Loaded Couch Potatoes

Honk Mahfah reviews the season’s penultimate episodes of Fringe and Lost.

Spoilers are throughout, but there is an especially big one for Fringe in the first paragraph, so if you don’t want to know, you might want to skip reading this.

The next-to-last episode of the first season of Fringe, “The Road Not Taken,” is a great example of why I try to not watch the “next-week-on…” clips for shows anymore.  Unfortunately, I’d seen a promo for this episode during House on Monday night, so I saw the Observer come into Walter’s lab and tell him that it was time to go.

That was in the final seconds of the episode, and was obviously intended by the show’s writers and producers to be a giant cliffhanger of an ending leading into the season finale.  So why Fox would then decide to put it in a promo is a mystery to me.

Actually, it’s not a mystery.  They do things like that for the same reason any marketing hack does things like that: because they think more people will watch if they do. I don’t believe it’s true, though.  Fringe is getting perfectly good ratings right now, and one thing that can increase its ratings is for the people currently watching to get so hooked on the show that they feel the need to get friends to watch.  You get people hooked on a show by surprising them and making them freak out a little over how cool what they just saw was.  If you’re giving away giant surprises like the one which ends this episode, then you’re dulling what should have been a great moment.  If my logic is sound, then you are therefore depriving the show of potential viewers in the future.  Well done.

It’s an annoying trend, and it must drive television producers up the wall.

Nevertheless, this was still a pretty good episode.  “Bad Dreams” writer/director Akiva Goldsman returned, this time as the contributor of the story, and while “The Road Not Taken” isn’t nearly as good as his first episode, it’s still good enough that I hope he returns for the second season.

He returns to the idea of the Jacksonville cortexophan trials, this time with a tale of twin sisters who have apparently been given pyrokinetic abilities.  (Yes, it’s a Firestarter reference, and yes, the writers acknowledge it.)  This leads to a scene in which one of the sisters incinerates Agent Harris, who has been revealed to be a mole … though who he is a mole for, exactly, has yet to be determined.  I’m guessing David Robert Jones, mainly because this episode is working so hard to make me believe it’s William Bell.

Olivia spends a decent amount of this episode experiencing some sort of deja-vu-like halucinations, in which she seems to be side-stepping into a parallel universe where things have happened slightly differently.  These scenes are shot well, and are creepy as hell.

I don’t have a lot to say about this episode, but I would like to take a moment to applaud some of the acting.  Anna Torv is steadily growing on me as an actress.  She’s quite the beauty, of course, so I’ve enjoyed seeing her the entire season from that shallow perspective, but for most of the season I’ve felt like she was curiously free of any real charm or charisma.  It’s now becoming apparent that that was simply how she was playing the role, and that there may have been reasons for it.  In the last few episodes, she’s started to seem a little crisper, a little more driven; or maybe it’s some other quality I can’t quite put a name to.  Either way, it’s not just Anna Torv that’s happening to, it’s Olivia Dunham; so I don’t think it’s a mistake, and I’m curious to see where it goes from here.

However, this episode — like several others before it, and arguably the entire season — belonged to John Noble.  He gets two incredibly juicy scenes.  The first is when he is confronted by Olivia, who demands to know what he and Bell did to her — to all the test subjects — during the cortexophan trials.  Noble’s work during this scene is tremendous, although I would like to point out that I had no idea Dunham knew Walter was involved in those trials.  That’s no reflection on Noble, of course.  But seriously, did we know she knew about this?  Did my attention slip at some point during a previous episode?

Bringing this review full circle, we return to the scene which ends the episode: the Observer showing up for Walter.  Earlier in the episode, Nina has alluded to something happening the last time the Observer showed up with the regularity he’s apparently been showing up lately.  Was this also something that involved Walter, or is Nina hinting at something even more ominous?  Either way, John Noble gets several more great moments during this final scene.  He finds the missing part of the ZFT manuscript, and calls out “Astrid, I’ve found it!”  That’s surprisingly touching; the poor guy has been saying Astrid’s name wrong all season, and now he finally gets it right.

Except it’s not Astrid walking into the lab; it’s the Observer, who says, “Hello, Walter.  It’s time to go.”  Walter replies, “Is it time?”  He doesn’t seem surprised; if anything, it seems as if (possibly subconsciously) he’s been waiting to hear those very words.  “I’ll get my coat.”

“Follow the Leader” is an episode of Lost that I know I probably should have loved.  I didn’t, though.  I liked it, don’t get me wrong; it just seemed very much like a getting-the-pieces-into-place episode, and while there were numerous moments of excellence, overall it felt a little lacklustre to me.

The two cruxes of the episode are Jack in 1977 trying to talk Eloise into helping him detonate the bomb and Locke in the present trying to take firm command of the Others.  The “leaders” of these two parts of the episode are seemingly Jack and John — appropriate, given how much of the series has revolved around the leadership of those two men — but both also feature Richard Alpert in a very prominent way.  I can’t help but wonder if he isn’t the leader the title is referring to.  I suspect we’ll find out next week.

Jack’s plan is to complete — or should I say “follow”? — Farraday’s plan to change the future by detonating the bomb.  Kate is not happy with this idea.  When Eloise asks her if Jack knows what he’s talking about and she replies, “He thinks he does,” I have rarely seen a more hateful look in anyone’s eyes than I saw in Kate’s.  It looks like this is it for Jack and Kate; I don’t see how she would ever even consider being close to him again.  Jack, in fact, is dangerously close to turning into a villain.  If this show can manage to persuasively pull that off, it’ll be one of the great coups in the hidtory of television.  And frankly, if they can turn him back into a genuine hero, at this point that would be a coup, also.  Once this Jack playing Sam Beckett, striving-to-put-right-what-once-went-wrong thing shakes out, it’ll be interesting to see where Jack is as a character.

Meanwhile, also in 1977, things are going poorly in Dharmaville.  Sawyer and Juliet sell out the location of the Hostiles in return for being put on the sub and evacuated from the island.  Things are looking pretty peachy for them until Kate shows up; nobody seems pleased that she’s there, except maybe for Kate herself, who now appears to have signed a lifetime contract with Team Sawyer.

The sub is evacuatig people because Dr. Chang has found Hurley and Miles and gotten the truth: that they are from the futre.  He puts Hurley on the spot, and Hurley says he’s crazy, but Chang presses the matter, asking Hurley a series of questions such as what year he was born.  1931, says Hurley, unconvincingly.  Dr. Chang asks sarcastically if he was in the Korean War.  “No such thing,” says Hurley, trying to salvage the situation.  He ends up saying, “Alright, dude, we’re from the future,” in his best hand-in-the-cookie-jar voice.  Jorge Garcia ought to be eligible for the next Emmy nomination for supporting actor in a comedy; he’s been pure gold this season.

Back in the present, Locke is doing trippy things like leading Richard to the Nigerian plane so that Richard can give past-John the compass and take the bullet out of his leg.  He is also asserting his supposed control over the Others, demanding that Richard take him to see Jacob.  In fact, since nobody has apparently ever seen Jacob, John wants the entire troupe of Others to go along for the visit.  “I’m starting to think John Locke is going to be trouble,” confides Richard to Ben.  “Why do you think I tried to kill him?” Ben replies.

Tried to kill him, huh?  Well, that’s interesting, innit?

Obviously, here, things are not entirely what they seem.  This shouldn’t surprise me, but somehow it did, and effectively.  This is probably why I’m getting a distinctly Wizard-of-Oz vibe off of Jacob.  Once again, I’m curious to see how this plays out.

I’ve got a feeling next week’s season finale is going to be monumental.

One last note: 1977 Eloise is played by Alice Evans, who is great, but it’s weird casting, because you could neve ever convince me that a smoking hot fox like her could eventually turn into Fionnula Flanagan.  Simply not possible.

Speaking of Flanagan, her Brotherhood co-star Kevin Chapman (he was Freddie Cork) shows up in this episode.  I hope he’s got a real role to play in future episodes; I’d hate to see him get wasted the way this show has occasionally wasted such fine actors in the past.