Friday, October 9, 2009

Review - Fringe Season 2 Episode 4 Momentum Deferred

With a single episode, we had another great leap forward in mythology. Luckily tens of millions didn't die in the process...or did they? (yes, that was an attempt to reference red China.)

The standalone episodes of Fringe aren't particularly strong, and the episodes with large focus of mythology blow them away, so I was very pleased to see another. I just hope there are more of these kinds of episode. We learned all about the shapeshifters who will be essential in the continuing story. For starters, they are biomechanoid, called the First Wave, drink mercury (yuck!!), and are looking for a frozen person with a weird symbol on his head who turns out to be the observer. The scientists at Massive Dynamic are so smart that with a working shapeshifter device, they can reproduce an image of the person last copied from the broken device recovered in the season premiere. After a cool fight, Olivia prevails when shapeshifter Charlie underestimates her. She kills him, so I'm guessing this is the last we will see of Kirk Acevedo. I hadn't expected him to depart so early and was waiting for the shapeshifter to thwart the imaging process. I didn't like how the fight ended, because it used a total cop out for Olivia to succeed. He kicks her around and calls someone while Olivia has time to get a gun. At least make her a badass and beat the shapeshifter in a fair fight.

Olivia remembers everything prompted by a bell. She learns about the shapeshifters and the people they work for from William Bell. In the other universe, shapeshifters are more prevalent and have been crossing over into the universe we know. They are trying to tear a gap between the two, which Walter theorizes, would destroy one of them.

Walter had a story that was a little creepy. The woman, Rebecca, he had tested on years has sine weird affinity with Walter and goes along to be tested on again. While the experiment ultimately failed and didn't contribute to finding the shapeshifter, her relationship with Walter interested me. I'm guessing they had a thing for each other and blurred the doctor-subject relationship.

We need more episodes like these. The episode was packed with intrigue, and had good pacing. I would also like to commend Michael Giacchino for his continuing work on Abrams shows. His music does an amazing job of setting the tone of the show, and for some odd reason I was wondering whether the ratings for the shows would be as good without the music.

Score: 9.4/10

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