After Fringe melted an entire airplane full of people in the pilot, I wasn’t exactly expecting the second episode to settle down and behave.
It doesn’t.
When we last left Olivia Dunham, Walter Bishop and his increasingly reluctant son Peter, on Fringe S1E1, they’d stumbled into something much bigger than one very disgusting incident aboard Flight 627. Broyles calls it The Pattern — a collection of bizarre events that may be connected. Olivia has also learned that John Scott, the man she loved and nearly died trying to save, wasn’t exactly the man she thought he was.
So yes, there’s an overarching mystery here. But Fringe also appears perfectly happy to hand us a fresh scientific nightmare every week while slowly connecting the dots.
This week’s nightmare? A baby. Sort of.
Congratulations. It’s an Old Man.
S1E2: “The Same Old Story” opens with Lorraine Daisy and a man she’s just met in a motel room. After they have sex, he disappears into the bathroom and starts preparing something in a syringe.
He never gets the chance to use it.
Lorraine suddenly doubles over in pain, and within moments, she looks pregnant. Very pregnant.
The whole sequence has shades of Alien as something rapidly grows inside her, but my brain went straight to the 1974 cult classic It’s Alive. Except that movie gave us an actual monster baby. Fringe manages to come up with something arguably worse.
Lorraine is dumped outside a hospital, where she dies after giving birth. The newborn doesn’t stay newborn for long. It grows and ages so rapidly that the baby is soon an elderly man — umbilical cord and all.
Imagine being the nurse who walks into that room.
Actually, we don’t have to imagine it. She screams her head off. Another nurse looks like she’s about to throw up.
Welcome back to Fringe.
Walter Bishop Has Some Explaining to Do
Broyles brings Olivia, Walter and Peter into the investigation, and we’re starting to see how beautifully weird this little team is going to be.
Peter still insists he doesn’t want anything to do with any of this. Walter, meanwhile, is fascinated by the seat warmer in the car.
At the hospital, Walter quickly realizes that Lorraine’s impossible pregnancy isn’t completely foreign to him. Thirty years earlier, while working for the Department of Defense during the Vietnam War, he experimented with manipulating growth hormones.
The goal is to grow soldiers.
That little revelation is one of the things I’m already loving about Walter. He constantly describes his old experiments as theoretical, but Peter isn’t buying it, and neither am I. Walter knows far too much about what went wrong for all of this to have remained on a chalkboard.
There’s also something genuinely unsettling underneath all the Walter comedy. He’s brilliant, but his memory is fractured after 17 years in an institution. Sometimes he can’t even remember that he has a laboratory. Then give him a scientific puzzle and pieces of the old Walter suddenly come roaring back.
He even remembers where he parked his car 17 years ago.
Naturally, when they find it, Walter has all kinds of bizarre crap hidden inside, including a specimen jar containing a hand. Of course he does.
Like Father, Like Son
The investigation eventually points toward Dr. Claus Penrose, who worked with Walter during the Vietnam-era experiments. Penrose claims he walked away because he believed the work was wrong and blames Walter for much of what happened.
He’s also lying his ass off.
Meanwhile, another woman has been attacked. The killer is removing pituitary glands because they’re helping slow his own accelerated aging. Walter realizes the man may actually be the result of research that continued after his own experiments and that Lorraine was impregnated with the killer’s child.
This gives Walter the perfect opportunity to offer Olivia and Peter some unsolicited sexual advice.
Walter informs them that condoms aren’t 100 percent effective and that they should be careful when they fornicate. Then he helpfully explains that fornication means sex.
John Noble continues to be one of the greatest things about this show. He makes me laugh.
But Peter is becoming just as interesting. He can roll his eyes at Walter all he wants, but the two of them think alike. Walter starts firing off complicated scientific explanations, and Peter translates them into language Olivia can actually use. When Walter proposes the completely insane idea that the last image a dead person sees might remain imprinted on the eye, Peter initially thinks it’s ridiculous.
Then he helps figure out how to do it.
You can fight it all you want, Peter, but whether you like it or not — you’re your father’s son.
Olivia Isn’t Okay
The episode also doesn’t let Olivia simply move past what happened with John.
She’s digging through his files and revisiting cases they worked together because she’s beginning to suspect his connection to The Pattern went much deeper than she knew. She even realizes that she and John had previously investigated a case remarkably similar to the one they’re working now.
That makes the case personal in ways she doesn’t want to admit.
Peter finds her sitting alone in a park after she loses her temper in the lab, and Olivia admits she hates losing control. She’s still grieving John while simultaneously wondering how much of their relationship was real and whether she somehow helped him without knowing it.
Then things get even stranger.
While waiting with Broyles at Massive Dynamic, Olivia suddenly finds herself having an incredibly personal conversation with him about John and birth control. For a moment, she’s pregnant. Then she snaps out of it. Broyles isn’t even sitting there.
What the hell was that?
Maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable Fringe explanation coming. Or maybe Olivia’s reality isn’t nearly as solid as it appears. I’m resisting the urge to Google anything because I’m having too much fun trying to figure this stuff out myself.
Massive Dynamic Is Definitely Not Suspicious at All
Nina Sharp is back, and Massive Dynamic continues to radiate nothing suspicious happening here, please stop asking questions energy.
Olivia needs specialized equipment from the company to test Walter’s dead-eye theory. Nina happily provides it, knows an uncomfortable amount about Olivia and John, and then casually offers Olivia a job.
Totally normal.
Broyles is suspicious of Nina. Nina doesn’t seem thrilled about Broyles assembling Olivia and the Bishops. Olivia doesn’t trust either one enough to reveal everything she knows.
And somewhere over all of this hangs William Bell, who’s apparently plays a big part in The Pattern.
The case eventually leads Olivia and Peter to a warehouse after Walter’s experiment actually works: they recover an image of a bridge from Lorraine’s eye and use it to locate the area where she was attacked.
Penrose turns out to be protecting the rapidly aging killer, Christopher who’s his son. And Christopher isn’t simply murdering women for kicks. He’s another experiment, desperately harvesting pituitary glands to keep himself alive.
By the time Olivia catches him, he’s already aging toward death. He tells her he never wanted this and blames his father for refusing to let him die.
It’s grotesque, but it’s also sad. Fringe could have made him another monster-of-the-week. Instead, he’s somebody whose entire existence is the consequence of other people’s scientific ambition.
And Walter knows his own work helped make it possible.
The Verdict
Two episodes in, Fringe is already showing me why this thing is dangerous.
“The Same Old Story” works perfectly well as its own creepy science-fiction mystery: accelerated pregnancy, rapid aging, stolen pituitary glands, secret experiments and a killer who’s literally running out of time.
But there’s all kinds of stuff happening around the edges everywhere.
The Pattern. Massive Dynamic. William Bell. Broyles. Nina. John’s secret files. Walter’s missing memories. Peter’s medical history, which Walter seems awfully interested in keeping from Olivia. And those damn glyphs.
I know the glyphs became a big thing with Fringe fans. I know there’s something to decode. I don’t know what they mean, and don’t tell me. I want to figure this stuff out as I go.
The final scene doesn’t exactly help my growing paranoia. Walter can’t sleep, Peter sings “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” to him, and as we hear life is but a dream, the episode cuts somewhere else.
There are bodies in pods, and they look like Christopher.
Oh, good. Cloning. Invasion of the Body Snatchers anyone? At least that’s the vibe I’m getting though this story lives in a totally separate lane.
This is absolutely going to be one of those shows you eventually rewatch just to see how many clues were sitting directly in front of you the first time and you were so totally engrossed that you completely missed them.
🔥 Final Verdict: WATCHABLE. Fringe isn’t slowing down after that pilot. “The Same Old Story” gives us a complete nightmare of the week while making the bigger mystery even stranger. Two episodes down, and I’m already suspicious of everybody.
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