Fringe – Episode 3 (Season 2): “Fracture”
I found this the best episode of the season, so far, and one of the better ones overall. There were certainly scientific mistakes, but it was nice to see some of the “police procedural” scenes well done, fo once
The Plot:Officer Gillespie, a policeman in Philadelphia receives a mysterious phone call from the “Colonel” and is told to head to a nearby subway station and stop a man in a black trenchcoat with a black briefcase. When the officer spots the suspect and tries to grab the suitcase, he suddenly begins to crystalize. Gillespie screams in pain, then explodes, killing all around him
The Fringe Team is called in to evaluate the Philadelphia explosion because no evidence of any explosive material can be found. Poking around, Walter finds some crystallized parts of Office Gillespie, and realizes that it was the officer that exploded. He takes the bodies back to the lab for autopsy. As he pieces the crystallized officer back together, he finds needle marks between the toes — Gillespie had been injecting himself with some unknown medication.
Meanwhile, Peter takes the subway station surveillance tapes to one of his contacts, because the tapes all were strangely full of static. Peter’s friend is able to remove a little of the static but not much, so what led up to the explosion of Gillespie remains unclear. His friend speculates radio wave interference caused the static. Later, Peter and Dunham are talking to the officer’s widow when Dunham stumbles across a hidden case consisting of a syringe and a strange injectable medicine.
Across the country, Captain Burgess, once a military officer, now a suburban housewife, is seen injecting herself with the same medication. Later that day, the Colonel appears and tells her she is needed on a mission to Washington D.C. He provides her with airline tickets and hotel reservations.
Dunham and Peter discover that the Gillespie was part of an experimental medical program while he was stationed in Iraq. They travel to Iraq and track down one of the doctors who worked on the program, which was developed to produce an antidote to the chemical agent cyanogen chloride. The experiments weren’t very successful — only four out of 200 patients survived. Plus there was another unfortunate side effect: the serum turned the users into human bombs if they were exposed to a certain radio frequency.
Back in the United States, Broyles in charge of taskforce put together to capture Captain Burgess and the Colonel. They track her to a Metro station in Washington. Peter spots the Colonel and a brawl begins. Dunham is able to shut down the radio signal the Colonel had been sending just in time to stop Burgess before she exploded.
Back in FBI custody, the Colonel tells Broyles that he was trying to stop the “others” — who were planning a war and passing intelligence by a network of couriers. In the end, we see a courier hand a briefcase to the Observer, who opens it to reveal surveillance photos of Walter.
1. A Quick Summation
The idea of a person being turned into an explosive device is clever, but I just don’t see how it would work. Where would the energy of an explosion that powerful come from — even if the person were injecting a strange medication and turning to crystal? I just don’t think there are that many high-energy bonds to break in a human (particularly since the explosion left behind identifiable pieces). Admittedly, this is all “back of the envelope” math so I could be wrong, but color me suspicious.
2. Deus Ex EMP
Does an “EMP disabling device disable” EMPs, or is does it utilize EMPs to disable devices?
If the former, wouldn’t the EMP disabling device itself be disabled by an EMP?
If the latter, how did it know which device to disable or when to activate? It can’t be “always on”.
Regardless, if the device scrambles all radio waves, you wouldn’t be able to listen to the radio or talk on your cell phone inside the station.
3. Moses Supposed his Toeses are Roses
The webspace between the toes is used by addicts to inject drugs because the track marks are harder to find. It is commonly used by medical personnel who are addicted.
Captain Burgess’s injection was horrible as she has apparently never heard of sterile technique. There are nasty germs on the soles of the feet, why invite them into the body?
4. Just Like Detective Comics
Cyanogen chloride is a nasty chemical weapon. It acts as both an irritant (to the skin, mucous membranes, and respiratory tract) and a cyanide agent. Like most cyanide agents, it is quick acting (less than 10 minutes, usually). Treatment involves skin decontamination and use of cyanide antidotes.
With treatment, the chemical is cleared from the body quickly, there would be no need for continuing injections. And even if the soldiers were lied to about the serum, their own NBC training should have raised questions.
5. Video Killed the Radio Star
316 megahertz is technically UHF, not VHF, and falls in the band controlled by the government.
While there was questionable science this week, the episode score points by actually showing some detective work (though mostly by Peter, Dunham — as usual — stumbled into clues) and having an enjoyably suspenseful chase at the end. The Doomsday Clock gains a minute, and goes back to five ’til midnight.
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:45 am
Plot convenience theater: The energy for the explosion comes from the serum, which releases its stored energy upon exposure to 30 seconds of 331.6Mhz, or maybe the serum catalyzes & accelerates the release of all the caloric content of the human body at once.
http://blog.cordialdeconstruction.com/2009/10/02/minor-comments-on-fringe-episode-3-season-2-fracture/
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:32 am
So, if crazy colonel wants to stop the couriers from passing their black briefcases, why not just put a bullet in the couriers heads and take them? Why was so much collateral civilian damage necessary (except as a way to get the Fringe division involved)?
Plus, how, exactly, was this unfortunate side effect of the serum discovered? Someone just happened to walk by a UHF transmitter in Iraq?
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:20 am
Official Comment
I thought about that too. The Colonel’s method limits him to only four attempts — hop their aren’t more than four couriers. And with his method, he’ll never learn what’s actually in the briefcases.
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:58 am
I thought that the “crystallize a person, release a big ‘ol bag of energy” sounded like the gorgonism/SCORPION STARE McGuffin from Charles Stross’ “The Concrete Jungle”.
http://www.goldengryphon.com/Stross-Concrete.html
It would require nuclear reactions, not chemical reactions, to do this though.
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:11 pm
By by using the methods he did, the Colonel sent an unmistakable message to the Observers that he knows they are out there, that he has tools and weapons available to him that are roughly equal to their own, and that he’s going to fight them with everything he’s got, no matter what.
His comments to the FBI interviewers at the end seem to confirm that primary goal seems to have been to send that message, rather than find answers.
It’s also possible he had the secondary intention of attracting the Fringe division’s attention, much as Mr. Jones did. He may have been looking for future allies, or maybe he was testing the waters to see if Fringe was a credible threat to future operations.
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Official Comment
I don’t know, Karl. I see what your getting at, but it still seems bass ackwards to me. The Colonel even admits that he doesn’t know who “they”are — so why destroy a chance to find out?
October 2nd, 2009 at 2:09 pm
I didn’t say it was a good or logical plan that made any sense, but it did seem to me that he was sending a message, possibly out of frustration from not being able to accomplish anything else to date.
Of course if that’s the way he thinks & plans, it would be no wonder he hasn’t accomplished anything so far.
Perhaps getting the attention of the Fringe division was more than just a secondary objective. Maybe just like Mr Jones was, the Colonel is exactly where he wants to be right now.
Then again, maybe the writers don’t think about this all nearly as much as we do. We already know they don’t use Wikipedia enough when writing.
October 2nd, 2009 at 2:11 pm
“why destroy a chance to find out?”
Maybe he’s tried hundreds of times over the years and always failed and has finally given up and just resorted to striking out in an impotent gesture of futility
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:47 am
I still want to know where they get their secret inter-city portal transportation from. Boston to NY, Philadelphia, and DC in just a few minutes
October 4th, 2009 at 10:04 am
Human body can produce large amount of energy.
THAT was whole point of Matrix XD
So if you could use this energy at will then you could be like Electro and Magneto and all.. =)
So i find whole serum-that-turns-human-body-in-the-bomb thing sounds plausable. Even more i think it’s possible to turn human into bomb. But it is a bad thing =|
But here is something abnormal. Observer is seriously de-powered.
Before that during the first season, we saw that Observer was at every scene, that he was hard to deal with, he was like G-man from Half-life minus hair and charisma XD
But now he need a few photos of Walter taken by High-tech binocular? Why? Can’t he like shadow him or something?
Is he afraid to get caught?
Also – erm… That woman with prostetic arm – what world is she from? Could it be that she also from Alternative world and Bell is employed her there? It’s just this is high-tech prostetic arm – and ONLY she has it – sounds fishy to me.
October 7th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Hmm doesn’t anyone think what Walter did in the lab with the watermelon is dangerous? They had eyewear but the crystals could have easily cut n killed them as in the first incident. What the hell was Walter and Astrid thinking standing cooly watching the watermelon explode!
November 4th, 2009 at 8:01 am
[...] episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. [...]
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