Fringe recap: "The Same Old Story"

Episode Title: The Same Old Story
Season: 1
Episode: 2
Network: FOX
Airdate: Tuesday September 16, 2008

Ground Rules:
Rule #3: Your momma probably told ya, don’t go with strangers. This is especially true if J.J. Abrams is in charge of the world and the rules by which it lives by…
Rule #4: Follow Rule #3 as if you life depended on it – it does!

Cruising at 30,000 feet (mini-synopsis):
A serial killing, pituitary gland thief is on the loose and Homeland Security and the FBI are out to stop him.

Ground level (the details):
This episode opens at night, at a cheap hotel…nothing good can come of this. Our thief is there with the “girl” – Loraine (“my mom gave all her girls flowers for middle names”) Daisy. Well, Loraine tonight is your night to be plucked. She asks him what is in his bag, a mushroom pizza (ok, that’s gross), and he says “yeah, it’s a mushroom pizza.” Uh, no it’s not, it’s a mini-science lab you freak. Suspect Zero goes to the bathroom and starts breaking out with the vials, needles, and other odd assortments of instruments to help him “take care” of his lady friend. While he is fiddling with his toys, Loraine starts screaming and going berserk as a weird shape moves around in her abdomen. Suspect Zero grabs his belongings, grabs the girl (who has now run outside) and helps her into his vehicle, it’s off to the hospital. He is about to become a proud papa…yeah, that’s right, she’s pregnant and it is growing so fast that it looks like she is close to delivering it.

At the hospital, she is still screaming and the doctors have her restrained on the table. The baby is increasing in size and the doctors are about to do emergency surgery on her to remove the child, but they are too late, the baby has grown so large by now that it rips through the stomach and Loraine dies instantly. Then mass hysteria ensues with the doctors and nurses in the room as they all start freaking out and screaming.

Recipe for 15-minute Insta-Baby
1 Suspect Zero
1 Random hooker
1 World created by J.J. Abrams
1 Seedy hotel room
Wait for 15 minutes, presto baby.

Homeland Security Agent Phillip Broyles is leading a meeting with several, as yet, unknown, people. The only other familiar person attending the meeting is Nina Sharp (Blair Brown), who works for Massive Dynamic. Agent Broyles tells the group that he has assembled his new team consisting of FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, Dr. Walter Bishop, and Peter Bishop (Walter’s son). The main purpose of the meeting is the event that happened at the hospital 43 minutes earlier and somehow this “anomaly” falls under this group’s jurisdiction.

Cut to Dunham, at home, pouring over old case files she worked with her former partner Agent Scott trying to find some clue as to what happened to him. She gets a call from Broyles where she is instructed to pick up the others and meet him in 30 minutes at the medical center. She goes to where the Bishops are staying and Peter answers the door. “You’re phone was off the hook,” Dunham says. “That’s because I didn’t want to get woken up,” replies Peter. She tells them that they are all being called in so Peter goes to wake up his father. Oops, Walter is not in his bed. No, he would rather stay in the closet. I’m guessing all those 17 years locked up in a small, padded room makes a closet an inviting place. Turns out he’s having troubles getting to sleep at night, because he had gotten used to a patient, Carlos, who would sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat every night.

They arrive on the scene, except Walter won’t leave the car because he is “fiddling around with the seat warmer. Broyles goes to get him and Walter says, “I have never seen feature like this before. It warms your ass. It’s wonderful. Have you tried it?”

Cut to inside the hospital, Broyles runs through the timeline for the team.

17 minutes after midnight, the girl is dropped off outside.

12:24 AM – she becomes a mom (that’s less than 2 minutes after she was pronounced dead)
He tells them that the baby was growing and that they could all see it doing so. The “baby” lived for about 30 more minutes before dying of natural causes, old age…It wasn’t just growing. It was growing and aging. Fun baby fact of the night: 92% of newborns have blue eyes. Peter’s were green. Dr. Bishop requests that the bodies need to be taken to a lab immediately so that he can begin work. He has forgotten he already has his old lab at Harvard. Broyles tell Dunham and Peter all of these inexplicable events are happening and his group is trying to find a connection between them, which they have dubbed “The Pattern.”

Olivia and Peter are at the hotel after a tip is phoned in asking about the girl. Olivia notices something familiar about the scene – medical grade sheets on the bed. It’s similar to the old cases that her and Agent Scott used to work on. She recognizes the profile of this serial killer. Whoa…

Each time Suspect Zero would kill five young women at a time, within a few days of each other. Pick them up, take them to motels, give them a muscle paralyzer so they would remain wide awake, but unable to move. He would make an incision along the front of the gums so he could pull their mouths open up to their eyes. Then, going through their nasal cavity he would remove their pituitary gland.

Peter asks the obvious, “An all of this connects to magic old man baby and the pregnant woman how?” Patience Peter, that is what the rest of the show is about.

Scoreboard: one girl down, four more to go. Our guy is now at a strip club, picking up his next victim.
Back at the FBI building we find out that Suspect Zero was dubbed “The Brain Surgeon.” Dunham makes a request to re-open the old case files. It is granted.

The Brain Surgeon and his girl arrive at a warehouse. Time to get to work. He tells her to check out the view of the bridge from the window. She doesn’t care about the bridge and asks him what he likes. “I like the bridge, go check it out.” While her back is to him, our guy whips out his needle, pops the top, gives the girl a kiss and a stick.

Back at the lab – Dr. Bishop is milking the cow… (that’s not a slang or euphemism, he really is milking the cow from episode 1) and he has finished doing the experiments on the 80-year old man-baby. He remembers that he conducted similar experiments before his lock-up as well as remembering where he parked his car seventeen years ago. It is in an old garage held closed by a combination lock. The combination – pi to the sixth digit – clever. In his car are piles of files and paperwork from Dr. Bishop’s work. The team is running through them to find the connection. We find out that the pituitary gland regulates growth and removing it causes rapid growth.

He worked with a colleague on it – a Dr. Penrose who is now a professor at Boston College. Time for a “get-to-know-you” session. Dr. Penrose has nothing to share, although he does have two different color eyes – right eye is blue, left eye is brown – freak.

Back at the warehouse, we have a little Dexter action ongoing. Girl is strapped down, despite being paralyzed. She has clamps holding her mouth open and then we have the scalpel enter the shot…cut to commercial. Even Fox has its limits.

The Lab: Dr. Bishop offers a hypothesis on why the gland is removed. They originally were cultivating soldiers. They could grow soldiers but they were unable to turn the aging process off once they reached the desired age. A breakthrough must have occurred while he was locked up in the mental hospital.

The gland is removed and the hormone extracted to regulate the aging process. The good doctor deducts that someone out there is an experiment and is trying to keep themselves from rapidly growing old. Apparently the rapid growth condition can be passed on via conception, as we found out earlier when Suspect Zero had un-safe sex. Dr. Bishop replies to both Dunham and Peter, “Even condoms are not 100% effective. You two should be aware of this.”

At the warehouse, Dr. Penrose shows up and is speaking to Suspect Zero – Christopher. Penrose tells him he had a visit from the FBI and to be more careful. He calls him “son.” Also, he only needs one more girl and then he will have what he needs.

At the lab, they know they have a pituitary gland serial killer on the loose, but they have absolutely no leads to work with. Dr. Bishop thinks that they can recover the last images the dead girl from the warehouse saw with some special equipment (using the theory that the last image she saw is permanently frozen into her retina, a la Jules Verne). Who has the equipment to do this? Massive Dynamic. How is it done? Something that can grab the frozen electrical impulses along the optic nerve and transmit them to a monitor. Dunham goes to Massive Dynamic to pick up the equipment. While there, Nina Sharp makes more cryptic statements, implying there is more to all of this than Dunham realizes, then she offers Dunham a job. With the equipment back at the lab and everything hooked up and working, the experiment begins. There is a lot of flashing lights, like paparazzi, and hazy, distorted images flash on the screen. (Meanwhile, our boy, Suspect Zero, is at another club on a hunt for his last girl.) They see something familiar in one of the images – a bridge…

Sargent Bridge, visible from the warehouse district. They find the bridge, match the angle, triangulate the position of the image to find the correct warehouse. Then they bring up old satellite imagery from the past 24 hours and viola, we have a car parked outside the warehouse during the time of the murder.

Dunham and Peter break into the warehouse and find none other than Dr. Penrose monitoring the latest victim. Christopher’s latest work has been interrupted and he goes on the run. Dunham chases him and it ends badly for Christopher, he instantly grows old and dies before it is all over, but before dying he tells Agent Dunham that he was an experiment and Penrose’s mistake was in blurring the lines and getting emotionally involved, thinking of him as a son instead of an experiment. Meanwhile, Peter is watching Penrose at gun-point. He gets distracted and Penrose delivers an overdose of anesthesia and takes off running as well. Peter makes a “dial-a-friend” to his dad and is walked through creating a make-shift defibrillator to shock the girl back to life. Dr. Penrose is on the run. No one knows where he is.

Parting shot: a sterile, white room under florescent lighting with three men each lying in their own bed, hooked up with monitoring equipment. They all look identical.
Roll credits.

Quote of the night:
“I thought you had a way with women?”– Dr. Walter Bishop to his son Peter after Dunham speaks down to him and walks out.

Parallel Universes?
On the island in LOST, they have fertility problems. Seems like in the Fringe universe, not only have they’ve got the fertility thing worked out, but they’ve created insta-baby (and insta-soldiers). I wonder if fertility issues will continue to be a theme on Fringe as they are on LOST.

Miss Anything?
If I missed something, then leave a comment and let me know.

If you missed something then pay closer attention.