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

[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.