This is one of those episodes that just hurt to watch. Not just because it was bad (and it was), but mainly because it seems that someone understood that it was bad, and gave it a proper burial back during season one. But for some reason somebody decided to desecrate its grave, exhume the body, and parade the corpse for all the world to see.
This was a “lost” episode from season one. If you didn’t know that, you might have been confused as to why Charlie Francis was magically back from the dead. It would’ve been nice if Fox had explained that better in the build up to this oddly placed, Monday night episode.
The story starts with the apparent death of a young girl, which then leads to fairly typical TV hospital drama. Then things turn a little freaky when the young lady pops up during her own organ removal surgery, but in the world of Fringe openings, this is rather mundane.
The story slowly evolves into the spiritual possession of our young victim, Lisa, by Andrew Rusk, a dead military man with a dark past and a vengeful wife (who had a big hand in making him dead). The Fringe team goes about an “exorcism” to get the spirit of the dead dude out of the body of the formerly dead girl.
Yes, that’s right…an exorcism…on Fringe.
This episode is cheesy, with mediocre writing and some fairly bad performances from the guest supporting cast. I’m not even going to go into the whole “seventeen-year-old-girl-doing-middle-aged-man-voice” because it’s something I’d rather erase from my memory completely.
There’s nothing special at all about this episode. One small glimmer of goodness is the old home video of a young Walter Bishop poking in some poor guy’s brain. We get to see John Noble in an entertaining wig, and there’s a casual mention of some poor test subjects who got fat settlements from the university, but that’s one of the very few bright spots of this story. One area that could have been interesting is the story’s dabbling in the topic of the intersection of faith and science. This could have been a thought-provoking sub-plot to all this talk of spirits and resurrection, but instead it was just random bits of theology thrown in with some out-of-character moments from Walter.
Is Fox trying to test the waters for a schedule change to move Fringe from the highly competitive Thursday slot that has killed its ratings? Or was someone just looking for something to fill some empty air time with?
Regardless of the reasons, this was a bad decision. This episode should have stayed buried, buried in a hole so deep it would never see the light of day. If you’re a Fringe fan, this episode brought you nothing. If you weren’t a Fringe fan, and just happened upon the show after watching House, you probably didn’t see anything that would make you interested in the series. This is a lose-lose deal.
So let’s all forget this ever happened. We’ve got what appears to be a perfectly fine Fringe episode coming in our regularly scheduled but perhaps ill-fated Thursday slot. Though it seems like this will be another standalone story, it can’t be possibly be worse than this one.
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