FRINGE - “The Equation”
Season 1 - Episode 8
A boy is kidnapped by a woman who uses flashing lights for hypnosis to pull off the abduction. In some of the worst detective work on the show yet (stupid coincidences, obvious holes and errors overlooked), Olivia and Peter put together a few pieces of the puzzle but it’s up to Walter to save the day by returning to the asylum where he was held to question another inmate who was abducted under similar circumstances.
Probably like, the seventh thing they teach you in writing school is that the guy running the asylum is always up to no good. He might be a mad scientist experimenting on the inmates, or he could just be this guy, a flat plot device of a character who counts any former inmate walking free as a loss, but either way it surprises exactly no one when he contrives to reincarcerate Walter. He only manages to hold him for a night, but it’s enough to shake Walter up a bit. Oh, and that bad writing I was talking about? The extended stay is also exactly what the plot needed to give Walter more time with his old buddy, who initially refused to help. Convenient!
It does give me a chance to make one wacky prediction though. And run off on a long tangent. Remember the flashbacks on LOST? Somewhere in the middle of the show, when it started to get into some of the crazier time-travel stuff, I offered the mostly-joking-but-wouldn’t-it-be-funny suggestion that maybe the flashbacks we’re trained to recognize as a storytelling device were literal shifts through time in the narrative that the characters weren’t yet aware of. There was no good reason to suspect it, but it just occurred to me that it would be fun to manipulate some of the most fundamental expectations and assumptions we bring to the act of watching TV (or movies, or whatever).
The best example I can think of is in Inception. When Cobb (DeCaprio) first takes Ariadne (Page) into a shared dream, she doesn’t realize it. As the scene opens, they’re apparently in the middle of a conversation at a cafe. But he begins to explain how dream-sharing works, going on to tell her that you never remember the start of a dream, and then he presses her to explain how they got to this cafe. You get to watch Ariadne’s brief confusion transition to understanding—she’s dreaming right now—but the beauty and the impact of the scene is that the movie played the same trick on you. When the scene started, you didn’t consciously acknowledge “Now a new scene is beginning!”, but you didn’t have to because you’ve seen films before. Just like Ariadne, you didn’t suddenly wonder what we were doing in a cafe or how we got there. There was no perceived incongruity. Except in this case there was an actual jump in the narrative. Ariadne didn’t catch it because she was dreaming, we didn’t catch it because we just thought we were in a new scene in a movie.
That’s the sort of thing I entertained as a possibility in LOST, and that line of thinking came up again for me in this episode. When Walter is faced with spending the night in the asylum, he’s visibly shaken. As he lies down that night he even hallucinates, he sees a sane, well dressed version of himself sitting next to him on the bed, welcoming him back. He sees this hallucination at least once more while in the asylum.
So what if it wasn’t a hallucination? When you see a crazy person talking to a second version of himself in a scene, that’s obvious TV shorthand for “this mentally unstable character is hallucinating”. Except FRINGE is exactly the type of show where there could be two Walters in the room together. Although one of them would probably be dead, and likely wired up to another cast member.
Anyway, that’s just a shot in the dark, but if I keep making this prediction, eventually I’ll look brilliant for getting it right.
Oh, they get to the boy in time to save him, but not apprehend the kidnapper. To make a badly written story short, she got what she wanted from him, the MacGuffin Equation that she turns around and gives to our new friend Loeb. Do you like apples? Cause Loeb just put one in a safe, then used numbers to pass his hand through the solid wall of the safe and pull it out. How do you like them apples?
