Fringe 3.19 meets Inception, The Walking Dead, and Tron

Weelllll ... what a Fringe 3.19 tonight ... certainly original and surprising in plot, but highly derivative in its structure, or on the other hand paying homage to a fine recent movie, a top-notch current television series, and a classic movie which has come back with more stories recently.

The surprise is Bell, last seen and still in residence in Olivia's body, now a cartoon figure in Olivia's mind - or rather, the way that Fringe represents the contents of Olivia's mind is, mostly, through animated figures.   Walter and Peter discover this when they enter Olivia's mind in search of Olivia, which is necessary to get Bell to leave so Olivia can take charge of her body once again.  And when Walter and Peter find Bell, a cartoon, in Olivia's mind, they turn into virtual cartoon figures, too.

So, at this point, we have Inception (entering someone's mind) and Tron (the move from physical to virtual worlds - a Second Life right before our eyes.   How does The Walking Dead come in?  In this world of Olivia's mind, first some flesh-and-blood zombies (or maybe they're alive) and then some cartoon zombies who are 100% zombies chase our heroes.   Totally unnecessary plotwise, but, hey, I'm a fan of The Walking Dead, and the TV series is after all an adaptation of the comic book series.

On the subject of homages, Bell aka Leonard Nimoy also says "aye, aye, Captain" to Walter, in a sly reprise of Spock to Kirk.

Also worthy of note are the WTC Twin Towers.  Why would they be in Olivia's mind?  I thought at first that maybe the mind was Fauxlivia's, but an equally good explanation is Olivia recently saw the WTC when she was "over there".

As to plot: Bell apparently takes his final leave, but since he doesn't like goodbyes, anything is possible in the future.  In the more immediate up ahead, Olivia thinks someone will kill her ... but how she got knowledge of her own future is anyone's guess...


5-min podcast review of Fringe

See also Fringe 3.1: The Other Olivia ... Fringe 3.2: Bad Olivia and Peter ... Fringe 3.3: Our/Their Olivia on the Other Side ... Fringe 3.5: Back from Hiatus, Back from the Amber ... Fringe 3.7: Two Universes Still Nearing Collision ... Fringe 3.8: Long Voyages Home ... Fringe 3.10: The Return of the Eternal Bald Observers ... Flowers for Fringenon in Fringe 3.11 ... Fringe 3.12: The Wrong Coffee  ... Fringe 3.13: Alternate Fringe ... Fringe 3.14: Amber Here ... Fringe 3.15: Young Peter and Olivia ... Fringe 3.16: Walter and Yoko ... Fringe 3.17: Bell, Olivia, Lee, and the Cow ... Fringe 3.18: Clever Walternate

See also reviews of Season 2: Top Notch Return of Fringe Second Season ... Fringe 2.2 and The Mole People ... Fringe 2.3 and the Human Body as Bomb ... Fringe 2.4 Unfolds and Takes Wing ... Fringe 2.5: Peter in Alternate Reality and Wi-Fi for the Mind ... A Different Stripe of Fringe in 2.6 ... The Kid Who Changed Minds in Fringe 2.7 ... Fringe 2.8: The Eternal Bald Observers ... Fringe 2.9: Walter's Journey ... Fringe 2.10: Walter's Brain, Harry Potter, and Flowers for Algernon ...  New Fringe on Monday Night: In Alternate Universe? ... Fringe 2.12: Classic Science Fiction Chiante ... Fringe 2.13: "I Can't Let Peter Die Again" ... Fringe 2.14: Walter's Health, Books, and Father ... Fringe 2.15: I'll Take 'Manhatan' ... Fringe 2.16: Peter's Story ... Fringe 2.17: Will Olivia Tell Peter? ... Fringe 2.18: Strangeness on a Train ... Fringe 2.19: Two Plus Infinity ... Fringe the Noir Musical ... Fringe 2.21: Bring on the Alternates ... Fringe 2.22:  Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming ... Fringe Season 2 Finale: The Switch

See also reviews of Season One Fringe Begins ... Fringe 2 and 3: The Anthology Tightrope ... 4: The Eternal Bald Observer ... 7: A Bullet Can Scramble a Dead Brain's Transmission ... 8. Heroic Walter and Apple Through Steel ... 9. Razor-Tipped Butterflies of the Mind ... 10. Shattered Pieces Come Together Through Space and Times ... 11. A Traitor, a Crimimal, and a Lunatic ... 12, 13, 14: Fringe and Teleportation ... 15: Fringe is Back with Feral Child, Pheromones, and Bald Men ... 17. Fringe in New York, with Oliva as Her Suspect ... 18. Heroes and Villains across Fringe ... Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Star Trek in Penultimate Fringe ... Fringe Alternate Reality Finale: Science Fiction At Its Best

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The Plot to Save Socrates



"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Inception: Brilliant

Given that this blog is Infinite Regress, I thought it was long since time that I reviewed Inception.  It had one scene literally of mirrors on mirrors, which is infinite regress par excellence.  And the rest of movie was just great as well - Christopher Nolan's best movie since Memento, which is high praise indeed.

The people part of the story is good.  Cobb (played Leonardo DiCaprio) is mostly in the business of stealing information from marks of clients by tapping into their dreams.   Introducing an idea into someone's mind - which if it takes root can change a person's life (and sometimes therein the world) - is called "inception," and is a much more difficult undertaking.   (Here the story picks up on Richard Dawkins' notion of the "meme" as an ideational virus.)    Cobb, we learn near the end of the movie, has done this only once before - to his wife, to get her to leave the deep dream state both were in.  It had disastrous ultimate consequences for her.

Cobb and team are hired to plant an idea into the new head of a company.  The team is a fine assemblage of memorable actors and performances, including especially Tom Hardy (good to see him back from Meadowlands),  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Ellen Page (meshing well with her Cisco commercials).  The action is superb, with car chases and scalings of snowy mountains almost James Bondian in their sweep and power.

But the deepest thrill of Inception resides in the sheer intellectual audacity of its puzzles and their pursuit.   The mission requires the team to take their target not just through a dream state, but a dream within a dream within a dream.  Time moves more slowly - drastically so - the deeper the dream state, or the further away it is from our normal time in our waking reality.   And though death in the first level of dreams just awakens you in our reality, death in the deepest, or third state, can sentence you to limbo forever.    When you add these high stakes to the speed and impact of the action, with stunning visuals including the folding of streets and the crumbling of cities, you get one breathless rollercoaster ride of a movie.

As is always the case in which dreams mix with reality, a central underlying question haunts the proceedings: is what we are seeing reality, or some dream of which we're not aware.

Cobb explains that there are ways in which we can tell.   One of them, a token that we can rely on as an indication of reality, provides a somewhat ambiguous ending.    But there's another way - whether we know how we got to where we are in our current experience.    And, on that score, I think the ending is clear.

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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book