Mini movie review: Run, Fat Boy, Run

Run, Fat Boy, Run is a silly, inconsequential comedy starring Simon Pegg, Thandie Newton and Hank Azaria, and directed by David Schwimmer.  About five years ago, Dennis (Pegg) suffered a major case of cold feet and left his pregnant bride Libby (Newton) at the altar.  Now, his relationship with her is strained, although he does love his exceedingly adorable son; he's out of shape; and his security guard job at the ladies' wear section of a department store scarcely pays enough for him to make the rent.

Libby is doing just fine, however, with her popular bakery shop and very nice flat.  Even better, she's dating the smooth, successful American Whit (Azaria) who runs marathons for fun.  When Dennis - who still carries a torch for the woman he abandoned - meets Whit and learns of an upcoming charity run ... well, you can see where this is headed.

This is not the Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead, Spaced or Hot Fuzz.  This is Simon Pegg in a generic, slightly funny comedy, playing an Everyman schlub who overcomes the odds with a supporting cast of vaguely eccentric characters, and ends up learning something in the process.  It's a harmless enough movie, not terrible but not particularly good, and while it's always good to see Pegg onscreen, I prefer him to be unshackled in less conventional fare.

Mini book review: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I'd been waiting for ages to read The Hunger Games - very popular at the library - and took it with me on vacation last week. I tore through it, loving it, this suspenseful, fast-paced, violent blockbuster of a post-apocalyptic YA novel, and when I finished, thought, "I'm so going to love writing a review of this book."  But now I find I don't have much to say about it, other than I'm looking forward to the other two books in the series and am also looking forward to the movie adaptation.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen is a great character: tough as nails because she has to be, yet vulnerable because she's yet only a girl; smart and adaptive to her world but often oblivious to the feelings of the people in it.  Brave and loyal, broken and battered, she's a wonderfully flawed heroine, fighting for survival in a vicious world, the ultimate reality t.v. show, The Running Man for the modern age.  Other characters are less fully developed, but that may be because the story is told from Katniss's point of view and her focus is on killing/not getting killed.

So that's all I've got.  I fear there is more murder and mayhem ahead for Katniss and Peeta, and heartbreak as well.  I'm on the waiting list for Catching Fire - hopefully I'll have more to say about the second book.  And hopefully I'll like it as much as I did The Hunger Games.

I haven't forgotten

This may be the longest gap between posts since I started ol' FMS.  I'm so sorry.  But our houseguests just left, and I just finished reading The Hunger Games, and I've got The Town and Session 9 waiting to fire up the DVR ... a book review will be up in the next day or so, promise.

Summertime Television

Summertime television used to be el sucko.  Of course, after this year's lackluster season, once the only bright spot - Justified - ran its course, there wasn't much I wanted to watch now anyway.  To be sure, I've got all the episodes of AMC's The Killing sitting in my DVR, and I've recorded a bunch of Invasions too (although I can't remember why - is it supposed to be any good?).  Burn Notice returns sometime soon too and that's nice and light and fluffy.

But what of the new cable shows, released in the summer when there's nothing on the networks?  This time around I've got a list of them that I'm willing to try, based on some geeky blog post I read somewhere:

• Teen Wolf - 6/5 on MTV.  This remake is not surprising in the wake of Twilight.  I read something somewhere that this version is "more Incredible Hulk than Teen Wolf," but I'll give it a shot.
• The Nine Lives of Chloe King - 6/14 on ABC Family.  From the show's site: "Chloe King is looking forward to celebrating her birthday with her friends and single mother, just like every other year…that is until she starts developing heightened abilities [FMS note: cat-like] and discovers she's being pursued by a mysterious figure. Chloe soon learns she's part of an ancient race which has been hunted by human assassins for millennia —and that she may be their only hope for ultimate survival."  Hey, I liked GREEK a lot so I'm interested to see what they do with an urban fantasy-ish series.
• Falling Skies - 6/19 on TNT.  A post-apocalyptic humans vs. alien invaders show executive-produced by Steven Spielberg?  I have high hopes for this one.
• Wilfred - 6/23 on FX.  You've seen the ads, right?  Frodo's got a dog.  Everyone else in the world sees an actual dog but to Frodo, it's a guy in a dog suit with an English or Aussie accent.  Could be twisted (she said hopefully).
• Alphas - 7/11 on Syfy.  Kind of like Heroes (but only in a good way, hopefully) with a team of folks with heightened abilities.  Only this time they have government funding AND David Strathairn.

What about you guys?  What will you be watching when it's too hot to do anything else?

Fringe recap: S1E20 "There Is More Than One of Everything"

The EMTs bring Nina Sharp into the ER.  She's unconscious from the whole being shot thing, and the EMTs are weirded out by her robo-arm, which has been stripped of its skin-coat.  Up in Boston, the Fringe team has heard what happened and is already on the case, reviewing the security footage from Nina's building.  They watch as a team of masked men - one is technically bandaged, not masked - shoot Nina, mutter to one another and then black out the camera for four minutes, whilst they do something untoward to the unconscious and bleeding woman.  The FBI runs the muffled voices through some voice recognition software and determine that the bandaged man is Jones.  He seems to be falling apart somewhat, post-teleportation.  The team wonders what Jones did to Nina in that four minutes they couldn't see.  Olivia jumps up on her soapbox and starts ranting about wanting to bring William Bell in for questioning.  Broyles, hilariously, tries to get a word in edgewise and tell her that yes, he's already starting to make those calls.

The next morning, Peter, Olivia and Astrid are all looking for Walter who has gone walkabout again.  Olivia has a slight crisis of conscience about upsetting the old guy at the pastry shop but Peter says that he, and Walter, understand. No one on campus has seen Walter so Peter heads out to search for him.  He's probably not going to find him since Walter is at some remote cemetery, staring down at a headstone whilst the Bald Man watches from a little ways away.

Nina wakes up in recovery.  Broyles is there and tells her it was Jones.  He asks what they did to her arm.  Nina wiggles her robo-fingers and tells Broyles to get Olivia here.  When the younger woman arrives, Nina tells them that Bell is not funding Jones's techno-terrorism: Jones used to be a valued Massive Dynamic employee but there was a falling out and Jones was fired.  Ever since he escaped from the German prison, he's been trying to contact Bell and Nina thinks Jones is trying to kill him.  She goes on to promise that if Olivia will stop Jones, Nina will personally set up a face-to-face meeting with Olivia and Bell, and Olivia will have all her questions answered.  If Jones gets to Bell first, however, all bets are off.  Olivia asks what Jones did to Nina's arm: he removed an incredibly potent power source.

Out on a rainy street, Jones and his team set up a bunch of tech that runs on the pilfered power source.  When they turn it on, the passersby cover their ears in pain.  A shimmer appears in the street, revealing a window into the alt-verse where a semi truck, under sunny skies, is heading towards them.  But the tech won't hold - "It's too thick at these coordinates," bitches Jones - and the shimmer closes, cutting the truck in half.

The Bald Man and Walter stand on a beach.  The Bald Man hands Walter a coin, telling him that it isn't hte one he thinks it is: "There is more than one of everything."  He asks if Walter knows this place and remembers what he's come here for, because there isn't much time.  Walter nods grimly and heads up the beach to a derelict house.

Broyles and Nina stop by the Harvard lab to ask Peter and Astrid about Walter's current whereabouts - they think he might know what Jones is up to.  When they learn that Walter is missing, both Nina and Broyles jump on their phones and order their respective organizations to search for the missing man.  Nina's team wins, soon passing along a photo of Walter at a North Shore commuter rail station, not far from the beach house the Bishop family used to own.  Peter muses that Walter liked it up there because it was quiet and heads out to collect his father.

Olivia and Charlie stare at the truncated truck.  "Where's the rest of it?" asks a bewildered Charlie.  They interrogate witnesses who confirm the shimmer and a man with bandages on his face.  Then Charlie is handed a report which completely befuddles him: the VIN, the parts serial numbers, the registration tag ... none of the truck's identifying numbers exist [in this 'verse].  "This truck doesn't exist! Where the hell did it come from?" He sounds pretty upset.

Back at FBI HQ, Olivia's like, WTF is going on - what's with this truck and where in the world is William Bell?  Nina rolls her eyes: "That's the trouble, Agent Dunham.  He's not in this world."  Charlie is having a really tough time getting his brain around the alt-verse concept but Olivia, who's been edging up to it for some time now, is totally on board.  Broyles is too, because he's complicit with Nina.  (Meanwhile, Jones and his crew get out of their SUVs at some soccer field in Providence.)  Nina tells the Fringe team that jOnes is using the tech out of her arm to try to cross over into the alt-verse and kill Bell.  Suddenly, every single cell phone in the room starts ringing.  That can't be good.

Up at the beach house, Peter finds Walter inside, frantically running from room to room, getting more and more agitated because he knows he has to find something important that he left here, but he can't remember what it was or where he put it.  Peter tries to calm his father, finally recalling a memory of when he was very young and Walter would make them whale-shaped pancakes on the weekends.  For some reason, Walter's brain clicks at this and he scampers up to the attic.

Out in the Providence soccer field, the witnesses are shaken up, describing the shimmer that opened and then slammed shut.  Trouble is, one of the soccer players was running through the shimmer when it closed and it decapitated him (and then some).  The decapitated bits are nowhere to be found - they're on the other side.  Eew.

Back at HQ (because Providence is like a block from Boston - the geography in this show is total crap), Olivia requests all the X-files from the file room.  [Sorry, but wouldn't she have gone through all these weirdo Fringe files AGES ago?  That's what I thought.] Some time later, she has put together a map of all the Fringe occurences and thinks she has made a connection between Jones's latest shenanigans.

Walter opens a trunk in the beach house attic and pulls out a lockbox.  There's a dusty coin sitting on top of the box - looks like the one the Bald Man handed him earlier.  Peter helps him open the box and he removes a gadget.  Walter opines that back in the day, he and William Bell used to do a lot of LSD (Peter is so not shocked by this "revelation") and were convinced that hallucinogenics offered them glimpses into the alt-verse, although they wanted to try to get there themselves.  Bell's cortexyphan experiments were to alter the children to have the ability to travel between the realities.  "Around this time, something was lost to me, Peter, something previous."  Walter decided to cross to the alt-verse and take from there what was lost to him here. 

But he had to find a soft spot between the realities to do so - otherwise the membrane between the 'verses is too tough.  But the world's advance technologies are messing with the natural order of things and creating more soft spots between the 'verses than there should be.  So Walter built a patch - this gadget he's uncovered - to close any holes between the realities.  He thinks that he knows where the next soft spot will be.  Fortuitiously, back at FBI HQ, the team has figured out the same soft spot location.

That dark and rainy night, Jones's crew sets up their tech at Reiden Lake.  "Come on, men, we're going to the other side!"  Peter and Walter arrive at the lake, Walter nervous about being late for whatever it is that's about to happen.  When they get out of the car, Olivia's FBI team pounces on them.  Then everyone figures out they're on the same side and move towards Jones.

This time Jones's tech works perfectly - the soft spot is soft enough.  Shots are exchanged between the FBI and the bad guys but Jones stays focused.  Walter shows Peter how to use the patch gadget and sends him in.  As the portal between the 'verses opens, Jones walks forward, ignoring Olivia's shouts for him to stop or she'll shoot.  So she shoots, but the bullets pass harmlessly through his body, a by-product of his post-teleportation bodily degradation.  Jones starts to step through the portal and Peter fires off the patch gadget.  The portal slams closed, slicing Jones in half.

Later, Broyles stops by Olivia's office and tells her that he's sorry, but they've been ordered to cease and desist in their investigation of William Bell.  And this time they have to pay attention to it.

At the lab, Walter is missing again but this time he's left a note - first time ever, which delights Peter - saying that he'll be back, and this time he knows where he's going.  He's gone back to that rural cemetery, actually, where he places one of those coins on that headstone.  The camera moves so we can read it: Peter Bishop, 1978-1985.  Walter stands there, weeping.

Olivia gets a phone call from Nina, asking her to come to NYC tomorrow so Nina can hold up her end of the bargain.  Olivia goes to the hotel and sits in the restaurant.  And sits and sits and sits and sits.  Nina never shows.  Pissed off, Olivia stalks to the elevator. 

In the elevator, there are some weird flashes of light and the doors open onto a bright white, futuristic corridor.  A tall, elegant young woman greets Olivia by name and takes her to a swanky office.  She walks around, puzzled.  A door opens behind her and Leonard Nimoy (!!!) walks in, introducing himself as William Bell.  She asks where they are and he smiles, saying it's complicated.  As the episode ends, Olivia walks to the windows and looks out as the camera pulls back: she's standing in one of the Twin Towers, which in this 'verse did not fall on 9/11.  That's a damn ballsy final shot.

Previously on Fringe / next time on Fringe

Fringe recap: S1E19 "The Road Not Taken"

At FBI HQ, Broyles flashes photos from the recent Fringe cases and hands out information packets.  He tells the assembled agents about ZFT and their manifesto, Destruction Through Technological Progress.  The bizarre acts perpetrated by ZFT appear to be increasing in frequency but are completely unpredictable.  Plus, they think that Massive Dynamic's William Bell is funding the techno-terrorists.  To prove it, the FBI needs to find the connection.

In NYC, a young woman, Sara, runs for the bus.  She's panting and seems very nervous.  As she leans her head against the bus window, it steams up; when she grasps the metal handrail, it glows red.  She stumbles off the bus, crying that she can't breathe.  As passersby watch helplessly, Sara catches fire and explodes right there on the street.

At the Harvard lab, Walter drags out that old typewriter and shows Peter and Astrid the Y that skips, just like in the manifesto manuscript.  The typewriter was Bell's.  But, Walter insists, Bell wasn't a madman: if Bell wrote the manifesto, it's been tampered with since the author refers throughout to the "ethics chapter" and there's no chapter on ethics in the manuscript.  Walter says they need to find the original manuscript to deduce Bell's actual intent.

Meanwhile, the whole Fringe team travels to the NYC sidewalk where Sara (they don't know her name yet but it's easier for me to type "Sara" instead of "the red-headed girl who spontaneously combusted until they learn her identity in a couple of paragraphs) exploded.  Strangely, when Olivia looks at the charred body, she sees two crispy corpses while everyone else only sees one.  After a weird shimmer, the second body disappears from Olivia's sight.  She doesn't know what to think about that.

Nina Sharp pays Broyles a visit - they are so in cahoots but we still don't know exactly how - since Massive Dynamic's counterintelligence has picked up on the FBI's Bell investigation.  "William Bell is not the enemy," she says.  Broyles says he would like to hear that from the man himself but Nina says Bell isn't available as "[h]e's travelling."  Broyles gives Nina a knowing look at that but doesn't press.

During the autopsy, Walter is annoyed that Peter has dismantled the electron microscope for a special project.  He's taken apart the Geiger counter too.

Olivia stops by Broyles's office to give him an update and comments on how he's redecorated.  Broyles: WTF are you talking about?  She tells him that they're working on an ID for the dead girl.  He asks, "What about the other victim?" and hands her a crime scene photograph with those two charred bodies.  Olivia turns around, confused, and that weird shimmer happens again, and suddenly Broyles is behind her, entering his office, and his office furniture is back to normal.  This time Olivia's like, WTF?  Then Harris bursts in, ranting and raving and ordering them to cease and desist with the Bell investigation.  After he leaves, Broyles assures Olivia that the investigation will continue, but she needs to get more evidence.

Walter and Astrid identify Sara from dental records.  Olivia and Charlie go back to NYC [because it's just across the river from Boston, really, so easy to get to and from] and check out Sara's apartment: no roommates, hardly any personal effects, gray and black clothing in the closet.  Olivia finds a $30,000 check from an "Isaac Winters" while Charlie finds the bathroom, completely scorched.  "What the hell happened to her?" breathes Olivia.

When she reports back to Walter and Peter, that they found evidence of other fires, Walter says it obviously isn't a case of spontaneous human combustion then, since that sort of thing really only happens once to a person.  It may have been pyrokinesis instead.  Peter scoffs - A firestarter?  Really?  So why'd she blow up? - and his dad posits that the pyrokinesis may be a new development and Sara hadn't gained the skill to control it yet.

Charlie interrupts to say that they've tracked "Isaac Winters" to a law office in Charlestown.  Olivia meets him there and they find nothing but an empty office with several panicked messages from Sara on the answering machine.  One of the messages relays that after she took the "test" Winters left for her, "something strange" started to happen to her.  At the word "test," Olivia twitches.  She heads outside and is stunned to see the Boston skyline in ruins and flames, with the military shouting commands over unseen loudspeakers.  Charlie touches her shoulder and she shudders, and the skyline is back to normal, no flames.

Walter checks her out, asking wistfully if she's sure she hasn't had any LSD, or acid, or 'shrooms lately.  She confirms that it wasn't a drug trip but she feels like she's losing her mind.  He gently says that if that were the case, she wouldn't realize it was happening.  He thinks that what's happening to her might be prolonged deja vu, going on to explain that there are alternate universes made up of all the choices that might have been made.  Deja vu is just a momentary glimpse at the alt-verse but perhaps Olivia's visions are more extended looks into that world.  She asks if maybe the cortexyphan she was subjected to as a child might have had something to do with it.  Maybe, says Walter.  Astrid interruptst to say that she's found an online photo of a similar pyrokinetic death in Budapest - the guy who runs the web site lives over in Malden.

Olivia and Peter go to meet the guy, played by Clint Howard.  He's a total X Files-level paranoid.  At first he says things that sort of make sense to them (or at least Olivia), about Massive Dynamic being behind the weird occurances, and doing secret testing on children to make them into supersoldiers for the upcoming war ... against the Romulans.  And he thinks he's Spock.  Peter gives him a "live long and prosper" and they get the hell out of there.

Nina Sharp gets an alarming phone call - "don't do anything until I get there" - and tells her driver to get her to the helicopter ASAP.

Back at FBI HQ, Olivia works through the case with Pete, saying that maybe she's missing something: in her visions, she always sees two bodies, so maybe there's another victim somewhere.  If she could get back to the alt-verse, maybe she could gather some additional information.  Harris interrupts and gives her a new assignment: psych evaluation.  They get into a huge yelling match out in the hallway.

When Olivia stalks back to her office, she slips into the alt-verse.  There, the FBI agents are stressed and frantic, and Charlie has a big scar on his face.  She asks him if she can take another look at the firestarter file.  Charlie: "You have half of Boston on quarantine lock-down and you're worried about burned twins?" but he gives her the file.  She gets a quick look before slipping back into her reality.

They find Sara's twin, Nancy, via face-recognition software, but Isaac Winters gets to her first.  By the time Olivia and Peter get to Nancy's apartment, it's empty and there are signs of a struggle.  Olivia calls for forensics; Peter notices that a window pane is slightly melted - he's got an idea.  He cuts a circle of glass out of the window just as Walter and Astrid arrive with Peter's special project.  The project is an audio-reconstructor gizmo so Walter can digitize all his old records - the machine might be able to read the grooves in the melted glass and play back the sound captured there, whatever was going on when Nancy was attacked.  After a few false starts, they hear this: screams and pleading on Nancy's part, a phone being dialed, and Winters's voice saying, "I have her."  They replay the phone being dialed and Olivia uses an app on her cell to dial the number from the tones.  Who answers?  Harris.

When Harris leaves FBI HQ, Charlie, Olivia and a small team follow him to a warehouse.  Inside, Harris tells Winters to hurry up and activate Nancy as "he" (presumably their boss) is getting impatient.  Winters prepares a syringe.  As the FBI team makes their way further in, Olivia sees a cork board with photos of the activated subjects: Sara, Nancy, Nick Lane and Olivia among them.  Shots are fired and Winters, a security guard and one of the FBI fodder go down.

Olivia finds Nancy, strapped to a table, and runs into the room to free her.  Harris locks the door on her and taunts her as she fires her gun at the bullet-proof glass, saying that Nancy will take care of everything for him since once she explodes, she'll take Olivia with her.  Nancy is panicking, finding it hard to breathe.  Olivia tries to calm her, saying that this was done to her when she was young, but now she needs to focus the heat building inside to an external object.  Nancy doesn't think she can do it but then, awesomely, she sees Harris watching them through the window.  He stares at her, horrified, as he starts to cough and sweat, and then he bursts into flames and explodes.  Oliva knocks Nancy to the floor, out of the flames, then hugs her and tells her that everything is going to be okay now.  She doesn't sound the least bit upset that Harris just popped like a firecracker.

Sometime later, Olivia finds Walter sitting alone at an ice cream parlor when Peter goes off to the restroom.  "What the hell did you people do to us?" she snarls, "You and William Bell - what did you do to me?  You were there, you knew what was going on! Why did you do it?"  Walter fumbles, tearing up, saying that they were trying to prepare the children for something, something that's coming.  "What?" hisses Olivia, "What's coming?"  But poor Walter doesn't remember, or can't, and he breaks down, crying.  Olivia gives him a look of disgust and leaves.  When Peter returns, Walter is a wreck and he clutches at his son's hand.

Nina Sharp rings a doorbell; Broyles answers.  She has a stack of photographs of the Bald Man, all taken very recently.  She tells Broyles that he knows as well as she does what happened the last time this guy came around.  They need to talk.

Walter is back at his lab, playing some of his old records.  He finds the original of Bell's manuscript stuck down amongst the albums, complete with the ethics chapter which says things like "the children will save us."  He hears someone come in behind him and turns, excited to share his discovery.  It's the Bald Man who greets him, however, and tells him it's time to go.  Walter: "Is it time?"  He replaces the manuscript and gets his coat, and follows the Bald Man out.

Nina Sharp has returned to her NYC apartment but when the elevator doors open, masked men are there and they shoot her, point-blank.

Previously on Fringe / next time on Fringe

Fringe recap: S1E18 "Midnight"

Leather jacket-wearing, English-accented Bob gets ready to go out as the television news plays, talking about a horrific murdr where someone's been killed and mutilated, apparently by a hunting knife.  Bob grabs his keys, phone and a pocket knife and heads out.  He calls his girl, who's out of town on a business trip, and says that he'll cook for her tomorrow night when she gets back.  He'll call her later, though, as he's just meeting some "suits from Hong Kong" for dinner.  When Bob hangs up the phone, he heads into a red-lit club, music blaring and pulsing.  Liar!  Inside, all kinds of hot chicks eye him.  He selects one, makes her laugh, then backs off when her date walks up.  Bob picks another one.  This one doesn't have a date.  Back at his place, things are getting steamy ... until she grabs his head and snaps his neck.  AWESOME - didn't see that coming.  Meanwhile, worried that he hasn't called her back, Bob's girlfriend tries his cell which rings and rings as the murderer goes into the bathroom to wipe blood off her face.  Her eyes are a freakishly bright blue.  The camera pulls back and ol' Bob's body looks as though it might be missing a few bits and pieces.

At Olivia's apartment, there's another boring domestic scene where some boring friends are over for dinner and Rachel gets served with divorce papers.  Luckily for her (and us), Olivia gets a call about Bob's case.

We get a better look at the body as Walter pokes at it: the back of his neck has been flayed open and his spine severed.  Walter declares that the wound was made with teeth, not a knife: either canine, ursine (bear) or human.  And it looks as though some blood has been drunk.  Peter starts to roll his eyes about vampires until his father interrupts, saying sadly, there are no vampires but he's sure this will turn out to be something else just as exciting!

Olivia tells Broyles that they have confirmed that the toothmarks are definitely human and Broyles is like, you know, it used to be that human was the only option ... I miss those days.  The police are searching for Bob's car and Walter is back at the lab, autopsying Bob's body and the mutilated victim from the t.v. news.

It turns out that both victims' spinal columns have been completely drained of spinal fluid.  And there are traces of an extinct strain of syphilis in the wounds, transmitted via the killer's saliva.  Olivia checks with the CDC and learns that a local research company ordered a sample of that syphilis four weeks ago.  What's weird is that the research company's address is in a residential area of Brighton.  So the CDC pulled their file and discovered that the company has requested quite a number of different contagion samples recently, including RUD390, which was an integral component to that fast-growing skin thing that ZFT released on the world several episodes ago.  The Fringe team decides to go check out that Brighton address.

First they find a bunch of dogs in cages - one with those bright blue eyes - and in the back they find Dr. Boone, wheelchair-bound, in the process of doing something nasty to another poor dog.  They arrest him and haul him off to FBI HQ.  There, Olivia shows Boone the photographs of the victims and asks, "What is out there? What is doing that to these people?"  They also tell him that they want to know everything he knows about ZFT.  He is surprised that they even know about that organization.  Boone tells them that "someone" was dosed, and then says that he knows a lot about what they want to know but first he wants them to help him: ZFT has his wife and he's being coerced into performing experiments.  He'll tell them everything he knows but first they have to get his wife back.

Broyles and Charlie think Boone is full of shit but Olivia believes him.  She notes that since she's been working in Fringe Division, 81 people have died, not including the 100+ folks on the plane in the first episode; in all her prior cases, only nine people died - this Fringe business is dangerous and people are dying.  She says that Boone is their first real lead to ZFT and she doesn't want to blow it.  A lackey interrupts to say that the address Boone gave them is a Chinatown restaurant ... which is using 5x the utilities a Chinatown restaurant should.  There could be a lab in the basement!  Olivia pulls her team together.

Meanwhile, Peter and Walter get to poke around in Boone's lab.  Walter has a hypothesis as to what Boone was doing.

The heavily armed FBI squad descends upon the Chinatown restaurant.  There's a lab in the basement!  But no wife.  Olivia gets on the phone with Boone who directs her to a refrigerator in the back: it contains a sample of XP43 which is the contagion with which the killer has been infected.  He needs that XP43 sample to make an antidote - because it's his wife who got dosed and is out there killing.  That was ZFT's punishment for Boone's trying to leave them.

That night, Mrs. Boone ("Valerie") picks up another guy at the same club.  Her eyes are not electric blue yet.  They start making out in his car and Valerie cries.  "What's wrong?" asks the guy.  She tells him that she's sorry, then her fangs pop out and she latches onto his neck.

The cops find the guy's body in his car in Roxbury.  Olivia goes back to talk to Boone.  She shows him a videotape that Peter found in Boone's lab: the video was taken three weeks ago and Boone was walking.  He tells her that what Valerie is feeding on is spinal fluid - he'd given her as much of his as he could without stroking out, but the contagion burns through her own spinal fluid and she just needs to consume more and more.  The extinct syphilis she's got is the carrier for the other "attributes" that changed her.  Boone again promises to tell them all about ZFT if they'll let him make a vaccine for Valerie.

They take Boone to Walter's lab - where Peter protests that one mad scientist is his limit.  Walter and Boone decide to make a super-penicillin to combat the super-syphilis.  Charlie has meanwhile found Bob's missing car but it's been stripped, including the GPS and there's no way to know where Valerie left it.  Peter, not surprisingly, knows a guy who tends to get involved in every stripped car in the Boston area.  He takes Olivia to see the guy and the guy tells them where he found Bob's car.

Walter and Boone bond as they work at the lab, Boone having heard all about Walter.  Boone also eyes the video camera sitting there on the table.

Olivia and Peter go out to Weymouth and find where Bob's car was found.  But why did Valerie come out here?  Peter figures it out when he finds yet another body with a flayed neck.  They bring that body, plus the Roxbury one, back to Walter's lab.  Astrid notes that one of the new bodies reeks of alcohol and then has the idea to check the bodies' hands for those fluorescent club stamps.  Bingo!  All of them have a stamp from the same underground club.  Boone begs Olivia to take Valerie alive: I just need more time - I know I can save her.

Olivia and Peter head off to the club.  Peter brings along a handheld heat-imaging gizmo, checking the female clubgoers' heat signatures since the syphilis makes Valerie run extra-hot.  One girl looks him up and down and tells him that she's sure she's hot enough for him.  He smiles and says he's looking for someone with syphilis.  Heh.  They're having trouble spotting Valerie in the crush of people but Olivia finally spots her as she heads for the exit with her freakishly blue eyes.  Charlie and some other FBI agents tranq her as she walks out of the club.

Walter and Boone are having trouble with their vaccine and Boone says they need to use more of his spinal fluid (for some weird science-y reason).  Astrid's like, no way, it could kill him!   But Walter says to prep the table.  Boone thanks him.  But some time later, after Walter has withdrawn the spinal fluid, Boone has a stroke.  It's going to be hard for him to tell them about ZFT now, isn't it?

Olivia and Peter drive back to the lab with Valerie in the backseat.  They assume that she'll be "out for hours" but as they banter, Valerie wakes up.  She goes after Olivia, trying to gnaw at her neck, and things get tense for a moment until Peter tranqs her again, several times for good measure.  They get her to the lab and shoot her up with the vaccine.  Boone whispers, "Thank you."  Valerie starts to shriek and convulse but the vaccine works.  Boone, however, is dead.  Olivia's expression is eloquent: devastated and frustrated and bereft of hope.

As the bodies are carted out, Walter hands Olivia a videotape that Boone made before he died.  On the tape, he tells her that he's got some names of ZFT people, including some he suspects she's already heard.   Cut to Olivia finding Broyles at a swanky restaurant.  She tells him that according to Boone, the man who is funding ZFT is William Bell.  Cue ominous music!

Previously on Fringe / next time on Fringe

Fringe recap: S1E17 "Bad Dreams"

A young mother, singing a song about an elephant, pushes her daughter in a stroller down a ramp at Grand Central Station, on their way back from the circus.  The little girl gazes happily at the bunch of balloons tied to the stroller,.  They descend to the tracks, the station largely deserted, just missing the train.  As they wait for the next train, the little girl looses a red balloon which bumps up against the ceiling.  Just as the next train arrives, a blonde woman rushes up and pushes the mother in front of it.  The blonde woman is Olivia.  She was dreaming and wakes up, gasping and frightened.

The next morning Olivia does her sit-ups, peruses her wardrobe of grey and black clothing, does the crossword puzzle while half-listening to the television news.  When the news reports that a young mother committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a moving train in NYC, Olivia puts down her pen.  The photo of the young mother is the same woman Olivia pushed in her dream.

Olivia asks Broyles if she can go to NYC to investigate, saying that she thinks extraordinary circumstances may be involved, making it a murder and not a suicide, but declining to tell him about her dream complicity.  He grudgingly gives her 24 hours, saying he needs her here, working as part of the Fringe team.  At Walter's lab, Peter scoffs when she says she thinks she murdered that woman, telling her that it was just a nightmare.  Walter checks her out with a Geiger counter, thinking that she might have teleported to NYC in her sleep and actually pushed the woman, but there's no residual radioactivity from any teleportation.  Another possibility is astral projection, but then it would have been difficult for Olivia to gain enough corporality to interact physically with the woman.  Peter rolls his eyes - and it's off to NYC for him and Olivia.

They meet up with a cop at Grand Central Station and ask her about the incident.  The cops think it was a suicide because there was no one else caught on the security camera when the woman jumped.  As they go down to the tracks, Olivia whispers to Peter that there will be a red balloon floating on the ceiling.  He doesn't have a smart-aleck comment when yes, there is a red balloon up there.  At the police station, they meet with the grieving husband who insists that his wife never would have killed herself - they were happy.  They review the security footage and see that no one pushed the woman, but Olivia asks for a copy of the tape anyway.

Back at the lab, Olivia insists that somehow she killed that woman.  She's beginning to get agitated.  Peter thinks it's crazy but Walter's like, okay, let's assume that you did it.  Why and how?  Did she somehow compel that woman to jump, using only her mind?  Peter thinks that's preposterous.  Walter shrugs, saying, "Okay.  Unless it happens again."

Even though she hasn't been sleeping well lately, Olivia buys a bunch of caffeine pills.  She goes to a nice restaurant and sits alone with a cup of coffee, intently watching a couple at a nearby table.  They're having a lovely dinner together until the wife starts shrieking, accusing her husband of having an affair.  The husband is confused, saying he doesn't know what she's talking about.  They both rise out of their chairs and the wife picks up a steak knife.  Olivia rushes over to them and grabs the wife's hand.  Then, together, the two women stab the husband multiple times in the belly.  He collapses and they step back, dropping the knife, hands bloody.

Olivia wakes up, nearly sobbing.  She calls Charlie immediately and says, "There's been a murder."

She and Peter walk through the halls of St. Vincent's Hospital (NYC).  Olivia's like, I killed him.  Peter, ever rational, reminds her that she was 300 miles away, plus numerous witnesses watched the wife - alone - stab her husband.  Olivia is adamnt about her involvement.  They ask the doctor how the husband is doing: he was basically gutted, his intestines shredded, but is still alive, albeit unconscious.

They question the wife, who for some reason has been given permission to sit by her husband's bedside.  The wife doesn't understand what is going on: she knows that her husband is devoted to her, but suddenly she got afraid and angry and just knew he was going to leave her.  Olivia starts to freak out, asking the wife if she felt like someone else was in her head, compelling her to attack her husband.  Peter drags Olivia away.

They go to the restaurant where it happened and Olivia finds a piece of broken coffee cup on the floor near the table she was sitting at in her dream.  She asks the restaurant owner who was sitting there, roughing him up a little when he backtalks to her; he tells her that it was just some blond guy with a scar on his face who comes in every now and again.  Olivia: "I know who that is."

Well, sort of: she tells Peter that she's seen a guy who matches that description.  They go back to Cambridge [Note: I don't think the producers of this show realize how far apart Boston and NYC are - the characters flit back and forth like they're going from Back Bay to Watertown] and look again at the security footage from Grand Central Station.  They do indeed see a thin blond guy with a scar on his face walk past the woman who eventually jumps.  He's been at both crime scenes.  Walter thinks that perhaps this guy is the one who's been attacking people with his mind, but somehow Olivia is dreaming of him.

They go to FBI HQ and run the guy's face through the FBI database: he's a former St. Jude's mental patient, Nick Lane.  Broyles comes in and is all WTF: you're using resources on something that isn't one of our cases and I've got a lawsuit from some NYC restaurant owner saying you pushed him around and explain yourself, Dunham!  Olivia brings him up to speed about their suspect Nick, and admits to her dreams.  Broyles is all, why didn't you come to me with this?  Olivia says she didn't want to sound crazy and then asks for a short leave of absence to sort things out, these weird Fringe-y things that seem to be happening to her.  Instead, Broyles opens a new case - this case - and puts her in charge of it, telling her to take care of herself.  Aw, he likes her!

Olivia and Peter go to St. Jude's, Peter remarking that until this year, he'd never spent any time in a mental hospital.  Olivia: "Learn to like new things."  They meet with Nick's former doctor who tells them that Nick had been there for years, self-committed and paid for under a high level military insurance policy.  Then, four months ago, some lawyer showed up, said that Nick had inherited a huge sum of money, and Nick checked himself out, leaving with the lawyer.  The doctor says that Nick's emotions seemed infectious: if he was happy, everyone was in a good mood; but if he was upset, you got sucked into a black hole of despair if you were around him.  She calls him hyperemotional with heavy self-contempt and a tendency towards suicide.  He was delusional too, saying he'd been recruited at a very young age to fight in a future war against the denizens of a parallel universe.  Olivia gives Peter an intense look upon hearing that.

Here's another coincidence: Nick was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1979.  Just like Olivia.  She and Peter go to Walter's hotel room and she asks him about that cortexyphan, the drug that Walter and William Bell developed.  Walter says that Bell experimented on children with it - which statement causes Peter to freak out - children who seemed predisposed to particular mental acuity, and that cortexyphan seemed to emphasize whatever psychic gifts they had, particularly any ability to alter perception or reality.  Olivia connects the dots: if Nick was treated with cortexyphan, he could change reality using his feelings, but possibly inadvertently, if his emotions were literally contagious.  He might have been thinking about committing suicide when he walked along the train platform; he might have been feeling lost and abandoned at the restaurant.

But how is Olivia connected?  Walter tells her that when Bell experimented on the children (another wig-out from Peter), he'd pair them up so they wouldn't be scared.  Sometimes an intense bond, amplified by the cortexyphan, would form between the two kids.  Peter's like, whatever, Olivia was never treated with cortexyphan.  Then he looks at Olivia and she's like, well, I might have been.  "Great!" says Walter, "then I think I might be able to find Nick."

Olivia goes to a strip club.  Except on this third outing we're pretty sure it's Nick, which is confirmed when we cut to Olivia hooked up to one of Walter's machines as he's got her in a hypnogogic REM state.  At the strip club, Olivia stares at the stripper who comes down off her pole and starts kissing her, as Nick's state of arousal excites the stripper.  They leave the club (despite the bouncer's shouted warnings) and go to a motel.  Peter, Walter and Astrid all get a little embarrassed when Olivia starts making sex noises.  Then, post-coitally, Nick feels guilty and ashamed, full of self-loathing, and the stripper becomes infected by his feelings.  She smashes a glass and slices her own throat, dream-Olivia's hand guiding hers.  Nick goes back to his apartment and Olivia snaps out of her trance, knowing where his apartment is.

The next morning, Nick takes a bunch of pills with his morning coffee.  He does his pushups and peruses his closet full of grey and black clothing.  Then he pauses.  Outside, an FBI squad has pulled up.  They bust into the apartment only to find it empty, one wall full of clippings, all paranoid, about government testing and experiments on children, plus some photographs of two-headed goats.  Peter now thinks that the lawyer showing up at the hospital with an inheritance was too good to be true: Nick was activated.

Nick walks down the street and as he passes other people, they turn and follow him like the Pied Piper.  The Fringe team gets a call from the cops saying they've located Nick.  Walter muses that Nick is a reverse empath and a kind of walking epidemic - if they get too close, they'll be infected as well.  Except probably not Olivia.  They find Nick and his entourage, all arrayed up on a skyscraper ledge downtwon.  The cops say they sent one guy up there and now he's on the ledge with the rest of them.  Olivia heads up there, over Peter's protests.

On the roof, she calls Nick's name.  He turns around, smiling: "You heard me, Olive! You heard me and you came!  You were always the strong one."  She says she's sorry but she doesn't remember anything.  He's a little crazy, saying that he does remember (although maybe he's not supposed to) and he stayed fit and ready for the call.  He tells her that some guy came and woke him up, and now he can't be put back to sleep.  "I want to stop hurting people!"  He hands her a gun and tells her to shoot him, put him out of his misery.  She doesn't want to and so Nick flinches, crying out, and a woman on the ledge throws herself off.  The jumper lands on a car next to Peter and Walter.  Walter: "I sure hope Agent Dunham meant to do that."

Back on the roof, Nick says that if "Olive" doesn't shoot him, the rest of the folks up there will jump.  And if he jumps, they'll all go too.  Olivia apologizes again and shoots him, once in each knee.  Nick collapses on the roof, all the others crumpling with him but none falling off.  He looks up at her: "Olive, you'll wish you'd killed me."

Later, as they walk through white industrial-looking corridors, Broyles tells Olivia that Nick's parents died a while back and his identity appears to have been falsified at some point.  They stop walking and look into a room where Nick has been put into a medically-induced coma, "indefinitely," according to Broyles.  Olivia's face is grim - she still doesn't remember anything from Jacksonville.  Broyles asks if she's okay and she replies, flatly, yes.

That night, Charlie stops by her apartment, handing her Nick's file and reminding her that he's breaking about a thousand regulations by doing so.  The file is classified, plus full of all sorts of newspaper clippings.  Olivia makes a frowny face and starts to read.

Meanwhile, alone in the lab, Walter has unearthed an old videotape.  It shows a little blonde girl, cowering in the corner of what looks like a hospital room.  Several voices, all off camera, say things like: "How many casualties?" and "We still haven't found [Whatsisname]" and "Something must have set her off."  Then it's Walter's voice on the tape: "Obviously she was upset about something."  A pause, and then Walter again, this time directed to the little girl:  "It's all right, nobody's angry with you, Olive. Everything's okay."

Previously on Fringe / next time on Fringe

Reading lists

It’s not all Fringe and Bruce Campbell around here, you know. I’ve also been reading a fair amount, such as: (1) re-reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series - which starts out sooooo strong, then gets flabby and self-indulgent in the last two books (seriously: SPOILER the author writing himself in as a character? And then a self-aware deus ex machina to boot? C’mon) … plus I always cry ANOTHER SPOILER when Oy dies; (2) Short Girls by Bich Minh Nguyen – a novel (possibly slightly autobiographical?) about two Vietnamese sisters growing up in the American Midwest; and (3) Mouse Guard: Winter 1152 by David Petersen – the second in the gorgeous Mouse Guard graphic novel series.

And I’m currently reading: (1) The Dirty Life - which is not as titillating as it sounds, being an organic farming memoir by Kristin Kimball; The Foremost Good Fortune: a Memoir by Susan Conley – written by a former neighbor/grade school, etc., classmate of mine about moving her family to China, plus a cancer diagnosis; and (3) re-reading Knife of Dreams, Book 11 in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, because I bought Book 12 and can’t for the life of me remember WTF is going on in that massive series so I thought I should remind myself before delving into the new volume. For what it’s worth, I’m not a huge fan of memoirs – I think it’s the introspective bits that turn me off; I much prefer biographies – but I like TDL for the farming bits and TFGF because it’s fun to read something written by someone I [used to] know. And dang, if Susan Conley doesn’t look exactly as young and gorgeous as she did when I knew her way back when.

Sam Axe kicks ass

So far I've only watched the first half of USA's Burn Notice special prequel, "Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe."  It's pretty light and fluffy, even for Burn Notice.  But it's all about Bruce Campbell's character, Sam, and how he fell out of favor with the CIA.  I love Bruce Campbell and he looks great here, having lost about twenty pounds and shaved the grizzled BN scruff to de-age himself.  The best part?  The scene where he fires up that chainsaw - how great was that?  No demon/zombies this time, but awesome nonetheless.  Burn Notice starts back up in June, FWIW.