Fringe: Cortexiphan stuff + annoying dropped plotlines from S1

[beccatoria]

So I was looking for something in Fringe S1 cus I only half paid attention to parts of that and accidentally found two totally different things that nonetheless I feel the urge to inflict on my overwhelmingly non-Fringe-watching flist. :)

1. I was wondering what Olivia's inherent Cortexiphan-related power was gonna be, except now I think that I got it a bit backwards. Looking at the three Cortexikids in the finale, each one of them got destructively "activated" by the ZFT. This I remembered. What I forgot is that it seems the activation is not blind activation of the subject's inherent abilities but rather a process that is designed to induce a specific response. This is best exemplified with the fire starter - the episode actually has at least one and maybe two other Cortexikids subjected to that experiment which makes them spontaneously combust, it's just that Olivia manages to save the last girl in time, ultimately allowing her to be rehabilitated into a pyrokineticist by Massive Dynamic. That suggests that had Olivia or Nick Lane or Cancer Guy been put through the same process the same thing would happen to them. We know less about Cancer Guy but we do know that he was approached while he already had cancer and then his power turned out to be cancer-related and we don't know much about Nick Lane but we know that his projecting abilities were all the more destructive because of his pre-existing mental health conditions. So I think I got it backwards and Cortexiphan allows a range of abilities based on perception as always stated, but also renders the subjects more susceptible to medical experiments designed to provide more outlandish abilities. We have, after all, seen the ZFT "weaponise" ordinary people in a similar vein to the Cortexikids, just with either less success or more fatality on the part of the subject.

2. SPEAKING OF ZFT. I really wish we hadn't just abandoned that whole plotline for a whole season. I do get that season one established "our" side's ZFT - the people on our side secretly preparing for the war of the universes in dodgy, horrible ways, while season two concentrated on "their" side - the shapeshifters sent through: their secret universe warriors. The ones the ZFT hopes the Cortexikids can stop. But there was that whole thing at the end of season one, where they found the ZFT manual and worked out that it was written by William Bell himself, just distributed by either accident or design without the chapter on ethics. Which okay, I could handle; someone else gets hold of his work, twists it or misunderstands it, and he's too busy on the other side trying to keep things calm, trying to help the other side's armies enough not to raise suspicion but not enough to actively help them? Except two things I wish had been clarified and I'm vaguely worried his "noble sacrifice" will take off the "unanswered questions" table:

(a) Season one also strongly implicates William Bell as funding ZFT. Now, writing a manuscript that they got hold of and misunderstood/misused is very different from actively funding an organisation as horrifying as that. One could argue that Bell may not have been entirely aware of the ZFT activities, but even if he'd been on the Other Side for a very long time indeed, we know he's getting messages from Nina. I find it hard to believe he'd be that out of touch with an organisation he's funding/ideologically inspired/believes is necessary/any of the above. Which begs the questions - why is he funding it if they're that eeeeeeeevil? Why doesn't he correct them if they're working from a version of his manuscript without the most important chapter? It doesn't add up.

(b) Okay, fine, so Walter asked Bell to remove parts of his brain, but I'm pretty sure that Walter didn't also ask Bell to store those parts of his brain that knew how to travel between universes in the minds of innocent people thus driving them insane. And it strongly implicates Bell as being the one who gave up that information to Newton, who we know works for Walternate. I suppose he could have been forced to, and that's why he then pulled Olivia over in a desperate attempt to balance the books, but I don't know.

I JUST SUSPECT SHENANIGANS IS ALL. I like the character, but even with his Spock-like sacrifice, I don't trust him or his altruism. There is a larger game afoot, that, given who wrote this show, may never be explained, or might come down to a giant red ball floating over Russia and lots of zombies.

Comments

[coffeejunkii.livejournal.com]

i really hope they will pick up the ZFT storyline again, too. it seemed so important in s1! also, i thought walter had written the manifesto? because remember that scene in which he gets out that old typewriter of his and the misplaced z matches the one in the manifesto? i thought bell had only written the lost chapter on ethics. but maybe i'm remembering that wrong.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too. David Robert Jones was so interesting I was kind of disappointed they killed him off; I wanted to see him make Olivia pass test two! Though thinking about this again does remind me that in the context of Bell's apparent helping of the other side (probably in part coerced/not as extensive as it could have been) as explained in the S2 finale, it does make Jones' apparent desire to kill Bell (if we can take Nina's word for that, and Jones' behaviour does seem to imply it) more credible. I was always somewhat dubious of the straight-up story Nina told that Jones was jealous Bell never appreciated his abilities and fired him. He seemed too...religious in his convictions that were all based around Bell's writings (even if he did maybe remove the ethics chapter?). But if he thought Bell had abandoned the cause and was now working for the other side, he may have felt obligated to kill him.

Although that still doesn't explain why Bell was funding them. The idea that that was misinformation planted to discredit Bell seems...I don't know, overly convoluted since it was from a credible source and never referenced again to explain it was a lie. I STILL CALL SHENANIGANS!

Regarding the typewriter though, that was Bell's typewriter - Walter found it kicking around the lab and yes, surmised the manuscript was typed on it based on the elevation of the "y" key, but he clearly says it was Bell's typewriter. Which isn't to say that an interesting twist might not be that Walter wrote the manuscript on Bell's typewriter but can't remember it, but the working assumption, at least, is that the manuscript was written by Bell.