Fringe – Episode 12: “The No-Brainer”
Another week, another episode of Fringe with painfully bad medicine — only this time with bad computer science as well!
The Plot: A teen age boy is on the computer when he open an anonymously sent program. Strange images begin flickering on the computer screen and he stares, transfixed. His parent find him later, dead, his brain liquefied and oozing from his ears and nose.
Agent Dunham and her team arrive on the scene. They interview parents and friends, but can find nothing incriminating. The grab his computer and take it back to the lab. Astrid tries to look at the hard drive — after all, she has a minor in “computer science” — but announces that she cannot because its platters are fused.
A second body is found, just like the first. This time, it’s a car salesman across town. The computer hard drive shows the same damage, but this time Astrid is able to determine that he had downloaded a shortly before he died. Peter takes both computer hard drives to one of his friends who is not able to track down the sender of the file, but is able to discover that it has been sent to a new location — Agent Dunham’s home. Dunham and Peter rush to her apartment and find her young niece transfixed by the screen. They are able to bring her out of the trance and she appears fine. Dunham does notice that the webcam light is on, suggesting that someone has been watching her.
Another victim is found, this time a day trader in Evanston, Illinois. The killer has gotten sloppy and there is enough information for even Agent Dunham to discover a pattern to the killings. This victim was the new husband of the mother of Luke Dempsey. Luke was the first victim’s best friend. Dunham discovers that Luke’s father is something of an incredible computer genius. She suspects he is the one behind the murders. She brings Luke in, but he won’t tell her where his father is. She lets him go, and follows him to his father’s hideout. She confronts the killer, but in the end he takes his own life.
1. Brain Fondue
Dr. Bishop: A complex combination of visual and subsonic aural stimuli, ingeniously designed to amplify the electrical impulses of the brain, trapping it in an endless loop.
That sure sounds like Dr. Bishop is describing a seizure, or actually a type of potentially fatal seizure known as “status epilepticus“.
People can die from status epilepticus, but their brain doesn’t liquefy.
Speaking of that, how exactly did this seizure-like activity cause the brain to liquefy? Was it supposed to raise the temperature so much the brain melted? That’s really too stupid for words.
And even if the brain did liquefy, why would it leak out the nose and ears? The brain is essentially in a tightly sealed container; it won’t leak out unless the container is broken (a skull fracture, for instance).
Flashing lights can certainly cause seizures in certain people; it’s called a photosensitive seizure and was the reason that one episode of Pokemon was never shown on television in the U.S. But it doesn’t cause seizures in people who aren’t already susceptible.
2. The Brown Note
My speakers can barely play real sounds, let alone “subsonic aural stimuli.”
3. Damn Viruses
Astrid: A computer virus that infects people.
I thought this idea was ridiculous when I first ran across it several years ago in the Cable/Deadpool comic book. Plus, I don’t think this was an actual computer virus. It was malware, certainly, but it didn’t have the self propagating characterstic of true computer viruses.
Yet another reason not to click on spam pop-ups.
4. The American Medical Association
There is no such thing as the “AMA Database.” The AMA is essentially a lobbying organization, it has little to do with the actual practice of medicine.
5. It Didn’t Even Start Well
That is an absolutely horrible episode title.
6. All Your Base Are Belong To Us
I know just enough about computers to realize that most of the “computer science” on this week’s episode was on par with the medicine. I leave it up to all you computer experts to do the critiquing here.
I’m afraid Fringe is rapidly reaching the point where it has gotten so ridiculous that it’s not worth an hour of my time to watch, let alone write about afterward. To this end, I have created the Fringe Doomsday Clock, patterned after the famous nuclear doomsday clock.
When the clock reaches midnight, my patience will be up and I will stop watching Fringe. After the last two episodes, the clock has been moved ahead to 11:57.
January 28th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
When I saw that they were going for “movie file that kills,” I thought to myself, “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with — depending on how charitable I’m feeling — either the generic ‘Motif of Harmful Sensation,’ or more specifically, ‘Someone’s watched “The Ring” recently.’”
I’d been wondering whether you were going to stick it out at least through the end of the season, or just give up on. Looks like the Doomsday Clock has my answer. Personally, if my TiVo wasn’t dual-tuner, and I had to choose between Fringe and The Mentalist, it’d be Mentalist in a heartbeat, even though I know it doesn’t really have anything for us to see you write about.
January 29th, 2009 at 2:00 am
Judging by the lack of comments, I wonder if everyone else’s doomsday clocks hit 12:15 long ago.
January 29th, 2009 at 2:44 am
I’m still watching the show and love your comments on it, but I can clearly see how it can be a waste of time.
I take the show more as a fantasy, the story unfolding in a world of its own where different laws of physics, biology and chemistry (and even computers) apply :D
January 29th, 2009 at 5:45 am
Don’t foget to mention that they never even bothered to explain why the car salesman was killed, or that the new govt overseer is so ridiculously obnoxious as to defy reality.
Honestly, the only reason I’m hanging on is in the (probably flase) hope that we get a Darin Morgan script…
January 29th, 2009 at 7:29 am
I’ve never seen an episode, so everything I know about this show comes from your reviews. That being said, I think it would be more watchable if you did a Season Challenge like you have running for House. Give people points if they can predict the antagonist for any given show, like man-sized bacteria or telepathic moray eels or whatever.
January 29th, 2009 at 8:06 am
From the review and comments, it looks like my decision to pull the shoot on this show after only watching the pilot was justified.
January 29th, 2009 at 8:17 am
Haven’t watched the episode, but from your description I would certainly agree that the computer stuff is on par with the medicine.
In “Snow Crash”, Neal Stephenson posited a computer virus that took over people’s brains. But Stephenson did it with style. The novel is fabulously excellent, and should be on anyone’s reading list. This episode just sounds like pulp…
January 29th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Ah, you may want to change the spelling on that Doomsday Clock.
January 29th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Between Snow Crash and the various “basilisk” stories by David Langford, there are some fairly reasonable theories behind how such a thing could work, although they tend to work more on the level of a systems crash than of a meltdown. I recommend the TVTropes entry on the Motif of Harmful Sensation for more (probably too many) pop cultural references.
As for the subsonics from the speakers, I seem to remember a self-hypnosis computer program which claimed to generate subsonics by generating two tones and using the harmonics from the interactions, but I have no idea how well that would work.
January 29th, 2009 at 11:58 am
When I saw the first bit, I immediately thought “Oh no, it’s ‘The Ring’ but with the internet, instead of a crappy VHS.”
January 29th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
downloaded a ____ shortly before he died. A file, I assume?
January 29th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
And, in a manner of speaking, there do exist human computer viruses. They’re called chain letters and not everyone falls prey to them, but enough do to propagate the species, complete with mutations to enhance the survival of a strain, such as when the address of someone important gets included in the forward history.
And, of course, there’s memes, but they usually don’t have as explicit of a propagation step.
January 29th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
I didn’t see it (I can’t stand Fringe), but from what I’ve read, they recovered data from a hard drive whose plates were fused? BS. They found the address of someone else downloading a file from the browser history? complete and utter BS. I’m glad I didn’t bother.
- a REAL comp sci minor.
January 29th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Re: memes – if I may be permitted to shamelessly self plug, I drew a cartoon about that once:
http://futurismic.com/2008/10/12/benchmark/
January 29th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Oh boy, a chance to pick apart this show like wet lettuce (something I’ve been doing alone since it first aired) AND use my engineering degree all at the same time.
The only conceivable way to overheat your HDD would be to overpower the little spindle motor that drives it, since it consumes most of the power supplied to a drive and, consequently, generates most of the heat.
http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/op/spin.html
You’d have to overload this motor until it was hot enough to melt the platters. The only problem there being that this would burn out its copper core long before it got hot enough to melt anything else (except possibly the soldering connecting it to its circuit board).
But that can’t happen because its voltage is strictly controlled by circuitry that keeps it spinning at a constant rate. This circuitry would burn out if you were to try to apply to much power to it.
And that can’t happen because there is no software interface for controlling that voltage. The power is supplied directly by the PSU and there is no way to change it with software.
In a way, its exactly like the melting brain issue. Its just infeasible for organs to start melting without an external energy source. Likewise, you can’t melt a hard drive without opening up your computer and torching the darn thing.
January 29th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Also like several other commenters, I only know this show from Scott’s descriptions – but isn’t this the *second* time flashing lights have been used to hypnotize/kill someone? Makes me wonder if one of the writers is epileptic, or just out to get people who are. I’m guessing my husband, who actually is susceptible to seizures, should probably not watch the series.
January 29th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
OK, one possibility I forgot. You could conceivably flash the firmware of an HDD with bad code, causing it to act erroneously.
But the only way to do this is by running the firmware update from physical media from the BIOS, not from some executable in a booted operating system.
So the requirements are that you’re present at the machine and have unrestricted access to it, have decompiled the firmware, hacked it, and recompiled it. Oh, and you’ve done this for each brand and model of HDD to plan to destroy.
And after all that work you probably won’t accomplish much more than a format of the drive could have done.
January 29th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Well, the computer stuff was pretty bad.
First off, data recovery. It’s real, they can do it in many situations, but this is a bit of a stretch. They said ‘fused’ but the hard drive looked more burned than anything, all the platters seemed to be in place. Given that, it’s possible to get many things back. The data stored is magnetic, so if you use high resolution magnetic imaging you can pick up what’s on the drive. Basically, so long as the platters have not been magnetically messed with (much) and they’re still in one piece, the data is there. Even if the data has been overwritten once or twice (by the drive’s read head, not another magnetic field) it can be recovered since the drive head will travel a slightly different path every time. So I guess it all comes down to what they mean by ‘fused.’
The file: they mentioned it as being something like 60 (or was it 600?) GB. Either way, seems like a pretty crappy setup. Let’s say the hacker knows the screen is 1280×800, just cause that’s the resolution on my laptop. Each pixel has a color depth of 32 bits for lifelike color in the freakiness. We could estimate the number of bits in one screen of data as about 32768000 bits which is 4096000 bytes or 3.9 MB. Just to keep this easy, let’s say our hacker need 4MB to store every pixel in one frame of his Ring-ripoff. Let’s be nice and say he needs 60 frames per second and the video plays for 3 minutes. That’d be 72000 MB or 42.2 GB for video. I don’t see the exploit and audio taking up another 20 GB, and this is assuming our hacker doesn’t know anything about compression. I also wonder how awesome these people’s ISPs are that they get 60 (or 600?) gigs of data down in an instant.
The exploit: our uber hacker can make the screen draw something that literally melts your brain, but he can’t figure out a better way to make it run than a popup?
Speaking of being a l33t Haxor, it appears the villain can do all this, cover his steps through some kind of traffic routing (and really, how much harder does that make it to trace?), but he can’t capture the image from a built in camera without the light turning on? Maybe that’s some kind of hardwired connection, but it sure seems like if you can hack the human brain you can grab a few images without turning on a light.
And of course they fell into some of the normal traps: the unrealistic UI (why does their counter hacker use a traceroute-ish program designed only to look cool?), the generic OSes, and so on. I’m just happy to be able to through some CS critiques into the medical stuff they normally mess up.
And I’m with you on the countdown. My TiVo is the only thing saving that show.
January 29th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
FWIW, the program I referenced above that claims to generate subsonics through harmonics is Virtual Hypnotist. It’s an interesting idea, allowing one to stitch together scripts on the fly, including simple interaction involving the keyboard and voice recognition, but somewhat marred by its reliance on Microsoft Speech’s mechanical tones.
January 30th, 2009 at 4:54 am
Actually he said it was 657 MB.
January 30th, 2009 at 9:57 am
After I watched this show I said to my wife, “Now I’m going to go read politedissent where Scott will say, ‘No that would just cause seizures.’”
CS problems:
“I can tell the platters are fused because I have a minor in CS.” Really? ’cause when you inserted the drive it just said “volume not recognized” not “oh no a l33t h@x0r has fried my platters.” Now if you took it apart and looked at it you could tell they were fused, (had they looked at all fused, which they didn’t) but you wouldn’t do that because there’s no serviceable parts in there.
657MB is still too big. An hour of MPEG compressed video is 1.4 GB, DIVX 450 MB, or completely uncompressed 14 GB. So maybe if he didn’t compress it at all he’s in the right range, but if he didn’t compress it at all he’s a tool.
“We need this data recovered!” “Don’t worry I’ll take it to some gambling addict I once knew.” Um, how about you use one of the many professional services that could do the work faster and better? http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHMB_en-USUS295US305&aq=0&oq=data+recover&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=data+recovery
“I’ve hakzored the net! The file is being sent again! It’s using lots of packet routers! It’s in your base killing your dudez.” OK, one, how do you know what every frickin’ router on the net is doing. 2 using a lot of routers for a large file is in no way odd, it sounds like he just used bittorrent. 3, no, really how do you know what zillions of routing computers are doing?
Um, did they say anything else about computers? If so, it was wrong as well.
January 30th, 2009 at 10:29 am
dr. scott, you can’t stop watching/commenting this show :-) i was really looking forward to read your comment of it — as I knew it’s terribly wrong again — and the very first sentence made me laugh a lot as expected :-)
(anyway, love your house reviews and i was pretty surprised you’ve started to review fringe in the first place — but please, don’t stop :))
my CS comments:
- ip addresses way out of 32bits (as we know, ipv4 addresses (the ones usualy formated as four numbers with three dots) can go only from 0..255 a part, totalling 4×8bits) — sorry if it was mentioned, did not read all comments
- i think, they were only plugging one cable to hard drives — the power — and no interface (as the power was old connector, wide pata/ide cable should be connected also)
- and now i see why the new macbooks have glossy screens — great for movies as the reflection appears (anyway, got one and love it, just made me laugh :)
cheers!
January 30th, 2009 at 11:42 am
sage, these flashy-but-unrealistic applications are common in film and television. They come about because the realities of computer use would bring a fast paced procedural drama grinding to a halt. Its no different than CSI playing a rock track over a 15 second montage of painstaking forensic work. How would you like to watch someone picking over a coredump for hours while debugging their leet brain-melting code?
See also the Viewer Friendly Interface:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ViewerFriendlyInterface
January 30th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Oh please don’t stop writing about Fringe! I am addicted to your write-ups even more than the show itself. You’re a highlight of my week.
February 1st, 2009 at 4:41 am
I still enjoy Fringe. I take it for what it is, a fantasy show. It doesn’t want to be anything different than that. You watch it and suspend your disbelief. It doesn’t want to mimic the real world, it’s not ER, where the whole point is to portray “real world” situations.
All Fringe stories are extreme and implausible. Some remind me of certain episodes of X-Files. Trying to “make sense” of the medicine or the science is a wasted effort, in my opinion, and of course in the end that leads to frustration and one doesn’t really enjoy the show.
I keep watching Fringe because, to me, it’s entertaining enough. The cast is good and the episodes are well shot. It’s not realistic enough? Who cares, in the end.
February 1st, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Let me just echo everyone else’s sentiments: don’t let the total absurdity of the science stop you from reviewing Fringe! The “science” in the show is obviously meant to be only tangentially related to reality. I mean, not only does the lead character has her dead ex-boyfriends memories “hidden” inside her brain, but the big evil corporation actually noticed they were “missing” from their original host.
As a CS major, I *always* cringe a lot when sci-fi writers play computer forensics crime writer, but frankly, this show was more realistic than most major motion pictures. Medically speaking, the melting brain thing may have been bunk, but that’s not my department. Playing lots of wierd images, patterns, and high-pitched noises it certainly nothing technologically unrealistic. As far as the computer stuff goes, these seem to be the biggest complaints:
* It is practically impossible for software to cause physical hardware damage to the computer it runs on (old-timers may have had fun making MFM drives hop off the table and smash themselves to bits, but that was back in the stone age). Even if somehow this malware managed to cook the drive, it would have shut the PC down from overheating long before the metal in the drives melted.
* Astrid couldn’t possibly know that the platters were “fused” without opening up the drive — a drive that damaged wouldn’t even register as present on the PC it was attached to. Of course, the simplest explanation is that she was just wrong, since there’s no way *anyone* could get data off “fused” platters, yet all Peter’s buddy had to do was plug the drive into a normal controller and boot up.
* The idea that the evil file downloaded itself in the background in millions of pieces is completely plausible, and is actually how most ad-ware works these days.
* The idea that the hacker could somehow “detect” another download of the file is wrong mainly on scale. Someone with enough CPU power and access to the right access points (basically the phone companies) could monitor traffic to/from a known set of addresses and pick up patterns. AT&T was caught doing exactly this with *voice* traffic for the NSA, and that’s significantly more complex than just monitoring endpoint address.
* The idea that some guy could do it in a matter of minutes from his basement PC is just silly.
* And lastly, for Scott — your speakers can probably play tones well above and below the range of human hearing. Again, it’s the scale — volume — that’s the problem, not the frequency.
–Kutulu
February 2nd, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Dear Scott,
I agree with your decision on stopping review of Fringe. Why not review “Eleventh Hour”? Its not as flashy but the theory is plausible.
February 8th, 2009 at 1:50 am
Half the fun of watching Fringe is to come here and read the review afterward.
Sort of to reconstruct my brain to some degree after I’ve melted it watching bad tv.
Which tangentially relates to this episode! :D
August 9th, 2009 at 2:58 am
Fringe seems to be a is good TV series. It a bit similar to Torchwood and X Files. I just hope that it will not be spoiled.
October 19th, 2009 at 6:32 am
[...] episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. [...]
February 19th, 2010 at 5:00 am
Well as the characters themselves have mentioned many many times that they are working in psuedo science. I don’t think its intended to be taken as a lesson in real science or how it works anymore than Star Wars was. It really is more about characters facing the same fears we all have of a world where tech is getting more and more wild just the characters face it in a more tangible albeit highly fictional manner.
To say that this show will die based on its scientific merit would be shortsighted since Star Trek, Star Gate or any other long running television franchise also has characters working with fictional science. I suggest Nova or your local space and science museum if your are looking for actual science facts and stop expecting every writer to carry Degrees in every subject they write about. Its like a chef telling bill cosby that he knows nothing about pudding and shouldn’t talk about it, something Bill knows but still sells because people like it for what it is fake stuff in a box pretending to be food. I suspect that is why the show is called Fringe and not Walters fact finding hour.
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