Fringe: Unearthed

By Rhea Dee

To kick off Fringe’s return to television (yay!) on Thursday, Fox decided to give us a double dose of Fringe goodness by airing a never before seen episode from Season One on Monday. (I’m not even sure if that episode made it onto the DVD box set.) Unfortunately, it wasn’t all too great.

The case of the week was pretty weak, compared to other Fringe episodes. A teenage girl, Lisa, who is in a coma, is taken off life support. When the surgeons begin to remove her organs (she’s an organ donor) she suddenly sits up and starts yelling in Russian (a language she doesn’t know how to speak). Team Fringe investigates and comes up with a theory that Andrew Rusk, a military man who’s gone missing, is hacking into Lisa’s brain somehow. The actual evolution of this story–dead guy in a teenage girl’s head–is pretty lackluster for Fringe. But the real story of this “Very Special Episode” was the battle of the wills between Team Fringe (now renamed Team Secular) and Lisa’s Mom, a devout Catholic (she was Catholic, I believe. My religion knowledge sucks).

It annoys me more than anything else when a typically secular show gets all religious. During this episode I got painful flashbacks to when The X-Files went down that road, and how much that sucked (because it did).

Because when faith is brought up in a science minded show, it is almost always brought up the same way: the non-believers are all non-believe-y, but at the very end, they admit that they have a little faith in them. Because really, we as a people just can’t make it without a little Christian-based faith.

And this episode follows a similar pattern, although it does its best to try and break out of that narrow box. I was pleased that Olivia, Peter and Walter were all secular, and I can understand the tension between them and the overbearing religious mom. But was Walter’s little aside at the end, that “we all have to have faith sometimes” really needed? No. We do not need to see a scientist admitting that even he believes sometimes.

And it’s not really a matter of “the scientist would never believe”. But whenever there’s a secular or atheist person on TV, they always seem to admit to believing sometimes. And belief never takes on an abstract thing; it is always a Christian based thing. Even shows like Bones and House, where the two title characters are hard-line atheists, both have a devout Christian-based character to offset their every word (Booth on Bones, Wilson on House). It gets really aggravating.

In addition to that, many regular quirks of the show felt completely off in this episode. Olivia seemed subdued, Walter hardly had any funny bits to share (save a settlement joke given his experiments back in the day, which was pretty funny), and the whole thing just felt clunky as hell.

It was also really easy to fish out subplots that the Fringe writing team decided to be more subtle about, like the budding relationship between Peter and Olivia. Two direct references were made in this episode to the pair “getting together”, which I found really odd, since Fringe is moving that at a snail’s pace, if they’re even moving it at all.

Reading around, I also found out there were a lot of people confused about this episode in the Season Two timeline since Charlie was running around not-dead and not-evil. Why Fox did not more avidly promote that this episode was a super secret one from Season One is beyond me. Speculation about this episode taking place in the alternate universe could be interesting, but quickly laid to rest (how could it be the alternate universe if Peter’s there?).

All in all, the whole experience was a confusing one, at best. I can see why Fox (or JJ and co.) scrapped the episode. My question is why they felt the need to air it at all.

Last Thoughts: There was one awesome thing about this episode. Walter in the 70’s! I loved how he looked in that little film he showed the team of his experiments. Definitely the highlight of this episode.

Next Time on Fringe: Not a long wait! Thankfully, Fringe goes back into familiar territory with an awesome looking story about monsters in the woods.

Rhea Dee spends her time collecting vintage junk, daydreaming about Eli Roth, and pondering the genius of John Carpenter soundtracks.  She really likes horror films.

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