Fringe recap: Still Life With Doomed Souls
Emily Mallum was a girl with a haunted, beautifully alien face – her dark saucer eyes and line-thin mouth and way young voice belonged to an anime waif, not a flesh and blood human being – and an extraordinary gift for drawing that portended a promising artistic career. She had another talent, too, one that portended a less desirable outcome for many, including Emily herself. Like some grim and gothy art school Cassandra, the creepy little girl was prone to receiving prophetic visions of death. She was a human antenna, wired to attract a very specific kind of emergency broadcast signal from the future. The not-so-good vibrations came to her with a hum and a pinch of headache, and she managed the pain by putting the awful images on paper. She tried to use her precognitive affliction/power for good, but often to no avail. “Why did God make me like this?” she asked her father, one of several loaded lines in “Forced Perspective” that tried to shade the story with philosophical/spiritual themes like causality, predestination and the problem of evil. The usual fun-time Friday night Fringe stuff. “You know how I feel, Emily,” Jim Mallum replied. “God has a purpose for all of us. Even if we can’t understand it.” By episode’s end, God would remain more veiled than ever.
Because of her ability, Emily had become a person of interest to all sorts of exploitative Fringe science interests, including Massive Dynamic, and so she and her family, a loving, self-sacrificing bunch, lived like Running On Empty outlaw nomads; at the first sign of black vans and morally ambiguous government types, they were in the wind, looking for new safe harbor. Poor Emily was growing tired of the life, of stressing her mother and father and brother with her inconvenient weirdness. She wished for the place where they were happiest, a house by the lake. She wished she could be free of her freakishness. She wished she didn’t know that her own end was nigh.
In an opening sequence that can only be described as riveting, we saw Emily sketching the urban wilds of downtown Boston when a picture of a young businessman’s death suddenly filled her brain. She quickly hashed it out and then chased after the man, one Mr. Engelhart, and served him with his death notice and a look of “sorry, dude” pity. His walking companion examined the awful artwork as they passed through a construction site and clucked: “Why would anyone draw something like that?!” Mr. Engelhart: “She’s a teenager. Isn’t that what they do? Play depressing music and complain about how everything sucks until they finally make everyone as miserable as they are? It’s a stage.” Yep: A—hole. Which made it really easy to not feel too badly for him when then the i-beam fell from the sky and impaled him to a dumpster – the fulfillment of the cartoon prophecy Emily had handed him just seconds earlier. His friend, splashed with his blood, screamed. For Emily, the feeling of hopelessness that weighed on her became another life heavier. Nothing she did changed the fates of her still-life subjects. Her motivation for trying to tell them of their imminent end: So they could redeem the time they had left with one more good deed or an “I love you” to someone they cared about. And so, with each vision and each death, Emily became increasingly locked into a fatalistic perspective. Her heroism in this episode involved overcoming her own outlook on life.
NEXT: The muted thrills of re-discovery.
The themes of destiny and determinism in Emily’s sad saga were mirrored in Olivia Dunham’s arc. “Forced Perspective” found the agent troubled by the perspective forced on her a couple episodes ago by a certain mysterious stranger wearing a cool fedora and sporting a bloody wound: “I have looked at all possible futures, and in every one, the result is the same: You have to die.” Olivia researched this phantom prophet, and learned from the wealth of crime scene photos and surveillance tape in the archives that this pale skinned curiosity – at least 91 years old, based on the trace of Spanish Flu antibodies Astrid found in his plasma — had been lurking in the background of her work life for three years. In this way, the Fringe Division of Rebootlandia – aided with insights from timeline-displaced Peter Bishop — finally began to wrap their minds around the conundrum known as The Observer. Cool for them, been-there/done-that for me. “Forced Perspective” was a solid, satisfying hour of Fringe – a classic formula case-of-the-week – but it also highlighted one of the weaknesses of the new timeline paradigm: The journey of discovery for these new versions of the characters is a journey of re-discovery for all of us who’ve been watching the show from the start, and the thrill just isn’t the same. But I do commend the show – and especially the actors – for somehow still making me care about the characters and keeping me entertained.
As Olivia wrestled with wondering if her destiny was locked and loaded or mutable and avoidable, the existentially agitated agent found herself emotionally engaged by Emily’s plight after tracking her down while investigating Girder-Impaled Guy’s perplexing dumpster pegging. She was particularly bothered to hear from Emily’s father that Massive Dynamic was one of the Big Bads hounding the Mallums. Olivia – who knew all about being a guinea pig for scientists — confronted MD honcho Nina Sharp, who in this version of history took her in when she was around Emily’s age. “I thought you said you were done using children as test subjects,” said Olivia, not yet aware that even now, her surrogate mother was still treating her like a lab rat. She blasted Nina for harassing the Mallums, equating MD’s desire to study Emily and catalogue her mutant power with “abuse.” Can’t wait to see how Olivia reacts when she finally learns what Nina has been doing to her lately in the middle of the night.
(In the creepy coda of reconciliation that concluded the episode, Nina offered to supply Olivia with an experimental new drug to treat her migraines. Now, allow me to repeat the theory I shared last week: “Nina and David Robert Jones want to use the Doomsday Machine Salvation Machine magical electromagnetic waffle iron to create a new universe with a new version of history, one customized to their specifications and ambitions. To accomplish that, they need Olivia – activated with cortexiphan abilities – to serve as the human software, in the same way that Peter functioned as the programming for the machine in his timeline.” In last night’s episode, we heard Peter mention that the machine doesn’t respond to him in this version of history the way it responded to him in his home timeline. Yes: Because I think in this timeline, the machine was meant for Olivia — but the machine won’t respond to her until she gets her cortexiphan powers on. That said, I’m not sure how or if this theory of Olivia is compatible with my NEW theory of Olivia, which I will save for the end of this recap.)
Emily’s father wanted her to stay away from Fringe Division. But then she got another vision while riding a bus, something akin to a terrorist attack involving multiple fatalities. When she failed to warn the individual that triggered the vision (“I tried,” she called to God while looking to the heavens) (groan), Emily did the right thing and called our heroes. Olivia and Lee brought Emily to Walter Bishop’s lab so the addled genius could examine her. Peter suggested that Walter hypnotize the girl so she could better examine the memory of her vision and ascertain the location of the catastrophic event. This made for a visually dazzling set piece, with Emily exploring the frozen moment, flying debris and blown-away bodies suspended in time, space and agony.
NEXT: Am I crazy, or was Fringe making coy references to Blade Runner and Angel Heart last night?
Long story short: The agents realized that they were hunting a grizzled construction worker named Albert Duncan, who was bent on destroying a Boston courthouse because the judge in his recent divorce had awarded custody of his kids to his now ex-wife. The good guys managed to neutralize the rig of fertilizer bombs in the bad guy’s truck, but Olivia had to talk Duncan out of killing the judge – and fair number of other people – by detonating the bomb strapped to his chest. All of the show’s themes came together in Olivia’s big speech: “Nothing has to happen. Nothing is written in stone. You and I, we don’t have to die here today. Whatever happens next is up to you. You are in control. I’m not ready to die, and I don’t think you are, either…”
If only Emily could have been so assuaged. The girl went missing before Olivia could tell her that she was wrong, that we aren’t victims of fate, that we can take control of our destiny and change it. Jim suspected mystery men in a black van had snatched Emily. Olivia had a different theory, and she was correct. They all found Emily sitting on a bench by a lake that reminded her of where she once lived, the place where she and her family had been happiest. She was dying. Cause: Electrical overload in the brain, due to her blessing/curse/genetic anomaly. In fact, she had come there to die: In a trippy twist, we learned that she had received a vision of this moment – the moment of her death – that had been slowly revealing itself to her over time. The final elements – Olivia; her father; herself – came to her while she and the family were packing up to run away yet again. Because she believed there was nothing she could do to alter her fate (and according to Walter, there truly wasn’t), she played out the part she sketched for herself. She died with her father at her side and with Olivia serving as Observer-like witness. But she faded away warmed with knowing she had helped save scores of lives. “I think you were right,” she said. “Everyone has a purpose.”
The camera doted on that haunted face, with those wide dark windows for eyes, and cut away just as a rivulet of blood ran out of her nose and down her icy skin. Chilling.
Crazy Theory Of The Week! Of Emily’s strange, brief life, Walter said: “The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.” It’s an old proverb – and a famous line from Blade Runner, intoned by Dr. Tyrell – the character who created the film’s biomechanical humanoids, i.e. replicants. Now, the guy who got riveted by the i-beam? His last name was “Engelhart.” “Engelhart” = “Angel Heart.” And Angel Heart is – SPOILER ALERT! a cult classic supernatural thriller starring Mickey Rourke as a private detective hired to find a very bad missing man who turns out to be… himself. END SPOILER ALERT! I think these clues add up to one undeniable conclusion:
Someone on this show is a shapeshifter – and doesn’t know it. And I’m thinking that person is none other than… Olivia Dunham.
READER TWEET OF THE WEEK: From @cocobean324 “I think Olivia in this timeline has to die in order for Peter to get back to his. But are observers the same in every timeline?” What do you think, folks?
Twitter: @EWDocJensen
