'The Recordist' - Fringe, Season Five

Fringe

Season Five

Episode Three

'The Recordist' - 2.5

Pointless facial disfigurements should always be scorned. Peter clearly gets it. 

Can anyone say 'snore'? God that episode was like nothing. I feel like we learnt nothing, established nothing, advanced nothing. Why couldn't we have just found the mineral and gotten that over and done with? Did we have to have that stupid moral tale of a father wanting to prove himself to his son? God, this show is pretty much about that with Walter and Peter and all. Hell, now ever Olivia is trying to make herself more of a worthy role model for her daughter, did we need this fucking side plot?

Also, was there anything at all relevant or interesting about the fact that some guy recorded history? Did that signify or change ANYTHING? 

'The Recordist', if you can't already tell, was awful. Perhaps it just hit me with the fact that it was nothing more than filler, since in a thirteen episode season I hadn't actually expected any. Other than give the team a dose of some mineral at the bottom of a mine shaft, we didn't get anything. Nothing. Nada. Zilcho. Fuck.

Fringe is an amazing show, and it was always happy to change things up a little and do it all just a bit differently, yet tonight the episode was so typical that I could have been watching Revolution or something. What turned out to be Walter's third tape took them all to a strange compound in the middle of nowhere which just happened to be run by a group of people covered in gross-looking growths. These had been caused by some sort of emanating something-or-other that came from the very mine in which the rocks our team had arrived for lay. Great for them. 

There's a father and son, the latter of which has a very unhealthy fixation on the Fringe team and their heroics. In a brilliantly original plot line the son's desire to have a similar hero as a father leads his daddy to going into the fatal mine himself, dying but still being able to retrieve the rocks.

Whatever. 

The biggest issue for me was that this season had this strong sense of impending doom and just the right amount of action, but 'The Recordist' totally stopped the momentum and suspense. A bit of calm reflection is OK with me, but at least make it worth something more than Olivia coming to a few realisations about how sucky she is as a parent.

Well, she isn't that sucky, but she should be. Olivia Dunham really doesn't seem like much of a family woman, even though she did fairly well with her young niece when she was around - What happened to Ella anyway? We've seen a future version of her character in ‘Back to Where You’ve Never Been’, so obviously something horrible has happened to her or we would've mentioned her. Or maybe I'm just pessimistic. Back to the point, Olivia was the fun aunt for young Ella, so surely that doesn't transpose that well to actually caring for her own offspring? She didn't have to be there through Ella's worst times. Why do main characters in network drama have to be good parents? 

Although, I did like the moments where Peter and Olivia discussed their search for Etta so many years prior, as she reveals that she had already concluded that their daughter was dead, and that she didn't want to definitively discover that. It makes a lot of sense, and Jackson and Torv performed a relatively complex scene very ably, as normal. 

I also enjoyed the few scenes spent fussing about the approaching loyalists, who had found signs of their van driving in the general direction, and managed to track them down to the area. Once Etta discovers this from her colleagues in the resistance, she warns everyone and sets off a few tentative interchanges and general worry that only amounts to getting our protagonists out of the dead zone and back on the road. 

Once again, whatever. 

To be conclusive, baring a few interesting moments of capable acting or temporary suspense, there was little to lift 'the Recordist' above horribly boring levels. Without a doubt, this was one of the worse episodes we've seen from this generally stellar series in its five glorious years.