Fringe: The Softer Side of Broyles

With the yawning chasm of postseason baseball in America’s rear view mirror, Fox is awakening from hibernation to kick off November sweeps the way they ought to—with dam bursting quantities of new comedy and drama. And thanks to the World Series ending in 6 games, Fringe (and Bones, I suppose) got to lead the charge!

A man lurks around his own home, plotting a romantic surprise, when suddenly the lights go flickery and the TV pops on, triggering palpitations due to my latent but ever present fear of The Ring. A shadowy presence overtakes him and his wife comes home to the less than pleasant surprise of her husband crumbling into ashes. Cue credits!

The action at Fringe Division gets going with an unexpected moment of playfulness with the stolid Broyles getting caught up in a game of copycat with a tyke at lunch. But hearing word of this latest case clearly gets him bolting. After Walter suggests they collect the victim’s remains with a small army of vacuum cleaners, Broyles reveals to Olivia that the case isn’t new business but rather the return of a killer who frequented hospitals and once contacted Broyles directly promising to end the violence if anyone could crack a sticky chemical equation.

Between strong arming some hospital HR and Walter puttering about with an antique Geiger counter, the team extrapolates that their man is a Russian immigrant who kidnapped his comatose cosmonaut brother who came back from the stars harboring an entity that craves folks with boosted levels of bodily radiation. And since it’s an international case, the CIA is none too happy to have an FBI pet project like FD snooping around. But Broyles calls in a favor with a senator, allowing the investigation to continue on the sly.

A curious Olivia presses a stressed out Broyles at just the right moment for the impassive boss man to confess that his obsession with the case’s first go-round is what dissolved his marriage and that closing the case would do him more than a little good. Back at Harvard, Walt uses the power of opera music and tinkertoys to discover that whatever spaceman’s got in him can’t leave without both of them biting the dust. So when the team storms the motel where little bro has been trying poorly to keep his sibling’s dark side at bay, Broyles is forced to permanently close the case by putting a bullet in coma-naut’s dome just in time to save a little girl from spontaneous combustion at the shadow’s translucent hands. The story closes with Broyles dropping in on his ex-wife to tell her the news, but the former Mrs. Broyles and her boyfriend (husband?) have clearly moved on long ago. Bummer.

This was a decent episode, not great, and wholly lacking in any serial plotline goodness, but it was a nice character piece, and the disintegrations did look wicked cool. My biggest complaint is the shoddy exposition given to the shadow creature. It seems alien, but if so, that’s definitely the most indifferent I’ve ever seen humanity react to new life from beyond the stars. I think the writers might be going a little too far to avoid the comparisons to The X-Files that dogged them early on. For future reference, writers, if you’re gonna roll out an alien, make it an event or don’t do it at all.

Season 2, Episode 6: Earthling (originally aired November 5, 2009)

For more on Fringe, click here.

Thursdays at 9/8C, Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro