I liked the plot of this week’s episode of Fringe — at least for the first two thirds (until Walter was captured, when it started going downhill) — but the “science” and “medicine” was ridiculous.
The Plot: Mysterious men break into a mental health facility and perform some sort of brain operation on one of the patients. They remove some sort of foreign tissue from his brain, but are disturbed before they can finish the operation, so the patient is left with part of his brain exposed. Strangely, the patient has also been completely cured of his schizophrenia.
The Fringe team is called in and it is clear that Walter is uncomfortable with being back in a mental health institution. The security tapes manage to capture the face of the intruders’ leader, and Olivia recognizes him instantly. It was one of the frozen heads that was stolen earlier in the season and belongs to a man named “Newton.”
Looking through the patient’s medical records, Walter finds reference to a mysterious psychiatrist by the name of “Paris.” Astrid can find no records of the mysterious doctor, but with Walter’s help, is able to track down some prescriptions he wrote. They find two other institutionalized patients with prescriptions from Dr. Paris. Visiting these patients, they find that they have also been recently miraculously cured of various psychiatric diseases and show evidence of recent brain surgery. Walter recognizes that one of the drugs they’ve been given is used to prevent tissue rejection in organ transplant patients. He then realizes that the patient’s brains had been used to store the tissue from someone else’s brain.
The team is informed that Walter’s old mental health records show that Dr. Paris visited him six times while he was in the asylum — visits which Walter does not remember. Peter check’s Walter’s scalp and, sure enough, there’s an old surgical scar. An MRI of Walter’s brain is obtained and it shows three missing sections of brain — missing sections that perfectly match the pieces implanted in the other patients. Someone has removed part of Walter’s hippocampus (important in memory storage) and placed it in other people’s brains. And now someone has taken these pieces back.
Meanwhile, Walter has been captured by the Newton and his cohorts. They hook him up through some sort of contraption to the missing pieces of his brain. Once the connection is made, Walter seems suddenly awake for the first time since the show began. Newton is able to get Walter to tell him how to make a door to the other universe. He then injects Walter with some sort of drug before high-tailing it just before Dunham and the rest of the team arrive. While Peter helps Walter, Olivia chases after the bad guys. She manages to shoot the driver of their van (who bleeds silver — one of the shapeshifters), and then the second man (regular blood). Newton is captured — but only for a moment — because he tells Dunham that Walter has been given a neurotoxin, and he’ll only tell her how to administer the antidote after he is allowed to escape. Dunham acquiesces and Walter survives, but she is chided by Newton for her “weakness.”
In a final flashback, we see that the mysterious Dr Paris was actually William Bell and Walter’s brain surgery was done — apparently with Walter’s consent — to remove the knowledge of how to open the cross-dimensional door from his brain and store it someplace “safe.”
1. Lost ‘em Again
That tracking chip didn’t last long, did it?
2. “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!”
There were a couple of H.P. Lovecraft references this week (purposefully?)
Dr. West (as in Herbert West, Reanimator)
Dunwich Mental Health Facility (as in The Dunwich Horror)
3. Department of Redundancy Department
“Global destruction of biblical proportions.” That’s ridiculously redundant — global destruction, by definition, is of biblical proportions.
4. The AMA Does Not Do What You Seem To Think It Does
A common mistake, but an irritating one. The American Medical Association is really nothing more than a professional organization for doctors, like a union or lobbying group. It has no official sanction. It is not in charge of medical licensing, and keeps no “official list of doctors.” Depending on which source you use, only 15-30% of the physicians in this country are members of the AMA, so someone not being on their roster is no proof that they’re not a doctor or don’t exist. [I've blogged about this several times before, most recently here, in relation to the Beast and Dr. Mid-Nite.]
5. But I Asked For Infinite Refills
You cannot write an “indefinite prescription.” One-year, maximum.
6. I Reject Your Rejection
The four drugs listed on the patient records (Sirolimus, Muromonab CD3, Basiliximab, Azathioprine) are used to prevent rejection in organ transplant patients.
You would think that in their years in the asylum, at least one doctor or nurse would realize the drugs make no sense.
7. Bad Radiology
Those spots on the patients’ brain MRIs were way too big to be thought of as artifacts. The brain tissue was large enough that it would show up on multiple MRI slices (images).
No radiologist ever noticed the three holes in Walter’s brain before?
8. Respiratory Depression and Death
Tolerance or no, 50MG of Valium is one helluva dose. That’s two-and-one-half times the maximum daily dose of Valium.
Dr. West is either extremely trusting or extremely naïve to give that much Valium to Walter just on his say so, especially when it’s clear that Walter is not all there.
9. It’s Not a Two-Dimensional Jigsaw Puzzle
The brain is three-dimensional. The tissue cut out was three-dimension. It was inserted into people’s brains (crammed in, basically, because there was no “slot” to put it in), but somehow manages to show up on a two-dimensional MRI as a perfect fit, like a jigsaw puzzle piece. There was no way they could fit the extra piece in the brain so precisely at just the right point and at just the right angle for this to be true. [A similar problem occurred in the infamous autopsy scene in Identity Crisis #6, where Dr. Mid-Nite managed to find just the right slice to find perfect footprints in the brain.]
Good plot but goofy science cancel each other out. The Doomsday Clock stays at 11:55
This week’s Fringe cipher was: PORTAL.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
Karl has much more to say.
If only it were as easy to convince people of your point of view in the real world as it seems to be in Buzzy’s world.
Hulk #15, #16
Now before all you “War of Christmas” soldiers get your knickers in a twist and start signing petitions and lighting up torches, bear in mind that this is the only one of three DC holiday PSAs that mentions any holiday other than Christmas (it’s also a 1953 ad, so this “war” of yours has probably been going on since long before you were born).
Betsy Crane’s friend and fellow nurse Diane has met and fallen in love with a Jeff, a widower with a young daughter. He saved her from drowning a few weeks before and she has fallen head over heels in love with him. 
Subscribe to Polite Dissent
