The third explosive season of Fringe continues and, because of the vagaries of life, I am quite behind on the show. Others are ranting and raving about the season finale, and I am only at episode 18. On the one hand, I am dying to know what is going to happen and what everyone has been talking about. I am also looking forward to catching up so that I can start scouring the web for other people’s opinions on the season, as well as start writing for The Fringe Report again. But that’s another story altogether. On the other hand, another painful summer hiatus has started and having only another five episodes to watch makes me want to take my sweet time.
Such is the life of a writer.
The episode “Bloodline” is the 18th of the season, set in the universe parallel to ours. Altivia deals with the until-now unknown potential heartbreaking consequences of her pregnancy. She has an 80 percent chance of carrying an infection that killed her sister and her unborn niece.
She is kidnapped and her pregnancy is forced, within the span of hours, from approximately six to eight weeks to full term. In the course of their investigation to find where Altivia was taken, Scarlie and Lee find out that they can’t quite trust Walternate, a hunch that proves correct when, in one of the final scenes of the episodes, we are given proof as to his involvement in the plot to kidnap Altivia and force the pregnancy along. But in one of those twists of life, the accelerated pregnancy ends up saving both Altivia and the unborn child, a son whom Altivia names “Henry”, after the cab driver who delivers her son.
The production quality of this episode of Fringe is, as always, quite impressive, with a tight script giving a lot of information and details in sometimes subtle ways we don’t catch on the first watch. One particularly well-filmed moment that scared the living daylights out of me comes near the beginning of the episode. Altivia is in her apartment; she gazes for a few moments at the screen of her tablet, flips the screen down, turns around and out of the blue, is tazered. I have watched this episode thrice, I know what’s going to happen, and each time, I jumped. Being someone that doesn’t often get scared watching movies, this is saying a lot.
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