Fringe – Episode 2: “The Same Old Story”
What will probably become my standard Fringe disclaimer: I am perfectly willing to accept “fiction” as part of my science fiction, but I do have a problem when the science [sic] violates many of the basic tenets of biology, chemistry, and physics without any explanation — not even any good technobabble. And Spoiler Warning.
I found the first episode more enjoyable — this one struck me as overly clichéd with the cold case serial killer and the all too common science fiction plots (the rapid aging, the quick pregnancy, the victim’s last vision).
The Plot: A woman is dropped off at a hospital, clearly in an advanced state of pregnancy, yet she claims she’s not pregnant. From what the viewer has seen, she apparently proceeded through nine months of pregnancy is a matter of minutes. She dies during labor and an emergency c-section is performed to save the child. The child lives for only a matter of hours, rapidly aging, and dies a withered old man.
Agent Dunham is able to tie this case into one of her older cold cases, a serial killer who removed the pituitary glands of his female victims. It also seems to tie into some of Dr. Bishop previous research, where he was trying to develop a perfect soldier — someone who aged from birth to 21 years in just three actual years. He casually mentions that stopping the accelerated aging was the problem. Bishop hypothesizes that the killer is one of these experiments, and uses the pituitary glands of his victims to stave off his rapid aging. Another victim is found, and Dr Bishop is able to use a fancy machine from Massive Dynamics to recreate some of the last visions she saw. Using these clues, Dunham and Peter Bishop are able to stop the serial killer — who dies of old age before Dunham’s eyes — and rescue his final victim
Given that Fringe is science fiction, (and thus far, not particularly original science fiction) I am willing to accept that — due to genetic manipulation — the killer rapidly ages. For the sake of argument, I will also accept that quaffing a handful of pituitary glands (of comely young women of questionable morals) every couple of years will stop this rapid aging.
But even accepting those, several items caught my eye:
1. The Pregnancy, Birth, and Child
Pregnancy is a joint relationship between mother and fetus — just because the fetal aspect has accelerated growth doesn’t mean the maternal aspect will be able to keep up. A miscarriage would seem to be the most likely outcome.
What type of c-section was that? Emergency c-sections are performed vertically along the abdomen as it’s the fastest way and scarring (and uterine rupture in subsequent pregnancies) is not an issue.
There has to be some conservation of mass. Where did the child get all the protein and other building blocks necessary to grow that fast? He would have to have been eating a tremendous amount from the minute he was born.
Funny how his entire body seemed to age — except the umbilical cord.
2. Neuromuscular blockade
Neuromuscular blocking agents paralyze skeletal muscles. Higher doses may paralyze the diaphragm and lead to respiratory paralysis and side effects are known to occur. These drugs have no effect on cranial nerves and would not in any way “freeze” the victim’s optic nerve. This woman has been dead for hours; there’s no electrical activity in those nerves left to speak of.
Apparently her eyes have no extraocular muscles.
Why the bridge? It wasn’t the last thing she saw — that would be the killer and his “father” — nor was it the last thing she saw when she was injected with the medication — that would be the killer.
3. Defibrillation
You don’t shock a flatline. It doesn’t work, and may make things worse.
In a situation like this: 1) stop the anesthetic — it’s short acting, that’s why it has to continually run during the procedure. 2) provide CPR until the drug wears off.
September 18th, 2008 at 8:01 am
After hearing that the first episode was good I decided to watch the latest one. I turned it off after about ten minutes.
With all the ridiculous screaming and gratuitous gore, this show seems to be an attempt to take “gross-out medicine as entertainment” to a higher level, using sci-fi as a vehicle.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:00 am
Would Crazy Dad’s original “Do you have any cocaine?” been a viable solution?
September 18th, 2008 at 9:11 am
This episode was less “Fringe” and more “bad science fiction cliche”.
The only place the child could have gotten the mass from would be extracting carbon from the CO2 in the atmosphere like a plant, but it’s not a plant, and it would still require a massive energy (sunlight for plants in a slow process) and nutrient intake.
Also, in regards to the conservation of mass: If they ever have an episode where somebody gets shrunk down to mini size, I will immediately cancel my season pass.
I think the eye thing was worse than the rapid growth with out mass input.
I guess I can buy rapid aging, but why would existing hair turn gray? (or did it not turn gray- I’ll have to re-watch the end)
September 18th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Official Comment
Cocaine is vaguely related to Lidocaine, a medication which was once commonly used to treat certain heart arrhythmias during cardiac resuscitation (and is still used as a local anesthetic).
But…
1) Much better medications are now available (though Dr Bishop may not be aware of that)
2) The victim wasn’t showing the particular arrythmias Lidocaine is useful for.
So Cocaine would be of no use.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Official Comment
Karl,
His hair did turn gray as he was running away from Dunham. First it was just the temples, but then by the time she caught him, he had a whole head of gray hair.
Maybe his “Just For Men” wore off in an accelerated fashion?
September 18th, 2008 at 10:13 am
I missed this. I’m wondering if, when the baby aged to an old man, it was all wrinkly. If a young person suddenly began to age, would they wrinkle? Aren’t wrinkles a product of use and exposure as well as the skin losing resiliency due to age?
I think that if, say a 20 year old, aged to 80 years like in that ST:TOS episode, he wouldn’t be looking like he’d lived for those 60 years. It’d probably look kind of creepy.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:26 am
I agree, a good cast wasted on a worn-out SF tv cliche. What’s next, a virtual reality script? A malevolent artificial intelligence? Evil clones?
September 18th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
At this point, Mrs. Serpent and I are sticking with FRINGE largely because we like the cast (especially the interplay between Crazy Dad and Snarky Son).
The episode almost lost me at the conservation-of-mass point. It crossed the boundary from “there are things we Just Don’t Know For Sure” to “there are things we Just Don’t Care About”. I finally just re-tuned my reality dial, and tried to watch the show from a more, ahem, flexible viewpoint.
From there, though, I started noticing just how pro forma everything was. It was like going down the Derivative Conspiracy Fiction checklist, ticking off boxes one by one.
Sigh. the Missus and I are gonna give it another week or two, but it’s probably going to be the first drop of the new season.
Oh… and I TOLD you he just wanted the cow because he likes cows!
September 18th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Yeah, it was the conservation of mass thing that got me, too. It would be one thing if they had handwaved it somehow, or just said that the baby went through a couple hundred pints of formula in the time it took to grow, but no, they ignored it to the extent that one imagines the writers involved just don’t know any better.
I’ve raised this point a few places, and had rabid fans either defend it as required suspension of disbelief, or bring up mass/energy equivalence without having any idea of what the exchange rate on that implies…
September 18th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Maybe the baby was on the Michael Phelps diet lol
September 18th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Oh my god, I just remembered where I last saw the “the eyes contain the last image seen before death” thing:
The movie “Wild Wild West”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, your honor, I rest my case.
September 18th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
They could have shown the mother withering away to nothing. At least that way the baby is getting energy from somewhere.
Some kind of attempt to explain where the baby was getting all its energy to grow would have been nice.
September 18th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I practically had an aneurysm when that INEXCUSABLY stupid “eye” bit came into play. The paralyzed muscles would freeze the electrical impulse in the WHAT WHAT?
Didn’t we the last victim’s eyes moving when they were operating on her? This while still under effects of paralyzing agents sufficiently powerful to, what, I don’t know, freeze the brain in some sort of suspended animation?
The guy grew from birth to age 21 in three years. Cool. Why, after being like ninety seconds overdue for his pituitary fix, he age seventy years in three minutes?
AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH
September 18th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
THANK YOU!!!
I spent about 2 minutes yelling “YOU DON’T DEFIB A FLATLINE” at my tv……
September 18th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
I spent about 2 minutes yelling “YOU DON’T DEFIB A FLATLINE” at my tv.
hahahaha Yes! My comment, as soon as they went there, was, “Oh, there’s a Dr. Scott no-no. They just invoked ’shocking a flatline.’”
I, personally, intend to keep with Fringe at least as long as Dr. Scott continues to provide us with these entertaining gems of medical review. I was also pleased to see the review of the recent “Hush steals Catwoman’s heart” comic.
September 19th, 2008 at 1:24 am
The episode struck me a ripoff of the classic X-Files episode ’squeeze’, with a vampiric person needing to eat people’s organs to live.
That said, I liked the bits with crazy doctor. Looks like he really did just want a pet cow.
September 19th, 2008 at 5:20 am
Not only there is a lack of mass conservation, but there is problem with excess heat. All that uber-quick metabolism would produce enough waste energy to instantly vaporize baby.
September 19th, 2008 at 5:45 am
What about the aging and growth, it didn’t add up at all. The Growth hormones from the pituatary gland wouldn’t have made his body older, it would only have hastened his development in to adulthood. They should have given the guy acromegaly instead of hyperaging which is caused by shorter telomeres on DNA.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
I found the second episode of “Fringe” annoying for pretty much the same reasons you outline here. I also felt like it was a repeat of the first season X-Files episode called “Squeeze”, but without the really interesting interactions between the main characters.
After this week’s episode, I re-watched the fifth season X-Files episode called “Bad Blood”. Frankly, I don’t see how Fringe can develop the sort of characterization that made “The X-Files” so brilliant.
September 19th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
You’ve linked to that bit you did on “never show them shocking a flatline” a couple of times, and it talks a bit about what _is_ done for a flatline, but did you ever go into when a defibrillator is called for, could you link to that as well if so? And maybe, if you didn’t, say a bit about that or give a link to some good info?
September 20th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
I’m certainly not qualified to comment on the science/medicine of this episode, but I have to say that storywise it was pretty bad (by the way, in what universe is “From the writers of the Transformers movie!” actually a selling point for a project??):
1) far too much expository dialogue in the beginning, in the guise of having to explain everything that happened in the first episode because the crazy man “forgot”. “Don’t you remember? You have your old lab back!” “Don’t you remember? My name is ____. We’ve met several times already.”
2) I missed the part why the the pituitary glands needed to be of pretty young girls who hung out in bars. Wouldn’t it be easier to just sneak up on some sleeping homeless guy from behind?
3) the thought of these guys carefully extracting the one tiny bit of tissue that they need, leaving the rest absolutely untouched, then basically just placing the bodies where they would be discovered the next day is all a bit…precious, I suppose.
I’m sticking with the show for now as I’m enjoying the relationship between Peter and Walter, and I keep feeling like the show is gonna get better (at least, better than the “just alright” level it’s at right now).
September 20th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
I see all points above and I concur, but I am wondering what the hell was at the end? Was that a bunch of Peters? Or more of the “son”? Any insight?
If in fact there were more Peters, who the hell has been taking care of those for the last 17 years?
September 21st, 2008 at 7:26 pm
The only good accelerated-aging (due to time travel) I’ve seen was a B5 episode in which one of their pilots falls through some kind of time warp. Afterwards, he looks unchanged except for being dead, but examination indicated his organs are like those of a much older person.
September 21st, 2008 at 7:28 pm
As for point (2) – I think there’s a movie-villain advice list that checks that one: “If my experiments require kidnapped human subjects, I will use homeless drifters from the edge of town, not pretty young co-eds whose disappearance will be immediately noticed and raise a hue and cry.”
September 24th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
[...] Fringe “violates basic tenets of biology, chemistry and physics without any explanation.” [Polite Dissent] [...]
October 1st, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Eh. I just watched the first part and am I right? Did I really hear the doctors say something like..forget anesthetic we will have to strap her down and do a c section.?????????????????????????????/ eh. WTF That was one of the most ridiculous parts.
October 6th, 2008 at 12:56 am
Regardless of whether pituitary hormones would be able to stave off the killer’s aging (it doesn’t make physiological sense to me) I would think that the killer’s scientist father would’ve been able to produce them recombinantly, thus obviating the need for all that murdering. You’d also get much better yield than from coffing pituitary glands.
February 6th, 2010 at 7:37 pm
Ed, in case you look back…defibrillation is just that –De Fibrillation. A normally beating heart consists of a huge number of muscle cells all contracting in a specific pattern to push the blood through the heart’s chambers in the right order to supply body and brain. Think of it this way: The cells in the upper part of the heart have to relax to let blood flow into the heart, then contract to push it into the bottom part of the heart. At the same time they’re contracting, the cells in the bottom have to relax so the blood cam come into their part of the heart. When they contract, the cells in the upper part are relaxing to let more blood into the upper part. That’s simplified but I hope it’s clear enough to give you the idea. Now, imagine that all of these cells start contracting randomly instead of each part’s cells contracting together in a specific order. The heart sort of tremors or twicthes instead of beating. No blood gets into the heart, no blood is sent to body and brain. THAT is “fibrillation”, or as my cardio prof called it “The Big One” because it is fatal. The cells normally take their contraction timing from the impulses of a small clump of cells called the heart’s natural pacemaker. To get those randomly contracting cells to beat in a specific order again, a shock is used to essentially shut them off for a fraction of a second so that the pacemaker cells can “re-set” them to the right contraction order.
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