Fringe Recap: “The Same Old Story”

by Sarabeth Pollock:

Fringe Recap: “The Same Old Story”
Original Air Date (Fox): September 16, 2008
Season 1 Episode 2

Roadside motel in Boston.  A man is in bed with a woman.  He seems agitated as he gets up to go into the bathroom to get dressed, and he becomes more flustered the more she talks.  She asks if he has a wife or girlfriend.  She says she’s not using her real name, of course, but that her real name is Loraine, Loraine Daisy of all things—all of her siblings have flower names and her mother couldn’t even spell Loraine right.  While she’s talking, he opens a leather case filled with medical supplies.  He starts to fill a syringe when she screams from the bedroom.  He rushes in to see that she is having some kind of seizure, and her stomach is contorting.  Indeed, something is moving inside of her stomach.  At this point I get an image from Alien, only in this case her stomach seems to be growing instead of exploding.  Loraine Daisy rushes outside, dressed only in her bra and panties, clutching her growing abdomen and screaming for help.  A man sees her and asks if she needs a ride to the hospital.  The man that she’d been sleeping with hurries out, wraps her in a shirt, and assures the man that he will take care of her.  They get into his car and he races to the hospital, wincing at her screams.  When they get there, he helps her out of the car and then drives off, leaving her alone.

Inside, Loraine Daisy is being wheeled on a gurney down the hall while doctors and nurses bark questions at her.  When they ask how far along she is, she insists that she isn’t pregnant.  By now, her belly has grown to that of a full-term pregnant woman.  After a final blood-curdling scream, Loraine Daisy flat lines.  The doctors move to get the baby out, but before they can do anything they stop in horror as they hear the sound of flesh being torn apart.  At the sight of the baby, which has evidently made an entrance on its own, the staff screams.

Special Agent Phillip Broyles has called a late-night meeting.  The only person we recognize at this point is Nina Sharp from Massive Dynamic.  Broyles introduces his new team to the group, passing around photos of Olivia and Peter.  Nina questions Broyles’ choice of Walter Bishop given his criminal history, but Broyles is resolute, stating that nothing was ever proved and that Walter could be a successor to Einstein.  When Nina turns to Olivia, Broyles insists that she is perfect for the job and worthy of their trust, especially given her determination to follow the evidence to find the truth even at risk of incriminating her lover.

At home in the early hours of the morning, Olivia is having flashbacks of John while she pours over old case files.  The phone rings, and Broyles tells Olivia to get Peter and Walter and meet her at the medical center in thirty minutes.  She calls Peter, who is not happy about being awakened so early.  He goes to wake Walter, only to find him sitting in the closet.  Walter tells Peter that he couldn’t sleep because for the last few years at St. Claire’s he was always lulled to sleep by a patient who sang “Row Row Row Your Boat” every night.  This is just another one of those moments when we realize how damaging Walter’s stay at St. Claire’s was.

The trio arrives at the hospital with two minutes to spare in her thirty minute deadline.  Broyles is impressed with Olivia’s ability to gather her team so quickly.  He meets Peter for the first time, and then he goes to the car to greet Walter, who is intrigued by the seat warmer.  Though it’s clear that Broyles has faith in Walter and his knowledge and his abilities, there is a shadow of doubt that flickers across his face when he sees how childlike Walter is.

Broyles takes the team inside.  A Jane Doe came into the hospital and dies, he says, and then two minutes later her baby was born.  The staff noticed that the child seemed to be growing before their eyes.  The baby only lived thirty minutes.  Broyles shows the team the baby; the baby hadn’t been growing, it had been aging, and in its thirty minutes of life it developed into a full grown, albeit very old, man.  Walter moves in to examine the man-child, looking at his eyes.  Ninety-two percent of Caucasian babies are born with blue eyes, he tells his son.  Peter’s were green.

Back at the lab at Harvard, Broyles tells Olivia more about the Pattern, and how there are inexplicable events happening all the time.  Their conversation is interrupted when a call comes in that a man had called the hospital to check on the woman he’d seen at the hotel.  Olivia and Peter go to investigate while Walter examines the man-child’s corpse.  At the hotel, Peter finds some orange gel on the counter.  Olivia’s eyes sweep the room and she notices that the woman’s clothes are still there, but there is no evidence of the man’s belongings.  She checks the sheets and finds that they are medical-grade sheets; her expression becomes grim as she asks Peter to look in the nearby cabinet across the room.  Her hunch is correct—the hotel sheets are inside.  Olivia explains to Peter that everything fits the MO of a serial killer she and John investigated.  He killed five young women over a short period of time, using a muscle relaxer (the gel Peter found on the sink) to render the women helpless but awake while he removed a piece of their brains from an incision in their mouths.  Based on what she saw tonight, the killer is back.

We flash to a strip club and see the killer pick up a woman named Stacy.  He takes her to an industrial area in Stoughton that is full of warehouses.  They go inside one of the warehouses and walk past furniture and boxes.  It’s not exactly a love nest, but she plays along with it.  He tells her that there is a view of the bridge out the window.  Stacy doesn’t care about the view, but the man insists.  Stacy doesn’t realize it, but we see that he wants her to look out the window so that he can inject her with the muscle relaxer.  She looks at the bridge, and he joins her and kisses her.  Then he sticks the needle in her neck.

Agent Charlie Francis ends a staff meeting by telling the group about Agent Scott’s impending funeral service.  He warns them that despite what they might be hearing, Agent Scott is still one of them and that won’t change until the full inquiry has been completed.  Olivia is waiting outside to ask Charlie for help finding files about the serial killer. Charlie asks how long Broyles will keep her on special assignment, and Olivia senses—correctly—that Charlie was also aware of her relationship with John.  She thanks him for covering for her.

Back at Harvard, Peter finds Walter milking Jean the Cow.  The tests are done, he tells Peter, and the DNA confirms that the woman had been impregnated by someone whose DNA was similar to experiments he ran thirty years prior.  Randomly, Walter suddenly realizes that he knows where he parked his car after seventeen years.  Peter begrudgingly follows along as Walter leads him to a garage.  Walter opens the combination lock, 3-1-4-1-5-9, and inside there is an old car and several boxes.  Peter tells his father he can bring a car back from the dead, and he and Walter make the drive back to Harvard in the old station wagon.  Olivia and Astrid join in the search through the boxes for files on the pituitary gland after Walter explains that growth is controlled by the pituitary gland, which is consistent with Olivia’s serial killer and the man-child at the hospital.  Walter recalls that he worked with Dr. Penrose on these experiments, and Penrose just happens to be a professor at Boston College.

While Peter and Olivia go to Boston College, we return to the warehouse, where the killer has Stacy prepped for surgery in a makeshift medical suite sitting among the furniture and boxes.  She is conscious though paralyzed as he makes an incision in her mouth.

At Boston College, Olivia and Peter interview Dr. Penrose.  Olivia shares information about the baby and asks if he has any ideas about its origins.  Penrose says that he left his government job after only a year because he believed the work was wrong.  He tells them that he tried to forget what he had been doing, and that no one in power should ever know what Walter knows.  It’s too dangerous.  He excuses himself and rushes off.  Peter watches him leave, noting that Penrose wasn’t sharing everything with them.  Charlie calls to tell Olivia that another victim, Stacy, has been found.  Olivia has her body sent to Walter’s lab.

Walter confirms that Stacy’s pituitary gland has been removed.  He reflects on the research he had been doing thirty years ago, when he had been tasked with cultivating soldiers in a lab.  They were grown in petri dishes and became full-grown men after only three years.  This case is reminiscent of those experiments.  Walter suspects that the killer is a product of genetically enhanced genes, and he needs the pituitary glands to slow down the aging process.  He would have killed Loraine Daisy that night at the hotel, but he had accidentally impregnated her.

At the warehouse, Penrose finds the killer, Christopher, in the medical suite.  He hugs him fiercely and warns him that he must be very careful when he selects his victims.  Christopher says the pain is getting worse.  Penrose decides that Christopher needs one more pituitary gland to relieve the pain.

With Stacy’s body in the lab, Walter can confirm that her pituitary gland was in fact removed.  To find the perpetrator, he suggests a procedure that will allow them to capture the last image that Stacy saw before she died.  Peter dismisses the idea, to which Walter asks when he lost his imagination. Walter posits that they can use a specialized camera and electronic impulses to view the images on a monitor.  Only Massive Dynamic has the equipment to do it, so Olivia goes to the Manhattan Massive Dynamic headquarters to see Nina.  While she’s waiting, Olivia has a conversation with Broyles.  She finally asks him why John said what he did when he died, that she should ask Broyles why he chose her.  Broyles turns the table and asks Olivia if she and John were being safe when they were intimate.  He guesses they weren’t, and before she can say anything she gasps in pain and grasps her abdomen the way that Loraine Daisy had.  In an instant, the “dream” is over and a perplexed Olivia is told that Nina is ready to see her.  Nina expressed gratitude to Olivia for keeping Massive Dynamic’s name out of the papers during the last investigation.  She offers her condolences on the loss of Agent Scott and expresses her admiration for being a woman in a role traditionally dominated by men.  It’s clear that everything Nina says has been calculated to fit a purpose, and through their brief conversation Nina insinuates that she knows a lot more about Olivia and Agent Scott without saying it outright.  She presents Olivia with the electric pulse camera and wishes her luck on the case.

Christopher is on the prowl again, seeking out his next pituitary gland donor at a bar.  Before long he has her prepped and ready for surgery back at the warehouse.  Just one more reason to avoid strange men lurking in bars….

In one of the more squeamish moments from the show, Walter pops Stacy’s eyeball out and positions it with the camera.  As the electric impulses fire, images pop on the screen.  There is an inverted picture of a bridge.  Astrid recognizes the bridge, and Olivia triangulates where you’d have to be in order to see it from that angle.  Using satellite imagery, the team is able to identify the warehouse.

Olivia and Peter race to the warehouse in Stoughton to find Penrose and Christopher about to cut into the latest victim.  Christopher flees, with Olivia in pursuit.  She tells Peter to call Charlie for backup.  Suddenly, the woman on the table goes into cardiac arrest, and while Peter is distracted Penrose escapes.  Peter frantically calls Walter for help.  Walter asks if Peter has any cocaine (Peter: “No, I don’t have any cocaine!” Walter: “Too bad).  In a moment that would make MacGyver beam with pride, Peter constructs a defibrillator using an engine and some large metal rings, and he holds them in place with phone books as he shocks her.  She comes around, and Walter praises his son.

After a long chase, Olivia finds Christopher crumpled on the ground near a storage container.  He has aged several decades and is near death.  “I was an experiment,” he tells her.  Someone had paid the man he called his father, Penrose, to watch out for him.  Christopher feels they should have let him die.  And then he dies.

When Olivia returns the camera to Massive Dynamic, Nina makes her move and offers Olivia a job, telling her that she is too valuable for the public sector and that Massive Dynamic is a very powerful corporation.  Olivia receives this information with the hidden message that it conveys, that Nina and Massive Dynamic have the same if not more information about the Pattern than Broyles and his special team of operatives.  Back at the Federal Building, Broyles tells Olivia that they are searching for Penrose but haven’t found him yet.  Given the sensitivity of the cases they are working on, and given that she will continue to work with Massive Dynamic for help, he explains that some private industries have security clearance.  The trap snaps shut when he asks Olivia if Nina mentioned the Pattern.  Olivia dodges the issue and tells Broyles that Nina offered her a job, which she declined because Broyles was going to give her a raise.  This is an important moment because Olivia is demonstrating that she is becoming aware of the players in this game, and she won’t be played.

At the lab, Walter and Peter fill out the paperwork to officially become members of the team.  Walter signs without hesitation, but Peter has trouble signing away his rights.  In private, Walter tells Olivia that if she read Peter’s file, then she no doubt knows his medical history, which he hoped would remain a private matter.  Olivia says there was no file, only his birthday.  This seems to trouble and relieve Walter at the same time, while it no doubt creates nothing but new questions for Olivia about the nature of Peter’s medical history.  Walter asks that they keep the conversation between them.

That night, Peter hears Walter rattling off seemingly random numbers while he lies in bed and attempts to fall asleep.  With a sigh of frustrated resignation, Peter starts to sing “Row Row Row Your Boat” for his father, who smiles contentedly and tries to sleep.

The last image we see is of a stark hospital room with three men laying in stasis on special beds.

It’s just another hint of what is to come on Fringe.

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Sarabeth Pollock is a contributor for DarkMedia.  Follow her on Twitter at @SarabethPollock and check out her blog at sarabethpollock.wordpress.com.

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[Photo Credit: Ben Mark Holzberg/FOX]