Fringe: "In Which We Meet Mr. Jones" - Episode 107

Now that baseball and politics have stopped ruining my television schedule (as well as my recap-based income therefrom), I'm happy to report that my favorite new fall show Fringe is once again very much alive and kicking. In fact, one might say it has wrapped its loving little tendrils right around my heart. Anyone else think that thing looked like Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors? Feed me, Pacey, feed me! More Fringe after the jump...

 

Fringe brought out the big guns for this episode - JJ Abrams himself co-wrote it alongside former Alias showrunner Jeff Pinkner, and big-time Hollywood movie director guy Brad Anderson ('The Machinist', 'Session 9') was at the helm. What's that mean? Well, the last time JJ played this much of an active role, we were introduced to the big-picture character of The Observer, so I'd say you can be certain that token Wissenschaft Prison wacko Mr. Jones is going to be much more involved in things somewhere down the line. That guy had a Hannibal Lechter kinda feel to him, didn't he? I'd say so. Anyway, on with the show.

 

We started off 'In Which We Meet Mr. Jones' at an FBI bust gone wrong. An entire strike team led by Agent Mitchell Loeb gets a whole lot less than they bargained for when they move in on a freight truck and get little more than a bunch of stuffed pandas for their trouble. Not quite what they were hoping for, to say the least. Someone must've pulled a switch somewhere. As Agent Loeb is making his report to Director Broyles back at headquarters, he outlines the background of Joseph Smith. According to Loeb, Smith must've been the one who pulled the switch with the freight truck at the shipping yard, and what's more, he's been making several unexplained trips to Budapest lately. As he's going through all this, Loeb suffers some sort of heart attack and collapses right there in his office. Medic! Loeb is taken to the hospital immediately, and when he's cut open by surgeons to find out what exactly keeps giving him multiple heart attacks right in a row, they get a little more than what they were expecting. Some sort of tentacled plant is growing around Loeb's heart, and any attempt to remove or even make contact with it is met with further constriction and a few dozen more heart attacks for Agent Loeb.

 

The Fringe team is brought to the front post-haste, and without hesitation, Walter makes a request. Yes, you guessed it - to the lab! Agent Loeb is brought back to Fringe HQ. Walter, Astrid, and Peter putz around a bit with whatever the hell it is in Loeb's chest, and Olivia deals with his wife who stops by with some interesting information brought back from her husband's recent trip to Germany. No, not the paperback copy of 'A Christmas Carol' (though I'm curious why that particular book might've been used - this is an Abrams show, after all), but the sheet of random number sequences that was with it. Enough about that for now, but in a related tip, Walter determines from a DNA sample of the creature that there is a repeating number sequence hidden inside of its numerical code. Astrid gets her Helpful Hint Of The Week moment by suggesting that the number sequence translates into a letter sequence of ZFT. These letters click in Olivia's head, and she heads off to Broyles' office to explain it. 

 

She tells him of an unsolved case she came across in her former beau John Scott's files, one that mysteriously alluded to the letters ZFT. Would he know anything about that? Turns out he does, of course, and what it boils down to is that ZFT is a terrorist group that allegedly has cells in 83 countries. They don't deal in guns or drugs, but in scientific advancement. They communicate with one another when experiments such as Flight 627 (from the pilot episode) or what's going on in Loeb's chest are a success. Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it? Could ZFT be recording the progress of The Pattern? Or are they responsible for it all in the first place?

 

Broyles tells Olivia about David Jones, a biotech genius who is being held in Germany for possession of state secrets. Broyles believes he's very much part of ZFT, but when Olivia states she wants to go talk to him right away, Broyles advises against it. No one gets in to talk to him, he says, and you'll be no exception. Olivia alludes to the fact that she may have an ace up her sleeve in Germany, so she's off to Frankfurt on the next flight.

 

Back at the lab, things start to go from bad to worse when Peter discovers that the parasite in Loeb's chest is actually starting to grow tendrils up through the IV drip in his arm. Yikes. Broyles gets a call from Agent Charlie Francis, who gives him a little background on the list of numbers they got from Loeb's wife. Turns out the numbers correspond with FBI case files and employee ID numbers. This information means that there very well might be a mole somewhere in that very FBI office, and the identity of that mole could be Joseph Smith, the man that Loeb was telling Broyles about when collapsed in his office. Charlie gets an address for Smith, and Broyles sends a strike team to his house double quick.

 

Meanwhile, Olivia lands in Germany, and her ace is there waiting for her - a former romantic involvement of hers named Lucas. As a government worker, Lucas has contacts with pretty much everyone in Germany, but as far as what's going on with Mr. Jones in Wissenschaft Prison, he's got nothing. Not yet, anyway. He takes her to the prison to see what they can do about getting into see him, and after some finagling that involves bartering with the prison liaison in German and a handwritten note to Mr. Jones from Olivia herself, she gets an appointment to see him the next day. However, Mr. Jones has a demand before he says anything. He wants to talk with a colleague of his back in Boston first, and you guessed it, his name is Joseph Smith, the same guy that Broyles just sent a SWAT team after. Oh snap.

 

Peter takes off in hot pursuit of the SWAT team to make sure nothing happens to Joseph, but he's too late. The guy makes a break for it, and to make matters worse, he pulls a gun. BLAM! The SWAT dudes shoot him in the head, and he's out for the count. Walter calls to see how things are progressing, but when Peter tells him that their best bet to save Loeb's life just got whacked, he doesn't seem that phased. In fact, he decides to run another test of the mind-meld machine that we saw back in the pilot episode to get the info from Smith the team needs. When Olivia goes to see Mr. Jones the next day, she may not need to tell him that his esteemed colleague is dead. All depends on whether or not Walter can pick his brain in the same fashion he did with Olivia and John Scott, I guess. Get his body back to me at once! says Walter in his best Vincent Price impression. Actually, that's just his regular voice. Never mind.

 

Lucas asks Olivia to spend the night in Germany with him, and for the most part, I didn't get much out of their failed romantic interlude. They almost got there, but then Peter called and cockblocked poor Lucas from like 10,000 miles away. I thought for a moment that we were about to see Anna Torv in a costume that wasn't her usual Dana Sculley original, but no such luck. Look, I understand that the writers are trying to flesh out her character a bit more with some history (the previous episode's dive into her childhood was only the beginning, I'm sure), but as it pertained to this particular episode, there really wasn't much there to absorb. So Lucas is a former lover that used to be in the military but now lives in Germany and works for the FBI. Got it. Next!

 

Back in the lab now, and Walter's got the Wayback Machine revved and ready to go. Peter's going to be the mouthpiece for the dead guy this time, so after a few dry runs, the team coordinate their makeshift electroshock therapy attempts on the dead guy to the exact time Olivia is meeting with Mr. Jones in the German prison. See, Mr. Jones still thinks that Mr. Smith is alive, and to keep that illusion, Walter and crew are going to have to extract the answers to whatever questions he has from Mr. Smith's corpse. No problem, right? Not at all.

 

Olivia goes in to see Mr. Jones, and she's got exactly 14 minutes to get things done. Mr. Jones is creepy with a capital C, and the two banter for a bit in true Clarice Starling/Dr. Lecter fashion before getting down to brass tacks. The question Mr. Jones demands to ask Mr. Smith in exchange for the necessary information to save Agent Loeb's life? Well, as you may have guessed, it's a bit... strange. 'Where does the gentleman live?' he asks. Yup, that's it. Walter and crew are still having difficulties getting any answers out of the dead guy, and the heat gets turned up even higher when Agent Loeb takes a turn for the worse and goes into cardiac arrest right as Mr. Jones asks his question. That 14 minutes is ticking away rather fast, isn't it?

 

Yes, it certainly is. Here come the security guards at the prison to remove Olivia from the room, and she still doesn't have her answer. Walter ups the voltage on the Wayback Machine and blasts Peter and Mr. Smith one more time. Peter's still getting nothing, but wait! Something's coming through. Peter grabs a marker and a pad and scrawls 11 vertical lines on it. What the hell is that? asks everyone, but Peter's stumped. Walter comes to the rescue here and determines that because Mr. Smith has been shot in the head (the result of the SWAT team's takedown), his ability to process horizontal lines has been lost. Therefore, Peter will have to fill them in for him. The lines Peter has written down on the pad aren't simply scrawls at all - they're letters without their accompanying horizontal tops, bottoms,  and crossbars. Peter thinks quick on his feet and fills in the blanks to reveal the words LITTLE HILL. Astrid relays this information to Olivia over the phone, and just in time, too. She's about to be dragged from the room, but when she tells Mr. Jones what he wants to hear, he's almost stunned. Defeated, but stunned. He gives Olivia the chemical mixture to defeat the parasite, and Walter injects it into the creature in the nick of time, saving Agent Loeb's life.

 

En route to the airport, Lucas tells Olivia that he's got other ways of extracting info from Mr. Jones should she need it. Not only does this tell us that Mr. Jones will be back in further episodes, but also that Lucas still wants to get a piece of that ass. Well played. Also, Broyles brought his pimp hand down strong on Loeb when he asks him whether or not he knows anything about a possible mole inside the FBI. Loeb assumes that it would be John Scott, but Broyles isn't so sure. Scott didn't have high enough of a security clearance to do the kind of moleing about that is in question here. Broyles wishes Loeb well, but I'm fairly certain that their relationship is going to be of the 'friends close, enemies closer' type for at least a while. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

 

The ending? Well, that was the best part. Loeb's wife comes to see him in his hospital room, and when he asks her whether or not what they did worked, she's all smiles. It sure did, she says. They got led right back to Mr. Jones. Agent Loeb looks pleased. Did they get the answer? he says. I mean, did Jones ask the question? Loeb's wife leans in close. Little... Hill, she whispers. Loeb's eyes say it all - he's pleased. Very pleased indeed.

 

 

'Wissenschaft Prison' translates roughly from German to mean 'Science Prison'. Awesome.

 

This is the second time that the life of an agent has been saved when it probably wasn't the best idea to do so. First John Scott, now Mitchell Loeb. Discuss.

 

I'm not sure which is more shocking - that Walter once tried to electrically jumpstart Jimmy Hoffa's dead brain, or that he used to run the same kind of experiments on Peter. Being that we pretty much already knew he'd been experimenting on Peter back in the day, I'm going to go with Jimmy Hoffa.

 

What do you guys think of Broyles' speech of praise to Olivia there at the end? Is he simply placating her to keep her loyal, or what?

 

Aside from the iffy Lost reference, why did Olivia get exactly 14 minutes with Mr. Jones in Science Prison?

 

Observer sighting! He was at the airport in Germany when Olivia arrived. Which strikes me as odd, because I thought our bald-headed friend only showed up when instances of the Pattern took place. Nothing happened in the airport except Olivia meeting up with Lucas, and... Uh-oh.

 

Mr. Jones was fascinating, wasn't he? That tick-tock sound he made with his mouth when time was almost up? GAH. Creepy. Also, I liked his pointing out to Olivia that the two most important assumptions she made about him weren't true at all - first, that freedom was the most important thing to him, and second, that he was the one who infected Agent Loeb with the parasite. His answers to Olivia pretty much gave away that corker of an ending. I guess Broyles was on to more than he realized, wasn't he?

 

Anyone keeping a running tally on all the names Walter calls Astrid? We got Astro and Asteroid this time around. I'm waiting for Astronaut and Astrological Phenomenon, myself. Astro Burger, maybe?

 

Yeah, Jean. Keep your voice down, would ya? Don't have a cow.

 

-littlebigmouth.