Welcome to the rewatch for episode 9 of Fringe season 2 – “Snakehead”. In this rewatch we celebrate the glory of this epic standalone adventure.
We have renamed this episode: Something Happened Here.
Newly Observed Perspectives
- I can’t say that I’ve gained any new perspectives from this episode. Walter got lost and cried a bit, echoing his displacement without Peter. Nothing we haven’t already covered in more detail than the episode deserved.
Best retrospective performer: Walter’s nightgown.
Best retrospective moment: The worms..the worms!
Retrospective episode rating: 2/10
Useful Links
Next rewatch episode – 2.10 “Grey Matters” – TBA.
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
“Best retrospective performer: Walter’s nightgown.”
Haha… omg Roco.
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13 more episodes before thursday night? good luck roco.
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best rewatch post ever?
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I really like all the tidbits, news, and occasional serious analysis provided on this blog, but it’s weird posts and unfair ratings like these that prevent it from becoming my favorite site.
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It’s just an opinion GeigerCounter.
Roco’s site is very well organized and one of the few that I look up on a regular basis.
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please enlighten us on why this episode deserves better than a 2/10 and any extra analysis! I would actually give it maybe a 1/10. In fact, I’m not even going to watch it for my rewatch through the season.
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AL’s reasons why Snakehead deserves better than a 2/10 rating.
-I liked watching Peter and Walter’s developing relationship. I enjoyed seeing Peter’s concern for Walter after they reconnected – but didn’t enjoy knowing that the closer they got now, the worse their rupture would be when Peter learned the truth.
-This is probably totally inadvertent on the show’s part, but there were two themes running throughout the ep.
1) Parents searching for their children (the emigrant mother), parents lost without their children (Walter), and parents who would do anything to save their children (the wealthy mom) – as the episodes go along, these themes continue as an undercurrent if not the main theme.
2) Walter in the RED world – Chinatown – is completely lost. He doesn’t belong there, and can’t function. Peter, on the other hand, speaks the language, knows his way around, and is much more comfortable.
3) The surrogate family theme. Walter actually calls Astrid by her correct name TWICE, and is horrified that she was hurt because of his carelessness.
4) Every time they featured the giant worm in the tank, we yelled “It’s a trap!” like Admiral Akbar from Star Wars and made many calamari jokes.
Was this one of the stronger episodes of the season? No, but it had enough of the recurring elements to make it enjoyable. Maybe a 5/10.
Was this one of the stronger episodes? No, but I and my husband certainly found
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oops – I should have written THREE themes and ONE Admiral Akbar/calamari joke.
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Ann_Louise i absolutely agree with you. Snakehead deserves more than a 2/10 rating. This is one of my favourite episodes and i have watched it at least 20 times (i think thats an under estimation). I love the developing relationship between Peter and Walter that runs through this episode and then continues on in Grey Matters. The worms deserve a rating of their own as they were AWESOME! It was also fantastic to see Walter and Astrid grow closer as well. Astrid is an important part of the team and up until Snakehead i thought she was under valued and her character under explored. Cant wait for season 3 to start to see if we find out more about Astrid/Asterix/Ostrich!
To prove how much i loved this episode i even went to Chinatown on my recent holiday in Canada. I came all the way from Australia and there way no way i wasnt going to venture into Chinatown and imagine myself following in the footsteps of Walter and his research. Once again i reiterate……I LOVED this episode!!! I am an absolutely OBSESSED FRINGE freak!!!
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I’m surprised you even gave “Fishhead” er “Snakehead” a 2. Were you being generous because they spelled the names of the cast correctly?
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This totally deserves the 2 rating.
The point of it was completely lost on me and the worms were gory/fake enough to make me giggle. The only positive side? Walter remembers Astrid’s name and apologizes to her. Touching. Unlike the… snakes? When did we ever actual see a snake in this episode?
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I thought seeing Peter speaking Cantonese was pretty cool!
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I actually turned this episode off in the first act on first viewing, then came back to it months later. It’s a little better that I first thought, but still 2 or 3/10 is pretty fair. The parasitic worms are a little more feasible than some of the other MOTW (molebabies). The Chinese mother arriving separately from her husband and child is an example of the contrivances that sometimes make me despair of this show.
Walter’s extra confidence in advance of the Chinatown trip I ascribed to the worm bite, and his extraordinary helplessness thereafter to crashing down from the “drug”. Otherwise, it’s just a bit too much. He was able to make his way home from Rebecca’s in “Momentum Deferred” and made a round trip to the cafe in “August”, so how else could he fall down so badly here?
Peter’s “get to know me” was bizarre, since whenever Olivia has asked him anything personal, he evades saying anything (e.g., about his Iraq ventures in “Fracture”).
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Wow, Roco. I know you’re cutting it down to the very last minute to finish this rewatch, but I was not expecting a rewatch post with absolutely nothing new to add. While I agree that this isn’t the greatest episode, there must have been something you picked up on the second time around…
(That said, I can understand where you’re coming from: I just finished rewatching Northwest Passage and I liked it even less than I did the first time around. I tried looking for some sort of redeeming quality, but it just wasn’t there. There is absolutely no substance in that episode, as far as I’m concerned. But I’ll stop there and save any additional opinions I have for the official rewatch. All I’m saying is that I can see where you would feel you have nothing to add.)
On a somewhat related note, I will say that the little DVD feature where Jasika talks about how she convinced the producers to give one of the thugs a black eye to show that Astrid had fought back was an intriguing insight that made me increase my opinion of Astrid and her abilities… slightly. I like her as a character, I’m just not sure I like her as an FBI agent. But I quite enjoyed getting that little insight where I’d never made that connection before. So I claim that there’s still more to gain from the episode if you had the time to devote to actually consider it a bit more fully… But I’ll give you a pass on this one.
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