Fringe - 4x06 - And Those We Left Behind

God damn, what is it about Fringe and time travel that breaks my heart every single fucking time? White Tulip was practically Emmy bait, what with  Robocop  Peter Weller's mournful, stoic performance complimenting John Noble's mournful, batshit crazy one, and all culminating in a perfect, closed, paradox-less time loop. I fucking loves me some paradox-less time loops. And this week, we get Stephen. Motherfucking. Root. as a ...mournful scientist (hmm...) desperately scrambling to create a perfect universe where he can be with his wife forever.

There were shades of Stargate SG-1's Window Of Opportunity in vague concept (a grief stricken scientist creating bubbles of looped time in order to buy more time to solve a series of equations), but while SG-1 played the majority of the episode for laughs, avoiding the heartbreaks until the very end, we're given a front row seat to Stephen Root's grief less than halfway in.

I once said I'd gladly pay twenty bucks a week for standing room only tickets to watch Jimmy James read the phone book, and it's really all because of Stephen Root's uncanny ability to channel wholly unique characters that ooze any one of a number of powerful emotions. Pathos, disgust, geniality, they all just appear fully formed out of this guy, summoned by nothing but a folksy accent and an intrinsic understanding of how to blend subtle and larger than life character tics into three dimensional characters. Here we don't get any less. Any other bit player given the part would've hit all the usual notes, yelled at all the right places, grimaced at all the expected times. And we would've forgotten him the same way we've all forgotten anything about that creepy zombie marionnette creator, or whatever the hell the deal was with the inventor in Johari Window. But I'm not going to forget the look on Root's face when he opened that journal in the end, or when he pleaded with his wife to let him repay her. I fucking loved this, and I really appreciate the Fringe team going out of their way to make sure they got someone of Root's caliber to do this episode justice. Peter Weller and Stephen Root. I can't wait to see who they'll get next time they decide to go this route.

I also really liked the relative originality of the premise. While the broad strokes were reminscent of SG-1, the execution definately was not. Though, science-wise, I did end up thinking the same thing I thought at the end of White Tulip, it would really be awesome if they saved this technology for use in the future. Walternate tries to start shit? Boom, time machine, biatches. Don't have quite enough time to figure out a solution to some big problem. Boom, time loop, biatches. Yeah, I know, it was hurting the environment as it went along. But they could build it out in the desert or something, and ameliorate all those problems. Eh, it's moot. The rules to this device never quite make sense, but that's okay, because by limiting the majority of the action to the house, we really got to cut through a lot of distractions and get to the meat of the drama.

I also always really like episodes that pay extra attention to the story of how the MacGuffin was built, and the whole idea that the architect of all this chaos was "just" an engineer working from notes of his wife's brilliant theoretical work was really a nice twist. I can't help but think of this as the Mensa version of some airport Notebook-esque novel about some rugged widower carpenter building something for his late wife. It subverts the usual cliche by having the woman be the inventor of this univese changing technology (as opposed to her being passive motivation to the man to invent it), further subverts the cliche of the engineer being a polymath (though not by much) by more or less relegating his role to being that of a glorified carpenter (cue Sheldon's endless supply of Wolowitz jokes), and then subverts both those concepts by virtue of the foundation that makes all this possible: that these two are fucking geniuses.

There's just something both banal and amazing about the fact that their core tragedy is an unfortunately common one, but that just by virtue of who they are, the consequences are reality shattering. Which really, has been the central theme of this show ever since we saw Walter break open that portal over the frozen lake.

Speaking of Walter, I did wonder why he wasn't the least bit concerned about Peter's luggable Faraday Cage maybe not working. He may not technically be his son, but I thought the trauma of potentially seeing him literally fade out of existence again would have at least shaken him. Hmm.

"Woman, please. That boy can't die. Tried three times already. Let's toss him in the lion cage at the zoo just to see what happens! And get me another Twizzler!"