All the odd Fringe stuff you need to remember for season 2

Saturday, September 19, 2009

All the odd Fringe stuff you need to remember for season 2

Fringe is back tonight, and there's some stuff you'll probably need to know—or at least need to be reminded about—before the new season starts. We've done our best to compile a Fringe 101 list to help refresh your (and our) memory below.
This is also a "quick start" guide for new viewers. If you think we left something important out, let us know in the comments.

[Warning: Spoilers ahead.]
Walter Bishop has a cow. It's in his lab at Harvard, her name is Jean, and he's delighted about it. He's a genius scientist, who usually solves the mystery at the heart of each episode. He has significant mental crackage, and not just because he was in a mental institution for years. He worked on a portal to an alternate universe and even took his son Peter from it.

Peter Bishop has a murky, off-the-radar past. Turns out he died as a boy in this, our universe. Walter, heartbroken, replaced him with the boy Peter from the alternate universe, who is the Peter we have come to know and love. It's unclear at this point what happened to alternate-universe Walter.

OK, let's talk about this alternate universe. It's the mainspring of Fringe—not time travel, not faster-than-light travel, but alternate universes. In the not-our-universe once inhabited by the alternate Peter who is now in our universe, John F. Kennedy is alive and aged, Len Bias didn't die of cocaine, and the World Trade Center towers are standing proud and gleaming.

There is a bald guy who is in every episode, mostly briefly. He's usually around when something significant happens. He and Walter know each other. He's called The Observer. I tend to think of him as the eternal bald observer, because a fair amount of this kind of science fiction has a bald observer.

Are there any crimes going on here? Yes, of course, but I wanted to tell you about the cow first. Olivia Dunham is an agent on a special FBI team tasked with investigating strange deaths and the like. In this, Fringe is a successor to The X-Files. But some crimes—especially those involving teleportation—connect to the alternate universes. They also connect to Olivia, who realizes she was treated as a child with a special drug. Indeed, she was experimented upon by Walter.

A little more about teleportation—when was the last time you saw it in a contemporary television series? You've of course seen it in Star Trek beaming, but the teleportation in Fringe is more ragged around the edges, more desperate, and feels more like the novel The Stars My Destination (highly recommended, by the way).

Olivia has enlisted Walter and Peter to help. She and Peter haven't hooked up yet, but I'd say it's just a matter of time. Broyles is the head of her team—you'll recognize the distinctive actor, Lance Reddick, from The Wire and Lost. The team has some good guys and bad guys—a lot more interesting than the FBI team from Numb3rs.

Olivia's former lover was her former FBI partner, John Scott. He's former in both pursuits because he's dead. Walter had a way of getting Olivia into his dead mind. But it was too dangerous for her, so they stopped that, and it's not clear what role, if any, John will play in the second season. Just keeping you posted in case he does come back (though the actor has moved on to another series), or in case you wanted to know. Charlie is Olivia's current partner, and they're just good friends.

Astrid's also FBI and works in the lab with Walter and the cow. Olivia's sister and beloved little niece live with her. The sister seems to like Peter, but they are mostly there as vulnerabilities that Olivia's deadly opponents can exploit.

And make sure you keep an eye on the glyphs—leaves, half apples, seahorses, and the like—on the screen when Fringe breaks for commercials. The glyphs provide clues. Some of them have been decoded on the Web.

And who are Olivia's opponents? Who are the ultimate villains in Fringe? Again, not completely clear. But William Bell, played by Leonard Nimoy, is the genius scientist who used to work with Walter. Bell now straddles both universes as head of the mysterious, powerful, Massive Dynamic. He also has some connection to ZFT (Zerstorung durch Fortschritte der Technologie, or destruction through the advancement of technology), the terrorist group that's behind the crimes, which may have been founded either by Bell or Walter.

And then there's Nina Sharp, played by Blair Brown, who's Bell's chief assistant. She's the current head of the company in our universe, and knows a lot more than she lets on.

The last scene of the last show of the first season found Olivia—our Olivia—in Bell's office, with Bell, in the alternate universe, in his Massive Dynamic office, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, 2009.

Paul Levinson, Ph.D., is professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York City. His eight nonfiction books include The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003) and Cellphone (2004). New New Media, exploring blogging, Twitter, YouTube and other "new new" modes of communication, will be published by Penguin Academics in the summer of 2009. His science fiction novels include The Silk Code (1999, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel), Borrowed Tides (2001), The Consciousness Plague (2002), The Pixel Eye (2003) and The Plot To Save Socrates (2006). His short stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar and Sturgeon Awards. He reviews the best of television in his InfiniteRegress.tv blog and was listed in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Top 10 Academic Twitterers" in 2009.

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Enjoy The Prologue From My Upcoming Book.. "Strolok"............by R.Goldberg

"WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOUR RACE WAS TARGETED FOR EXTINCTION?"

The Sun is a powerful force in our Universe. It brings us light, warmth and a promise of a galaxy beyond the stars. Often we associate massive flashes of light with the reflection of our Sun's light bouncing off of another surface.

This is not always the case though, especially if you believe that we are truly not alone in the Universe. When we witness things that we can't readily explain we sometimes turn our heads and shrug our shoulders in a display of apathy.

A display such as this occurred on Friday January 29, 1982 at the Crater Lake National Park just outside of Chemult, Oregon. The snow had been falling steadily for a period of four days. The winds had been whisking about at 40 miles per hour.
Then there was one of those unnatural flashes of light. This created an eerie silence as a lanky boy, just nine years old, seemed to appear from out of that flash. If he had walked to this point there would have been a distinct trail in the newly fallen snow.
There was no trail and as a matter of fact the only tracks in the snow were the ones that outlined his feet where he was standing.

He began to trudge through the snow wearing what could only be described as dark brown long johns. He seemed dazed yet, at the same time, very clear about the direction that he was travelling. This boy with no identity or name seemed to be on a mission that would take him to places he had never been before.
His main goal was to reach Chemult, Oregon and he had no intention of stopping until he accomplished this. As strange as it seems the extreme cold seemed to have little or no effect on him at all.

Why Chemult? What was so special about this town located at an elevation of 4,758 feet above sea level in a frozen winter wilderness in Oregon?

The town of Chemult was first opened to the local traffic in 1926 and here in 1982, with its population of only 241, offered little in the way of comfort for a nine year old boy who was all alone. This journey, although prompted by something deep inside of him, did not provide a feeling of comfort and yet he had hoped that he would at least experience a feeling of accomplishment once he reached the town.

The wind was getting stronger and he noticed a small piece of yellow paper tattered and torn from whipping about in the snow. He only stopped long enough to
pick up this paper..........it read:

.....With the winter season here there was a lot of fun to have. Travelling miles of open trails on snow mobiles skiing or simply hiking, but there are dangers of doing so. Please remember safety first. Do not travel alone and be sure someone knows where you are and where you are going before travelling our trails, and please read the safety rules and codes of ethics before hiking the trails...

Nightfall was near and he had already walked 38 of the 40 miles needed to reach Chemult. He was just off of Route 97 when he spotted an old barn just about 200 feet NE of his present location. Making his way to the barn he went in and found it to be totally deserted, it was a perfect place to rest for the night.

Morning had arrived and once awake the boy started to look around the barn in the daylight light to see if there was anything that was lying in the barn that he could use to assist him on his trek.

Over in the far corner of the barn he found an old metal locked box that had long been forgotten. It was all rusted out and the key was nowhere to be found. After several failed attempts to open the box the young boy closed his eyes, sat back on his tired limbs and placed the palm of his right hand on top of the box. All of a sudden a dull red glow appeared from his right palm and the box lid flew open. Strangely enough once the red glow disappeared all that remained was a faint thin black outline where the outside of the red mark had appeared on his palm. Inside of the box he found several items all of which were unfamiliar to him and it was obvious that they had been there
for a very long time.

The contents included a tattered passport with the picture missing, a pocket knife, a compass, an antique pocket watch with a broken crystal, a time-worn souvenir porcelain coffee mug with the words; "Atlanta, Georgia, The Peach State, A Perfect Place to Live", on it and a frayed map of the Metro Atlanta Area It was difficult to make out the name on the passport but with a couple of light brushes with his fingers he saw the name Jason Tredmore. This is now who this boy would become.

Sci-Fi Blast

Saturday, September 19, 2009