than the traitorous (OR IS HE?!) agent Scott.
We knew Massive Dynamic still had the body, but now we have additional “television knowledge”: Showing the body means the actor wasn’t done after the pilot, because you don’t keep paying actors just to lay there on a table for a scene every few episodes. I expect we’ll see quite a bit more of Scott.
Here’s something I haven’t formed my opinion on yet. The opening attack—the first thing we see Roy have a vision about, and the first attempt to take the computer chip thing from the undercover agent—is a guy setting off some kind of gas grenade on a crowded bus with fumes that harden into a green glass-like substance, killing everyone.
Why? They don’t try to take the agent’s body after the attack, the only practical purpose of the crazy, attention-getting, grenade thing is as a distraction so they can swipe her backpack in the confusion. They could’ve accomplished the same thing with a normal tear gas grenade, or even just a straight-up armed robbery. So that’s probably how this show is going to work. It’s probably going to be stupid if you think about it.
Maybe the masterminds pulling the strings stand to benefit from big flashy public displays of sci-fi terrorism. But it’s more likely that the writers just needed a reason for our team to get involved in what would otherwise be an unremarkable robbery. But maybe the masterminds pulling the strings wanted to directly manipulate our team! Yeah, maybe that’s the kind of rationalization that you can spin after the fact, fixing your sloppy writing with more sloppy writing!
I just don’t know if I care. Should that sort of thing bother me if the show is an entertaining ride in the mean time? Three episodes in is too early to give up, but on the other hand you have to remember I’m not just three episodes into FRINGE, I’m about 120 hours into J.J. Abrams television, and LOST left me with some resentment.
