The non-science of Fringe: Dream Logic

Fringe: Season 2: Episode 5: “Dream Logic”

Olivia in search of business cards.

Just when we finally meet a suspect who cooperates fully, he turns out to have an evil alter ego who’s been mainlining dreams. The usual impossibilities aside, this episode was refreshingly easy to watch.

This episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

Random thoughts

Our opening victim may have been a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as his “demons” looked like they’d been lifted straight from Sunnydale.

I thought that Walter, in his relatively advanced age, shouldn’t have been stuck carrying all the equipment – Peter or Olivia should at least have offered to take some of the bags.

I’m not sure what was in the vial that Walter tricked Kashner into smelling, but for it to knock him out so quickly it would have been so strong as to cause permanent damage.

I’m fairly sure that it would have been more efficient to unplug something or yank the swimming cap off Nayak’s head than to shoot the server rack at random.

Olivia’s anagram – OAUGENYIRENBEFO – can, according to The Internet, be arranged into around 66,667 phrases of varying complexity and sneaky 1- and 2-letter word content. I think my favourite is nu age bee of irony.

The poster in Peter’s room reads, “Challenger Mission 11 June 28 1984″ – in our universe, the space shuttle Challenger was lost during mission 10 in 1986.

The non-science of Fringe: Momentum Deferred

Fringe: Season 2: Episode 4: “Momentum Deferred”

Physics is a bitch.

“Are you Olivia Dunham?” Shapeshifting cyborgs from the future another dimension start combing the area for mercury and frozen heads. The usual impossibilities aside, this episode was refreshingly easy to watch.

This episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

Random thoughts

No, you cannot gain the memories or experience of things that you eat – if you could, all meat-eaters would start lusting after fields of grass and become wary of men in overalls. It’s possible that Walter’s worms contained some psychoactive material, like the Colorado river toads from season one.

If I were faced with bodies bleeding mercury, I wouldn’t have handled them as casually as Walter did – examination in an unventilated room without masks? Crazy.

I’m sure that the parallels to Terminator 2 here have passed no-one by, in fact the T-1000’s “mimetic polyalloy” might have been a little more believable than mercury. I have high hopes for someone saying, “Come with me if you want to live,” in a future episode.

Nina fluffs the Pauli exclusion principle a little – in general chemistry, it’s usually expressed as, “two identical fermions cannot have the same quantum state at the same time.” A fermion is a type of particle (common examples include protons, neutrons and electrons), and a quantum state is a collection of properties that completely describe said particle. This can be extended into a general statement about matter (which is mostly made up of fermions), but it would go something like, “no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time with the same energy.” Physics is a bitch, eh?

The non-science of Fringe: Fracture

Fringe: Season 2: Episode 3: “Fracture”

Walter and Peter contemplate the case.

The Shadowy Organisation^TM just won’t quit with the weaponised people – it’s radio-triggered crystal bombs this week. The usual impossibilities aside, this episode was refreshingly easy to watch.

This episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

Random thoughts

The first scene in Walter’s laboratory, about five minutes in, was one of my favourite introductions to Fringe Division. Walter is heating a test tube over an open flame, which is quite unusual (due to the flammable chemicals that are generally found in a lab), and then proceeds to pour the contents into a Büchner funnel. It’s obvious from the speed at which the liquid runs through that there’s no filter paper in it, which renders it largely useless – until we see that Walter is actually making a cup of coffee.

Although Walter is only speculating, silica (SiO₂, probably quartz in this case) doesn’t taste salty and it’s a little presumptuous to proclaim something “as hard as diamond” after merely tapping it with a pair of tweezers.

Apparently, the chemical reaction that crystallised our human bomb “solidifies the water in the cells” – or, put another way, freezes them. Some other effect must also be at work, because otherwise the ice would just have melted (this may have made for a less-traceable weapon, though).

Cyanogen chloride

Cyanogen chloride is certainly dangerous enough to be a chemical weapon, but it’s not a neurotoxin. It prevents oxygen exchange between blood and cells, resulting in rapid cell suffocation and death from respiratory failure.

As everyone else in the blogosphere has pointed out, 331.6 MHz is not considered part of the VHF spectrum.

The non-science of Fringe: Night of Desirable Objects

Fringe: Season 2: Episode 2: “Night of Desirable Objects”

Charlie begins his last mission.

A spate of disappearances prompts Fringe Division to track down a subterranean creature, mutated by the One Ring yet another rogue scientist. The usual impossibilities aside, this episode was refreshingly easy to watch.

This episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

Random thoughts

Walter has acquired a state-of-the-art laboratory with virtually unlimited resources, and yet has to use sequenced instant cameras to record an accident reconstruction? Surely a high-speed digital video camera would have been more appropriate.

Walter’s offhand remark, “we’re all mutants,” is quite interesting – he’s referring to the natural, random mutations that change DNA sequences and occur in all lifeforms. Random mutation is one of the principles of evolution by natural selection, but in this episode, like before, the creature in question has been deliberately created.

It’s a good job that Andre’s wife wasn’t diagnosed by House, because it’s never lupus.

When Olivia and Peter drove up to Andre’s house, they failed to notice the big hole in the ground near the empty police car – they might increase their efficiency if they worked more closely with local law enforcement.

“You’ve come a long way, Charlie Francis.” Nice to have to occasional literary references.

The non-science of Fringe: A New Day in the Old Town

Fringe: Season 2: Episode 1: “A New Day in the Old Town”

Peter and Walter in a typical cross-purposed conversation.

Olivia is back, and apparently has interdimensional amnesia (couldn’t Nina have just reminded here where she went?). The usual impossibilities aside, this episode was refreshingly easy to watch.

This episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

Random thoughts

Ordinarily, I might comment that people can’t change their bone structure like that – but now that we have the catch-all explanation, “it’s another dimension, stupid!” I can’t.

The non-science of Fringe: There is More Than One of Everything

Fringe: Season 1: Episode 20: “There is More Than One of Everything”

Peter on a trip to the past.

Season one finishes off with a trans-dimensional bang, and quite the cliffhanger. This episode was refreshingly easy to watch.

This episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

Random thoughts

Mr. Jones shot Nina at point-blank range – surely he could have killed her if he’d really wanted to. Perhaps he just reckoned without the Kevlar-coated ribs (which would probably not have worked exactly Wolverine-style as several layers are needed for decent bullet resistance).

Wait, Nina’s “priority one grid search” on Walter couldn’t have been used to spot a highly-conspicuous guy in sunglasses and bandages?

There are shades upon shades of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy here, with references to alternate worlds, weak points between them, children as a resource and the opening and closing of crossings.

So the fundamental constants aren’t as fundamental as we think? A gradual decay would have appalling repercussions, and this is a particularly unsatisfying explanation for the “weak” points between realities.

And, of course, there are no known parallel dimensions – though it’s nice to see this sci-fi staple getting another airing.

The non-science of Fringe: The Road Not Taken

Fringe: Season 1: Episode 19: “The Road Not Taken”

Olivia and Charlie at the latest Pattern occurrence.

Someone with the ability to generate and/or control fire was bound to show up in Fringe sooner or later, though this is overshadowed somewhat by Olivia’s dimension-hopping. In this post, I’ll be making the usual comments about how much suspension of disbelief is required to enjoy the show.

This episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

The non-science of Fringe: Midnight

Fringe: Season 1: Episode 18: “Midnight”

Olivia on another laboratory raid.

Another week, another serial killer with a need for body parts – this time with retractable teeth! The usual impossibilities aside, this episode was refreshingly easy to watch.

This episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

Random thoughts

When Walter is examining the cervical vertebrae, he’s clearly saying “vertebrae” when referring to a single vertebra. Tsk.

Our vampire seems to kill one person a day in order to survive, and a person contains around 150 ml of cerebrospinal fluid. However, humans produce around 500 ml of cerebrospinal fluid per day, which makes Nicholas’s claim that he couldn’t provide enough for his wife unlikely.

Nicholas requests a spectroscope, which is a fairly archaic term for a general class of analytical instruments known as spectrometers.

Nicholas claimed that he studied at King’s College, Aberdeen. Unfortunately, this building contains the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy. Perhaps he felt that it would be a good foundation course for playing God.

“We are about to inject the infected rat with an antidote. Should it prove effective, it will no doubt work on humans as well.” Really? The vast archives of drugs which don’t make it to market say otherwise (something like 90 % of all new drugs will fail at the animal testing stage).

The non-science of Fringe: Bad Dreams

Fringe: Season 1: Episode 17: “Bad Dreams”

Olivia chases down her co-subject.

The impossibility of being able to infect people with your emotions aside, this episode was refreshingly easy to watch.

This episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

Random thoughts

I like Walter’s old-school Geiger counter (he’s using a pancake probe), but I think they usually either click or beep, not both. There must be quite a lot of background radiation in the lab (or radon gas) for it to make so much noise, which makes Walter’s “not a rad” statement in need of an “above the background reading” qualifier. A rad is an old unit measuring how much radiation one had absorbed; it was superseded by the gray, and for Walter to get a reading in rads he would need to know Olivia’s weight. Geiger counters typically give readings in clicks (or counts) per minute, which can then be converted into energies and absorbed doses.

In the video at the end, did Olivia cause the fire that put Walter in the asylum? If so, it’s appropriate that she should be the one to bring him out.

The non-science of Fringe: Unleashed

Fringe: Season 1: Episode 16: “Unleashed”

Walter reflects on his experiments.

A stark warning to all animal rights activists: sooner or later, you might break into a real-life Resident Evil. In this post, I’ll be making the usual comments about how much suspension of disbelief is required to enjoy the show.

This episode is debunked at Popular Mechanics and Polite Dissent, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. Club.