Fringe
I’ve had several people ask me what I thought of FOX’s new show Fringe.
I liked it. It was an enjoyable action procedure with some potentially interesting characters. The science was questionable — fringe at best, pseudoscience at worst — but that’s pretty much as advertised.
I’ll certainly keep watching for few more weeks, at least long enough to see if they give Pacey Peter Bishop any actual personality.
The Plot:FBI Agent Olivia Dunham is part of a team evaluating a fatal outbreak of an unknown disease aboard a plane bound for Logan International Airport. While following up a seemingly minor lead, Dunham and her partner/lover Agent Scott manage to stumble upon the prime suspect and his secret lab. They give chase, but the suspect triggers an explosion that knocks Dunham unconscious and exposes her partner to mysterious chemicals which affect him in a similar way to the mysterious plane contagion. Doctors are at a loss and Agent Scott is placed in a medically induced coma.
Searching the internet for answers, Dunham discovers the work of a Dr. Walter Bishop, a schizotypal genius scientist who has been confined to an insane asylum for the past 17 years. She tricks his equally genius (but much more sociable) son Peter into helping her get Dr Bishop released from the asylum and working to find a cure for Agent Scott. Through a combination of legwork, questionable science, and chutzpah the team succeeds and is able to cure Agent Scott — but even more questions are uncovered.
Thoughts, good and bad, about the science/medicine:
1. The Contagion
The writers are quite vague — intentionally, I’m sure — about the nature of the “contagion” aboard the plane. It is strongly suggested that it is an infectious agent. If so, that was an incredibly fast spread of the disease. From one person infected to an entire planeload in just a handful of minutes. So the agent not only has to infect and affect a person in mere minutes, but is able to get far enough along in it’s life cycle to allow that person to become virulently contagious in the same period of time. That’s unnaturally — and I’d wager impossibly — fast.
Later, it’s suggested by Dr Bishop that it may be a “leprotic contagion.” (i.e. leprosy based). I guess (shrug). Leprosy really looks nothing like that, is a very slow infection, and is not particularly contagious.
2. The Cow
Why use a cow as a test subject? Peter Bishop says, “genetically, humans and cows are only separated by a couple lines of DNA.” That’s certainly true, but following that logic, why not choose something with even an closer DNA match to humans, like primates (monkeys and apes)? In fact, cows are rarely used for medical testing. Monkeys are used frequently, but so are mice and rats, which have an immune system and pharmacokinetics surprisingly similar to humans.
Not to mention you’ll need more than one test subject.
3. Synaptic Transfer
The whole concept of Synaptic Transfer is just plain silly. Brains do have an electrical field, but different parts of the brain have different electrical patterns – that’s why an EEG has more than one lead. Synchronizing the overall electrical pattern of two brains will not allow them to communicate or share thoughts. Medically, I’d be worried that the person who was having their brain waves “adjusted” to match the other person’s would suffer as seizure, as that’s what unwanted electrical activity in the brain tends to cause.
4. Drugs
Doctor Bishop wants to give Ketamine, Neurontin, and LSD to Dunham before placing her in the sensory deprivation tank. His choice of drugs makes a fair amount of sense.
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic — it makes a user feel as if they are outside their own body. It is used primarily as a veterinary anesthetic, but is also infamous as a date rape drug.
Neurontin (gabapentin) is a drug that was originally developed as a medication to prevent seizures in epileptics. It has also proven to be useful for treating neuropathic (nerve) pain and chronic pain. Of note, it is a relatively recent drug and had not yet received FDA approval when Dr Bishop last conducted his experiments — though it had been known for some years before that.
LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) is a fairly well-known and infamous psychedelic hallucinogen.
5. Stored Blood
Color me skeptical that FBI agents keep blood stored in case they are wounded in the line of duty. Stored blood has a limited shelf life, so they’d have to keep donating more every few months. They would also need to donate multiple units of blood because serious injuries take more than just a single unit.
6. Technobabble
“The active toxin was a magnesium based ethylene glycol…with an organophosphate trig-”
“Calcium gluconate in a thiamine base”
September 13th, 2008 at 1:38 am
So it’s basically CS: Millennium, huh? Thanks for the heads-up; I think I won’t bother downloading it…
September 13th, 2008 at 1:39 am
(That should have been CSI, not CS, obviously. Dumb oversized Post button tempting me to press it… rass’n frass’n…)
September 13th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Mmmh, I don’t watch CSI nowadays, but when I did it seemed they at least tried to stick to _possible_ things, not that sometimes paranormal seeming stuff Fringe does.
September 13th, 2008 at 11:24 am
I got a good laugh about the “blood stored in case they are wounded in the line of duty”.
I used to wonder, why in cop shows, they would always see cops donating blood. I figured it was to show solidarity and to be dramatic. Did the cops think that fresh blood was better than the blood bank blood? Did they think extra fresh blood, had more fizz?
Well, they were right! Fresh blood is better/fizzier. lol
Nitric Oxide is the fizzy factor.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1669438,00.html
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: nitric oxide (NO). A workhorse of the blood, the gas helps red blood cells ferry oxygen to tissues and props open tiny vessels to allow freer blood flow. It turns out that within hours of leaving the body, levels of nitric oxide in the blood begin to drop, until, by the time donated blood expires after 42 days, the gas is almost nonexistent.
September 13th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
I think that the cow is just there because Dr. Bishop likes cows.
I don’t remember ever seeing him TESTING anything on the cow.
September 14th, 2008 at 11:37 am
I actually kind of liked it. And yes the cow seems to be simply a comic relief. This show will probably not be very accurate and it a cross between x-files, lost and gray’s anatomy ;) sounds weird right? I’ll give it a shot, JJ Abrams doesn’t usually dissapoint.
September 14th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Leprosy?!
I’m assuming they thought: “people are still scared of leprosy and people with leprosy, so let’s use it as the archetype of infectious disease.”
I used to worry about leprosy (and cobras) when I was seven – I lived in Canada, so neither was terribly likely, but I was a bookish child.
September 15th, 2008 at 7:27 am
It’s nice to see that the FBI is still composed mainly of sexy young people, instead of paunchy, badly-dressed Mormon men.
That said, I enjoyed the show, especially the basset-hound visage of Dr. Bishop.
More disturbingly, can we have a show where suspects are NOT tortured successfully for information? Is this a new tv paradigm foisted on us by Jack Bauer and the Bush administration?
The cow was named ‘Gene’, lol.
September 16th, 2008 at 9:14 am
“Right, let’s make some LSD…”
I used to have a professor like that too…
September 19th, 2008 at 9:44 am
I am way to much of an X-phile to be able to enjoy this show…
September 19th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
After reading your House reviews for years, and feeling somewhat stupid for not understanding half the dialog, nor why most of what they did on the show was insane, as a professional interpreter/German speaker/general polyglot I felt slightly vindicated at being able to nit-pick that the “German” people in the plane were apparently unable to speak their own language, sometimes bordering on unintelligibility. Not that that’s any surprise, most “foreign” people on TV have probably never heard a native speaker speak their lines, and rarely does anyone care. Like that “Korean” guy from LOST, who has a horrible accent as well. Not really a nit-pick I guess. You can’t hire a bunch of Germans and fly them to America to be extras. *sigh*
And yup, that’s all I have to add to this discussion.
February 6th, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Well, primates are harder to take care of than cows, but good point on the rats and mice! I think the writers got their wires crossed and meant to have an aerosolized toxin as the culprit on the airplane…sometimes it’s as much fun to try to figure out how a nonbiologist got their ideas wrong as to nitpick them ;)
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