Fringe: Bloodlines
Mar. 29th, 2011 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaFour word Fringe review: I didn't hate it!
Also I'd meant to get these things out a bit quicker than I have been recently. I think it's because either I haven't been as enthused or my thoughts (as last week, as, to a small extent, this week) have run somewhat tangentially to the actual episode and have thus taken me more time to get in order.
Basically, in some ways, I think the wound in my soul left by BSG has finally done some...good in that I was so afraid of Fringe falling down the rabbithole of 4.5-level suck because it had suddenly "gone there" on a romance I narratively feared, and had introduced babiez, that my minimised expectations - the fact I'd reached the bargaining stage of grief for a storyline we may yet get but I suspect not (the epic, permanent breakup of Peter and Olivia), - this was a vaguely pleasant surprise.
Things Which Did Not Happen Thank God:
- Dead Altlivia.
- Dead baby (caveat: there are a few ways I might have been okay with that, but they are not the ways I was afraid of).
- Kidnapped baby.
- Superfast Magic Growth Baby (at least I'm PRETTY SURE he wasn't still growing...)
- Pregnancies are always superhappy funtiems.
- Altlivia having a magic Head!Peter.
- A thing which SADLY didn't happen was a discussion of the fact that if I, for instance, knew I had an 80% chance of DYING if I ever gave birth, contraception would be like, my number one priority. For real, a technobabble line about universe hopping screwing with her birth control, or even just saying, "Jees, that 0.0000000000000001%, huh?" would have really helped there, writer people.
So like, there were some issues with this episode, and with the general direction of this part of the season for sure, but the fact it avoided all of my Huge Paranoid Fears means I'm feeling reasonably generous right now. Which is not to say I rolled my eyes when of course it was a boy. And the whole internet is referring to it as a Bishop. Why not a Dunham! If we're going to use the gendered assumption that male name takes precedence, I insist we ALSO adhere to the gendered assumption that bastards are forced to live with the eternal shame of their mother's maiden name.
Thus,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chaila43 and I have named him JESUS DUNHAM. In my head this is pronounced like the Spanish name, and it will never not be funny.
In terms of the actual episode, there were some structural similarities to Immortality, the last time we were Over There, in that both episodes were basically totally and obviously manufactured in order to get to the final "reveal", so to speak. The difference is that on this occasion, it at least held more personal significance from the beginning and thus felt a little more organic.
The obvious plothole is Altlivia's abductors refusing to tell her what they're doing for, near as I can tell, no reason. I understand why Walternate wouldn't tell her - what if she refused? What if either she didn't want the baby regardless of her genetics and/or she wasn't in the mood to put herself through what was clearly a life-threatening procedure on the offchance it worked (if it was super reliable I imagine it'd be a treatment that was at least known about even if hard for the average VPE sufferer to obtain).
But once he has her in his evil web of abductions and doctors, there's no reason for them to allow her to continue thinking what they're going to do is designed to kill her - that's just going to steel her resolve to escape and fight them even more, and probably being super stressed isn't exactly the best condition to be in when being forced to undergo radical experimental medical treatment.
If she either didn't believe them, or didn't care and still wanted out, then it's not like they've lost anything, they still have her strapped to a fucking bed! And it's not like it would have been a long-kept secret either since as soon as she had the child, as shown at the end of the episode, someone would inform her that the crazy stuff they did to her actually saved them both. I suppose she could be assuming that she was kidnapped by weird baby-thieves who just happened to perform the exact right freaky shit on her to save her kid, but that seems a bit of a stretch for a trained investigator.
So yeah that was...weird and clearly only in there to maintain suspense.
That said, the emotional impact and background was much more interesting. To start with, ridiculous, melodramatic shit goes down in this episode, and the ingredients for making the audience feel might manipulated are all there - last minute resolution to a high risk pregnancy, declarations of love on death's door, weird shop assistants who just stand, staring into middle distance behind the register with weird pseudo smiles on their faces while people give birth three feet from them - a lot of the actual emotions (perhaps excluding Lincoln, but we'll get to him) are underplayed.
I think that Immortality certainly started showing us Altlivia on her own terms in her own world, but she was still bravado and quips (and I loved her for it); she was still fighting against the crucible of her experiences Over Here changing her, against becoming another Olivia altered by what another Walter chose for her life.
Bloodlines makes those parallels more explicit; I could probably cap half this episode and find corresponding shots of Olivia being held against her will, experimented on, rendered choiceless, dying, pleading, fighting back. I don't think it's lazy that Altlivia begins to feel, while still impressively her own character, more familiar also. The last inch of yourself, right?
Regardless, I found her cautious, flat emotional affect at the start of the episode to be a really good example of this. Altlivia is carefully careless, acting as if she's already accepted what is clearly not something she's processed yet at all, while Olivia would probably have simply shut down entirely, but it's the same final inch, just moulded differently.
Marilyn's quiet, distant response to hearing the news that her surviving daughter also had VPE was another moment I thought the episode played very well.
To continue my rambling analysis of what amounts to structure as much as events, there's something about the inevitability of biology and I wonder if it's intended as some kind of representation of fate? Undetectable until it's too late to escape it. In turn how does this fit into Walter(nate)'s propensity to repeatedly spit in nature's face with imagination and science? In turn, how does this fit with Walter(nate)'s understanding that ultimately nature only cares about balance. Nature is already compensating (or failing to compensate for in apocalyptic ways), Walter's original act of unnatural hubris - the unbalancing of its scales.
It would be easy to fall down the rabbit hole of BSG-thematics at this point, to introduce science as the enemy of nature and therefore, ultimately, the enemy of humanity. The concepts of those things we are not meant to know, we doom ourselves with knowledge... You all already know how that goes.
When I very first watched the very first episode of this show, on an 11 hour plane journey, and Nina Sharp made that comment about how science and technology may have advanced beyond our ability to regulate them, and yet, there she was, a cyborg in charge of the chief culprit with no intention of stopping any time soon, I thought to myself, in my hazy, enplaned way, either this show will eventually do something really interesting with that statement or it'll pretend to and then accidentally tell us science is the devil. And then I largely forgot about that specific point, but it is something that drifts back to the forefront of my mind every now and again; the way in which Fringe grapples with the same questions of ethics and technology as BSG did (and, in my opinion, failed to satisfactorily answer).
So far, at least, science is very definitely the bad guy, but science is also the good guy. It's the solution as well as the problem, like Walter. Perhaps like Walternate. Like the Vacuum Machine? There's never been anyone on this show with any voice who's ever advocated anything other than "if you can dream a better world, you can make a better world," and the points at which doing so make a worse world instead are fairly consistently shown to be as a result of personal hubris and failure rather than a failure of knowledge.
I do not count on this to last, but I do note that it remains consistent at this point in the story and I appreciate it quite a lot. If we must speak of fate, let's do so in terms of multiple futures that a future version of yourself has already chosen for you; let's speak of it in terms of biological determinism; let's speak of it in terms of the subconscious, if I'm reading the promo for the next episode correctly.
To continue my vague BSG analogy jag, because why not, there's a structural difference in the way the shows seem to develop, narratively. They were both always more serialised than they initially pretended to be, and both eventually gave up that pretence, to varying degrees. What Fringe developed that BSG didn't, is, I think, are these (not so) subliminal repeating patterns. The way it structures its case of the week as a mirror to a theme or individual, whereas I felt that BSG more often structured it as a platform from which to launch into scenes about individuals or themes? That its self-contained episode-of-the-week stuff which never irrelevant, was dropped more completely when it was finally dropped because it was never part of the style. BSG was one epic analogy, or metaphor, or allegory, whichever you feel is more appropriate. Fringe has that larger story too, and more of it is leaking into individual episodes, but in general, it reads to me more as an endless series of fables about that overarching Big Plot rather than endless parts of it?
I feel it has chapter breaks where BSG started to just bend over pages when it had to stop.
This isn't a criticism of either, in fact, BSG is probably my preferred method if, obviously, not my preferred success story in terms of ultimate message. But there's something to be said for the safety of illuminating small pieces of the plot at a time. The actual mytharc will still succeed or fail based on its inherent suck factor, but in being asked to re-examine it from different angles in small but consistent ways, I feel there are...more bulkheads in case of a narrative hullbreach.
If nothing else, and if I were attempting to be poetic, the endless, low level repetition makes me think of mirroring in nature, of cellular replication, both benign and malignant.
So, back to the episode.
I don't really have a great deal more to say about its actual content - as I said earlier, it was a kind of silly plot that I was okay with because I appreciated the fact it was so much LESS bad than I was expecting an episode with the potential for this much soap this far into a soapy love triangle storyline that I Do Not Care For.
But there are two things that niggle me, one of which I'm...reasonably certain the show will address to my satisfaction, the other of which I'm completely uncertain how they'll resolve.
The first is that Olivia's been passive for a good while now. And I've been largely fine with that because I love watching her Angst Quietly because she has been Wronged but is Stoic about it. But between young!Olivia and Altlivia and Bellivia, I miss her and I want to see her...explode at some shit and scream the house down about what has been done to her and take some names (or more likely, Dunham!Glare with Stoic Pain and Fury before going out and Dunhamnating some bad guys). I guess what I'm saying is, I love watching Olivia get put through the wringer because I love how she rises to the occasion each time with pure heroism and a total lack of repentance for any of her feelings. But...I'm ready to get to that bit now, please. Or at least, you know, after next week when everyone's high on acid.
The second bit is I still have no idea how they'll resolve this love triangle baby thing.
I really like Lincoln (though I still vaguely wish they were using Scarlie for the role; if they want her as Liv's perennial Big Brother in any incarnation, great, but give us more of that, please). And actually, probably the part of the episode that I thought was best done was Altlivia asking him if he'd spoken to her Mom, because...she actually didn't even know yet if she was about to die. And how neither of them can say anything and she's just like...okay. Right. That's how it is then.
I love how much Lincoln loves Liv; and yes, I'm sure some of you can anticipate my next comment - if I believed Peter felt half that deeply for our Olivia I'd have less issues with the 'ship, and I don't think that's just down to Peter being emotionally repressed where Lincoln isn't. Sure there are elements of that, but there's also writing choices that are going on here and I don't like 'em.
So I'm at this frustrating point where I really want to like the idea of Lincoln and Altlivia together, but I can't bring myself to because it seems like an overly convenient trapdoor to avoid the issues of Peter/Altlivia. Which, in fairness to the show I don't think it's going to immediately do. I do think that there will be/has to be more exploration of Peter's connection to Altlivia before the season (or series) ends. And ultimately, how they handle that will be something I'm both deeply interested in but also fully expecting to be disappointed by?
I just mostly can't see how they can resolve this plot anyway though? Because I don't think Peter would be happy to live in another universe to his child, I don't think the thesis of the show can allow a child to be taken away from a parent unwillingly (and I can't see Altlivia agreeing to give up Baby Jesus). But then on a meta level I can't see the show allowing its sole copy of Peter to live in its secondary universe, nor can I see it permanently having two Olivias in the same universe because filming doppelganger scenes is a bit nuts budget and timewise if it's gonna be happening all the time. The idea of killing off Altlivia is one I find superlame both because I like her, it's overly convenient and then there's the idea of Olivia raising the child as her own which would be an interesting parallel if it weren't tied to a ship that's partly about how twisted it was the she was replaceable.
Long story short, can I ship Olivia/RedUniverseLincoln? And maybe they can like, bond over how the people they fell in love with were in love with other people in heartbreaking ways?
Four final notes on Episode Stuff:
1) Fake Altlivia Death was a bit random. I mean...why? They held it for long enough to make it seem like they really were killing her off but then her waking up again was...a relief but also what was wrong with her? Did her heart like, fail A LITTLE and then GET BETTER? Maybe she passed out? Idk, it just struck me as slightly cheap in what was otherwise an unusually noncringy birth scene (crazy spectating shopkeeper aside: HELP OR LEAVE LADY!).
2) I hate Olivia's fringe. It's ugly and makes her look weird. Or, more accurately, I hate it when it's so severe. Which I think is partly a function of when she's wearing the wig rather than her own hair? But also they do use it to tell Altlivia and Olivia apart. When Olivia was being Altlivia, her fringe was way more feathered over her forehead and looked fine, but when Altlivia was being Olivia, that blonde fringe was as severe as it was when she was a redhead.
3) I really love Henry. I've rambled more than enough about parallels and cycles and replication, but I love that Henry is there for both Olivias, inexplicably, when they need him. I don't know if I'd prefer for Our Henry to show up or simply for this Henry to remain unique and connected to both women. Yay Henry!
4) I'm fairly certain that Scarlie and Linc love Liv too much to seriously suspect her in Walternate's shenanigans, but it does concern me slightly. But not as much as I am concerned for their SAFETIES because Walternate would totes off them without a second though even if he wouldn't do so wastefully. I also like that they're questioning him - it's an exciting development and one that throws an air of uncertainty over the finale.
Thus concludes the most pointlessly rambly review I've written in a long while... ;)
Also I'd meant to get these things out a bit quicker than I have been recently. I think it's because either I haven't been as enthused or my thoughts (as last week, as, to a small extent, this week) have run somewhat tangentially to the actual episode and have thus taken me more time to get in order.
Basically, in some ways, I think the wound in my soul left by BSG has finally done some...good in that I was so afraid of Fringe falling down the rabbithole of 4.5-level suck because it had suddenly "gone there" on a romance I narratively feared, and had introduced babiez, that my minimised expectations - the fact I'd reached the bargaining stage of grief for a storyline we may yet get but I suspect not (the epic, permanent breakup of Peter and Olivia), - this was a vaguely pleasant surprise.
Things Which Did Not Happen Thank God:
- Dead Altlivia.
- Dead baby (caveat: there are a few ways I might have been okay with that, but they are not the ways I was afraid of).
- Kidnapped baby.
- Superfast Magic Growth Baby (at least I'm PRETTY SURE he wasn't still growing...)
- Pregnancies are always superhappy funtiems.
- Altlivia having a magic Head!Peter.
- A thing which SADLY didn't happen was a discussion of the fact that if I, for instance, knew I had an 80% chance of DYING if I ever gave birth, contraception would be like, my number one priority. For real, a technobabble line about universe hopping screwing with her birth control, or even just saying, "Jees, that 0.0000000000000001%, huh?" would have really helped there, writer people.
So like, there were some issues with this episode, and with the general direction of this part of the season for sure, but the fact it avoided all of my Huge Paranoid Fears means I'm feeling reasonably generous right now. Which is not to say I rolled my eyes when of course it was a boy. And the whole internet is referring to it as a Bishop. Why not a Dunham! If we're going to use the gendered assumption that male name takes precedence, I insist we ALSO adhere to the gendered assumption that bastards are forced to live with the eternal shame of their mother's maiden name.
Thus,
chaila43 and I have named him JESUS DUNHAM. In my head this is pronounced like the Spanish name, and it will never not be funny. In terms of the actual episode, there were some structural similarities to Immortality, the last time we were Over There, in that both episodes were basically totally and obviously manufactured in order to get to the final "reveal", so to speak. The difference is that on this occasion, it at least held more personal significance from the beginning and thus felt a little more organic.
The obvious plothole is Altlivia's abductors refusing to tell her what they're doing for, near as I can tell, no reason. I understand why Walternate wouldn't tell her - what if she refused? What if either she didn't want the baby regardless of her genetics and/or she wasn't in the mood to put herself through what was clearly a life-threatening procedure on the offchance it worked (if it was super reliable I imagine it'd be a treatment that was at least known about even if hard for the average VPE sufferer to obtain).
But once he has her in his evil web of abductions and doctors, there's no reason for them to allow her to continue thinking what they're going to do is designed to kill her - that's just going to steel her resolve to escape and fight them even more, and probably being super stressed isn't exactly the best condition to be in when being forced to undergo radical experimental medical treatment.
If she either didn't believe them, or didn't care and still wanted out, then it's not like they've lost anything, they still have her strapped to a fucking bed! And it's not like it would have been a long-kept secret either since as soon as she had the child, as shown at the end of the episode, someone would inform her that the crazy stuff they did to her actually saved them both. I suppose she could be assuming that she was kidnapped by weird baby-thieves who just happened to perform the exact right freaky shit on her to save her kid, but that seems a bit of a stretch for a trained investigator.
So yeah that was...weird and clearly only in there to maintain suspense.
That said, the emotional impact and background was much more interesting. To start with, ridiculous, melodramatic shit goes down in this episode, and the ingredients for making the audience feel might manipulated are all there - last minute resolution to a high risk pregnancy, declarations of love on death's door, weird shop assistants who just stand, staring into middle distance behind the register with weird pseudo smiles on their faces while people give birth three feet from them - a lot of the actual emotions (perhaps excluding Lincoln, but we'll get to him) are underplayed.
I think that Immortality certainly started showing us Altlivia on her own terms in her own world, but she was still bravado and quips (and I loved her for it); she was still fighting against the crucible of her experiences Over Here changing her, against becoming another Olivia altered by what another Walter chose for her life.
Bloodlines makes those parallels more explicit; I could probably cap half this episode and find corresponding shots of Olivia being held against her will, experimented on, rendered choiceless, dying, pleading, fighting back. I don't think it's lazy that Altlivia begins to feel, while still impressively her own character, more familiar also. The last inch of yourself, right?
Regardless, I found her cautious, flat emotional affect at the start of the episode to be a really good example of this. Altlivia is carefully careless, acting as if she's already accepted what is clearly not something she's processed yet at all, while Olivia would probably have simply shut down entirely, but it's the same final inch, just moulded differently.
Marilyn's quiet, distant response to hearing the news that her surviving daughter also had VPE was another moment I thought the episode played very well.
To continue my rambling analysis of what amounts to structure as much as events, there's something about the inevitability of biology and I wonder if it's intended as some kind of representation of fate? Undetectable until it's too late to escape it. In turn how does this fit into Walter(nate)'s propensity to repeatedly spit in nature's face with imagination and science? In turn, how does this fit with Walter(nate)'s understanding that ultimately nature only cares about balance. Nature is already compensating (or failing to compensate for in apocalyptic ways), Walter's original act of unnatural hubris - the unbalancing of its scales.
It would be easy to fall down the rabbit hole of BSG-thematics at this point, to introduce science as the enemy of nature and therefore, ultimately, the enemy of humanity. The concepts of those things we are not meant to know, we doom ourselves with knowledge... You all already know how that goes.
When I very first watched the very first episode of this show, on an 11 hour plane journey, and Nina Sharp made that comment about how science and technology may have advanced beyond our ability to regulate them, and yet, there she was, a cyborg in charge of the chief culprit with no intention of stopping any time soon, I thought to myself, in my hazy, enplaned way, either this show will eventually do something really interesting with that statement or it'll pretend to and then accidentally tell us science is the devil. And then I largely forgot about that specific point, but it is something that drifts back to the forefront of my mind every now and again; the way in which Fringe grapples with the same questions of ethics and technology as BSG did (and, in my opinion, failed to satisfactorily answer).
So far, at least, science is very definitely the bad guy, but science is also the good guy. It's the solution as well as the problem, like Walter. Perhaps like Walternate. Like the Vacuum Machine? There's never been anyone on this show with any voice who's ever advocated anything other than "if you can dream a better world, you can make a better world," and the points at which doing so make a worse world instead are fairly consistently shown to be as a result of personal hubris and failure rather than a failure of knowledge.
I do not count on this to last, but I do note that it remains consistent at this point in the story and I appreciate it quite a lot. If we must speak of fate, let's do so in terms of multiple futures that a future version of yourself has already chosen for you; let's speak of it in terms of biological determinism; let's speak of it in terms of the subconscious, if I'm reading the promo for the next episode correctly.
To continue my vague BSG analogy jag, because why not, there's a structural difference in the way the shows seem to develop, narratively. They were both always more serialised than they initially pretended to be, and both eventually gave up that pretence, to varying degrees. What Fringe developed that BSG didn't, is, I think, are these (not so) subliminal repeating patterns. The way it structures its case of the week as a mirror to a theme or individual, whereas I felt that BSG more often structured it as a platform from which to launch into scenes about individuals or themes? That its self-contained episode-of-the-week stuff which never irrelevant, was dropped more completely when it was finally dropped because it was never part of the style. BSG was one epic analogy, or metaphor, or allegory, whichever you feel is more appropriate. Fringe has that larger story too, and more of it is leaking into individual episodes, but in general, it reads to me more as an endless series of fables about that overarching Big Plot rather than endless parts of it?
I feel it has chapter breaks where BSG started to just bend over pages when it had to stop.
This isn't a criticism of either, in fact, BSG is probably my preferred method if, obviously, not my preferred success story in terms of ultimate message. But there's something to be said for the safety of illuminating small pieces of the plot at a time. The actual mytharc will still succeed or fail based on its inherent suck factor, but in being asked to re-examine it from different angles in small but consistent ways, I feel there are...more bulkheads in case of a narrative hullbreach.
If nothing else, and if I were attempting to be poetic, the endless, low level repetition makes me think of mirroring in nature, of cellular replication, both benign and malignant.
So, back to the episode.
I don't really have a great deal more to say about its actual content - as I said earlier, it was a kind of silly plot that I was okay with because I appreciated the fact it was so much LESS bad than I was expecting an episode with the potential for this much soap this far into a soapy love triangle storyline that I Do Not Care For.
But there are two things that niggle me, one of which I'm...reasonably certain the show will address to my satisfaction, the other of which I'm completely uncertain how they'll resolve.
The first is that Olivia's been passive for a good while now. And I've been largely fine with that because I love watching her Angst Quietly because she has been Wronged but is Stoic about it. But between young!Olivia and Altlivia and Bellivia, I miss her and I want to see her...explode at some shit and scream the house down about what has been done to her and take some names (or more likely, Dunham!Glare with Stoic Pain and Fury before going out and Dunhamnating some bad guys). I guess what I'm saying is, I love watching Olivia get put through the wringer because I love how she rises to the occasion each time with pure heroism and a total lack of repentance for any of her feelings. But...I'm ready to get to that bit now, please. Or at least, you know, after next week when everyone's high on acid.
The second bit is I still have no idea how they'll resolve this love triangle baby thing.
I really like Lincoln (though I still vaguely wish they were using Scarlie for the role; if they want her as Liv's perennial Big Brother in any incarnation, great, but give us more of that, please). And actually, probably the part of the episode that I thought was best done was Altlivia asking him if he'd spoken to her Mom, because...she actually didn't even know yet if she was about to die. And how neither of them can say anything and she's just like...okay. Right. That's how it is then.
I love how much Lincoln loves Liv; and yes, I'm sure some of you can anticipate my next comment - if I believed Peter felt half that deeply for our Olivia I'd have less issues with the 'ship, and I don't think that's just down to Peter being emotionally repressed where Lincoln isn't. Sure there are elements of that, but there's also writing choices that are going on here and I don't like 'em.
So I'm at this frustrating point where I really want to like the idea of Lincoln and Altlivia together, but I can't bring myself to because it seems like an overly convenient trapdoor to avoid the issues of Peter/Altlivia. Which, in fairness to the show I don't think it's going to immediately do. I do think that there will be/has to be more exploration of Peter's connection to Altlivia before the season (or series) ends. And ultimately, how they handle that will be something I'm both deeply interested in but also fully expecting to be disappointed by?
I just mostly can't see how they can resolve this plot anyway though? Because I don't think Peter would be happy to live in another universe to his child, I don't think the thesis of the show can allow a child to be taken away from a parent unwillingly (and I can't see Altlivia agreeing to give up Baby Jesus). But then on a meta level I can't see the show allowing its sole copy of Peter to live in its secondary universe, nor can I see it permanently having two Olivias in the same universe because filming doppelganger scenes is a bit nuts budget and timewise if it's gonna be happening all the time. The idea of killing off Altlivia is one I find superlame both because I like her, it's overly convenient and then there's the idea of Olivia raising the child as her own which would be an interesting parallel if it weren't tied to a ship that's partly about how twisted it was the she was replaceable.
Long story short, can I ship Olivia/RedUniverseLincoln? And maybe they can like, bond over how the people they fell in love with were in love with other people in heartbreaking ways?
Four final notes on Episode Stuff:
1) Fake Altlivia Death was a bit random. I mean...why? They held it for long enough to make it seem like they really were killing her off but then her waking up again was...a relief but also what was wrong with her? Did her heart like, fail A LITTLE and then GET BETTER? Maybe she passed out? Idk, it just struck me as slightly cheap in what was otherwise an unusually noncringy birth scene (crazy spectating shopkeeper aside: HELP OR LEAVE LADY!).
2) I hate Olivia's fringe. It's ugly and makes her look weird. Or, more accurately, I hate it when it's so severe. Which I think is partly a function of when she's wearing the wig rather than her own hair? But also they do use it to tell Altlivia and Olivia apart. When Olivia was being Altlivia, her fringe was way more feathered over her forehead and looked fine, but when Altlivia was being Olivia, that blonde fringe was as severe as it was when she was a redhead.
3) I really love Henry. I've rambled more than enough about parallels and cycles and replication, but I love that Henry is there for both Olivias, inexplicably, when they need him. I don't know if I'd prefer for Our Henry to show up or simply for this Henry to remain unique and connected to both women. Yay Henry!
4) I'm fairly certain that Scarlie and Linc love Liv too much to seriously suspect her in Walternate's shenanigans, but it does concern me slightly. But not as much as I am concerned for their SAFETIES because Walternate would totes off them without a second though even if he wouldn't do so wastefully. I also like that they're questioning him - it's an exciting development and one that throws an air of uncertainty over the finale.
Thus concludes the most pointlessly rambly review I've written in a long while... ;)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-03-29 11:55 pm (UTC)And yes, that really is the only thought I have. :)
no subject
Date: 2011-03-30 12:14 am (UTC)As to who knows what and when, almost no one knows, although Lincoln, Scarlie and Altstrid find out throughout the course of the episode. It's like a giant secret and Altlivia's lying to everyone that it was just Some Guy she Met In A Bar. But Walternate comes clean to Lincoln about the whole Olivia-swap et al during the course of the episode because he's trying to cover the fact that he stole a Liv to experiment on her again, but knows that Lincoln's a good agent so tells him as much of the truth as he can to hide the lie.
But yeah, it's certainly not public knowledge, nor is it likely to be especially given Walternate's desire to keep it secret that he was behind the kidnapping so everyone's working off an assumption it was probably an inside job by someone who does know it's Walternate's grandkid and has a grudge against him or something. OR SOMETHING. IDK. The point is, Lincoln and Scarlie do some math and work out that Broyles went missing at a VERY SUSPICIOUS TIME and start wondering at each other what else Walternate isn't telling them.
LONG STORY SHORT: They better name that kid Jesus Phillip Dunham. THEY BETTER.