"Episode 1.06"

"The cure made her a perfect candidate for weaponization"
Well, this episode opened with a very long (uninteresting, sorry) intro that was punctuated by lots of ketchup. It happens in Mass., so I have a question: if someone is "experimenting on the whole world", why do these weird things always happen in or around Boston? Just askin'. Mulder and Scully got to traipse across the US (even though we knew that they were really still in Vancouver, heheh).

The story we get this week hit close to home for me, after being through the whole chemotherapy experience -- I can vividly relate to the fear of watching someone pumping gallons of bizarre toxic unpronounceable chemicals into your veins. And here we see one of the Lost taglines ("The cure is worse than the disease") getting an even more serious treatment. Apparently someone is infusing the "cure" with a substance that sets the patient up for becoming a walking weapon. Interesting. But of course experiments do have their failures before perfection is attained, and these failures are tres gory!

Another question that I need to ask is, how is it that our intrepid para-science team can bring highly contagious corpses back to their ad hoc basement lab with no precautions? I mean, I know that they are set up for the bizarre, but why are the exploded bodies contagious in the diner but not the lab? And I'm beginning to wonder if TPTB are trying to out-gore CSI in the post-mortem department. The gorey details don't bother me that much, knowing that they're fake, but it's becoming laughable to me.

I love the new sneaky Pete. He is drawing on his grungy mysterious espionage persona and meeting with Nina to make deals to get info for the team. As he is not in law enforcement, he can take risks that Olivia can't, which makes things interesting. I can't wait to see what Nina asks of Pete in return someday for payback. (insert creepy "mwa-ha-ha-ha!")

I really didn't get the point of the mouse having to explode underneath the sheets, but if the answer is for TPTB to save some money on Special FX, that's a good enough answer for me.

I missed it, but someone caught Observer at the swanky happy hour where Olivia confronted the evil doctor. That whole confrontation felt stilted to me, but I think that I'm just getting too negative about this ep. I really didn't like it too much, but we're still in the set-up stage of the overall mythology so some of the important details that need to be revealed for the long haul might still be getting planted into the episodes. The X-Files didn't get really gripping for me until the second season.

Something tells me that Broyles might not be as angry at Dunham as he seems to be. His admonishment might be mostly a CYA maneuver, such as A.D Skinner used to pull on Mulder and Scully ("I specifically told them NOT to go!"), while giving them the old side wink. But I could be wrong. I really do love his office though.

We didn't get a visitation from John Scott this ep, but that's a good thing as it would have been too predictable. Unless that card pushed under the door was really from him. I don't know what to think of Dunham's creepy father story, but can you explain to me how it is that an FBI agent with her uber-connections can't track down a deadbeat dad? Seriously.

Overall this episode seemed low-key like last week's, but the science du-jour was thought provoking. And I was intrigued by the scenes revealing how an altruistic physician's compromises evolved into evil purposes via utilization by the wrong people. I'm sure that happens quite a bit in real life. BTW, be sure to check out the easter-egg section of FringeTelevision, they've posted some great ones for this week. Also, all my images here are from their screencap gallery, as Fox is not really putting much effort into keeping up with theirs.