Fringe: "Bloodlines"

In honour of Fringe being picked up for a fourth season yesterday, I'm going to do something I haven't done in a long time... blog about it the same night of the episode!

Last week’s episode of Fringe featured Anna Torv channelling Leonard Nimoy, and the episode ended with a momentary return of Olivia’s consciousness in her own body, which signalled that Bell’s soul magnets might not be sticking as well as he’d hoped. With a cliffhanger like that, I was disappointed to discover we’d be back in the other universe this week.

But luckily, this week’s episode was amazing, and once again pulled in season 1 elements, making those early “fringe science of the week” episodes even more a part of the larger Pattern at work.

At the beginning of the episode, Fauxlivia is at her ob/gyn appointment with her mother, being tested to find out if she’s a carrier of VPE. This disease, which doesn’t exist in our world (although there’s a test to figure out if the mother has a certain ph balance which, if it’s not neutral, will pass a disease onto the baby as it passes through the birth canal), is what killed her sister, and sister’s baby, in childbirth. Fauxlivia returns home with the suspicion that someone is following her, and she’s right – as soon as she’s done talking to Lincoln, she’s kidnapped and taken to a warehouse in Chinatown, where her pregnancy is accelerated and she endures nine months of pregnancy in a matter of hours.

Meanwhile, Lincoln finds out she’s missing and begins searching frantically for her, and the first person he and Charlie go to is Bubs, the cab driver (you can call him Henry, but he’ll always be Bubs to me). His cab had been spotted driving by Fauxlivia’s house several times, so they question him, only to find out that he knew Olivia... as in our Olivia, and not theirs. They begin to put the pieces together when they go to Walternate, who finally tells Lincoln that the Olivia who’d been with them for several months was from the other side, and Fauxlivia is pregnant. And then Fauxlivia’s mom shows up to say that hey, my daughter’s got VPE and cannot have that baby.

But see... it appears Walternate had his finger on those results long before the ob/gyn got them. He knew she couldn't bring that baby to term, and he was going to do something about that.

Over in Chinatown, the doctors are preparing Fauxlivia to give birth (Me: “Wow, if you could go through pregnancy in one day, your stomach muscles would bounce back immediately!!!” Husband: “Right... and your skin would have probably torn to shreds, not to mention what your muscles would have done under that kind of stress.” Me: “Let a woman dream here.”) and she appeals to an obstetric nurse to let her go, but the nurse won’t. Fauxlivia overcomes her (even as a prego, Fauxlivia KICKS ASS) and gets out into the streets, where she’s found by Lincoln and Bubs. Bubs delivers the baby, and it would appear that Fauxlivia has died (when she was in labour, I said to my husband, “Oh man, they might actually kill her off here!!” and we both thought they had) but she opens her eyes again and she’s just fine.

At the hospital, Walternate comes to see Fauxlivia just as the nurse is taking the blood sample of the baby. The super-slimy and sleazy Brandon (he’s a fun geek in our world, and an evil nerd in the other) intercepts the card, which will presumably be used for DNA tests. We’d guessed early on that Walternate was behind it, so that didn’t come as much of a surprise, but his actions create several questions:
• Why did he do this? Does the Vacuum machine work with anyone matching Peter’s DNA, so his child could also operate it? And did Walternate have the technology to do so and needed to speed things up to get the child to do it now?
• Will the child continue to grow at a more accelerated rate? (Will this be like Gabrielle’s baby on Xena?)
• Does this link back to the second episode of season 1, “The Same Old Story”? In that episode, we see a prostitute become impregnated and move to full term in about an hour, and she’s killed during delivery because the baby is growing at such an exponential rate that it’s a pre-schooler before they can get it out, and it basically breaks her ribs and tears her insides apart. After it’s born, the doctors stare at it with horror as it continues to age before their eyes, and by the time the Fringe division shows up, there’s a dead woman on the table and what appears to be an 80-year-old man on the floor, dead, still connected to the woman through the umbilical cord. It was such a horrific opening to the episode I was almost scared away from the program, but it was too fascinating to stop watching. We find out that the man who impregnated the woman suffers from a rapid aging disease, and his father, Dr. Penrose, has been getting his son to drug women and cut out their pituitary glands in order to slow down his aging. The two of them have been working toward something that will control the rapidity of the aging. Clearly... Walternate’s figured out exactly what that control is. But we can only wonder what will happen to that child now.
• What did August the Observer mean when he said it’s beginning?

Anna Torv continues to be a marvel on the show. Last week my husband and I were chuckling our way through the episode, giggling every time she’d say something with that lisp and the Nimoy slur. It was awesome. And this Olivia is so entirely different from ours, and yet there are moments of sameness. I’ve often wondered this season... is she an example of what Olivia would be like if she hadn’t been administered the cortexiphan as a child?

Did You Notice?
• The glyphs this week spelled out FATED.
• Opus the Peahen!!!!! I think that is my favourite pop culture reference ever. SO brilliant. First, did you notice he had the same enlarged nose that our beloved Opus the Penguin has? The strip was still written by Berkeley Breathed, and it still appeared to be making current topic jokes (the words were fuzzy, but a large woman sits down and appears to say something about Lindsay Lohan... did I see that correctly?... and Opus tells her to hold that thought, brings back some sort of electrodes that shoot out and electrocute her, and he makes a witty comment I couldn’t read). If this means that in the other universe Breathed is still doing that strip, I want to go over to the other universe. Peahen or Penguin, I just want more Opus.
• West Wing is in its 12th season.
• In the altverse, Francis Ford Coppola directed Taxi Driver, not Scorsese. (The protagonist is still named Travis Bickle, though...)