I'm almost done with Fringe, and I've really enjoyed the experience so far. Fringe has shown me some pretty fucking weird things that I would never have seen otherwise. For example, have you ever wondered what interrogating a corpse would look like? Holy shit, it looks so wrong there's an atavistic reaction from my lizard brain to it.
There is a lot of gross stuff on this show, and some of it isn't necessarily gross, but it is very uncomfortable to look at, like the people with the see-through skin. Some of this stuff I wonder how they got away with on network TV.
But there are two things that really stood out for me. Both involve the character, Walter Bishop. The other I'm going to talk about some other night, but I wanted to talk about a moment late in the first season that I think was handled like no other show would.
If you haven't watched the show, when we first meet Walter he's been in an asylum for almost two decades. He's a mad scientist who did some pretty fucking crazy things before his lab exploded, killing someone, sending him to the asylum for all those years. He doesn't have a lot of his memories because his partner, the Steve Jobs-esque William Bell (played by Leonard Nimoy!!!!), removed parts of his brain at his own request so he wouldn't have to remember certain things.
So a lot of his past is shrouded in mystery. When we discover that one of the things he didn't want to remember is the horrible child experimentation he did back in the day, it's kind of awful. We've grown to love this eccentric old man who does drugs (a lot) and sometimes doesn't believe in clothes (OK, maybe a lot). We don't want to believe that he's capable of such things. And then we find out that he experimented on Olivia, one of his colleagues in the Fringe department, when she was a kid. She, also, didn't have memories of this until late in season one. And now they both know what happened way back when.
There is a scene where, full of rage and rightfully so, she confronts Walter at a diner about what he did to her as a child, and Walter responds in the most unexpected way. In my experience when someone is confronted with the horrible deeds of their past, they react in one of two ways: complete denial or righteous indignation with an unhealthy dose of self rationalization.
Walter does neither of these things. Instead he breaks down and cries with shame and guilt. I've never seen that before, in real life or in fiction, and I'm kind of jealous that I never wrote anything like that. Who knows? Maybe I'll rip it off at some point.
As for the other thing about Walter, that's for another night.
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