Fringe – Episode 19: “The Road Not Taken”
A rather unexciting episode of Fringe overall, despite several clever plot concepts. Definitely a “sum of the whole is less than the parts” week.
The Plot: A young woman is desperately trying to get to a hospital when she suddenly catches fire and explodes. Agent Dunham and her team are called in to investigate. Through dental records, they are able to identify her as Susan Pratt, a 29 year-old toll booth attendant. They search her apartment and find a large check made out by a mysterious lawyer, a lawyer whose office seems hurriedly deserted. Walter initially suspects spontaneous human combustion, and then deduces that Susan was a pyrokinetic (think Firestarter
Meanwhile, Agent Dunham is having recurrent hallucinations. Walter tells her that she is experiencing déjà vu, which he explains are visions of an alternate reality. The next time Dunham has one of the hallucinations, she investigates and discovers that in this reality, Susan had a twin sister Nancy. Sure enough, in our reality there is a twin sister too, and Olivia’s team rushes to Nancy’s apartment, but she has been kidnapped. Luckily, Peter has invented a machine that can pull sounds from an apartment window which was melted during the kidnapping. Uncovering the sound of a phone dialing, Olivia is able to trace a call made to Sanford Harris’ phone (if you can’t remember, Sanford Harris is the new a**hole boss at the FBI who took over earlier in the season). She and Charlie track Harris to a warehouse where he and the lawyer have locked up Nancy and are experimenting on her. In the final confrontation, Nancy is rescued and Harris burned alive by her pyrokinesis.
The episode ends with a variety of short scenes: Olivia confronts Walter about the experiments he and Walter Bell performed on her and other children, Nina visits Broyle to discuss the reappearance of the Observer, Walter discovers the missing original ZFT manifesto just as the Observer walks in and tells him it is time to go, and Nina is shot by masked men in her apartment building.
1. Walter’s Reality, Quite Different From My Reality
A myth is an unverified fact? I’m sure Zeus would be happy to know he’s factual, merely unverified.
2. Again and Again
That is an interesting explanation for déjà vu. Just saying.
Would Robert Frost approve?
3. Too Close a Look
There are so many things wrong with Peter’s electron microscope/Geiger counter/mp3 player. Here are just a few:
Electron microscope samples have to be specially prepared.
At electron microscope level, there would be so many natural grooves and bumps in the surface of the glass that it would have tremendous background noise. Even an LP or CD at that level of detail would have so many imperfections it would be hard to hear the actual sound.
A flash fried window captured that much sound?
Peter was somehow able to reproduce the sound perfectly down to the exact voices and tones of a dialing phone?
4. Irony
I had to laugh when Walter told Olivia she was a good investigator — she’s anything but. For instance, she missed the entire closet full of gray clothes and the check from a mysterious lawyer that all tie into the emotion spewing guy from episode 17.
5. Y Kant Olivia Read?
Olivia is a cornflake gal. Is that anything like a Cornflake Girl?
A plainly mediocre episode. Not bad enough to advance the clock, but not good enough to gain some time. (With just one episode left, it is extremely unlikely the Doomsday Clock will run out…this year at least. Fringe has been renewed, so I’ll continue the clock next year.)
May 6th, 2009 at 10:23 am
If we weren’t so close to midnight already, I’d say the clock should be moved up at least 30 sec just for Peter’s electron microscope/Geiger counter/mp3 player.
Before addressing my main complain, I’ll just ask why this spiffy invention would be the least bit useful if Walter’s records suffered from water damage? (How does being exposed to water affect the ability to play the LP’s? The jackets may be destroyed, but the vinyl should be intact. Was it special Fringe water that melts vinyl?)
In addition to your points, I’ll add a fundamental flaw to the whole thing.
Even if we grant that
-It is possible to “naturally” encode sound waves on a microscopic level on a pane of heated glass.
-This special invention doesn’t require special preparation of the samples.
-The background noise could be filtered out.
-The window captured the exact sound with extreme fidelity.
We have the problem of the fact that their recording medium was STATIC, and all the sounds were encoded in the exact same location.
When you capture sound on a record, the stylus is moving across the surface of the record in real time as the record spins and the stylus tracks inwards, such that the captured sound wave is a long continuous stream spiraling inward on the disc, and the data never overlaps. The window pane was static in place. Recording sound onto the window in this manner would be like cutting a record with the stylus held fixed in place without the record spinning, or recording onto magnetic tape with out moving the tape across the recording head. All the information would be encoded in the same spot, and would be absolutely indecipherable and unrecoverable.
May 6th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
“Luckily, Peter has invented a machine that can pull sounds from an apartment window which was melted during the kidnapping.”
I would just like to point out that this sentence made my brain hurt…
May 6th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
It bothered me when Walter stated that the “rhythmic” clicking of the Geiger counter soothed him. But a Geiger counter is highly unlikely to click rhythmically – atomic decay and cosmic rays are unpredictable.
The sound recovery system was utter nonsense from beginning to end – it didn’t even give a nod to sequential recording, like the pottery-sound-recovery myth. It definitely justifies advancing the clock.
May 8th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Boy I’m glad I’m dumb enough to appreciate the list of incorrect facts in this episode.
It’s much easier for me to fantasize that the vibrations would have caused the glass to vibrate from one end to the other and back again, instead of *every* surface of the glass vibrating at the exact same time. And somehow, they were able to decipher the frequency by measuring the distance between the “waves” (or whatever it’s called) on the glass.
And regarding the electron microscope… I’m not really a chemistry/biology, but I’d like to fantasize (once again)… take a whole bunch of high-res images from different angles and positions, and combine them together using a simple pattern recognition algorithm (or just record the whole thing as a video and use optical flow to match the movement in order to map each frame together). That would probably allow them to reduce (if not get rid of) the calibration/preparing samples process.
But all in all, I’m glad that I’m dumb enough to not nitpick what’s wrong with the episode… which is why I enjoyed it immensely. Feel kinda bad for you guys. :)
May 10th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Sajar, not to mention that they missed the fact that Abrams actually outed the plot to his new Star Trek movie in this episode… and it was done by the guy who played Blaylock in the episode the Corbomite Maneover from the original Star Trek series – a delightful homage.
Or that the document Olivia is holding in her hand when the director’s room reverts back to the correct universe is the photograph of the TWO victims in his universe, rather than the ONE in hers. Which means they now have evidence of there being two universes…
I guess that’s what happens when you’re looking too closely at the trees…
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:25 am
[...] episode is debunked at Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. [...]
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