Fringe (new JJ Abrams show) : Mad scientist, flesh eating virus, a cow and talks with the dead

o probs

i don't really remember, what is it the observers want exactly? to drain earth's resources and enslave its inhabitants to drain them? or something?

Dunno

It got so silly at the end of last season i'm just going to ride these last episodes out

But fuck the observers being nazis. Fuck that bullshit, jj

thought nazis

with fedoras

and CO factories

Yeah, as lame as that

who think music is just noise

and have taken all the walnuts

all the ads about the 'observer' stuff in this show now make it look like The Adjustment Bureau: The Series

I think the deal is they destroyed their future so much that they need a new place to live, so they're colonizing the 21st century?

ok lol @ the search for walter bishop's betamax horcruxes

also why has no one bothered to ask Etta the very obvious question of what happened to her when the observers arrived at the park?

I don't know, do we really want them wasting screen time with that kind of useless backstory?

Way behind, watching first ep now.

Thought carbon monoxide machines were going to be some geoengineering kludge for climate change.

Astrid Naugahyde == yay ^_^

Thought the preferred term was Amber Roma.

Exposition filling in past details is boring.

ON NO, WALTER'S SHOE.

I started watching the new episode of the new season and was so lost I've had to go back and read a recap of last season bc clearly I was asleep for half of it

I swear this show is so wtf I need a goddamn flowchart. But I love it.

I feel you there, like I'd forgotten Desmond was ambered so that they could get... Peter? out. And I thought September was dead? But somehow was able to hatch a plan with Walter after the point in the story where he died?

God, I think I'm at least one season behind. Was watching it as self compiled dvdrs of d/lded videofiles and just stopped making them at one point. Not sure if it was just that I stopped making those things which I'd been doing with a few tv series or if I'd just stopped making them of that series while I continued with others.
Had watched it through from the beginning that way and got up to I think the middle of series 3, could have been 4. It's on 5 now isn't it?
Whichever series that was that was suddenly quite a bit longer tahn previous ones had been anyway.

humanity's only hope!

I read all the recaps and was still completely mystified why the new season picks up in 2036...but I guess i'll just go with it.

God this show is like homework now, lol

it's pretty simple, they wrapped the last storyline, didn't have anything plotted, and had floated a "fringe in the future" episode last season as an out in case they had to plot out another season

observers come, fringe team ambered, they're let loose 24 years later - is there anything else to it?

Well that's why I was confused --- I thought I'd missed something huge in the last couple of eps that triggered the future jump

Now I understand that *it's just a story* I can relax

be patient with me. I'm slow

'tape 6... or 7...'

so...

i can't even remember what happened to that dude in which time in which timeline

lost me completely in season breaks. like when peter and olivia were talking about how their marriage didn't work because they lost their child/couldn't save the world ?_? so much melodrama and so little interesting action.

that dark skies/shoe bit is some classic hard SF. love the stuff where sufficiently alien/advanced folks are simply incomprehensible to us.

that assembly scene was pretty cool

so was this plot kind of like 'gift of the magi' except backwards?

so "An Origin Story" refers to Peter being the father of the Observers, no?

probably ref to his superhero observer powers he'll have now

both seem possible given time-travel hijinx

preview for this week's episode had him super-punching an observer across the room

b/c now he can accurately observe all the physiological processes in his fists

OK so I just caught up with "Through the Looking Glass," and something that's been bugging me is the increasing gender normativity of this and the prior episode, namely how Olivia's been relegated to such a passively domestic role of wife/mother who has all the feels, while Peter's turning into Superman (he even rocks the S-curl in this episode), which is all the more frustrating considering Olivia starts out the series as the one with superpowers.

Though lol @ Walter not remembering the case with the bald kid, he's clearly a surrogate for most of this show's viewers.

well considering that the secret ingredient is gonna turn out to be WUV in the finale...

"Is it safe?"

Walter confusing the past with Marathon Man was a++

I feel like the Olivia character is definitely shouldering too much of the emotional baggage /now/, but I don't think that is true overall -- surely Peter angsting it up and deciding to lash out at the Observers at any cost is emoting, although in a stereotypically male fashion. Lots of Walter emoting in the last episode or so, as well.

I think the main issue with Olivia losing track of Peter / Walter worried about turning into his worse self and using Peter as an anchor / Peter losing his humanity is that they're spending too many minutes per episode explaining their feelings verbally on-screen. Way too much telling, reduces the script quality.

'they're just better at math than we are'

emotions vs. logic, whatever blah.

I liked etta, but they're making her retrospectively really freaking irritating.

Yeah, whatever, illmatic and all that

But in this season they've gone so far beyond any network sf show

gilliam bit was delightful.

did that notebook show walter inventing a dalek??

Though lol @ Walter not remembering the case with the bald kid, he's clearly a surrogate for most of this show's viewers.

lol thank you Peter and Olivia for reminding all of us that bald kid case actually happened in the original timeline, which only both of them can remember.

gilliam bit was delightful.

loved this so much too. and walter on LSD, in general.

finally caught up and tbh I quite enjoyed the emotion vs logic episode. felt like the ambiguity reached at the end was something LOST had tried to do with the man of science vs man of faith thing, but never quite accomplished. Fringe does this kind of thing so much better on the whole, though.

and I agree with this:

I think the main issue with Olivia losing track of Peter / Walter worried about turning into his worse self and using Peter as an anchor / Peter losing his humanity is that they're spending too many minutes per episode explaining their feelings verbally on-screen. Way too much telling, reduces the script quality.

the best moments of this season was when they managed to tie the characters' personal arcs to the action and weirdness (eg Peter dealing with grief by turning himself into an Observer or Walter getting taken to the pocket universe by his old self), but there hasn't been enough of that imo. for all the strengths of this season, the parts where they're just talking about their FEELS really weigh everything down.

Hey, they remembered how to do emotionally resonant scenes without tons of exposition!

Finally caught up again (>=( @ Hulu), overall assessment is that this season has been zzzzz. For a show that has the capability for some audacious storytelling, the plot this season has been depressingly linear: get tape 4, now get tape 5, then tape 2, etc. -- maybe the numbering is out of order but everything has been largely episodic and disconnected, without a unifying sense of the bigger picture beyond Observers Bad.

Pocket universe episode was rad though for just how weird it was. Was the Gilliam bit actual Gilliam?

ha, i forgot peter is supposed to have an iq of 190

http://blog.zap2it.com/frominsidethebox/walter-white-tulip-fringe.jpg

I am almost caught up... only 1 episode left. ;_;