Fringe — Episode 6 (Season 2): “Earthling”
Could have been a contender, but was KO’d by bad science and too many clichés
The Plot: A married man in Boston mysteriously turns to ash while waiting to spring an anniversary surprise on his wife. The Fringe team is called in to investigate. Broyles tells Dunham that he’s seen this before — there were five similar deaths several years ago at a hospital in Washington DC. He tells her he was contacted by an “Eastern European” man who provided a strange formula to him and indicated it was the solution to the deaths. Unfortunately, none of the FBI’s scientists could decipher the formula several more deaths occurred before they suddenly stopped — until now.
Dunham digs a little deeper and finds that the victim had recently been visiting his sick mother at a hospital. The Fringe team stakes out the hospital, trying to find a link between this hospital and the one four years ago in DC. They find a critical care nurse named Tomas Koslov who has worked at both institutions. Meanwhile, another ash-death has occurred on the in the hospital. A review of the hospital’s surveillance tapes show a strange being made entirely of shadow moving down the hall right before the death was discovered.
The team locates and searches Koslov’s apartment but discover he has abandoned it. They are able to find a fingerprint. When they run the fingerprint they find that their suspect is man by the name of Timur Vasaleiv who is wanted by both the CIA and the Russians because he stole something important from Russia. Broyles is told that the CIA will be taking over the case, but he decides to keep his team on it anyway. A contact at the Senate sends him Timur’s file. It turns out that his brother Aleks was a cosmonaut who returned comatose from a space mission, and it is his brother that Timur has stolen from a special Russian quarantine facility. He has been keeping him in various American hospitals while posing as an ICU nurse.
Walter has been working on the formula and realizes that it represents an organism that seems to feed on radiation. The hospital patients died because they all had been undergoing radiation treatment, and the husband died because he had been on a recent cross country flight (where he had been exposed to higher than normal levels of background radiation).
Timur returns to the hospital and takes his comatose brother out of the ICU and to a hotel. The shadow tries to emerge, but using a series of car batteries, Timur shocks his brother enough that the shadow retreats. He also knocks his brother into asystole (flatline), but after a few moments, a normal heartbeat returns.
Confident that Walter can crack the formula, Agent Broyles reaches out to Timur and offers his help. Timur is trying to decide whether to take Broyles assistance when he slowly turns to ash — the shadow is loose. The FBI arrives to find the comatose cosmonaut and the dead Timur. Peter thinks Walter can shock Aleks to make the shadow return, but Walter cannot read the equipment as it is all in Russian. When they hear a young girl scream from another motel room, Broyles takes unhesitating action and shoots Aleks in the head, killing him. The girl tells her mother that there was a shadow man in the room, but he disappeared. Later, when the CIA approaches Broyles to warn him off their case, they tell him that despite being shot in the head, Aleks returned to life, and they apparently sent him back into space.
1. Glow In the Dark
There is a major misunderstanding of radiation here. While the victims had all been recently exposed to radiation, but they were not radioactive themselves. There was no “high levels” of radiation for the shadow to detect, let alone feed off of.
2. Feed Me, Seymour
What had the shadow been feeding off of for the past four years, after DC but before the husband died?
3. I See You
There is no way a patient is going to sit for four years in a hospital ICU like Aleks apparently did.
ICU beds are incredibly expensive. The hospital billing department would have been on the phone to his insurance company as soon as he was admitted. No insurance? While they wouldn’t have kicked him out (unless he was medically stable and had a place to go), they would have been looking at the records very closely.
If someone is in a permanent coma, they would be transferred to a rehabilitation hospital or a nursing home as soon as they were medically stable. They wouldn’t keep them in a regular hospital ICU indefinitely.
How did he get him admitted to each new ICU? ICU transfers are very irregular unless one is going from a less-equipped hospital to a better-equipped one, and that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
4. Eleven Herbs and Spices
In my brief look at the formula, there seemed to be a number of carbon atoms with more than 4 bonds. I admit that Ionly had two years of Organic Chemistry, but that seems quite unlikely to me.
5. Blackjack
Your Osama Tezuka link for the day: the little girl was watching Kimba, the White Lion.
The plot line had potential, but was dragged down by too much bad science, reliance of clichés, and deep piles of nonsense they didn’t even try to explain away. The clock moves closer to midnight.
This week’s Fringe cipher was: DEJAVU.UPDATE: And I should mention that I’m already dreading next week’s show, just based on the preview, where they mention the completely debunked “most people only use 10% of their brain” myth as if it were fact.
November 6th, 2009 at 7:32 am
I love Fringe, but this episode felt like it was part of a different, much worse show. Especially the whole bit about Lt. Daniels losing his family over the case and the crappy denouement.
November 6th, 2009 at 8:43 am
“There is a major understanding of radiation here”
I think you made a typo and meant “misunderstanding”
More of my thoughts on this epdsode at:
http://blog.cordialdeconstruction.com/2009/11/05/minor-review-of-fringe-episode-6-season-2-earthling/
If the clock hits midnight, who will I link to for a synopsis? :)
November 6th, 2009 at 9:48 am
You can’t be “wanted by the CIA”. They aren’t a law enforcement agency. You can only be “of interest” to the CIA.
Can someone just “pose as” an ICU nurse without credentials or training? Wouldn’t your utter incompetence become obvious to your co-workers very quickly?
If the space-thing needed to feed on radiation, why didn’t Timur just steal or buy some Russian plutonium on the black market, or buy steal an x-ray machine, instead of hatching elaborate plots involving murdering strangers?
Note: Timur is a reference to Timur the Lame=Tamerlane, the famous Mongol/Turkic conqueror. It is not a Russian name at all.
November 6th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
wouldn’t the critter just go for the x-ray machines anyway?
November 6th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
1.It was a pleasure to hear russian speech in the series =)
2.Russian speech, writings and whole alien-thing-that-came-from-space-and-bonded-to-an-astronaut is sooooo X-Files.
Seriously they had very similiar episode in it except creature was white, and it left the body when the guy jumped out of the window. Althought it was american astronaut. But X-files had a lot of “russians” =)
Also… I don’t think that some of the equipment that Timur was using even exists… Unless it’s some ancient russian technology.
November 6th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Between the Shadow and the presence of Russian Cosmonauts, I was put in mind of the Doom Patrol character Negative Woman (aka Valentina Vostok), who would have been even cooler if she needed to eat people’s life energy, turning them into ash.
November 6th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Awww.
I actually thought that, aside from the Broyles marital troubles subplot, this was one of the best Fringe episodes ever.
It got the suspense and horror aspects *just right*.
Too bad about the medicine and science (and cliches), but hey, that’s Fringe.
November 6th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Thanks for the ongoing reviews Scott, I appreciate that you take the time to break down each episode with your our analysis on the medicine and science. I also enjoy Fringe and even I, who knows very little about medicine and science, was shaking my head at this episode.
I’m surprised you never mentioned the part about the Penthouse Guy victim. All the victims except Penthouse Guy were receiving radiation treatments. Penthouse Guy just flew across the country, which, according the the writers of Fringe, apparently is like getting a “big ol’ head X-ray.” Is that correct?
I wonder if the clock should have moved two minutes instead of one.
November 7th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
This ep was painfully boring. I’m surprised you only docked the clock by a minute.
November 8th, 2009 at 4:40 am
I’m glad you updated to mention the preview for next week. When they started talking about the “10% of the brain” myth as the whole premise of the episode, I started screaming at the TV “OMG that’s not even close to being true, you IDIOTS!” along with some other choice words…I can’t wait to read your review next week! :-)
November 8th, 2009 at 5:30 am
I so wanted that CIA guy at the end to be played by David Duchovny. It wouldn’t have made any sense as a cross-over (Mulder was FBI), but it would have been a neat wink to the fans, especially considering how much this episode in particular was very much like a bad X-Files episode.
As soon as they mentioned radiation, I knew it was going to go off the rails. I liked seeing more of Broyles (thanks Andrew, I still don’t really know his name) but the whole episode was really weak. I agree with the posters above that you’re being generous in only skipping ahead one minute. I think I’m just really interested in where the myth arc is going, so I have very little patience with the freak of the week episodes.
November 8th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Broken link in green letters (”here”).
November 9th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Just to leave my opinion about the general trend of comments. Don’t mistake me: I like this site and I find the comments and criticism most enlightening and interesting. More so, sometimes, than the series itself, actually. I fully agree that this episode was quite weak and rather tiresome. Also, I think they are starting to drag the series AGAIN by leaving the main storyline aside and have too many fill-out episodes like this and the last one. However, when it comes to the scientific nonsense: that is why this is just science fiction. I mean, the only true SCIENCE fiction film ever is 2001. The first season of ER had some good contributions by Michael Crichton, so it went ok. But I believe J.J. Adams and the rest couldn’t care less for real science. They just use it as a loose background in order to tell what they consider a thrilling story to the audience. Some people use magic, some call it science. It’s like calling X-Men a science fiction story when their powers are obviously just magic by another name. Most Science Fiction movies and TV series are just that. After all, magic by any other name… that’s what hooks most of the audience.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
I’m an organic chemist and I have no idea what that molecular structure was supposed to be. Not only did the carbons have fantastic numbers of bonds but there were elements not currently on my periodic table. This kind of thing frustrates me but I can’t wait to have a chance to say “Oh titanium tetrachloride – you sly temptress…”
November 10th, 2009 at 12:06 am
Hard Sci-Fi doesn’t make for good TV.
November 10th, 2009 at 4:45 am
Defying Gravity is just about the hardest SF you’ll ever see on American Television, and that just got killed. I’d consider ReGenesis hard SF, but it’s not clear whether it’s SF at all rather than medical drama.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:22 am
Well, even science fiction ought to be believable, and when the science is too stupid, it’s not (rather, it’s switchoffable). And if the magic is magic (ESP, leprechauns, little green men of all colours, …), I wish they could resist from trying to explain it (did the X-files ever try to explain the weird goings on (pseudo)scientifically? can’t remember); the force was cool, the midi-stupid-chlorians were not …
“Hard Sci-Fi doesn’t make for good TV.” Has there been any? On the other hand, stupid science makes you (if not you, then at least me) switch off (I gave up on Fringe a long time ago: these reviews on the other hand are very enjoyable indeed).
November 12th, 2009 at 7:54 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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