User Reviews

The opener to this episode is great. It's very disturbing and horrific. The ultimate reveal of what was inside her is totally nuts! You can't help but watch on to find the answers.

I can totally see this story working in the X-Files. Growing soldiers using pituitary gland technology.

I had a lot more fun watching this episode than I did watching the pilot. The characters are coming into their own, especially the dynamic between the Bishop father and son. I love how they provide natural comic relief. I'm loving Joshua Jackson in this role; he's adorable.

I love how we are already getting more answers about the Pattern and starting to explore mysteries that were raised in the pilot episode. I was worried things might be left hanging for too long.

Strikes a great tone between sci fi, horror, mystery, comedy and crime drama. Really fun watch.

I'm even more excited now to see where this goes. Also, the hint about Peter Bishop's birth that we are given is tantalising!

Revisiting these Season 1 eps has solidified my love and support for the show. And this 2nd Episode was a great start. We are handed a bucket of conundrums in the Pilot, this ep get right into the grisly meat of what makes Fringe a great show.

It is as if, this team of people has been working together for years, the chemistry is that good. The cast of Fringe is probably the best ensemble ever assembled for network TV. But in reality this is NOT Network TV: This is Feature Quality Filmaking at it best. Each camera move, each gag, has been carefully thought out with love by a production team of basically young people, a production team who understands not only how to make good product, they also understand things like the angst of teenagers, the lure of sexual drive, the consequences of bad decisions and the need for self-protection.

It's all personifies here, in the character "Christopher" played by Derek Cecil, and his "father" Dr. Claus Penrose (Mark Blum). And as someone else stated, this is a level beyond the "Monster of the Week" kinds of shows that have been around lately - These two characters are intrinsically connected to Walter and his work.

This episode defines "The Pattern" and gives us a look forward into how these things are all interconnected. The more Walter works on these cases, the more he realises that HE is the cause of them. This is explored through the entire series, but it is put into place here, in this 1st "Procedural" episode.

Watching these 1st-Season Eps and comparing them to S4, there is NO drop in quality - The show is still made using the same care that was used in making these eps.

You'll end up with a magic man baby bursting your nethers to bits.

While not quite as grisly as the series premiere, this episode's opener was still pretty freaky. If the last episode played on fears of flying, this one tackles fears of pregnancy gone wrong (and how!). We begin with a young woman (in her underwear), lying on the bed of some seedy motel, showing off her perfectly flat stomach, and asking the dude she's with whether he brought her a mushroom pizza. Sadly, though, Loraine Daisy (as she informs us her mother so cruelly named her) never gets her mushroom pizza. Instead, she gets a belly full of magic old man baby. She's certainly one hell of a screamer (but, hey, wouldn't you be too, if you had something growing inside of you at an accelerated rate?). The dude drives her to the hospital...then promptly dumps her ass out on the snow, leaving her alone and driving off. Cut to her declaring that she's "not pregnant" to the doctors (meanwhile, her distended belly begs to differ). After some cringe-worthy ripping noises, she flat-lines and the doctors cut open her stomach...just in time for something gruesome to emerge, making horrible moaning/groaning sounds, which causes interns and nurses alike to throw up/scream their heads off. Then comes the tinkly, effectively eerie Fringe theme music - which is just as unsettling as it was in the premiere.

Then we get an exposition-heavy scene with Broyles, Nina Sharp and various other shady types. They basically just tell us stuff we already knew about Walter, Peter and Olivia. Obviously this scene was designed to catch up those who missed the 'Pilot'. When Broyles brought up the subject of his old team (which this new team is now replacing), I couldn't help but be reminded of that scene in the first Futurama episode, where Professor Farnsworth is asked what happened to his old crew, and he says, "Oh, those poor sons of-- But that's not important. The important thing is I need a new crew. Anyone interested?" and then proceeds to tip out the career chips of his previous crew from an envelope labeled 'Contents of Space Wasp's Stomach'. Why do I get the feeling it's a similar case with Broyles' last team?

Moving things along, Broyles awakes Olivia (except she's already awake, wearing glasses and going over old case files), who wakes up Peter (who *was* actually sleeping), who then finds Walter in his closet. He tells his son that he's unable to get to sleep without being sung 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' (which another inmate used to do back when Walter was in the mental institution). Walter makes a rather amusing/memorable first impression on Broyles, when he's sitting in the car, fiddling with the seat warmer, and informs him, "I've never seen a feature like this before. It warms your ass! It's wonderful!". We're then treated to the rather nasty visual of a bloodied magic old man baby (as Peter refers to it as). It becomes clear that this is a case of rapid aging.

After some poking around the seedy motel, Olivia quickly makes the connection between what's currently going on and an old case she and John Scott investigated. The killer removed the pituitary gland from his victims (Olivia gives us a rather nasty visual description of the killer making incisions along the gums of his victims and pulling their mouths open up to their eyes, going in through the nasal cavities and removing a piece of their brains). This also happens to be the MO of the current killer, who they discover the identity of after some investigating. They're not in time to save another woman, though (who he takes back to his abandoned industrial building, telling her to look at a bridge and injecting her with muscle relaxant when she's distracted. Apparently, he was *really* into that bridge). It is soon discovered the killer needs pituitary glands to keep from aging (chalk up another one to those crazy experiments Walter did back in the day!), and that the woman he impregnated with a rapidly-aging baby was an accident.

Luckily, Walter knows of a way to see the last image the victim saw before she was killed - which will help them find the killer. Of course, to do this, they need a piece of equipment from Massive Dynamic. Whilst waiting for Nina Sharp, Olivia talks to Broyles. He asks her a personal question about whether she was safe the last time she was intimate with John, then says, "You weren't, were you?" and suddenly Olivia's screaming, her stomach bulging outward, with something writhing around inside. Thankfully, it's nothing but an unnerving dream sequence (effectively shot, with changing lights in the background, all very moody and off-putting).

After extracting the last image the previous victim saw (of the bridge) - by literally pulling out her eyeball from its socket - they manage to hunt down the killer (who doesn't get to finish off his latest victim). He winds up aging into a grandpa and dies, while Peter magically brings back the killer's latest victim (from flat-lining) with a makeshift defibrillator.

While the second episode wasn't as great as the first (but then, when are they ever?), it was still quite good. It had its fair share of creepy moments, and some intriguing mysteries (such as "the truth about Peter's medical history", which Walter mentions to Olivia, then that final strange image of three bodies lined up like they're seemingly part of some experiment. What are these images supposed to be of and where exactly are they coming from? Is Walter dreaming them as Peter attempts to lull him to sleep by singing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat'? Guess we'll find out).

After a young woman becomes mysteriously pregnant she is quickly dropped off to a hospital where she delivers an infant whose above the normal baby, especially for the doctors delivering. In an instant, all heck breaks loose and immediately officials are on it. Newly recruited Olivia Dunham, Peter Bishop, and Dr. Bishop investigate the hospital only to find an old lifeless corpse. This corpse, is only a few hours old. That WAS the baby delivered. Following the path of the mothers' night Olivia and Peter discover that the mother, before she went into labor and passed away, was with a man( the same man who dropped her off, and high tailed it) the same man who Olivia and her late boyfriend Scott had been tracking down years ago but never found him. This killer has only been known to have young females as his victims, why? They don't know. Soon, the serial killer strikes again and another life is lost. The new body is fund and with some new old tricks up his sleeves Dr. Bishop does an experiment which will help them see the victim's past prior to her death.Thsi helps them discover the setting of her death. But there is more to this killer, this killer often injects something into his victims and once they are frozen he takes something from their jaw area, but why? To continue living as a young man for it is revealed that he was an experiment apart of a program which Dr. Bishop had worked on which was to make the perfect soldier and for them to stay young at all times, this also explains why the over-aged baby came to be. Can Olivia and Peter stop him? Who knows, but in the meantime Nina Sharp of Massive Dynamic takes interest in Olivia, after Olivia asks for some help out of Nina of course.

I really enjoyed this episode, probably more than the pilot. It had some pretty intense and graphic moments to it and at the same time it had a nice balance with it's humor and drama( A very good balance I'd might add). This episode also had more character beats, which made the characters a little more interesting and it also explored a bit more into the father-son relationship between Walter and Peter. This episode also had better direction and acting than the pilot delivered, the chemistry between the actors was much more costumed and Anna Torv did a better job here than before. I liked how director Paul A. Edwards handled things a bit more than Alex Graves did with the pilot episode. Can't wait to see Edwards next episode.

Overall, this was a pretty good episode, it had a nice twist at the end to, but I'm not spoiling that one.

9/10.

Can't wait till next week's episode...