Fringe Re-Watch

On the surface, Unleashed is a meh filler episode. An unseen monster is on the loose, it’s based off of an old experiment Walter did that someone has picked up, people are dying, Charlie might die from it’s attack, and the Bishops and Dunham must find a way to finally stop it. Simple, right? But in this filler episode is a buried treasure of establishing how characters react to situations that would keep sturdy for all 5 seasons. 

It’s kind of amazing that I spent 5 seasons never asking the question “Why would they do that?” even if Olivia/Walter/Peter do things that don’t make the most common sense, it is always done with this character believes this and that is why they are doing it. This episode starts to lay down the foundations of how Walter handles responsibility, regret of things done in the past, and a need to protect his son and Olivia, the woman who believed in him. These are very similar feelings he would have at the end of the series, when he decides to make the sacrifice to give Peter and Olivia their life back. 

This episode reveals Peter’s antagonizing his father for his past experiments and tries to hammer home to Walter that he needs to take responsibility for his past as it has now led to chaos in the present. If only Peter knew the half of it. This episode also attempts to give Charlie layers as he faces his own mortality and keeps his near death experience to himself and decides to not tell his wife. I think most Fringe fans liked Charlie. He’s great to Olivia, good at his job, and worth a chuckle for a few of his one liners as the odd man out of the Fringe team. This episode does humanize him, although I don’t know too many people who felt they couldn’t connect with the character because we never saw him outside of the FBI. If anything Charlie felt like a solid character that could be built on, but was taken too soon from us. I’ll have way more to add there when we get to that unfortunate twist in season 2. 

Speaking of Charlie, Unleashed also tries to add a few things to other characters as well. There’s the budding potential relationship between Peter and Rachel that Olivia doesn’t seem too thrilled with. Polivia fans (of which I am one as well) will probably say this is Olivia not wanting her sister to take a potential interest in Charlie, but I feel like we can also see this as Olivia fearful of worlds colliding. Her personal life and her Fringe life, just as her Fringe life collides with her FBI life when Charlie is almost killed. Astrid also gets a bit more to do and the writing is shown to make her adapting to Fringe life. 

Last time, we talked about how Clarice Starling must’ve been a huge influence on the character of Olivia Dunham, so it’s no surprise the villain of this week has a bit of Bufallo Bill about him. There’s A LOT of Silence of the Lambs in Fringe’s first season and that might be a reason I got so attached to it. One of the great things about the character of Clarice and Jodi Foster’s performance, is that she’s able to show her vulnerability and humanity in the shadow of such a gruesome set of murders and interviewing a cannibal. For Olivia, she becomes so obsessed with a case, that at times it felt like we didn’t really know who Olivia was behind the agent. Looking at that, we can see her sister and niece coming to live with her was meant to show what Olivia is like at home, with family. We can debate whether or not this worked overall, but it does come into play in this particular episode. 

We’ve seen Olivia get along with her niece in several episodes before, and it actually all pays off here with the child. I’m just gonna call him Michael, even though we won’t get that information till much later. While connecting with Michael could’ve gone to Peter or Walter, it was a smart choice to give this to Olivia and have her be protective of Michael while also using his clues to try and solve an old case. This goes to show Olivia’s empathy and compassion and how her job is very much connecting with others.We did get this in the pilot, her whole motivation for kicking off the event of modern day Fringe was to save the man she was in love with, but with everything that’s been going on in season 1, we may have gotten away from this, so it was important to bring this back to the center. Especially when we’re about to get involved in some revelations to Olivia’s backstory.  Season 1 did go back and forth between plots a lot, but it is a bit jarring that there’s really not a mention of what went down in the episode previously. It goes with this episode feeling like it could’ve been placed anywhere.

Not to make this all about Olivia, Peter has a nice moment with Michael when trying to connect to him with a G.I. Joe and one of the standout moments of this episode is Walter’s dance to get the device on Michael. Both of these moments would later feed into the future of the show. A reference about Peter’s toys is a clue to the season finale shocker that Peter is from the other side, and Walter’s dance has a very creepy negative effect when we start to realize he knew how to manipulate children in order to do his experiments on them. 

I can’t say much about The Artist in this episode. A neat idea that’s been done quite a few times and I’ll admit in 2019 I would’ve expected them to go a bit deeper into the idea of someone killing women and remaking them the way he felt. Considering some of the gender politics that was a big part in the pilot, maybe the show was going to go deeper into this, but smartly realized the Olivia/Michael connection was more of the central emotional story. I do feel like The Artist could’ve been a bigger character had he been part of a different episode of the week, one not centered on Michael. 

And that brings us to the ending with Michael and September. For years fans debated the importance of this scene or what it meant. I will admit I was one of the people believing that Michael was actually September and that September was time travelling to the year when he was found. We weren’t actually too far off either! I’ll have more to say when we eventually get to that reveal in Season 5, but I’m glad this wasn’t a dropped storyline and it was brought back. 

I feel Olivia Dunham was heavily inspired by Clarice Starling, being a capable and clever agent who is always doubted, looked down upon, and both with being a woman in a field populated by men. For that reason it made a lot of sense that there was a bit of a Hannibal Lecter vibe with David Robert Jones in his debut (episode 7) Jared Harris is fantastic in the role, though “Ability” does change a bit. He feels like a combination of Hannibal in the way he tests Olivia but also has a little bit of John Doe from Seven as unpredictable and playing mind games with his captors. In fact, the scene of David Robert Jones surrendering himself to the FBI is almost shot for shot from John Doe surrendering in Seven. And this being a a couple months after The Dark Knight, there’s some Heath Ledgar Joker trickery thrown in there as well. 

There’s a lot in play with “Ability” we find the ZFT manuscript, DRJ is suffering from his transportation, we get the mention of Liv and cortexiphan, the ending with the lights, and Walter realizing he wrote the ZFT manuscript. There’s...a lot. 

The episode starts out a bit weird with a recap of the ending of “Safe” (Episode 10) and possibly the scariest pattern event yet with the skin covering up your eyes and mouth to kill you. That is some scary stuff and I’m glad they eventually bring this back in season 5. Jones goes into a tank to help his body process the transportation effects. While Walter and Astrid work on the case of the human sewing shut skin, Olivia cutely asks Peter if he as a “weird connection” to find the ZFT manuscript. Peter indeed does have a weird connection (he always does) and we get to meet Edward, a bookstore owner who will creepily have Olivia as a coffee table in season 5. Charlie and his partner Tommie, who has an unusal amount of close ups and dialogue for a character we’ve never met before so you just knew he had to be working for ZFT or was going to get killed, find evidence to where DRJ is hiding just as DRJ makes his Seven inspired surrender. 

Sanford continues to be a thorn in the side of Olivia and Broyles when it comes to questions DRJ and throws in a “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” line. Maybe one day I’ll talk about the show using very specific terminology like terrorists attacks and negotiating with terrorists, which is a very post-9/11 world (In their defense, they are the FBI) and then using the world trade centers as a visual to represent the alternate universe. Back to this episode, Olivia once again has to find concrete evidence for the bigs in the FBI to let her do her job. A raid on Jones’ safe house leads to Olivia finding a drawing Jones made of her and, you guessed it, the death of poor old Tommie. This death leads to Sanford giving into Jones’ demands and Jones performs an elaborate experiment to get him and Olivia some alone time. He leaves a package for her to complete the, now iconic in my mind, light test. 

And this is where the episode gets really interesting. In a rewatch, we of course, know that Olivia was indeed used in the cortexiphan trials and we know why Jones wants to use Olivia’s powers for his own gain, and we know that Olivia does posses the power to turn off the lights. However, back in 2009 (or whenever you first saw this episode) “Ability: is playing mind games with it’s audience the same way Olivia believed Jones was playing her. Does Olivia actually have powers? Could she really use her mind to turn off the lights? Or was this all a game just to mess with her. If it was a game, what was Jones’ goal? Just to put doubt in her? I know Olivia makes the argument that Jones just wanted to get close to Walter and the episode ends with us knowing Walter may have written the ZFT manuscript, so it would make sense why Jones wants to see Walter, but it also wouldn’t really excuse why Jones has been quite obsessed with her. But if Olivia did really turn off the lights, that means she has powers from this cortexiphan, and that opens a lot of doors. Doors that we’ll eventually go through as we continue the rewatch. Again, it seems a bit silly today to think of this episode’s light test and be of course Liv has powers! But only 14 episodes into Fringe’s story, we have seen weird stuff, but Liv with some kind of super power was a pretty big leap for the show. It’s easy to see how audiences would think Jones was just screwing with her. 

The light test also allows Olivia to have a heroic moment. We’ve seen Liv be a badass and can take down the baddies, but we haven’t seen a lot of Olivia being a hero. Her decision to stay and try to turn off the lights with her mind, something she doesn’t 100% believe, is a heroic mark. It’s also a bit of her maybe being drawn into this idea that Jones might not be telling all lies. The shots going back and forth between her and the lights before they finally start to go out is probably the most intense scene we’ve had so far. Also, I don’t think enough is said about Peter’s decision to leave and then go back and watch Olivia turn off the lights. If she couldn’t turn them off (and thus going with the idea that Jones didn’t set it up for the lights to always go off with 2 seconds to spare) both Olivia and Peter would have died. You can make the argument that he wouldn’t have been able to get far away enough, so either way he could’ve died, but I feel like this episode is part of Peter embracing the weird, that anything can really happen, and him really caring for Olivia and can’t bare to just leave her alone. A nice touch was him standing behind her, but not giving her vocal encouragement, and still allowing this to be her moment. 

Then that finale! Olivia gets word from Nina that there were cortexiphan trials in Jacksonville and we can see from her face, that there’s now a real possibility Jones was telling the truth. Walter has been gazing over the ZFT book with great interest and we notice how the y is indented in the book. Walter uses his typewriter to confirm his suspicions, that he wrote the ZFT manuscript. This is some scary stuff considering ZFT’s terrorism and gives the audience a reason to start to mistrust Walter. For one, he can’t even remember the things he’s done, and we know his experiments have crossed a moral line. I feel like this is a bit downplayed in the next episode (and possibly putting fuel to the fire that some of the fringe episodes seem to be a bit out of order) but it was a great little clue to the larger Fringe story. 

And that was “Ability”. One of my absolute favorites from season 1. This really feels like the show finding it’s voice and getting into the meat of the story. Jones continues to be a great villain, Olivia is emerging as a reluctant hero, the relationship between Olivia and Peter grows, and we’re not sure exactly what Walter has done. It’s a solid 10/10 episode, no real complaints from me.