With 2009 nearing its end we thought we’d follow up our “10 Most Fascinating Characters” retrospective with a look back at our 10 Best Fringe Moments from the past year. Let me tell you, it was NOT easy to select just 10 moments from the 20 episodes that aired in 2009. However we painstakingly cast our minds back to the very best (and in some cases, most significant) moments from those episodes and came up our ordered list, counting down to what we believe was the very best Fringe moment of 2009.
See whether or not you agree with our choices below the jump.
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As most of you know Fringe is back for an all-new season this Thursday on FOX. But for those of you who want to catch up and haven’t got the DVD’s, there’s still time to rewatch the season 1 episodes. How, you ask? Well, TheWB now has the first 10 episodes of Fringe season 1 available to watch for free! Personally, I think this is great, as the first half of the season has been difficult to get hold of online. This is a good, legal, way to do it.
If you’re looking for episodes 11-20, you can still catch most of them on the FOX video site or Hulu (expires midnight). So you can do a bit of mix-and-matching to get up to speed before the season 2 premiere.
Elsewhere, we have a few other Fringe-related bits and pieces below the jump – including various Fringe videos, “Science of Fringe” article and some William Bell spoilers.
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Comic Con. The time of year when grown men and women dress up in rubber costumes as their favourite super heroes. Whilst it’s not exactly my thing, there’s nothing wrong with getting your freak-on – let the people have their fun, I say. But there’s a more important element appearing at the annual convention, and it goes by the name of the Fringe Panel.
After a successful first season on the air, and with fans still buzzing over what is to come next, this is the first real opportunity the people behind the magic have to let us know where the show is heading in the new season.
With that in mind, FB have 5 “Burning Questions” that we’d like to ask..
(warning: one spoilery topic mentioned below)
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you rang?
Our good friends over at the terrifyingly awesome FEARnet invited FB and a bunch of other “Fringe” commentators to take part in their “Fringe Season 2 Predictions” article. Here’s an excerpt, the link to the entire article is below:
We didn’t realize how much we enjoyed watching Fringe until the season ended. It’s true what they say, that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. The good news is that Fringe has officially been renewed by FOX for Season 2, the bad news is we need to wait until the fall to see a new episode. Much like we did with Dollhouse last week, we decided to ask our favorite Fringe bloggers where they think the series is headed for Season 2. We may not have the option of watching it but we do have the next best thing – we can talk about it.
Alyse Wax – FEARnet
I feel pretty confident that Fringe will not go down the same path as Lost – as in, it won’t become a tangled mess. Olivia’s ‘powers’ will come into play more, though not until closer to the end of the season. She will learn the truth about whatever drugs were used on her as a child, and Walter will help her harness whatever powers she might have.
You can read the entire article here
Popular Mechanics take one last attempt to kick Fringe in the shins, with their final season 1 fact vs fiction look at the science portrayed in the show:
During the course of its first season, Fringe has played with the idea of that there are actually two realities, one slightly different from the other. In the season finale, “There’s More Than One of Everything,” the show delved into the science behind this idea, fleshing out the alternate reality with FBI Agent Olivia Dunham and company trying to stop über-villain David Robert Jones from getting to the elusive Massive Dynamic CEO William Bell, who, according to spokeswoman Nina Sharp, is hiding out in this other reality. PM spoke to physicist Michio Kaku, author of Physics of the Impossible, to perform our final fact check of Fringe, season one.
In the previous episode, “The Road Not Taken,” Jones shot Sharp and removed an energy cell that Bell had hidden in her prosthetic arm. Jones was using this mysterious cell to pry open a portal to an alternate reality, slightly different from our own, where Bell was hiding out.
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Walter once said that mankind’s oldest ambition was the power to murder with the mind. Whilst this is probably more true that we’d care to admit, I disagree with him. Mankind’s biggest ambition is the ability to change the past, to undo what has been done, to re-write what is written.
Which is why the season finale — “There’s More Than One Of Everything” ended with a message of hope, of possibility. A fresh take on what life would be like if the history of our world was not set in stone, if things were different. Not only is Obama also President in the alternate reality, but the Twin Towers still stand — 9/11 seemingly didn’t happen in this sun-kissed world filled with orangey goodness.
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Our friends at TV.com have a nice article on the freaky science of “Fringe” and how it relates to the real world, and the world of one of its predecessors — “The X-Files”. Here’s an excerpt below:
Science-y thing: Walking Through Solid Matter
Episode: “Safe”
Air date: December 2, 2008
Definition: The ability to pass through solid objects by disassembling and reassembling one’s atomic structure (or electromagnetic forces) or the atomic structure of something else. In layman terms, holy s*** he’s walking through walls!
Fringe reality: Bank robbers used the technique to rob banks by using a special device that messed with the walls’ molecular structure. While the walls were all bendy, one just passes through. However, walk through when the wall was solidifying, and one ends up like the guy in the picture–a real wallflower.
Reality: Absolutely zero. Well, maybe Calista Flockhart can.
The X-Files did it: In the season six episode “Trevor,” a man–who possesses the ability to walk through walls and other solid objects through throwing off the balance of their electromagnetism–kills others (and seriously invades their personal space) by walking through them. Ick!
Click here to read the entire article.
Popular Mechanics continue their bid to debunk the science portrayed on Fringe. Here’s what they have to say in regards to the Spontaneous Human Combustion elements from episode 1.19 “The Road Not Taken”:
When a woman gets on the bus to go to the hospital in the Fringe episode “The Road Not Taken,” things get hot—literally. Her breath steams up windows and a newspaper on the seat in front of her starts to smoke. Frantic, she runs off the bus and bursts into flame, then explodes. Walter Bishop, the mad scientist in Fringe’s motley crew of researchers and FBI agents, pinpoints a legendary phenomenon as the cause: Spontaneous Human Combustion. PM talked to Dr. Steven Novella, Yale neurologist and founder of the New England Skeptic Society, to separate the fact from the fiction.
Worldwide, there are allegedly about 200 cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC), a phenomenon where, according to believers, human tissue spontaneously heats to the point of combustion, leaving the surrounding area virtually untouched by fire. “Alleged victims burst into flames and are burned alive,” Novella says. “Cases that are promoted by believers in SHC typically involve individuals found after the fire has taken place. Often they were alone, infirmed, and elderly. Believers point to unusual aspects of the pattern of burning to argue for a spontaneous cause.” According to Novella, believers say SHC is caused by a vague unknown energy in the body. Larry Arnold, who wrote Ablaze, even went to the trouble of inventing a new particle of physics called the pyrotron—Bishop name drops the particle during his investigation—which he says is responsible for the energy. But, Novella says, there’s no scientific proof that the pyrotron, or even SHC, actually exists.
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Popular Mechanics are back to put the latest episode of Fringe -“Midnight” – under their scientific spotlight:
Peter Bishop might only be able to handle one mad scientist, but in Fringe episode 18, “Midnight,” we got two—Dr. Nicholas Boone, who had been creating bioweapons for the mysterious terrorist organization ZFT, joined Walter Bishop in his Harvard lab. Thanks to Boone, we know how ZFT reacts when your conscience catches up with you: They kidnap your wife, infect her with a virus and turn her into a spinal fluid–drinking monster.
When dead bodies begin turning up in the Boston area with their spinal cords ripped out of their backs and their cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) completely drained, Agent Olivia Dunham and father–son duo Walter and Peter Bishop are on the case. Their investigation leads them to scientist Nicholas Boone, who informs them that after he tried to defect from ZFT, they stole his wife and infected her with an extinct strain of syphilis that turned her into a creature thirsty for CSF. The virus upped her body temperature to 105 degrees, he claims, and she’s burning through her own CSF faster than she can replenish it. “When she kills, she’s refueling,” Boone says. And before she took off, Boone tells us, he was feeding his wife with his own spinal fluid. But the more he gave, the more she craved—and that’s how he ended up in a wheelchair.
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Popular Mecahnics are back with another microscopic look at the science portrayed in the latest episode of Fringe. As usual they take ask a group of ‘experts’ whether or not the events in “Bad Dreams” are currently possible in the real world:
In [Tuesday] night’s episode of Fringe, “Bad Dreams,” FBI agent Olivia Dunham visits crime scenes in her dreams as the crimes are occurring. Even worse, it appears she is the one committing the murders—but she’s actually watching the work of Nick Lane, a former mental patient and current serial killer. Lane, a reverse empath, infects people with his emotions, causing them to take their own lives.
As it turns out, Lane was part of an illegal drug trial run in the 1980s by Massive Dynamic CEO William Bell and, of course, Walter Bishop. The scientists tested the drug cortexiphan on children predisposed to having special abilities; Bishop explains that he and Bell put the children in pairs during the experiments to keep them calm. Dunham, though she can’t remember it, was part of the same trial—and Lane was her partner, which Bishop says explains their intense psychic connection.
To stop Lane from killing again, Bishop puts Dunham under a machine that “hypnotically [induces] REM state,” he explains. “It’s enhancing the psychic connection to Lane. Tuning her antenna, if you will.”
According to Doug Kirsch, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School and Regional Director of Sleep Health Centers in Boston, REM, or Rapid-Eye Movements, is a normal part of our sleep architecture. “REM is the stage of sleep during which we have the most vivid dreams and during which our brain is quite active,” he says. “It is also a time in which we are generally unable to voluntarily move any part of our body, other than our breathing muscles and our eyes—so we don’t act out our dreams.”
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