Fringe - 4x07 - Wallflower

You know, it's kind of weird. When I think back on my good memories of the X-Files, I mostly remember the government conspiracies, the alien abductions, the magic cell phones that worked every-fucking-where. When I look back on Fringe in about ten years, I'll probably mostly remember the multiple universes, the Walternates and Fauxlivias, Eddie Finnerty maybe being sorta immortal. But the bread and butter of both these shows were/are the prolific "monster of the week" episodes. These are the episodes that hook the general public in, these are the episodes where the creative teams cut their teeth, where production creates entirely new worlds from scratch, and where the most beloved episodes come from. Now, this isn't really going to be one of those great beloved episodes, but it was pretty damn good. And it occurred to me while watching that I should be annoyed that the bigger, incomprehensible Peter plot is plodding along while we deal with another Not!Vampire, but instead I'm just plain entertained. This is why Fringe will probably age better than it's predecessor.

I wanna see an octopus do THAT.

Alright so, firstly, science is out the fucking window, as usual. The concept of this one doesn't even pass the smell test. It's already hard enough base an "Invisible Man" concept on genetics, but did you really have to throw in poorly thought out animal-gene-splicing into it? Yes, octopii have a complex camoflouge system, but I'm pretty sure it's really just relegated to abstract patterns or waves of color though, and I'm not even a ...fish doctor knowing person. You can't put an octopus in a fishtank and have him turn completely transparent. So how is this guy supposed to do it, involuntarily, no less? Do each of his chromatographic skin cells have "eyes" embedded in them that tell the cells on the opposite side of his body what to color themselves? In exact geometric shapes doors and buildings and intricate glassworks?

Whatever, nerd rant over. I just kind of wish sometimes that this show could try a little harder to correspond to real science. When you hold yourself to actual scientific concepts (within reason), you don't limit your storytelling potential, you expand it exponentially. Every scientifically plausible way to overcome limit X leads to story possibilities Y and Z. Okay, nerd rant REALLY over now.

Forget breaking two universes, this motherfucker has invented the invisible rat.
Truly, he is history's greatest monster.

So the dude is invisible for all intents and purposes. And as heinous and disgsting and horrifying as his acts of murder are (and how does he even "drain their pigment" anyho--no, no more nerd rants!), I'll be damned if you don't feel for the poor bastard after his last scene. As io9 put it, he literally died just to get that pretty girl (or anyone) to notice him. Making you feel for monsters is not something I remember the X-Files doing on a regular basis. It may have happened, but I'll be damned if I can remember it. Similarly, I may not remember anything about Crazy Marionette Maker's performance in his episode, but I'll always remember why he did it. Mostly. I think. It was like a year ago, what do you want from me?

I'll totally remember your touching performance forever, liver-snacking-werewolf...

PigmentVampire also gives the show another chance to throw up the MOTW as a mirror to Olivia, as she wonders if she's as emotionally damaged from her Cortexiphan's trials as this dude was from his Massive Dynamic sponsored splice-fest. Again. For the first time. One of these days I hope a drama major and maybe a statistician get together to map out all the different characters portrayed in this series by the same actors. John Noble takes the cake at a whopping eight (at least) versions of Walter in little less than three years, but Anna Torv is now currently on her fourth incarnation of Olivia who's supposed to be the same version as the first Olivia, but without half the shit in her life happenning to her (including the last four years), and she's Nina Sharpe's adopted daughter. Who's being secretly experimented on by same surrogate mother, and suffering from debilitating migraines as a result. And she fucking pulls this off. They should give out Technical Emmy's on pure acting craft for like half this cast, I swear. Joshua Jackson has it fucking easy. There's really only ever been one version of Peter he's had to portray. Two, if you count Olivia's hallucinations while on the other side.

Speaking of Peter, io9 has a theory that this episode and the last prove that the Peter we're watching is not "our" Peter. Which is to say, he's not the Peter that disappeared from the machine at the end of last season. I'm not sure I'm down with that, I'm liable to chalk up his new Science! skills to a bit of neccessary plot contrivance, or even point out that a Faraday Cage isn't exactly a genius level concept, but I am intrigued by Peter's new insistence that he's not in HIS universe(s).

"Yeah sure, dude. Totally go for it. Just a heads up, I'm
gonna rewrite y'all out of existence on Tuesday, so
try and seal the deal by then."

I can barely wrap my brain around the temporal mechanics involved to even get us where we are now (...if the machine was invented once, how did it end up in both universes? Do they share a common past? Did they diverge recently, or do all inhabitable universes share the same common past?), much less try to do the gymnastics neccessary to factor in an additional TWO universes, which also had to be joined, in the exact same way, in order to avert the exact same catastrophe. I'm not that smart. So instead, I'm going to choose to think that we're caught in a matter of semantics. Peter is just saying that this time line has been rewritten so extensively, that none of the folks here are essentially "his". It's still the same universe(s), just rewritten. So when he says he's trying to get back, he's really just trying to rewrite history again to put himself back in. Or maybe there's some kind of model of the multiverse that allows for multiple timelines within the same universe(s). I don't know. Temporal semantics gives me a bigger headache than temporal mechanics. Moving forward, I think we should all start consulting the appropriate texts, as they'll probably start to become more necessary.

None of the women I meet at diners at 4am look like Anna Torv...

One aspect of this whole reality pretzeling I do like is the utter sweetness that's ThisOlivia's and ThisLincoln's little burgeoning courtship. Even Peter thinks it's adorable as all get out and starts giving Lincoln tips and hunky glasses to help the dude along (probably because he's already decided these aren't HIS folks). I can't help but wonder if this show has accidentally (purposefully?) stumbled on a way to make as many potential shippers happy. Sure, ThisOlivia and ThisLincoln can explore the chemistry the actors have together, (much like FauxLivia and Lincoln were when we left them), but it doesn't take away from the seasons-long romantic arc because she's not really Our Olivia. It's brilliant.