FRINGE - “Power Hungry”
Season 1 - Episode 5
By the end of the prologue, anyone who’s ever watched TV knows what’s going on. Some poor guy, Joseph Meegar, is manifesting electromagnetic power. Telltale signs—flickering lights, computer problems—end up sending him spiraling out of control. The anomalies start stressing him out, which makes his electro-powers flare up, which make him stress more, and so on until he’s crashing an elevator and killing everyone inside. Tragic, blah blah blah, but I’m already a little annoyed. If you’ve ever watched any science fiction at all, from X-Files to Heroes, you’ve seen this same kind of power, so it’s frustrating to wait for our team to catch up.
Anyway, Olivia and the gang don’t know anything about Joseph, they’re just called in because the elevator crash looks unusual. Walter’s got some theories—Walter always has theories—but Olivia’s still distracted by her dream/vision/visit from the traitorous (OR IS HE?!) agent Scott the night before.
In a new dream, Scott leads Olivia to an elevator where she finds a clue she missed: the maximum weight sign. I guess elevators have scales in them, so she compares totals when the elevator started with the weight of the bodies and the team finally puts together that there was someone in the elevator who caused the crash and lived to escape.
Jacob Fischer is the guy who gave Joseph his Magneto powers, under the pretense of some kind of self-help, “unlock your potential” clinical trials. So around the time that the team puts together they should be tracking Joseph, Fischer swoops in and kidnaps him first.
Walter’s theories lead where all good theories should: electrifying pigeons. He “tunes” them to find Joseph’s electromagnetic signature and they rescue/capture Joseph, and imprison Fischer.
The episode ends with no real epilogue for either of those characters. I suspect they’ll both be forgotten because this felt like another filler episode. The only part that wasn’t filler was the advancement of the Scott-plot. Walter talks to Olivia about her visions, and he’s not surprised, claiming that a part of Scott may still be in her mind from their brain-link the pilot. The real finale of the episode is Olivia having another vision of Scott. She follows him and uncovers a secret office where he was conducting his own investigations, with files on many of the same Pattern events they’ve seen (but with his own findings), as well as an engagement ring he’d purchased for Olivia. Awww, she’s conflicted!
So there’s definitely some of Scott in Olivia’s mind, telling her things she couldn’t have known on her own. I guess at this point we’re wondering if he’s some kind of active presence in her mind, or if it’s just her own subconscious creating the visions around his stolen memories; just raw information that she’s forming a narrative around to process.
I hope the Scott angle doesn’t get silly, but it’s okay so far. The rest of the episode was forgettable.
