Head past the jump for our Monday-flavored Fringe round-up.
Here’s a new promo for Thursday’s Fringe installment - “What Lies Below” [via]:
Fringe improved on it’s previous Thursday Nielsen ratings with a heartening 6.6 million viewers and 2.6 in the key demos (compared to 6.3 and 2.3 for Grey Matters). I think that’s what they call an “uptick”:
“Fringe” (6.6 million, 2.6) rose slightly from its last original. “Bones” benefited from reduced competition, with ABC airing its news special and CBS running a repeat at 8 p.m.
[via]
Popular Mechanics tackle the latest two episodes of Fringe (“Unearthed”, “Johari Window”) with their science gloves.
Monday’s “Unearthed” was the first of the Fringe double-episode week and dove into the paranormal with a brain-dead teenager, a murder victim and a Russian invasion of the mind.
Agent Olivia Dunham, along with ex-mad-scientist Walter Bishop and son Peter, is called in after a young girl wakes from the dead. The girl, Lisa, was pronounced brain dead after suffering an aneurysm, but wakes up on the operating table, just before her kidneys were to be harvested as donations.
At the hospital, the Fringe team learns that it wasn’t the girl’s startling resurrection that garnered the most concern; it was that she woke and immediately started to scream out Russian phrases and classified military alphanumeric codes—codes that just happened to link her to a missing military officer. (There’s also an appearance of an already-dead Agent Francis, which, if you hadn’t figured it out by now, makes this episode officially a season one cast off.)
As Olivia and Peter follow the trail of the missing Officer Andrew Rusk (who they soon figure out has been murdered), Walter tests his theory that Rusk’s energy was transferred to Lisa after her aneurysm, which somehow enhanced her psychic ability and sponged up Rusk before waking—a near-death experience with a little bit of ghost magnetism.
Pop Mechanics on “Johari Window“:
In Thursday’s episode, the deaths of three cops and a strange young boy with a mutated face draws the Fringe team out to the tiny town of Edina, where stories of creature sightings are a little bit more than mere legend.
The boy, Teddy, is picked up by a state officer, who offers to give him a ride home from his failed runaway attempt. But halfway through their trip, Teddy’s face morphs into a deformed monster’s. Unfortunately for the officers on Teddy’s case, a few more “creatures” come to rescue the boy and make sure there are no witnesses left.
The boy, more so than the deaths, spurs a call to Agent Dunham’s team. It partners with Edina’s local sheriff, who tells them about legends of the creatures around the area, while Walter and Astrid attempt to decipher Walter’s self-laid evidence about his involvement in the area decades ago.
To kick off the monster fact-finding, Dr. Jeff Meldrum of the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University says that creature legends are usually based on some real occurrence that is reinterpreted by different people to fit their own ideas or needs to explain an experience.
IDesignYourEyes.com talk to Zoic Studios -- the people behind several of the ‘monsters of the week’ featured in Fringe. Here’s a sampling:
In a lecture hall at Boston College, a biology professor gives a lecture about pathogens. In mid-sentence, he begins to choke and falls over. While his teaching assistant watches in horror, the professor’s throat becomes enlarged, and what looks like a massive slug crawls out of his open mouth. As the slimy creature slithers across the floor, students flee the hall in a panic.
Banta explains: “It’s a super-sized cold virus – a giant squishy slug with little cilia across its surface. This thing pulled itself out of his mouth, flopped onto the floor and squished away as quick as it could. It’s quite disgusting, and was played for dinnertime theater.
“It was a fairly simple model – a slug with a couple of things sticking out of it. But it had to maintain its volume and look like it was a rubbery object moving around, so there was a lot of finessing in the animation. We didn’t use any form of volume-preserving algorithms — other than Mike Kirylo — so it was all based on a really good animator.
You can read the entire article at the following links -- part 1, part 2. [thanks: fringewatch]
Spoiler alert. According to IGN, Peter Weller (RoboCop) will be guest starring on an upcoming episode of Fringe:
IGN TV has learned that Peter Weller will be guest starring on an upcoming episode of the J.J. Abrams produced FOX series. Weller had a stint on FOX a few years ago on 24, as Jack Bauer’s mentor turned enemy, Christopher Henderson.
FOX have released an additional promo photo for the Jan 28th episode -- we’ve added it to our original 2.13 promo photo gallery if you want to check it out.
Mark Valley, who played Fringe‘s first bad-guy-turned-good-guy, John Scott, tells AOLtv that there’s little chance of a “Human Target”/”Fringe” cross-over -- thank goodness for that. He also talks a bit about his new show:
[via]
