'The No-Brainer' - Fringe, Season One

Fringe

Season One

Episode Twelve

The No-Brainer - 6.0

There's a masturbation joke here somewhere. 

When I decided to write these as a series of blog entries, I originally intended for them NOT to sound like the review section of a half-arsed university newsletter. I don't mean five star quality literature, I mean I wanted to add a little personality to what I write, while ensuring that they were only reviews on the surface, and could double as a blog entry underneath. Sadly, my life is exceptionally boring so in the end, it is far more interesting to focus solely on what happens in the television I watch and how it made me feel. Well, you might think it's sad, I don't really. For the time being I am an aspiring film maker who is doing something I actually love to do; watching TV.

Fringe is one of the many shows I love to watch, and to be honest I'm not good enough at analysing media to tell you why. I enjoy the characters, the story, the acting, the special effects, yatta yatta yatta. It'd be great to say that I love how thematic it is or whatever, but I'm not the artsy type you might think an aspiring film maker to be, generally themes bore the crap out of me. I like fast, I like action, violence, sex, bright colours and shiny things. Does that make me shallow? God I hope so.

'The No-Brainer' is the twelfth episode of Fringe's premiere season, and so far we've come to know and love FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, mad scientist Walter Bishop and his son-with-a-colourful-past Peter, along with the secondary cast Astrid Farnsworth, Charlie Francis, Philip Broyles and Nina Sharp. By this point in the show, we have learnt too much and seen too much to be able to sit down and allow an hour of this wonderful sci-fi 'procedural' to go by without advancing the greater plot a little. Does this episode give us that? I don't really think so. We get a better look at antagonist Sanford Harris, who continues to impede Olivia's attempts to do her job, and we are led to believe Walter receives closure for a devastating event from his past, but in my opinion neither of these events constitute an adequate leap forward.

I've decided to be a bit lenient, mostly because of the previous two episodes which shot the story in the right direction with a freaking cannon, and it is strange for a semi-procedural to have three important episodes in a row, especially right in the middle of a season. I didn't expect this to be a game-changer, and it wasn't.

It started relatively simply, with some teenager talking with his friend over the computer. In typical Fringe fashion, everything goes pear-shaped pretty damn fast and a couple of viewer-minutes later we come to know that the kid had his brain sucked out of his head by a program his computer had downloaded. The scene itself didn't really enlighten us, it only confused us, but I guess I'm cool with that. There was at least a nice visual with the hand slowly reaching out from the computer screen and grabbing his head, all the while the suspenseful score dramatises the brain-suck moment. Yum.

What is kind of a surprise is exactly how many different instances there are of the programming cranial assault - the boy, a car salesman, some woman's new husband and nearly Olivia's own niece and the programmer himself. And the episode didn't even seem filled! I was a little impressed, sometimes that many separate events can leave one exhausted or desensitised, but not here. Each new death and almost-as-such is handled differently, and we don't suddenly come down with a case of been-there-done-that. Still, it wasn't particularly interesting at the start. The best sequence by far was Peter's discovery that the program was being downloaded at Olivia's own apartment, where her sister and niece, Ella, were staying. There was a thrilling race interspersed with Ella playing what is undoubtedly the best computer game of all time - 'Paint a Pony' - which reinforced the notion that we had only known the young girl and her mother since the last episode, and there were by all means expendable. Of course, a show like this wouldn't cover the main character's apartment in the brains of her young niece, and we were at least a little aware of this. When Olivia rushes in and manages to distract Ella from the screen, we aren't really surprised, but we are relieved.

At episode's climax, it is revealed that True Blood's Chris Bauer is the perpetrator of these horrible acts. I don't mind True Blood, but Bauer is the most annoying SOB on the entire show, and he doesn't really break character here. The acting was off and unbelievable, and I wasn't upset by his kind of accidental suicide, even when his kid found him like that. Eh, he killed your step dad and your best friend, I'm sure you'll come to understand the justice served here. Is there anything else that really needs to be said about the week's bad guy?

You know what was more annoying than Bauer? Walter's dead-lab assistant sub-plot. Look, Fringe, I know and remember why he was in the mental institution, I just didn't care that much. Don't spend ten minutes of the episode building up a mystery then revealing it to be the dead girl's mother. Yay, emotion. Sometimes a little softer plot is great, but when the main plot isn't that action-packed a saccharin story about redemption is a not gonna enthral me. BAH. And was anyone else a bit disturbed when Astrid performed a serious invasion of privacy on Peter by reaching into the trash to pick up his letter? I don't even really know you, you scheming wretch, stop messing in the affairs of important characters!

So why does the episode score relatively high? It's simple really, because while the episode's entire plot verged on boring, it never went over the edge. The acting from the main cast was exemplary as usual, and I did enjoy the episode's aesthetic with the hand and stuff. I also really like the moment where Olivia was looking into the security camera when our bad guy pulled a gun on her - you'd have to see it, I thought it was a striking image.

As a final note, I'm going to suggest that it be made a law that unnecessary Beyonce on television should be a crime. I don't mind the woman, but her music was pointless and distracting. I'll Single Ladies you Ms. Knowles, don't try me.