1x02: The Same Old Story

[kerithwyn]

Today's episode: 1x02, "The Same Old Story."


Oh, you say the sweetest things.
Only to you, Charlie.
(Dialogue not from above scene)

Writer: J. J. Abrams, Jeff Pinkner, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci
Director: Paul Edwards
Originally aired: September 16, 2008

Synopsis:
A woman conceives, carries to full-term and births a baby in the span of minutes, dying in the process; the baby dies after aging 80 years in three hours. This leads the investigators on a search for a serial killer harvesting brain parts for his own survival and raises questions about biotech cloning of 'cultivated soldiers'. (from Fringepedia)

Hey, everyone, it's the pregnancy horror episode! Good to get this theme out of the way quickly...at least until season 3. (Callbacks: "The Abducted" and "Bloodline"; Penrose's name comes up in "Of Human Action.")

Most Memorable Quote:
BROYLES: Thank you all for convening at this late hour. Forty-three minutes ago, we were alerted to an incident at the Wallace Bromley Medical Center. While the details are still coming in, it appears to be another anomaly whose mysteries and origins remains the sole purpose of this committee. I called you together tonight to introduce you to my new team, who will now be responsible for investigating all these events. Hopefully, they will have more success than our last.

...where is all the fic about the previous team, I ask you.


Links:
Episode transcript
Seriable rewatch, commentary including links to previous rewatches
Polite Dissent, medical/science reviews.

Comments

[elfin]

In my head, the fic about the previous team is at Gossamer. ^_^

[kerithwyn]

Yes, of course. :D But it sounds there like a more recent previous team met an unfortunate end, and I'm intrigued by the idea that they've been trying to re-create the M/S team with no luck for a while now.

[elfin]

True, and Broyles does imply it was his team, and he wouldn't have had anything to do with M/S.

[wendelah1]

Maybe the previous team was this pair?



That didn't end well.

[wendelah1]

Mine, too, obviously.

[laurus_nobilis]

It's only the second episode, and we already start seeing the theme of fathers who do terrible things to keep their sons alive. I remembered there were plenty of "cases of the week" reinforcing that theme, but I'd forgotten it started so soon.

[kerithwyn]

Yup. The parallel is especially on the nose, since Penrose apparently wasn't Christopher's biological father:

The man I called my father. He should have let me die. That was his mistake. But he was blinded... Because he loved me. He loved me.

[laurus_nobilis]

Good point! That makes it even better.

[seekingferret]

Re: our conversation on the last post about Broyles as traitor, they tease the idea again in Olivia's daydream in the Massive Dynamic waiting room, before turning that scene into more pregnancy horror. I actually found that a little strange... I guess the connection between the two themes was that bit from her conversation with Peter, wondering which cases from the past few years with John were actually Pattern cases and wondering what Pattern-related things John had done during those cases behind her back.

There is a walk and talk with Broyles and Olivia in both this episode and the pilot. What I noticed when I was vidding both of those scenes for a vid that never worked out is that the camera starts out framing both of them equally, but quickly moves to focus on Olivia. She moves faster than Broyles, more purposefully. Her body posture demands that people listen to her.

And of course we get the mystery of Peter's medical file, which "Only contains his birth date." Discovering Peter's grave really doesn't seem beyond Olivia's superpowers of investigation, so to a degree I wonder why she doesn't even seem to try to figure out what Walter was talking about.

[kerithwyn]

I wonder why she doesn't even seem to try to figure out what Walter was talking about.

It's a good question. I suppose it could be her own subconscious warning her off--she'd forgotten about Jacksonville and meeting Peter as a child, so perhaps as self-defense part of her knows better than to dig too deep.

[seekingferret]

I was also intrigued in Olivia's daydream by the subtext to her Fake-Broyles saying that he wasn't sure if asking a favor from Nina was a good idea because favors from MD always came with the expectation of quid pro quo.

One of the memes that I hold to when discussing Olivia's character is that her default mode is to always pay any cost required to solve a mystery and get more information. That's why when Walter in the pilot asked her to jump into the tank, she asked how high. Not because she trusted Walter, but because she didn't mind paying the price if Walter was wrong. Similarly here, as soon as Walter mentions that he needs a technology from Massive Dynamic, Olivia is tesseracting down to NYC.

So I thought it was interesting that the Broyles in Olivia's head is second guessing this tendency and asking if there are actually costs she isn't willing to pay. And then of course she dismisses this inner voice and asks for the favor anyway, because fundamentally that is who Olivia is.

Of course, this character trait is in contrast to Walter, who once believed that there were no costs that came with is work and therefore was blindsided when the cost was suddenly too high for him.

[kerithwyn]

Not a favorite episode, but it's got some important establishing background. Lest we forget Everything is Walter's Fault:

"...as sorry as I was to hear about Doctor Bishop's incarceration, I believe it was the best thing that could ever happen to humanity. No one in power should ever learn what he knows."

The !SKIENCE! in this episode is more ridiculous than usual, in a "lol no" sense.

Previously noted:
+ The elder Penrose got away, never to be seen again. Hmm.

* But what really gets me about this episode? The tesseract. Apparently all in one day: Olivia goes to a crime scene at the hospital at 4:00 a.m., goes to the lab in Cambridge, goes to the hotel where Loraine died, drops by the Federal Building in the middle of Boston, heads back to the lab, drives over to Boston College (west of Boston proper), comes back to the lab, goes to New York to meet with Nina Sharp [at least a four-hour trip by car], comes back with equipment for Walter to do his eyeball experiment, goes to catch Penrose at a warehouse [hey, it’s finally night]. The next day she drops in on Nina and then finishes up at the Federal Building and the lab.

"Bad Dreams" has even worse tesseract whiplash.

Still want the AU where Olivia took Nina up on her offer. (Or an s4 AU where she went to work for MD after college.)

[seekingferret]

Ahaha... Massive Dynamic being in New York is a problem the show never managed to solve. The episode where amnesiac Peter took the taxi to New York and got the several hundred dollar bill will never not crack me up.


Yeah, I was also interested in the Olivia at Massive Dynamic AU. I feel like there are ways in which Nina is not wrong, that it would have been a good fit for her curiosity. And I reallywant the fic where Olivia learns about Jacksonville from Nina while working for her, instead of from Walter.

[casually_cruel]

Re-watching this episode, I'm still a bit confused my Nina's motives. She's so blatantly two faced in this episode and it doesn't make much sense to me. If she's in contact with William Bell and knows about the other universe, and presumably the fact that Olivia is a Cortexiphan subject, then why wouldn't she want her working on the Pattern? To protect her? That might explain why she tries to recruit her to MD, but it still seems strange to me. There's also some power play going on between Nina and Broyles. Maybe it has to do with the (possibly dropped?) not trusting Broyles plotline. He really does seem to pull a 180 from the pilot.

Anyway this episode has some great Peter stuff: his reluctance to be there, calling Walter out when he claims that Peter was "always impatient," which is a really valid point, taking the brunt of Olivia's anger. Yet his reluctance to work with his father doesn't go so far that he won't indulge Walter intellectually. I think that's one of my favorite things about season 1 Peter, that he'll call out craziness and acts as a sort of skeptic, but that doesn't make him any less likely to play the game.

Olivia's snark in this episode is great ("I told her you're giving me a raise"). We seem to get less of that as the show goes on.

[wendelah1]

Re-watching this episode, I'm still a bit confused my Nina's motives. She's so blatantly two faced in this episode and it doesn't make much sense to me. If she's in contact with William Bell and knows about the other universe, and presumably the fact that Olivia is a Cortexiphan subject, then why wouldn't she want her working on the Pattern? To protect her? That might explain why she tries to recruit her to MD, but it still seems strange to me. There's also some power play going on between Nina and Broyles. Maybe it has to do with the (possibly dropped?) not trusting Broyles plotline. He really does seem to pull a 180 from the pilot.

I don't understand Nina's character during season 1,2 and 3. Seasons 4 and 5 Nina Sharp seems different to me. We'll have to watch to see if the trusting Broyles plotline really is dropped or not.

I think that's one of my favorite things about season 1 Peter, that he'll call out craziness and acts as a sort of skeptic, but that doesn't make him any less likely to play the game.

I like that about him too.

Olivia's snark in this episode is great ("I told her you're giving me a raise"). We seem to get less of that as the show goes on.

That was a great line.

[seekingferret]

Olivia's snark in this episode is great ("I told her you're giving me a raise"). We seem to get less of that as the show goes on.

I usually find the Olivia snark in these early episodes doesn't quite land right for me. It seemed like a part of the character that Anna Torv wasn't quite feeling, and gradually the writers stopped trying to make her do it. Which is why I find it strange that I love AltLivia's snark.

Oh

[corwinofamber]

Ohhhh...Olivia working for MD would be delicious for AU fic. Particularly since she isn't all that by-the-book as an FBI agent! Imagine her with fewer rules to follow. That would fit into a fic I've had on the back burner for two years very well.

Dreams vs reality, body horror, fathers and sons. Although not a favorite episode, it hits a lot of recurring themes of Fringe in a satisfying way. They played loose with the science as they usually do, but certainly not as loose as most procedurals.

My mind rationalizes all the apparent teleportation by assuming one episode takes approximately one week in real time.

Re: Oh

[casually_cruel]

Particularly since she isn't all that by-the-book as an FBI agent! Imagine her with fewer rules to follow.

Oooh that's a good point. I think Anna Torv said in an interview that Olivia would probably act up more, but she's constantly being put in her place by Broyles.

I wonder what Olivia would be like with only Nina to answer to, if she would go further and be darker. There might be too much cop in her to cross some of the more... questionable lines, though.

Re: Oh

[kerithwyn]

I always thought that if Olivia had joined MD (in any timeline), she would have uncovered all the dirty secrets (John's body! the Tyler clones!) and taken it down from the inside out.

[wendelah1]

I found fanfic for "The Same Old Story." Row, Row, Row Your Boat by muselives. The first part was adorable, haven't gotten to the rest yet.