Fringe: Attack of the C.H.U.D.

After a solid season premiere most notable for Charlie’s death and subsequent replacement by a shapeshifting assassin, episode 2 of Fringe’s sophomore outing dives straight into the fray of weirdness with a bigger budget for Fringe Division, a glimmer of progress in Olivia’s memory of her meeting with William Bell, and a way creepy case of the week that might dredge up some of Walter’s guilt over a certain case of otherworldly kidnapping.

While investigating cases of disappearance like Olivia’s, the gang follows a lead to rural Pennsylvania where something pulled from Gollum’s family tree is dragging locals into the bowels of the earth. Walter manages to immediately offend the slow moving local authorities with a comment regarding pee in their gene pool, LOLing ensues. Whatever’s snatching the locals, it all seems to lead back to one Andre Hughes, local creepshow and target of a less than friendly visit from Pete & Liv. Olivia’s out of the hospital and may be getting around with a cane (paging Dr. House) but it does nothing to deter the steely blonde’s resolve to crack each case, be it with guns blazing or through the finer arts of diplomacy and interrogation.

Turns out Mr. Hughes was once a doctor, at least until his wife and son both died in childbirth. This would be a perfectly normal tragedy, if not for a quickie exhumation order that reveals a tunnel burrowed straight through the floor of Lil’ Hughes’s coffin. Walter’s medical knowhow ascertains that Dr. Hughes’s wife had lupus, turning her body against itself and rendering her womb a particularly inhospitable region. So what’s a doctor to do but engineer himself a human/scorpion/mole superbaby with a chance at survival, watch it go horribly wrong, and spend the subsequent 15 years covering the tracks of its subterranean murder binge?! Walter would be so proud. Pete & Liv neutralize this especially morbid threat when they find his network of tunnels behind the eerie remains of a nursery. Mole Boy takes a bite out of the both of them, but with the help of a bone shard through the chest and a crushy cop car tumbling down from the surface, this is one freak who shall tunnel no more. The episode may not have mentioned the thematic connection of fathers committing crazed acts of scientific atrocity to save their sons explicitly, but I’m down with the writers finding an effective way to merge freak of the week stories with such overarching plotlines and themes.

Things wrap up when Non-Charlie (have the interwebs given him a catchier nickname yet?) reports back to the beyond on his handy cross-dimensional IMing typewriter. Somebody over there wants to know what Olivia can’t remember, bad. To that end, our heroine ends in a meeting with Sam Weiss, a mysteriously wise bowling alley attendant endorsed by Nina (because you can always trust a shifty cyborg CEO) and apparent peddler of mysterious wisdom and counseling for those who have visited the other side. Whatever he has to say, I hope it’s effective, cause’ I needs me some Nimoy!

For another take on this episode, read Night of Desirable Objects by Jaime Campos.

Season 2, Episode 2: Night of Desirable Objects  (originally aired September 24, 2009)

For more on Fringe, click here.

Thursdays at 9/8C, Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro