Fringe Episode 120: There's More Than One of Everything

Setting the stage for the dramatic and revealing first season finale are a sudden and unexpected attack on someone with close ties to Fringe Division, the return of bioterrorist David Robert Jones (guest star Jared Harris) and the inexplicable disappearance of Walter. Find out more about the mysterious events surrounding our trio when questions are answered, observations made, loyalties are tested and the elusive William Bell (guest star Nimoy) is finally introduced in the "There's More Than One of Everything" season finale episode of FRINGE.

Rate There's More Than One of Everything (Stars*)


Don't forget to keep an eye out for The Observer and other Fringe Easter Eggs.

LIVE Fringe Chat Tonight: Finale!

Happy Fringeday! It's time for another LIVE Fringe chat from 9:00 PM to 12:00 PM ET, if you want to talk with other Fringe fans during or after the show. We'll try to get there a little early if anyone has questions they want answered.

To join the chat, visit the Fringe chat room, enter your name or a nickname, and join the fun! (please don't use the default mib_xxxxx nickname!)

I will be there (as AdamMorgan) along with our fearless leader (as FringeTelevision). And as always, you never know who else might join us...

Fringe Programming Note

Tonight's episode of Fringe is scheduled to start at 9:04 PM. The end time is still 10:00 PM, but remember this is all subject to change is American idol goes over (again...)

Fringe Episode Preview: There's More Than One of Everything

It's the episode you've been drooling over for weeks: the Season 1 finale of Fringe. Per usual, here are four nonspoilers for you to chew on between now and tonight:

• If you thought Bad Dreams had a good tag scene...just wait for this one. It deserves a codename just as much as Lost's season-enders.
• David Robert Jones' role in the grand scheme of things will become much clearer.
• You will learn a secret about Peter, the something that John Noble referred to as "shattering" in his interview with us a few weeks back.
• Dunham will make a discovery that changes our perspective on the Pattern.

Don't forget to drop by our Fringe LIVE Chat during tonight's episode, which airs at 9/8c on FOX.

New Viral Website For Fringe - There Is More

A new mysterious glowing yellow dot has appeared on Fox's Official Fringe website, down towards the bottom next to the BIOS section. Hovering over the yellow dot will open up the "wormhole" to a new video and viral site. I've hidden rest of this post if you'd like to check it out yourself first, then come back here and...

Click here to read more...

Hovering over the yellow dot play a small video montage with a voice over of William Bell:

“Is the incident contained?”
“Yes Dr. Bell.”
“How bad?”
“Bad!”

At the end of the video there is a hand holding a large coin. After the video plays, click the yellow area again, and a new site will open up - Fox.com/fringe/ThereIsMore.

There are eight sections to the site, each represented by braille code, which translates to numbers from the Fibonacci sequence - 144, 89, 55, 34, 21, 13, 8, & 5. Clicking on each of the numbers displays different Fringe symbols: Embryo Apple, Delta Leaf, Six-fingered Hand, Phi Frog, Wing Daisy, Golden-Spiral Seahorse, Bones Butterfly, and Phi Sheep Horn.

The only glyph that is currently active is the Apple, which will display the golden spirals when you hover over it, and if you click it, it will displays a Walking Liberty Half Dollar coin (and the braille for "return"). Clicking the coin plays a quote from Nicholas Boone (seen in Midnight) saying: "How Far Would You Go?"

One other fun thing to look at is when you click on 89 (braille #2), listen very closely and you can hear a strange voice. The voice, if played backwards says "Expand Your Consciousness"

You can hear the original and reversed sound below.

Original:


Reversed:



BTW, for those that haven't been here from the beginning, the site is a rehash of the original Fringe viral site initially at ImagineTheImpossibilities.com (which currently holds the CASE 0091 website) In fact, digging through the flash files reveals a bunch of legacy stuff from the old site, e.g. the old Fringe viral radio ads. I suspect they will replace all the old content as they activate each new glyph in the coming days...

* Thanks to Scully and Daniel for emailing about this!

Deep In The Lab by Walter Bishop, Part 3

IGN has the exclusive part 3 of Deep In The Lab by Dr. Walter Bishop, a spoof of SNL's "Deep Thoughts". This week's episode is about proper toothbrush hydration.

You can see part one and two of Deep in The Lab here.

JJ Abrams Interview

The King of Media himself, JJ Abrams, spoke with a handful of journalists (including one of our own) on Friday about Fringe. Specifically, this week's finale and what to expect in Season 2 (no specific spoilers). Here's the audio from the call:

We got to ask two questions, including one of your own! Here's the transcript from our part of the call:

(At the 10:30 mark)

Adam Morgan

All of your projects feature very strong-willed, independent females like Olivia Dunham. Who or what is your inspiration for those characters?

JJ AbramsI would like to think that I've been luck enough to work on projects that have strong-willed characters who happen to be male or female, and in the case of characters like Kate or Sydney Bristow, and certainly Olivia Dunham, those are females that hopefully pop because they are interesting and strong-willed, but I could also point to certain male characters that have the same things. I guess the answer is that I don't really try to write characters that are strong women, I just try to write, when I can, strong characters, and if they happen to be women, they happen to be women.

And in my life, I've got the most spectacular wife in Katie McGrath. She is probably the strongest and best influence on me that I've ever had. And I would say that it's no coincidence that it was after I met her that I wrote Felicity, mostly because she reminded me to write about stuff that I actually care about again. It had been a while. But her strength, and her amazing ability to not only immediately understand right and wrong, but she's amazingly capable of articulating that position. And she's very socially active and politically minded, and fights the good fight, and she's someone who is definitely an inspiration, who happens to be a woman.
(At the 25:10 mark)

Adam Morgan

By the way, I saw Trek last night, and I'm going again tonight. I loved it.

JJ AbramsGod bless you, sir. Thank you very much.
Adam MorganAnyway, now that we've seen Charlie and Broyles in this alternate reality, do you think we might run into, say, a still-breathing John Scott over there?

JJ Abrams

I would say that it would be very difficult now that "John Scott's" show got picked up.

Adam Morgan

Ooo, that's right.

JJ Abrams

But having said that, I'm very excited that it got picked up. And I do think that there will be some very interesting things happening, given this "other place" that you're referring to. And again, that's part of the fun of the show, and I hope one of the aspects of the show that makes it incredibly unique. Meaning, my favorite kinds of ideas are the things that we work on that make me think, "there's no other show on television that could do that wierd thing." That's my favorite kind of an idea. And I just think that if you don't go for those, then the show becomes increasingly mundane and disposable. But the more you can do some of those things, even if they don't work, to try and do those things that feel specifically "that show." Anyway, there are some things with that "other place" that I think will feel uniquely "Fringe."

Anna Torv On Good Day LA

Anna Torv was on Good Day LA, where they mostly grilled her about her relationship with co-star (and now husband) Mark Valley. (Thanks for the tip, Kim!)

Walter's Lab Notes: The Road Not Taken

Two new pieces of the Fibonacci spiral this week, plus some other goodies:

• Walter reasserts that it was William Bell who wrote the Manifesto (the typewriter was better-suited to his long fingers).
• He compares the Chapter of Ethics to the Gospel of Judas again, convinced that it will prove Bell innocent.
• He alludes to mythological "firestarters," such as Prometheus, Mixcoatl, Surt, and Vulcan.
• He deplores himself for being unable to answer Olivia's questions in the coffee shop, and vows to jump-start his memory using his old record collection.
• Walter prefers Chicago over Delta Blues!

Page 3.14

Here is a round up of stories that just didn’t make the FringeTelevision front page, or what we like to call…. Page 3.14!

• SpoilerTV: Fringe - Jasika Nicole Interview
  
• RedEye: 'Fringe' star Jasika Nicole is ready for action
  
• Starpulse: Anna Torv on the Fringe finale
• SciFi Wire: Fringe's Jasika Nicole promises we'll learn about Astrid. Next year
• USA Today: Leonard Nimoy makes a logical move: Guest-star on 'Fringe'
  

Fringe Episode Review: The Road Not Taken

Sorry for the delay on this review, but May (like December), is when all things happen at once.

Since Fringe returned on April 7th with Inner Child, we've gotten one great ep after another, and the roller coaster continued this week with The Road Not Taken, a brilliant serial-procedural hybrid that featured several compelling mysteries, Emmy-worthy performances, and some real pay-offs for devoted fans. Oh, and some shameless cross-promotion for a little movie that came out this week.

"Blonde girl about 5'7. Really well-done. Melted fillings."

Spontaneous human combustion? Nah. That was The X-Files. This is Fringe.

So Susan Pratt and Nancy Lewis were part of the same Cortexiphan trials as Olivia and Nick Drake. It looks like Cortexiphan affects more than just perception! Sure, Liv can see into alternate realities, but she, along with this week's twins, can also excite molecules until they conflagrate. What other kinds of mind-tricks are ZFT recruits capable of? And why did William Bell think these super soldiers were necessary to win the imminent inter-reality war?

"Each choice we make creates a new reality."
Walter confirmed it: Fringe doesn't just take place in our own universe, but in the meta-universe. The world we've occupied since the Pilot is only one path of causality, out of an infinite number of possible timelines, akin to Hugh Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics.

The narrative implications are endless. Is there an alternate Boston where John Scott is still alive? Where Peter and Walter weren't rescued from drowning by the Observer? Where history as we know it is remarkably different? That certainly seems to be the case with the reality Olivia glimpses in The Road Not Taken. Here's everything I noticed about it:

Dell is still a ubiquitous computer manufacturer. Everyone wears kevlar. Things are...bluer. There seems to be no trash pickup. Lots of graffiti. Lots of smoke and fire. The FBI communicates via red bat-phones. Kirk Acevedo is mean. And scarred. And giving shoot-to-kill orders. The city of Boston is being both evacuated and quaratined (which seems a contradiction).

My biggest question about Olivia's visions: is this reality the one with whom ZFT prophecizes a war? The one they created super soldiers to fight? If so, I'm confused. Where do the Observers fit in? And what's so special about this particular alternate reality, when there are an infinite number of them in the meta-universal manifold?

"William Bell is not the enemy."
Look out, we've got another Ambiguously Powerful Figure from JJ Abrams, the same man who brought us Arvin Sloane and Benjamin Linus. All of Season 1, the writers have establish Bell as a morally corrupt Man Behind the Curtain of Massive Dynamic, the Pattern, and now ZFT. But in The Road Not Taken, both Nina Sharp and Walter defend Bell's character, assuring viewers that he's been misrepresented.

Who do we trust? Will the apocryphal Chapter of Ethics really prove Bell's innocence? I have a feeling Bell's intentions may be benevolent, but his means, unethical. Maybe we'll find out in next week's finale. And if Bell's not evil, who's responsible for ripping out the Chapter of Ethics and corrupting ZFT? Mr. Jones?

Stray Thoughts

• Best Walterism of the Night: "When he was five, he built me a popsicle napkin-holder. Dreadful design. Utterly useless."
• How slick is Lance Reddick? The man could kill someone with a glance.
• Interesting cameo from Clint Howard. I imagine Akiva Goldsman talked him into it. Did this shameless Trek plug bother anyone?
• How many of you cheered when Sanford Harris went up in flames?
• Blair Brown was awesome as Nina Sharp in this ep, and I think John Noble deserves an Emmy for this performance. The coffee-shop scene particularly.
• Nina seems to be limping all of a sudden. Just how much of her is robotic, do you think?
• Nice to see Astrid out of the lab! Get that girl a gun next season.
• I liked the return of the light box. Here's hoping we see ZFT Test #2 next year.

Adam Morgan is a writer for both the page and screen in Chicago, and he blogs pseudo-daily at Mount Helicon.

Could Fringe Be An Emmy Contender?

The LA Times' awards blog "The Envelope", has an interesting article discussing the possibilities of Fringe joining "the Emmy Mainstream". It's certainly not unprecedented, with other "genre" shows such as LOST and X-Files taking home Emmys in the past.

The deadline for nominations is not until May 31, and the Fringe season finale which airs next Tuesday could be the best episode yet.

According to Jason Hughes of TV Squad: "Fringe is one of the best hours on television right now, and it could well be poised to be one of the all-time greats!"

What do you think about an Emmy (or two or three) for Fringe? Outstanding Drama Series? John Noble for best supporting Actor?