Lower Decks

Fringe
“Midnight”
Originally broadcast 4/28/09

“Bad Dreams” was a more direct act in the season arc, but “Midnight” pushes it along a little more. The character of William Bell, a former associate and colleague of Walter Bishop’s familiar to readers of the comic book but scarcely acknowledged in the TV series until now, is shaping up nicely as the culmination point of the first season. Here we learn that he’s the founder of shady development company Massive Dynamic. But more importantly, the episode revolves around a fringe investigation that seems to tie just about everything together.

As an ongoing serial TV drama, there has always got to be a balance between an arc and what needs to entertain viewers between things that push the greater story along. From the start, ‘Fringe’ has made no bones about the episodic nature of its approach, that it’s a show about odd things our central characters investigate as well as the greater meaning behind those odd things. For a while, the early clip of Broyles explaining to Dunham that there seems to be a conspiracy of scientists using the whole world as a laboratory was played before each episode, as much to get new viewers up to speed as remind old ones what they were getting. Eventually, the conspiracy got a name, ZFT, and a face, David Jones, but little more explanation. Ongoing hints about the involvement of Massive Dynamic and Walter Bishop himself would have to continue waiting as we instead learned more of Dunham’s own connection to the aims of this organization, which reached something of head last episode.

So, finally, “Midnight” begins to deliver some of the big answers, in the form of Nicholas Boone, who was recruited by ZFT and then kept in line by means of using his own wife against him. The episode opens rather ingeniously by inverting the viewer’s expectations about who it should be paying attention to. As it turns out, not the young Brit lying to his girlfriend, but the woman he comes across in a club. Eventually, we learn what’s going on with this woman, who’s sucking the spinal fluid of her victims, that she’s in fact Boone’s wife, and that in exchange for helping her he’ll give Dunham everything he knows about ZFT.

In addition to the heavy implications of Boone’s presence, the episode offers some of it usual, casual character work. Walter is in fine context here as a consummate professional who can’t help but observe every detail around him, both his own thoughts and from his environment and work, as he experiences it. His only problem, as Boone helps remind us, is his lack of specific memories about his past, around the time he interacted with this mysterious William Bell, who as it turns out is not only founder of Massive Dynamic, but head honcho of ZFT as well. Dunham’s sister Rachel, who has been staying with her for so long now it was easy to forget why until this episode, when she periodically bursts into hysterics about a divorce her estranged husband is now filing, serves as a counterpoint to the drama of Boone’s sorry saga, and no doubt bigger things still in future episodes. It’s been equally easy to write Rachel and her daughter off as some kind of device to humanize Dunham, but the writers continually use them in increasingly meaningful ways, and it would seem a mistake to continue thinking of them in one-dimensional ways, regardless of what a given episode seems to suggest.

Anyway, further significance of Boone: while by no means a major player within ZFT (he didn’t know of Mr. Jones), he represents a humanization of the organization, the first sympathetic inside figure we’ve seen, someone who’s seen what ZFT is up to and whose faith has buckled. While ZFT reacts vindictively against him as a result, the results are by no means atypical, just another chance for an experiment, which either implies more faith than Boone could muster or a truly unwarranted fanaticism. Boone was in awe of meeting Walter, a character who has become easily sympathetic for the audience, both for the trials he’s endured and for his own willingness to play along with the FBI investigations into the work, sometimes literally, that he’s previously been involved with.

Two episodes left in the season.