The Tittie Pipe

When talking about "Fringe" you should always say it with an elongated "iiiiiiii" like how they announce the "seeeeeecrets" sketch on Conan. It adds to the atmosphere. And atmosphere is really what the show has going for it. The storylines are all quasi-interesting. Frankly, a lot of the science-powers are familiar to anyone who watches Heroes (or in tonight's episode, The Green Mile) but how it plays out is always kind of cool and how far that atmosphere spreads is one of the great strengths of the show.

Last night a young guy - fake Tom Green - has the power (unbeknownst to him mind you) to fuck up any electrical device around him when he gets upset. Sadly, this means he kills the young woman of his affection when the elevator they are both in plummets 32 stories straight into the ground. Oh, and also his mom, whose pacemaker he short circuits. So it's not a good day for this fella. How do you find him? Well luckily it turns out that it wasn't Walter's fault that this kid is all amped up. There is some other guy who is doing experiments on unknowing people and giving them this power (an interesting parallel though, as Peter pointed out last week, Walter is as much a cause of these problems as he is the solution). Walter, using pigeon technology (finally!!) deduces the Freak Of The Week's (FOTW's) magnetic output from the walkman he was using and then shocks the pigeons into oblivion with the same frequency so they will all migrate towards the guy (thereby allowing the FBI to find him). Good idea? Great idea!! As for what becomes of the pidgeons when they have to fly south and instead keep flying towards Harvard University Hospital... We'll leave that to the scholars to discuss.

The episode, though not amazing, makes a sensible move to finding the balance between a serial show (the pattern is a consistent) and a weekly procedural show (Freak Of The Week). Note, for example that just as FOTW gets on the elevator The Hairless Man - noted two weeks ago as a harbinger of an addition to the pattern - steps off the elevator. Also, in our preview of next weeks episode, we see that a girl, similarly amped up (but this time radioactive) stumbles in to a deli and boils everyone's brains. Awesome. But also awesome? The deli is the same deli The Hairless Man sat in with his roast beef sandwich in Episode 3. What does it all mean? Maybe it was just cheaper to use the same background twice... I don't know. But what it suggests to me is that the show - now picked up for a full season and with strong ratings - is relaxing a bit and injecting some much needed mythology to the weekly emergencies of the Homeland Securities Fringe Division.