Polite Dissent

Big questions were answered, the science wasn’t that bad, but it still struck me as a surprisingly lifeless outing for the “Winter Finale” of Fringe.

The Plot: At an office building in Manhattan, the workers grouse about a series of small earthquakes the city has been experiencing. Suddenly, there is a larger tremor and one of the workers finds himself caught in the quake. He blacks out for a second and when he comes to, he is pinned by the rubble — and has four arms and four legs.

The Fringe team is called in to examine the office building. So far, no survivors have been found, but many dead bodies. The bodies aren’t normal, however, but each seems to be two separate people fused together. Walter hypothesizes that a “Quantum Tectonic Event” has caused a rip in space that caused the quake and fusion. A survivor is found upstairs: the worker from the opening scene. Walter converses with him while he is slowly dying and learns that the worker is from the alternate universe. Walter has a new theory: an office building from that universe has suddenly merged with the same office building from ours, killing all the inhabitants. Agent Dunham suspects this to be a deliberate act on the part of Newton (the leader of the team from the alternate universe that is trying to destroy ours).

Back at the lab, Walter realizes what has happened — and what will happen. Twenty-five years ago, he and William Bell sent a car to the alternate universe and a short time later, a car of equivalent mass from that universe appeared in ours, merged into a statue. Walter tells the team that a building from our universe will disappear within 35 hours. His only idea how to stop it is to use some of the abilities Dunham gained from Cortexiphan. He drags her and Peter to Jacksonville, where the original Cortexiphan experiments were carried out. He repeats the experiment on Dunham, but it has no effect this time. Belatedly he realizes that her abilities depends on fear, and Dunham no longer experiences fear, but channels it all into anger. Defeated, the three of them return to New York.

While they’ve been in Florida, small earthquakes have started in New York City, signaling that the calamity is impending. The scientists at Massive Dynamic are trying to find a pattern to the quakes, but Walter tells them there is no pattern to find. Instead, he suggests locating the building in New York City of identical mass to the one that appeared from the other universe. They are able to narrow the list down to 147 building, but the thirty-five hours is up. Concern over her failure and the likely loss of life scares Dunham, kick starting her spot-the-things-from-the-other-universe power. She is able to spot a building that weirdly glimmers, a sign that it is the one that is going to disappear. The team is able to identify the building and the authorities evacuate it just in time — with a massive inrush of air the entire building — basement, foundation, and all — disappears.

As the episode ends, Olivia and Peter are heading out for drinks, but when she looks at him, she realizes that he is glimmering too. Walter begs her not to tell Peter the truth.

1. Spellchecker
Manhattan was spelled wrong in the opening scene.

2. Island of Misfit Toys
If the building in Florida has been sealed for 25 years, why did it have toys from the Ice Age movies (’02, ‘06, and ‘09)?

3. Where’s Johnny? He Was Here Just a Minute Ago!
So did a child of identical mass to Peter get transported to the alternate universe when Walter brought Alterna-Peter here?

4. Glimmer Glimmer Glumpkin
If Olivia’s powers detect items from the other universe (that’s what Walter was testing in the classroom after all), why did the building from this universe glimmer?

5. Tick Tock
Why 35 hours? I’m guessing that’s how long it took for the car to appear.

6. Mass Effect
How are they going to be able to find the mass of the alternate universe building when it is merged with ours. Are they assuming it was identical to the one in our universe, just like their Nixon coins and double-decker cars are identical to ours?

7. There’s No Babble Like Good Babble
Quantum tectonic event. That is some grad-A prime of technobabble. It sounds impressive, but notice how none of the words really work together (or at least the two most important: tectonic and quantum. They’re pretty much contradictory — “quantum” suggest atomic or sub-atomic, while “tectonic” is very macro in its implications.)

I so wanted to like this episode with the Peter reveal (that we all knew anyway), but I couldn’t — it was dull. It wasn’t horrible, but an episode this big should be more fulfilling. The Fringe Doomsday Clock stays put.

Tags: television fringe quantum tectonic cortexiphan

Does Godwin’s Law apply to television shows? Actually, though the science was questionable, I thought the storyline was sufficiently creepy to be a good episode overall.

The Plot: At a wedding, the groom’s grandmother notices someone standing in the back who alarms her. As she moves to confront him, she starts gasping for breath, turns an ashen gray, and then collapses, dead. Soon, other members of her family start dying as well – fourteen total – and the Fringe team is called in. After examining the corpses, Walter and Peter declare that everyone has died of asphyxia (suffocation). Agent Dunham notices a tattoo on the grandmother’s arm that indicates she was a concentration camp survivor. Poking around the church, they find the groom, still alive, but gasping for air. He dies at their feet, bringing the death toll to fifteen.

At the lab, Walter starts his autopsy of one of the victims and notices that the blood is a deep blue (Prussian blue, perhaps?), indicating some form of toxin exposure. The team also realizes that everyone who died was a blood relative and a direct descendant of the grandmother. Re-examining the church, Peter finds a candle that is different from the others and brings it to Walter. A quick run through the lab equipment shows that the candle contains some sort of cyanide compound. Walter suspects the deaths at the wedding were an experiment by the murderer to see if his toxin would work, and predicts that he will strike again soon. Sure enough, in a similar episode, nine people die in a coffee shop. The connection this time is that they all have brown eyes.

Back at the lab, Walter has isolated the toxin and shows how it can be set up to target different proteins, depending on who the murderer wants to kill. He points out a carbon chain on the toxin that he claims in the creator’s “signature.” When Peter remarks that it looks like a seahorse, Walter realizes that the poison was created by his own father who had been a scientist in Berlin until fleeing in 1943 (his nickname was “seahorse”). He has kept his father’s formulas in some old German books, Peter sold them ten years ago when Walter was in the asylum. It all turns out to be a red herring though, as they are not connected to the mysterious murderer.

Meanwhile, Walter has managed to get a partial DNA profile of the killer from skin cells left on a fingerprint. He claims that it’s a bad sample though, because the telomeres are severely damaged, suggesting that the person must be at least one hundred years old. The FBI is able to track down the chemicals used in the making of the toxin, and get the killer’s address. They search the house (poorly), but find nothing, as their target is at that very moment escaping from his lab in the basement. Eventually, Agent Dunham finds the basement lab, but the killer has set a trap for them, with some of the toxin specifically targeted to Walter. Luckily, Dunham and Peter get Walter to medical care in time, and he survives. A clue (found by Dunham even) tells the team that the killer has his sights set on a World Tolerance conference going on in Boston. Peter, Dunham, and the FBI head over to the conference to look for the killer. Walter stays behind, mixing up something in the lab, and then he heads over to the conference himself. Peters spots the poison and he and Dunham are able to confiscate it before it can be activated – but they are interrupted by a horrible coughing sound and rush over to find the killer, disguised as a waiter, gasping for breath and dying. Walter has turned the tables on him and made a version of the poison specifically tuned to his DNA. As the episode ends, Peter and Walter are still puzzled how the murderer got his hands on Walter’s father’s research, not realizing that the killer was a Nazi scientist himself, somehow still alive sixty years later.

1. Stay on Target
According to Walter, the toxin binds to a particular protein, and this protein can be altered depending on who the target. Unfortunately, the Nazi scientist’s poor understanding of molecular biology has doomed more people than he realizes. For instance, there is no protein specific to brown eyes. Brown eyes simply have more melanin than other eye colors — but the other eye colors still contain melanin. Everyone in that coffee shop, including the Nazi, should have died. Similarly, there is no special protein in dark skin that sets them apart — people with darker skin simply have more melanin than lighter skinned people. Trying to kill off the darker skinned people would have killed everyone — well, except the albinos. Good job, Nazi scientist. Now the albinos rule the world.
Suddenly, in a virtual deus ex machina, the toxin can be programmed with a specific DNA — even though Walter made it point, repeatedly, to mention that it was created before DNA was understood.
Even if the poison could target DNA, how are you going to get that big of a molecule into the nucleus of the cell, let alone through the cell membrane?

2. Those Who Do Not Know History…
Walter is off on his history: the discovery of DNA predated the Nazis, not the other way around. DNA was discovered in the middle of the 19th century, well before the Third Reich. By the 1920s, there was strong evidence that DNA was involved in inheritance, with the first definitive experiment performed in 1943. Walter is probably thinking of Watson and Crick’s famous work on the structure of DNA, which was published in 1953.

3. Sure Hope He Never Testifies in Court
The signs Walter mentions — petechiae, bulging eyes — are seen in asphyxia caused by strangulation (they are related to increased venous pressure in the head from the compression of the blood vessels in the neck), not by asphyxia due to toxin inhalation.
Can the vitreous humor, a gel-like liquid, really swell?

4. How Dare You Kill People With My Dad’s Poison!
Walter was upset that the murderer was “perverting” his father’s work, but let’s not forget that his father’s work was a nasty chemical warfare agent.

5. It Is Impolite To Inquire As To A Telomere’s Age
Telomeres are special DNA sequences on the ends of chromosomes that keep it from breaking down or fraying. There has been some good research suggesting a link between aging and the break down of telomeres. Still, it’s a dubious stretch to tell someone’s age from looking at their telomeres.

6. Nasty Poison
Hydrogen cyanide can kill remarkably fast, depending on its concentration.

6. Comes With A Certificate of Authenticity
That seahorse “signature” is so incredibly bulky and large that it would interfere with the biological activity of the toxin. Plus, it’s bad planning because it provides an easy target to identify and develop an antibody against.

7. Two Puffs Four Times A Day
A nit-pick here, but the groom sure has poor inhaler technique (but then, so do many of my patients — and a quick Google search reveals that much of the internet has a similarly poor understanding.) The inhaler should be held an inch or two in front of the mouth, not actually in the mouth.

The science was quite questionable this week, but I thought the story did a good job keeping the suspense going — and the Nazi scientist was truly creepy — so it’s a wash and the Doomsday Clock stays at 11:58.

Tags: television fringe toxin nazi cyanide

The plot of this episode of Fringe was, at best, so-so. They could have at least played up the “trapped in a building with a possible killer” angle. The science — and it’s generous calling it that — was painfully bad.

The Plot: In a large office building in Boston, a man walks into the office of a petroleum corporation, then drops dead, with his last breath spraying a fine mist of blood on all around him. Given the strange nature of the man’s death, the Fringe team is called in. Peter and Olivia arrive first and are interviewing bystanders. Walter, Broyles, and Astrid are on their way into the building, when one of the people exposed to the dead man’s blood comes walking toward the door, as fast as he can. Walter quickly shuts the door before the man can escape, and the man dies, spraying blood against the closed door. Fearful of an unknown contagious disease, the CDC is called in and the building quarantined — with Peter and Dunham still inside.

Some blood samples are obtained, and Walter takes them back to his lab. In the office building, the receptionist falls ill. Doing a little detective work, the team determines that the first dead man was a corporate spy from Dubai who was selling information on the peteroleum company’s competitors. The ill receptionist becomes frantic and violent. She scuffles with Peter, then jumps through a window, plummeting to the street below, dead. Unfortunately, Peter has been exposed to infected blood and now may be infected himself.

Inspecting the car of the corporate spy, the FBI and Center for Disease Control (CDC) find a core sample from 10 miles down that he was trying to sell. They also find the mysterious virus behind the outbreak contained within the core sample. Walter speculates it is 75,000 years old and was responsible for killing most of the mammals on Earth during the Ice Age (as opposed to the ice and cold). From this virus, Walter is able to concoct a test to determine who is infected and who isn’t. Walter believes that the virus has human-level intelligence and is purposefully acting to infect as many people as possible. He and Astrid enter the office building and test the staff. Most are not infected. Peter is showing signs of infection, but through sleight of hand, makes sure he has a negative test. The people who tested clean are escorted out of the building — except Peter. The guard at the door (a competent FBI agent at Fringe?) notices he has a nosebleed and keeps him in quarantine. In the end, eleven infected individuals remain in the building. Walter and Astrid also elect to stay.

Walter deduces that sulfur is a cure for the virus and relays the information to Dunham. Meanwhile, the CDC has called in the US Army to “take care of” the people remaining in the building. Dunham and Broyles ask for more time to synthesize Walter’s cure. Broyles suggests pumping the building full of Fentanyl gas (a strong narcotic) to knock everyone out and buy time. Dunham volunteers to enter the building and turn the HVAC back on. She scuffles with an infected Peter but succeeds in her mission. All the infected people are knocked out, Walter’s cure is made, and everyone (well, except for those already dead) survives.

It’s been a number of years since I’ve worked in a biochemistry or infectious disease lab, and I found the “science” in this episode totally appalling. I’m sure any actual infectious disease researcher or biochemist who watched the show had their television explode from the rays of frustration and hate their brains emitted. I’ll highlight a handful of items, but there are many more mistakes and plot holes that I didn’t have time to mention because I actually do have to get some sleep tonight.

1. I Give Him Credit For Trying
I applaud the bike messenger for attempting CPR (even if it was the 5 compression/1 breath technique that is not recommended anymore), but give it some time before you declare the guy dead. Ten compressions doesn’t cut it. At least continue the CPR until the EMTs arrive.

2. You Know What They Say About “Assume”
Walter believes the virus is transmitted by bodily fluids. How does he arrive at this conclusion? Certainly blood transmission seems probable, but how does he know about other bodily fluids? Is he surreptitiously testing saliva and semen?
He claims the virus is not airborne, or more people would be sick. How is he so sure about the incubation time? Maybe more people could be sick than he knows, they’re just not showing it yet. Sure, the bike messenger fell ill fast, but how do you know he was not exposed before (maybe the Dutch guy wasn’t patient zero), or maybe the messenger had a weakened immune system and succumbed faster than normal. Walter is making way too many assumptions.

3. Do You Even Know What You’re Testing For
There are way too many problems with Walter’s test.
Why the cheek swab? That’s used for DNA samples. Is he saying the virus can be found in the DNA of cheek cells?
Most viral tests look for antibodies against the virus — they’re a lot easier to develop. Of course, it usually takes several weeks for these antibodies to appear. There are some tests that look for the actual virus, but I don’t care how much of a genius Walter is, he couldn’t have cobbled one together so fast, or made enough of it to test the entire office building.
Most importantly, there was no prior testing to determine the false negative/false positive rate of Walter’s test. No test is 100% right all the time. They are risking everybody’s life on an unknown test.
Then Peter’s test was negative but he clearly was infected. We the viewers know he faked the test swab, but the characters don’t know that. Their first thought would have been: “Peter’s test was negative, but he has the disease. How many of these other people we let outside also had false negative tests?” And then they would have hustled them all back inside and left them there.

4. If Only My Labs In College Were This Easy
The scene in Walter’s lab was laughable.
No protective gear.
Isolating a virus in a test-tube using a centrifuge (and using it poorly) would never work. It’s not even close to being right.

5. Down In The Hole
Admittedly, I’m not a geologist, but how does 10 miles down equal 75,000 years. I would think it would be a lot more (years) than that.
The virus lived 75,000 years without a host — that’s impressive. Plus this virus can apparently be visualized without an electron microscope.

6. It’s A Gas
Fentanyl gas has been used at least once before to subdue a building full of people. In this case, it was a hostage situation in Russia with Chechnyan separatists. The Fentanyl didn’t work as well as expected and actually killed 117 hostages. In situations like that, it’s hard to control the inhaled dose — and Fentanyl can kill at the wrong dose. Plus, a fair number of people are allergic — fatally allergic — to narcotics.

7. Dire-Swine Flu?
Neuraminidase inhibitors are used to treat influenza viruses and … that’s about it. So this is a flu virus now

8. Eli Lilly Is Spinning In His Grave
In vivo does not equal in vitro. In other words, what works great in a test tube often doesn’t turn out to work so well in an actual living organism. If creating a new drug were as easy as Walter makes it out to be, we’d be neck deep in fancy new medications and the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be laying off people left and right.

9. Not So Smart, Is It?
If the virus really wanted to infect as many people as possible, why not infect the airplane instead of an office building? Those people would be in an airport and then other planes, not trapped in a building.

8. Nice Try, But…
The US Army is not authorized to act on US soil. National Guard, maybe.

9. Georgia On My Mind
I’m not sure of the actual powers of the CDC in a situation like this, but this seemed unrealistic to me. Their response was incredibly fast and a lot like a sledgehammer. I’m not saying the CDC isn’t fast — they are easily the best in the world at what they do — but they’re not that fast. And they actually do research, rather than just shoot people. Wait, was that a knock at the door?

I thought last week’s science was bad, but this was even worse. I have no choice but to move the Fringe Doomsday Clock forward two minutes to 11:58.

Tags: television fringe mutation virus infection cdc

Not the best episode of Fringe. The storyline was pretty cliche (the sheriff involved, really?) and the science was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Plot: A state trooper picks up a young boy running away from home. A few minutes later, he looks over at his passenger and discovers that the boy has suddenly become horribly deformed. The trooper arrives at the station and he and two coworkers photograph the child and enter him into their database. They all mention that they’ve heard rumors of deformities such as this, but never actually seen one. Suddenly, a car pulls up and three adults, all as deformed as the child, enter the station and kill all the troopers, reclaiming the boy.

The Fringe team is called in because of the picture of the deformed boy. Looking through other files at the station, the team finds thirty years worth of similar reports, though no actual evidence, all centered on the nearby town of Edina. Deciding that it’s their next logical stop, the team heads over to Edina where they meet the local sheriff. He tells them he’s also heard stories of deformed people nearby, but never seen one. He also identified the sound the team has heard since entering the town as the “Edina Hum” – which he blames on turbines at a nearby military base. Strangely, the hum causes Walter to start singing nonsense words to Bizet’s Carmen.

As the team heads out of town back to their hotel, they are run off the road by a pick up truck. Dunham was knocked out by the crash but Peter stayed conscious. Walter is blissfully asleep in the back seat. The pickup that ran them off the road comes back and a deformed men gets out and starts shooting at the wrecked car. Peter gets off a couple of shots, and actually thinks he hits the shooter, before he gets back in his truck and drives away. Other federal agents arrive and inform the team that they’ve found an abandoned truck that matches their description. Peter spots a blood trail leading into the woods, and they find a dead man –- but he’s not deformed at all. The corpse is sent to Walter’s lab for autopsy.

Agent Broyles tells the team that the nearby Army base was once home to classified experiments known as “Project Elephant” back in the ‘70s. Meanwhile, in Walter’s lab, when the body bag is opened, the corpse has become deformed once again. Walter continues to sing Carmen and Astrid realizes that the song is really a mnemonic for “Harkness,” which Walter recognizes as the name of the campus’s law library. Furthermore, he remembers that he did work on “Project Elephant” –- which dealt with camouflage — and hid some papers in the library, which he and Astrid successfully recover.

Peter and Dunham are going through the county and federal records on the town of Edina and realize that several key files are missing. The census date shows the town population has only changed by deaths and a few births — no one has moved in or out of town in the past thirty years. The town sheriff calls to tell Dunham that he has located the owner of the truck and wants Peter and Dunham to join him at the subject’s house. They agree, unaware that the sheriff is setting a trap for them.

Walter tells Astrid that the people of Edina are all hopelessly deformed because they lived too close to the military experiment. However, in order to help the people of Edina, one of the scientists built a giant transmitter that sends out powerful EM waves which fool the eyes into thinking what they see looks normal. Thus, as long as the residents stay within Edina and range of the transmitters, their deformities are hidden. When they leave town, their deformities can be seen again. Walter and Astrid find the transmitter and shut it off, proving his theory, as all the deformities are suddenly clear. Across town, the sheriff is not particularly good at his ambush and loses a few men, but he ultimately gets the drop on Peter and Dunham. Luckily, one of the town’s residents – sick of all the death of innocents – steps up and shoots the sheriff, saving the team. In the end, the transmitter is left on for the residents and it is decided that no one outside of the Fringe team and the residents will learn the truth about Edina.

1. The Eyes Have It
The eye does not act as a transmitter, sending through whatever the eye sees to the brain as if it were a fiber-optic cable. Instead, the receptors in the retina at the back of the eye are triggered by certain specific wavelengths of light, and when they’re triggered, a nerve impulse is sent to the visual areas of the brain. No extraneous information is transmitted. If a wavelength is not visible, it’s not visible, end of story.
So the EM wave is a low enough frequency to be heard as a deep hum, but still manages to affect the eye?

2. Are You Still Rose or Am I Hitting on Susan?
For the sake of argument, let’s say that the EM camouflage does work. How would it remain constant from person, to person, time to time? I see Rose as beautiful brunette instead of a Troma look alike. Does the person next to me see the same Rose as I do? If I leave town and then come back, does she still look the same to me?

3. A Window To the Soul (Kinda)
A Johari window is a cognitive tool that compares how we see ourselves with how others see us. It looks into four areas of personality: Arena (known to others and known to self), Façade (known to self but unknown to others), Blind Spot (known to others but not known to self), and “Unknown.”

4. God, that hand! The window! The window!
This is another episode this season (the third, I think) that had some definite Lovecraftian overtones, in this case “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, about an isolated town with a deformed populace and a hidden secret.

5. Not What I Expect To See In a Corpse
Frankly, I’d expect histolysis (tissue decay) to be present in any corpse, not just shapechangers.

6. A Generation Unexplained
A germline mutation would be inheritable, but it wouldn’t have a tremendous (really any visible) effect on those originally exposed to the mutagen. So Teddy would be visibly deformed, but if Walter is right, Rose shouldn’t be.

Painfully bad science this week, the Fringe Doomsday Clock advance to 11: 56 (ironically, the real Doomsday Clock was moved back a minute this week)

Tags: television fringe mutation camouflage science

This was a Fringe episode left over from Season One that had never been aired — and it wasn’t a particularly good episode, but better than some that were aired. There was at least one good plot twist.

The Plot: Lisa, a seventeen year old high school junior has been declared brain dead after a cerebral aneurysm. Her life support is shut off and she is declared officially dead before being wheeled into the operating room to harvest her organs for transplant. Once the operation has started, she suddenly sits up, alive, and screams out a series of code numbers. It turns out the code refers to a naval officer by the name of Andrew Rusk — and he has been reported missing. The Fringe team is called in to investigate.

Lisa denies ever having met Rusk, but when his name is mentioned, she speaks a phrase in Russian which translates to “my (or ‘little’) star.” Lisa has developed a fever and the doctors are watching her closely. Her mother tells Agent Dunham that she doesn’t want the team questioning Lisa anymore when Lisa suddenly screams from the bathroom — when looking in the mirror she has seen the image of Rusk standing behind her. Walter hypothesizes that Lisa’s aneurysm affected Broca’s area, a part of the brain which controls language — and according to Walter — also controls psychic ability.

A little while later, Lisa calls Agent Dunham, telling her that she still is still seeing Rusk. She is at a junkyard, because she saw the image of it in her mind. When the Fringe team finds her, she tells them that Rusk was shot there. Sure enough, a 9mm casing is found and a short time later, Rusk’s body is found. Lisa has a sudden seizure and is readmitted to the hospital.

Walter deduces that Rusk’s death and Lisa’s rebirth occurred simultaneously, and somehow this allowed her to pick up his memories. Lisa’s mother allows Lisa to be taken to Walter’s lab to purge the memories.

Meanwhile, Dunham finds out that Rusk used to call his wife the Russian phrase “my star.” She also finds out that he was exposed to high radiation doses in a shipboard accident and was given an experimental radiation inhibitor.

Back at the lab, Walter hooks Lisa up to an EEG, pumps her full of drugs, and the team discovers that she doesn’t just have some of Rusk’s memories — his entire consciousness is sharing her brain. Rusk’s personality emerges when the drugs put Lisa to sleep. He is able to give the team enough of a lead to track down his killer — a former Navy SEAL. When the suspect is questioned by the FBI he admits that he killed Rusk, but he did it because Rusk was a wife beater — Rusk’s wife hired him to kill her husband. He tells the team that he mentioned this fact to Rusk before shooting him.

Rusk is still in control of Lisa’s body, but by pretending to be Lisa, manages to sneak out of the lab. He goes to his house and grabs his gun. He confronts his wife, but she denies having anything to do with his murder. He ties her up and is getting ready to start a house fire when Peter arrives, with the rest of the team following a short time later. Peter talks to Lisa/Rusk enough to distract him so that Charlie can shoot him with a tranquilizer dart. Further testing in the lab reveals that only Lisa’s consciousness remains within her mind.

1. Breathe, Breathe In The Air. Since Lisa stopped breathing and died once the ventilator was stopped, why are they bagging her on the way to OR? (And if you want to argue that they are bagging her to provide oxygenated blood to her organs, then they also need to 1) give CPR, and 2) continue to bag her in the OR).

2. Infection Control, What’s That?
Lisa has enough of a fever to worry her doctor, but is discharged the next day — and immediately returns to school and church? Where lots of sick people are? (Assuming she goes to church on Sunday, it seems impossible for her to have made it back to school. By my calculation she would have been discharged late Friday at the earliest.).

3. Total Nit-Pick About Balloons
Hospitals are picky about which balloons are allowed. The ones is Lisa’s room are not allowed due to concerns about latex allergy.

4. I Wish All Surgeries Were That Easy
Abdominal surgeries, even on dead people, are not that easy. The renal artery is way in the back and all the intestines have to be moved out of the way before it can be reached.

5. Seize Her
That was one of the more unconvincing seizures I’ve ever seen.
Speaking of seizures, while I agree with the hospital doctor that in most cases the cause of seizures are never identified, I would not so cavalierly dismiss the idea that it was related to her aneurysm. She had a recent bleed in her brain, and blood is a very irritating substance — not to mention the swelling from the injury — which is enough to set off a seizure.

6. Too Many To Choose From
It was nice of Walter to put her on 100 mikes (micrograms) of a benzodiazepine, but it would help if he told Astrid which one to use. He typically has used Valium, but the doses he is giving fits Versed better.

7. Too Late To Matter
With a dose of 600-1000 REM, Rusk would have had the initial symptoms of radiation poisoning starting shortly after exposure (mostly nasty gastrointestinal ones). His bone marrow would be dead and he would require a bone marrow transplant to have any chance of survival (and for the record, only one person has ever survived that dose of radiation).
Once Rusk was removed from the reactor, he was no longer exposed to the radiation — and since he is not radioactive himself (radiation doesn’t work that way) — giving a radiation inhibitor at this point is useless, like closing the barn door after the horse has left. There is no radiation left to inhibit. The damage has already been done.

8. Quickdraw McGraw
Intramuscular medications (like the tranquilizer dart) do not take immediate effect. The medicine must be absorbed into the blood stream and spread throughout the body — or at least reach the brain) before it knocks the victim out.

9. Enough Already, George Michael
Scientifically-based faith (e.g. I have faith the sun will rise tomorrow) is a completely different concept than religious-based faith and the terms are not really interchangeable.

Since this is not a current episode, it’s not going to affect the Doomsday clock — which is a good thing for the show.

Tags: television fringe brain psychic possession

I liked the plot of this week’s episode of Fringe — at least for the first two thirds (until Walter was captured, when it started going downhill) — but the “science” and “medicine” was ridiculous.

The Plot: Mysterious men break into a mental health facility and perform some sort of brain operation on one of the patients. They remove some sort of foreign tissue from his brain, but are disturbed before they can finish the operation, so the patient is left with part of his brain exposed. Strangely, the patient has also been completely cured of his schizophrenia.

The Fringe team is called in and it is clear that Walter is uncomfortable with being back in a mental health institution. The security tapes manage to capture the face of the intruders’ leader, and Olivia recognizes him instantly. It was one of the frozen heads that was stolen earlier in the season and belongs to a man named “Newton.”

Looking through the patient’s medical records, Walter finds reference to a mysterious psychiatrist by the name of “Paris.” Astrid can find no records of the mysterious doctor, but with Walter’s help, is able to track down some prescriptions he wrote. They find two other institutionalized patients with prescriptions from Dr. Paris. Visiting these patients, they find that they have also been recently miraculously cured of various psychiatric diseases and show evidence of recent brain surgery. Walter recognizes that one of the drugs they’ve been given is used to prevent tissue rejection in organ transplant patients. He then realizes that the patient’s brains had been used to store the tissue from someone else’s brain.

The team is informed that Walter’s old mental health records show that Dr. Paris visited him six times while he was in the asylum — visits which Walter does not remember. Peter check’s Walter’s scalp and, sure enough, there’s an old surgical scar. An MRI of Walter’s brain is obtained and it shows three missing sections of brain — missing sections that perfectly match the pieces implanted in the other patients. Someone has removed part of Walter’s hippocampus (important in memory storage) and placed it in other people’s brains. And now someone has taken these pieces back.

Meanwhile, Walter has been captured by the Newton and his cohorts. They hook him up through some sort of contraption to the missing pieces of his brain. Once the connection is made, Walter seems suddenly awake for the first time since the show began. Newton is able to get Walter to tell him how to make a door to the other universe. He then injects Walter with some sort of drug before high-tailing it just before Dunham and the rest of the team arrive. While Peter helps Walter, Olivia chases after the bad guys. She manages to shoot the driver of their van (who bleeds silver — one of the shapeshifters), and then the second man (regular blood). Newton is captured — but only for a moment — because he tells Dunham that Walter has been given a neurotoxin, and he’ll only tell her how to administer the antidote after he is allowed to escape. Dunham acquiesces and Walter survives, but she is chided by Newton for her “weakness.”

In a final flashback, we see that the mysterious Dr Paris was actually William Bell and Walter’s brain surgery was done — apparently with Walter’s consent — to remove the knowledge of how to open the cross-dimensional door from his brain and store it someplace “safe.”

1. Lost ‘em Again
That tracking chip didn’t last long, did it?

2. “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!”
There were a couple of H.P. Lovecraft references this week (purposefully?)
Dr. West (as in Herbert West, Reanimator)
Dunwich Mental Health Facility (as in The Dunwich Horror)

3. Department of Redundancy Department
“Global destruction of biblical proportions.” That’s ridiculously redundant — global destruction, by definition, is of biblical proportions.

4. The AMA Does Not Do What You Seem To Think It Does
A common mistake, but an irritating one. The American Medical Association is really nothing more than a professional organization for doctors, like a union or lobbying group. It has no official sanction. It is not in charge of medical licensing, and keeps no “official list of doctors.” Depending on which source you use, only 15-30% of the physicians in this country are members of the AMA, so someone not being on their roster is no proof that they’re not a doctor or don’t exist. [I've blogged about this several times before, most recently here, in relation to the Beast and Dr. Mid-Nite.]

5. But I Asked For Infinite Refills
You cannot write an “indefinite prescription.” One-year, maximum.

6. I Reject Your Rejection
The four drugs listed on the patient records (Sirolimus, Muromonab CD3, Basiliximab, Azathioprine) are used to prevent rejection in organ transplant patients.
You would think that in their years in the asylum, at least one doctor or nurse would realize the drugs make no sense.

7. Bad Radiology
Those spots on the patients’ brain MRIs were way too big to be thought of as artifacts. The brain tissue was large enough that it would show up on multiple MRI slices (images).
No radiologist ever noticed the three holes in Walter’s brain before?

8. Respiratory Depression and Death
Tolerance or no, 50MG of Valium is one helluva dose. That’s two-and-one-half times the maximum daily dose of Valium.
Dr. West is either extremely trusting or extremely naïve to give that much Valium to Walter just on his say so, especially when it’s clear that Walter is not all there.

9. It’s Not a Two-Dimensional Jigsaw Puzzle
The brain is three-dimensional. The tissue cut out was three-dimension. It was inserted into people’s brains (crammed in, basically, because there was no “slot” to put it in), but somehow manages to show up on a two-dimensional MRI as a perfect fit, like a jigsaw puzzle piece. There was no way they could fit the extra piece in the brain so precisely at just the right point and at just the right angle for this to be true. [A similar problem occurred in the infamous autopsy scene in Identity Crisis #6, where Dr. Mid-Nite managed to find just the right slice to find perfect footprints in the brain.]

Good plot but goofy science cancel each other out. The Doomsday Clock stays at 11:55

Tags: television fringe brain schizophrenia door

This week’s episode of Fringe was fairly creepy, and the science wasn’t all that bad

The Plot: A boat from Hong Kong has run aground in the harbor and dozens of illegal Chinese immigrants have washed up on the shore, dead. It turns out it wasn’t the water or cold that killed them, but giant tentacled parasite worms lodged in their gastrointestinal tracts. The Fringe team is called in. One of the immigrants, Mai Lin, managed to survive. She tells the team that all her fellow immigrants were given a strange capsule to treat sea-sickness, but since she was raised in a fishing village and never got sea sick, she didn’t take it. The team suspects these capsules contained the larvae for the giant worms. She tearfully tells the team that her husband and daughter are on the next boat arriving in few days.

The immigrant smugglers are tied to a local Triad gang best known for smuggling and selling illegal drugs. The team initially surmises that the worms secrete some form of opiate, and this is why they’re being smuggled. After being bitten himself, Walter realizes that the worms produce a powerful immune boosting agent. Walter does some research and discovers that the worms are genetically modified Ancylostoma duodenale (hookworm), an intestinal parasite used in traditional Chinese medicine. The genetically modified versions make an immune boosting agent that is stored in their lymph glands.

Some financial documents tie a local woman to the one of the Triad’s front. She tells Agent Dunham that she has no knowledge of any illegal activity and only invested the money where her financial adviser suggested. Peter notices that her house has a surprising number of air filters and hermetically-sealed windows. Once the team learns about the immune-boosting aspect of the worm, they realize this woman knows more than she is telling. This time, Peter approaches her son who tells him that he has a rare immune deficiency. He receives a special monthly treatment of worm-powder delivered surgically, directly into his spleen.

Walter, with some reluctant help from Astrid, heads off to Chinatown to find a herbalist that sells Ancylostoma that is genetically similar to the giant worm. He finds several shops that sell the worms, and inadvertently discloses to one of the shop owners — the wrong one, of course — that he has a giant worm back at the lab. The Triad follow Astrid back to the lab, beat her up, and steal the parasite.

The ship carrying Mai Lin’s family is found and boarded, but it is too late — all the immigrants have already been carted off. Luckily, Peter is spying on the shop in Chinatown where they have been taken. He calls Agent Dunham then decides to do some investigating of his own. He breaks in to the shop and is in the process of freeing one of the immigrants when he is captured. The Triad and their crooked doctor are force feeding Peter one of the larva when the FBI team arrives, just in the nick of time. The villains are shot or captured, Peter is saved, the immigrants are taken to the hospital where they are treated, and everything ends happily.

(Oh, and Walter implanted a tracking chip in his neck.)

Overall, the science — what little there was of it — was passable this episode, so I just have a few nit-picks an observations:

1. As the Worm Turns
Nematodes such as Ancylostoma are too primitive an organism to have a lymphatic system. They don’t even have a circulatory system.
Admittedly, these are “genetically engineered” hookworms, and for a worm to grow as large as those shown, thanks to the square-cube law and other similar concepts, they would have to have some sort of circulatory system.
In the actual worms, the many-tentacled end is the tail, not the head.

2. Glad I Don’t Have to Take Them Out
Matt’s staples should have been removed long ago. He was 3 ½ weeks out from his surgery. By this far out, the incision is healed with 80-90% strength. Leaving in staples or stitches that long serves no purpose, is going to lead to train-track scarring, possible stitch abscesses, and skin-growth around the staples.
Open abdominal surgery is to be avoided whenever possible, especially in immune compromised individuals. Why not just inject the powder into the spleen?
Credit-Where-Credit-Is-Due Dept: That is where an incision for splenic surgery would be made.

3. High is Not Always Better
A high white blood count is a sign of infection (or leukemia, not the sign of a healthy immune system).

4. Ahhh, Just Right
I was starting to have concerns with Walter’s mention of “boosting the immune system” — a common alternative medicine/quackery claim. In reality, the human immune system is finely tuned: too little leaves you open for infection; too much and you get allergy problems and autoimmune disease. If all the alternative “medicine” boosted the immune system like it was claimed, we’d have an epidemic of autoimmune problems in this country. I’ll give the episode credit for having the medication be used by immune-compromised patients — a proper use.

5. What Does the FBI Teach These People?
Walter’s about as good an investigator as Olivia — that is, very bad. The logic of his whole “find a matching worm” plan had more holes than Swiss cheese (though this is Walter we’re talking about). For instance, who’s to say the various different herbalist shops didn’t all use the same importer of worms — which they probably did — so the worms from the various shops would be identical.
And Peter’s not any better. Why would he think breaking into a shop owned by the Triad — known for their brutality — would be a good idea at all?

5. Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!
The song Walter was singing was “The Menagerie“, which was also mentioned in the first season (episode 16, Unleashed).

While there was some errors of scientific-concerned, most of them were minor and could be hand-waved area. Thus, for the second week in a row, there is a one-minute improvement on the Doomsday Clock.

Tags: television fringe parasite ancylostoma worm

A fairly light episode of Fringe, but an enjoyable one

The Plot:The Observer is patiently standing in front of a museum in Boston, taking notes, and spying on brunettes. After a few minutes, he finds the one he wants, grabs her, throws her in the back of a stolen car and drives off. Arriving at an out of town motel, he gags her and ties her to a chair, and then leaves.

With the Observer involved, the Fringe team is called in. The kidnap victim is identified as Christine Hollis, and seems to be an entirely normal young woman. They review the surveillance camera footage and realize that this is a different Observer than the one they first met. It turns out that the Observer accidentally left his notebook behind, so it’s turned over to the team; however, they are unable to decipher the code/language in the book. Astrid identifies over 1200 different symbols, without any repeats. Looking online, she discovers that one of the researchers at Massive Dynamics is also interested in the code. He has not been able to solve it either, but he has documented evidence of Observers at important historical events including the Boston Massacre, the beheading of Marie Antoinette, and the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand. Peter finds a drop of what appears to be blood in the Observer’s journal. Walter notes its orange cast and wonders if the Observer might not have hemophilia.

At a restaurant across town, a group of three Observers are meeting to discuss the actions of the rogue Observer, whom they call “August”. They mention a plane flight and imply that Christine is supposed to be dead, so they send an assassin after her.

August returns to the hotel room, unties Christine, and shows her the television news, which reports that the flight she had booked to Rome crashed en route with no survivors.

The labs tests come back and the drop in the journal wasn’t blood, but hot pepper sauce — and sauce from a particular hot pepper: the King Cobra Chili. Astrid is able to find the address of the individual who imported some last year, so Olivia and Peter head over to check it out. As luck would have it, the Observers’ assassin is there at the same time. There are some fisticuffs and Peter sustains a small wound, but the assassin escapes.

August meets with the other Observers. They tell him that Christine must be killed to set things right. This is not what he wants to hear. He manages to set up a meeting with Walter, asking for his help. All Walter can tell him is that he must somehow make Christine important to the Observers, so they won’t kill her.

August returns to the hotel room and unties Christine. He tells her that she must do exactly as he says. A short time later, the assassin appears at the hotel and in the ensuing battle, August is shot and critically wounded. Olivia and Peter arrive, and August gives his gun to Peter. Together, Peter and Olivia are able to kill the assassin. They find Christine and return her home.

The first Observer picks up August and drives him away from the hotel. As August lies dying in the back, he tells the other Observer that he had developed “feelings” for Christine, even loved her — and that is why he saved her. The first Observer tells August that she is safe now because she is responsible for the death of an Observer, and that makes her important.

Overall, the science — what little there was of it — was passable this episode, so I just have a few nit-picks an observations:

1. Hot, Hot, Hot
The King Cobra Chile is the hottest chile known to man, scoring 850,000 to 1,000,000 Scoville units. It is also known as the “ghost chile”, which should be familiar to you if you watch Man v. Food.

2. 15% Tip
Why would it be a surprise that the tip about August was called in from the same hotel? Would it really be a shock that one of the other guests, or an employee, saw him and phoned it in?

3. Color of Love
This is the first I’ve ever heard of hemophiliacs having orange blood, and I don’t buy it. Hemophilia affects the clotting of the blood, not the hemoglobin (which is what gives blood its red color), so why would the blood be a different color?

4. You Go That Way, I’ll Go This Way
I would not want to be Olivia’s insurance agent, and I hate for her to be my backup. Tonight she: 1) was easily distracted by the assassin, 2) nearly shot Peter, and 3) only avoided being shot by the assassin due to dumb luck and Peter.

A much better episode this week. The show does much better when they stick with the Pattern. There is a one-minute improvement on the Doomsday Clock.

Tags: television fringe observer hemophilia scoville

An incredibly mediocre show that didn’t meet a cliche it didn’t like (except, unfortunately, the psychic nosebleed). Sorry if the write up seems brief, but I’m really having a hard time caring about this show recently.

The Plot:The police are called for a kidnapping/hostage situation at the top of a parking garage where two guys are holding a teen hostage in a car. When the police arrive, they order the men out of the car. The duo get out of the car and then strange things begin to happen: one cop backs up and throws himself off the garage, while his partner shoots the other cops and then herself. The two guys get back in the car and drive off with the kid.

The Fringe team is called in to evaluate the case. Walter suspects that there is hypnotism of subliminal messages involved. The team heads to Massive Dynamic because the kidnapped boy is the son of one of their top aerospace researchers. By now, the two guys in the car have been identified as two local used car salesmen who had been upstanding citizens until now. The kidnappers and teen stop by a convenience store and ob it. A burly customer tries to intervene, but suddenly he is pouring scalding coffee over his head and the breaking the carafe over it. The cashier tries to shoot the men, but finds himself picking up a key and inserting it into an outlet and shocking himself unconscious.

Walter has been performing an autopsy on the cop who shot the other cops and deduces that it was not hypnosis, but instead mind control. He makes his deduction based on the fact that there are hematomas (pockets of leaked blood) on the surface of the brain, suggesting some mind/body conflict. He then infers — for no good or logical reason — that this mind control must be done via the cochlear (hearing) nerve.

A call comes in from the kidnappers demanding two million dollars. Meanwhile, Walter has concocted white noise headphones for the FBI troops to wear in the field which should block out any mind control. At an abandoned factory, the teen’s father hands over a briefcase of money to the kidnapper, who then runs into a nearby building. Agent Dunham follows. Meanwhile, Peter sees someone else running with the briefcase and follows, only to find the teen, Tyler, holding the briefcase. It turns out Tyler’s the one with mind control and the others were nothing but patsies. Unfortunately, Peter’s white noise headphones don’t protect him and Tyler orders him to drive the two of them out of town in the Bishop family roadster.

Peter tries to rebel, but Tyler forces him to drive the car as fast as it can go and plays chicken with a truck before Peter agrees to behave. A little while later, they are pulled over by a policeman. Tyler wants Peter to shoot the cop, but in the end, he lets Peter just knock him unconscious. Finally, Tyler and Peter arrive at his mother’s house (by way of a strip club), where Tyler finally gets to meet the goal of his quest — his mother. He believes that his father had driven her away and lied to him about her, but that turns out not to be the case, and when he learns she is married he has Peter pull out a gun and point it at her husband. Luckily, Agent Broyles arrives and shoots Tyler with a taser — but it’s a bad shot. Tyler has Peter shoot Broyles, and then he and Peter hop back in the family roadster and take off. Agent Dunham, Astrid and Walter are following close behind, and when they get near off, Walter activates the EMP device he has been working on. It knocks Tyler out for a split second, and that’s enough for Peter to realize what is going on and drive into a telephone pole. He survives with a mild concussion, but Tyler is knocked unconscious and captured.

1. Watching Too Many B-Movies, and Now I Need Some Popcorn
Walter’s original suggestions were nonsense. As Peter pointed out, hypnosis doesn’t work like that — and subliminal messages don’t work at all.

2. La La La! I Can’t Hear You!
Why go through all the elaborate set up of the white noise headphones instead of just using ear plugs?

3. Bleeding On The Brain
Hematomas don’t form with brain/body conflict. There are certainly medical conditions with conflict between mind and body — somatization comes to mind — but none of them cause hematomas. You could argue that the straining led to an increased blood pressure which popped the vessels, but high blood pressure related bleeds occur within the brain, not on the outside.
That was a surprisingly intact brain for someone who received a bullet at point black range.

4. On the AM Radio
Why amplify the brain waves — that should have been the team’s first realization that something wasn’t kosher — why not just make better sensors?
Amplifying the brain waves means that you are increasing the voltage within the brain itself, which is wonderful way of setting off a seizure.

5. It’s Better Than The 10% Cliche, But Just Barely
Brains are not computers. Whenever someone uses this analogy, it’s a safe bet that they don’t understand brains or computers
Having Tyler’s mother actually be a surrogate was a fairly clever twist — really the only one in an episode thick with clichés — but how does the doctor raise all five Tylers? Are they frozen until needed? Does he spend one day of the week with each one?

6. The Blind Leading the Blind
Geez, Olivia is a bad detective. She already knows Tyler’s mother died when he was young, and then can’t figure out why he’s looking at records of women who died in car crashes fourteen years before.

7. Crime And (Lack of) Punishment
Why would Tyler get off with just seeing some psychiatrists? That makes no sense at all, especially the way they explain it. He was directly involved in the murder of five people, the maiming of three others, and at least three attempted murders. He’s fifteen — old enough to be tried as an adult.

Why exactly am I still watching this show? I’m sure I have much better things to do.

Tags: television medicine fringe mind control hypnosis subliminal

Could have been a contender, but was KO’d by bad science and too many clichés

The Plot: A married man in Boston mysteriously turns to ash while waiting to spring an anniversary surprise on his wife. The Fringe team is called in to investigate. Broyles tells Dunham that he’s seen this before — there were five similar deaths several years ago at a hospital in Washington DC. He tells her he was contacted by an “Eastern European” man who provided a strange formula to him and indicated it was the solution to the deaths. Unfortunately, none of the FBI’s scientists could decipher the formula several more deaths occurred before they suddenly stopped — until now.

Dunham digs a little deeper and finds that the victim had recently been visiting his sick mother at a hospital. The Fringe team stakes out the hospital, trying to find a link between this hospital and the one four years ago in DC. They find a critical care nurse named Tomas Koslov who has worked at both institutions. Meanwhile, another ash-death has occurred on the in the hospital. A review of the hospital’s surveillance tapes show a strange being made entirely of shadow moving down the hall right before the death was discovered.

The team locates and searches Koslov’s apartment but discover he has abandoned it. They are able to find a fingerprint. When they run the fingerprint they find that their suspect is man by the name of Timur Vasaleiv who is wanted by both the CIA and the Russians because he stole something important from Russia. Broyles is told that the CIA will be taking over the case, but he decides to keep his team on it anyway. A contact at the Senate sends him Timur’s file. It turns out that his brother Aleks was a cosmonaut who returned comatose from a space mission, and it is his brother that Timur has stolen from a special Russian quarantine facility. He has been keeping him in various American hospitals while posing as an ICU nurse.

Walter has been working on the formula and realizes that it represents an organism that seems to feed on radiation. The hospital patients died because they all had been undergoing radiation treatment, and the husband died because he had been on a recent cross country flight (where he had been exposed to higher than normal levels of background radiation).

Timur returns to the hospital and takes his comatose brother out of the ICU and to a hotel. The shadow tries to emerge, but using a series of car batteries, Timur shocks his brother enough that the shadow retreats. He also knocks his brother into asystole (flatline), but after a few moments, a normal heartbeat returns.

Confident that Walter can crack the formula, Agent Broyles reaches out to Timur and offers his help. Timur is trying to decide whether to take Broyles assistance when he slowly turns to ash — the shadow is loose. The FBI arrives to find the comatose cosmonaut and the dead Timur. Peter thinks Walter can shock Aleks to make the shadow return, but Walter cannot read the equipment as it is all in Russian. When they hear a young girl scream from another motel room, Broyles takes unhesitating action and shoots Aleks in the head, killing him. The girl tells her mother that there was a shadow man in the room, but he disappeared. Later, when the CIA approaches Broyles to warn him off their case, they tell him that despite being shot in the head, Aleks returned to life, and they apparently sent him back into space.

1. Glow In the Dark
There is a major misunderstanding of radiation here. While the victims had all been recently exposed to radiation, but they were not radioactive themselves. There was no “high levels” of radiation for the shadow to detect, let alone feed off of.

2. Feed Me, Seymour
What had the shadow been feeding off of for the past four years, after DC but before the husband died?

3. I See You
There is no way a patient is going to sit for four years in a hospital ICU like Aleks apparently did.
ICU beds are incredibly expensive. The hospital billing department would have been on the phone to his insurance company as soon as he was admitted. No insurance? While they wouldn’t have kicked him out (unless he was medically stable and had a place to go), they would have been looking at the records very closely.
If someone is in a permanent coma, they would be transferred to a rehabilitation hospital or a nursing home as soon as they were medically stable. They wouldn’t keep them in a regular hospital ICU indefinitely.
How did he get him admitted to each new ICU? ICU transfers are very irregular unless one is going from a less-equipped hospital to a better-equipped one, and that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

4. Eleven Herbs and Spices
In my brief look at the formula, there seemed to be a number of carbon atoms with more than 4 bonds. I admit that Ionly had two years of Organic Chemistry, but that seems quite unlikely to me.

5. Blackjack
Your Osama Tezuka link for the day: the little girl was watching Kimba, the White Lion.

The plot line had potential, but was dragged down by too much bad science, reliance of clichés, and deep piles of nonsense they didn’t even try to explain away. The clock moves closer to midnight.

UPDATE: And I should mention that I’m already dreading next week’s show, just based on the preview, where they mention the completely debunked “most people only use 10% of their brain” myth as if it were fact.

Tags: television medicine fringe sleep coma ash formula radiation

The science, while a little sketchy, wasn’t half-bad in this episode of Fringe. Despite this, I found the story itself rather lackluster.

The Plot:In Seattle, Greg, a businessman, walks through his office, late for a meeting with his boss. As he moves through the office, he notices that everyone he sees has the heads of demons rather than their proper heads. When he enters the conference room, he sees that his boss is also a demon, so he bludgeons him to death with his briefcase. The co-workers who wrestle Greg to the ground notice that his eyes are cloudy and twitching.

The Fringe team is called to Seattle to evaluate the case. They interview Greg at the hospital and he tells them what he saw in the office. Suddenly, he begins thrashing wildly in bed, his hair turns completely white, and he collapses, dead. Walter assists that local medical examiner with the autopsy and determines that Greg died of “acute exhaustion.” He arranges for the body to be sent to his lab at Harvard for a more complete, Walter style, autopsy.

Talking with Greg’s wife, Dunham and Peter learn that he had a history of sleep walking, but it hadn’t been a problem for several months since visiting some specialists.

A second incident has occurred: a woman driving a mini-van told her husband she saw a monster and drove her car into an innocent cyclist. She died at the scene and was found to have the same white hair Greg did.

Back in his lab, Walter finds a microchip implanted in Greg’s midbrain. A quick look at the body of the second victim shows an incision on the neck suggesting she had the same operation. Broyles takes the microchip to Nina Sharp at Massive Dynamics who identifies it as a chip designed to work on the thalamus to promote sleep. She identifies its creator as a Dr. Nayak, also in Seattle.

Dunham and Peter pay Dr. Nayak a visit. He identifies both victims as patients of his who are taking part in a clinical study on the brain chip. He takes Dunham and Peter to his office only to finf there has been a break-in. Nayak’s office has been trashed and the computers containing all the patient data are missing.

Walter and Peter hypothesize that someone is using the chips as a rudimentary form of mind control. Meanwhile, in a dark room, we see shadowy someone access the clinic’s computers and select a patient — a waitress at a local Greek restaurant. Soon she begins hallucinating before attacking the chef and then collapsing, dead. Nayak identifies her as one of his patients as well.

Back on the east coast, Walter has been experimenting with the chip and discovers that it siphons the patient’s dreams away so that they never dream. The chips can also be used to place the patient in a dreaming state while awake. Finally, he discovers that whoever is on the receiving end of the chip gets an incredible high from the stolen dreams. Olivia realizes that they are looking for someone addicted to the dreams. A brief amount of detective works reveal that Dr. Nayak himself is the perpetrator. He has a dream-addicted dark side that is causing all the problems. They track him to his home just as he is using his machine to activate the chip in an airline pilot’s head. Dunham destroys the computer, saving the pilot (and his crew and passengers), but killing Dr. Nayak in the process.

Overall this week, I felt the science was not entirely implausible, a step up from the usual. So most of what follows are probably best regarded as “nit-picks”

1. Wherein I Make Some Concessions
I agree that exhaustion/stress can cause high cortisone levels and dehydration. For the sake of the story, I will also accept that it can cause sudden loss of hair pigment (a la Jean Valjean) and thyroid disorders. However, I am at a loss to explain how it can cause the sudden appearance of large patches of thickened flaking skin. Sure, dehydration and low thyroid can cause skin problems, but it is the entire skin, not just large discrete patches.

2. We Solve the Problem by Breaking the Space-Time Continuum
Let me get this straight: the brain chip is used to correct non-REM sleep disorders. It does this by siphoning off dreams. Now, dreams generally occur in REM sleep, which comes after non-REM sleep. So the chips fix the sleep by removing something that hasn’t even occurred yet.

3. Department of Redundancy Department
“Blood CBC” is hopelessly redundant. CBC stands for complete blood count, so a blood CBC is a blood complete blood count.
A CBC looks at the blood cells (white, red, platelets). It doesn’t look at hormones like thyroxine and cortisol, that’s a different test entirely.

4. OMG, n00b
Yes hackers steal passwords. They also mount DDOS attacks, but these are two separate things. Claiming the lack of DDOS attack means that a hacker couldn’t be involved means the FBI (or the Fringe writers) need much better forensic computer experts. (And what would a DDOS attack against a single clinic server accomplish, anyway?)

5. It’s Not Brain Surgery — Wait, Maybe It Is
The thalamus is located deep in the center of the brain. Any surgery to reach it, let alone implant a chip in it, is going to be a major undertaking — a hole in the skull needs to made after all — and wouldn’t be performed as an outpatient clinic procedure.
The thalamus is part of the diencephalon, making it forebrain, not midbrain.
And good luck getting the clinical trial approved by the IRB.

6. Your Suspicions Are Suspicious
Hearing that one of his employees was suspected, one would think that Dr. Nayak would have volunteered the information about his assistant being missing earlier in the day, rather than waiting until the end of it (or was that the effect of Hyde-Nayak?).

7. A Shot In The Dark
Peter, Dunham and the other FBI agent can’t find an on/off switch or a plug or a circuit breaker between the three of them? So the next logical step is shooting the server?

It’s the reverse of last week. This time, I found the science acceptable, but the story tepid — so they cancel out and the clock stays at 11:55

A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.

Tags: television medicine fringe sleep rem hacker adrenalin

An exciting episode of Fringe that did a nice job advancing the overall plot. The action and suspense were well done, but the medicine was rather abysmal.

The Plot: A cryogenic storage facility is robbed and a truckload of frozen human heads is stolen. Four security officers are killed in the robbery — well, actually it’s three officers killed and one shape shifter. The Fringe team is called after the last corpse is found bleeding a silver colored liquid. While Walter inspects the corpse, Peter mentions that this is the third cryogenic facility robbed in the last week, and every time, only human heads are stolen.

Back at the lab, Walter has Agent Dunham drink a concoction of ground up flatworms to help restore her memory of her time on the parallel Earth. It seems to work as she begins to have brief flashbacks as the episode progresses.

Walter finishes the autopsy and discovers that the shape shifters’ blood is 47% mercury. He realizes that there was only trace mercury in the previous body they thought had been a shape shifter (the Nurse from the first episode), so that means the shape shifter who tried to kill Olivia is still out there.

Walter and Peter to hunt down Rebecca, the girl from the ESP video (first episode again), to see if she can still detect the shape shifters with her psychic powers. She tells them her powers faded a few years ago, but she agrees to repeat the experiment to see if her powers will return. She returns to the lab and is dosed with a variety of hallucinogens.

Meanwhile, Agent Dunham takes the device found on the dead shape shifter to the lab at Massive Dynamics. They tell her they can use the new device to repair the damaged device from the first shape shifter and will be able to generate an image of who he is disguised as now. They’ll have the results sent to Walter’s lab and Olivia’s phone.

Back at the lab, Dunam collapses and has an extended flashback to her time in the other universe. She remembers William Bell telling here that there is a war coming and he needs her to guard the gate between the two worlds. He tells her the shape shifters are looking for a certain person — a leader who can open the gate — and that’s why they’re after the frozen heads; one of them is the leader. Later, when Dunham is telling Nina Sharp of her recovered memories, Charlie calls to inform her that Nina is the shape shifter. She all but runs out of the building and encounters Charlie outside. Just then, her phone rings and sends her the results from the device that reveal that it is Charlie who is the shape shifter. There is a brutal fight, and at the end, Dunham shoots him, repeatedly. And then she learns that the other shape shifters have found their leader. This is what we call a downer ending.

1. The Worm Turns
Ah, the famed planarian experiments from the 1950s. A “scientist” trained some of the flatworms to run a maze. He then killed them and fed their remains to a second group of flatworms. This second batch of flatworms was found to be able to run the maze faster, suggested that they had gained the memories of the worms they ate. This experiment was actually featured in one of the greatest comic books of all time (Saga of the Swamp Thing #21 — “The Anatomy Lesson”). Trouble is, it’s not true. While the story of the experiment persists as a myth/urban legend, few actual scientists believe the results are valid. Over the intervening fifty years, no one has been able to duplicate the results despite repeated attempts. The current suspicion is that the positive results of the initial experiment were due to either observer bias (the tests weren’t double blinded), or the fact that the worms were following the slime trails left by the initial batch of worms.
Even if the experimental results were valid, why would that apply here? By drinking all the flatworms, shouldn’t Olivia have gained flatworm memories, not her own?

2. The Medicine Cabient
Salvia – a native Mexican plant with hallucinatory and dissociative properties. Currently legal in the U.S., but maybe not for long.
Phenothiazine - medically, it refers to a class of antipsychotic drugs derived from the chemical phenothiazine. The chemical itself isn’t really used in medicine, but is used as a dye, insecticide, and livestock dewormer.
Valium – a benzodiazepine. A relaxant and sedative. Addictive.

3. A Bad Resuscitation
How is turning Olivia’s head to the side going to open her airway?
Nitroglycerin relaxes blood vessels and drops the blood pressure. How’s that going to help Olivia?
30cc is a large amount of medication to give. If oral, that’s a shot-glass full of liquid to get down an unconscious person. If intravenous or intramuscular, that’s a hell of a lot to get in. Most IV or IM medications are 1cc or less.
I know I’ve mentioned this before several times (including a previous episode of Fringe), but despite what you’ve seen on Pulp Fiction, shooting adrenalin into the heart is a bad idea. It’s a blind stick and you could easily miss the heart, or worse, rupture one of the coronary arteries and cause a heart attack. There are other options for giving adrenalin: inject it into a blood vessel, or squirt it down the throat.

The story was good, but the medicine was bad, so it’s a wash and the Doomsday Clock stays at five ’til midnight

UPDATE: Oh look, I’ve made a Fringe landing page. It’s plain now, but I’ll fancy it up soon.

I found this the best episode of the season, so far, and one of the better ones overall. There were certainly scientific mistakes, but it was nice to see some of the “police procedural” scenes well done, fo once

The Plot:Officer Gillespie, a policeman in Philadelphia receives a mysterious phone call from the “Colonel” and is told to head to a nearby subway station and stop a man in a black trenchcoat with a black briefcase. When the officer spots the suspect and tries to grab the suitcase, he suddenly begins to crystalize. Gillespie screams in pain, then explodes, killing all around him

The Fringe Team is called in to evaluate the Philadelphia explosion because no evidence of any explosive material can be found. Poking around, Walter finds some crystallized parts of Office Gillespie, and realizes that it was the officer that exploded. He takes the bodies back to the lab for autopsy. As he pieces the crystallized officer back together, he finds needle marks between the toes — Gillespie had been injecting himself with some unknown medication.

Meanwhile, Peter takes the subway station surveillance tapes to one of his contacts, because the tapes all were strangely full of static. Peter’s friend is able to remove a little of the static but not much, so what led up to the explosion of Gillespie remains unclear. His friend speculates radio wave interference caused the static. Later, Peter and Dunham are talking to the officer’s widow when Dunham stumbles across a hidden case consisting of a syringe and a strange injectable medicine.

Across the country, Captain Burgess, once a military officer, now a suburban housewife, is seen injecting herself with the same medication. Later that day, the Colonel appears and tells her she is needed on a mission to Washington D.C. He provides her with airline tickets and hotel reservations.

Dunham and Peter discover that the Gillespie was part of an experimental medical program while he was stationed in Iraq. They travel to Iraq and track down one of the doctors who worked on the program, which was developed to produce an antidote to the chemical agent cyanogen chloride. The experiments weren’t very successful — only four out of 200 patients survived. Plus there was another unfortunate side effect: the serum turned the users into human bombs if they were exposed to a certain radio frequency.

Back in the United States, Broyles in charge of taskforce put together to capture Captain Burgess and the Colonel. They track her to a Metro station in Washington. Peter spots the Colonel and a brawl begins. Dunham is able to shut down the radio signal the Colonel had been sending just in time to stop Burgess before she exploded.

Back in FBI custody, the Colonel tells Broyles that he was trying to stop the “others” — who were planning a war and passing intelligence by a network of couriers. In the end, we see a courier hand a briefcase to the Observer, who opens it to reveal surveillance photos of Walter.

1. A Quick Summation
The idea of a person being turned into an explosive device is clever, but I just don’t see how it would work. Where would the energy of an explosion that powerful come from — even if the person were injecting a strange medication and turning to crystal? I just don’t think there are that many high-energy bonds to break in a human (particularly since the explosion left behind identifiable pieces). Admittedly, this is all “back of the envelope” math so I could be wrong, but color me suspicious.

2. Deus Ex EMP
Does an “EMP disabling device disable” EMPs, or is does it utilize EMPs to disable devices?
If the former, wouldn’t the EMP disabling device itself be disabled by an EMP?
If the latter, how did it know which device to disable or when to activate? It can’t be “always on”.
Regardless, if the device scrambles all radio waves, you wouldn’t be able to listen to the radio or talk on your cell phone inside the station.

3. Moses Supposed his Toeses are Roses
The webspace between the toes is used by addicts to inject drugs because the track marks are harder to find. It is commonly used by medical personnel who are addicted.
Captain Burgess’s injection was horrible as she has apparently never heard of sterile technique. There are nasty germs on the soles of the feet, why invite them into the body?

4. Just Like Detective Comics
Cyanogen chloride is a nasty chemical weapon. It acts as both an irritant (to the skin, mucous membranes, and respiratory tract) and a cyanide agent. Like most cyanide agents, it is quick acting (less than 10 minutes, usually). Treatment involves skin decontamination and use of cyanide antidotes.
With treatment, the chemical is cleared from the body quickly, there would be no need for continuing injections. And even if the soldiers were lied to about the serum, their own NBC training should have raised questions.

5. Video Killed the Radio Star
316 megahertz is technically UHF, not VHF, and falls in the band controlled by the government.

While there was questionable science this week, the episode score points by actually showing some detective work (though mostly by Peter, Dunham — as usual — stumbled into clues) and having an enjoyably suspenseful chase at the end. The Doomsday Clock gains a minute, and goes back to five ’til midnight.

More exciting than the last episode, but the “big surprise” was obvious barely halfway in. Charlie is seriously creepy though.

The Plot: A small town in Pennsylvania has had seven people disappear in the past four months. Peter talks Agent Broyles into letting the Fringe Team investigate because he feels it may be related to Agent Dunham’s disappearance. Walter discovers a strange thick blue liquid at the scene of the latest disappearance, and Dunham realizes that one townsman, Andre Hughes, a retired doctor, was at the scene of several of the disappearances.

Peter and Dunham question Hughes at his home. Olivia thinks she hears someone else in the home, but can’t find anyone. She does find a fairly extensive lab in the house. They bring Hughes down to the Boston FBI office for questioning. He answers their questions, but refuses to give a blood sample. Dunham discovers that Hughes’s wife and infant son died in childbirth nearly twenty years before.

Suspecting foul play, the team exhumes the bodies of Hughes’s wife and son. The wife’s body is brought to Walter’s lab for evaluation but there is no body in the son’s coffin. It looks like something chewed its way in — or out. A small tunnel is found leading out of the grave into the ground.

Walter’s autopsy reveals that the late Mrs. Hughes had lupus, which he claims made it impossible for her to be pregnant. Closer examination reveals that she had been pregnant as there is still a placenta present; however, closer examination of the placenta reveals human DNA plus something else, apparently scorpion and mole rat DNA. Walter hypothesizes that Hughes used his knowledge of biology and genetics to alter his son while he was still in the womb — to make it more likely that he would survive the pregnancy.

Peter and Dunham suspect Hughes’s mutated son is still alive and living in tunnels under the town. They search Hughes’s house once again and find the partially decomposing corpse of a dog hidden behind a wall in the basement. They also find a recent tunnel with a dead — and gnawed — human body. Just as Dunham is telling Peter what she found, something grabs her from behind. Peter chases after her and there is a claustrophobic fight in an underground tunnel between Dunham, Peter, and Hughes’s mutated son. Peter stabs it through the chest. It tries to escape, only to be crushed by car that falls into the collapsing tunnel.

As the episode ends, Peter and Walter head of to go fishing, while Olivia meets with a mysterious man at a bowling alley who seems to know more than he is telling about the strange symptoms she’s been having since her trip to the other world.

1. A Quick Summation
This episode of Fringe = 65% The Lurking Fear + 30% Tremors+ 5% The Big Lebowski

2. A Silver Platter
Has then ever been an episode of Fringe telegraphed more blatantly? Who didn’t realize who the killer was, once Hughes mentioned that wife and infant son died in childbirth? The episode could have been salvaged by a climactic ending, but it instead it was over faster than the big boss fight in Transformers 2.

3. My Arm is Tingling Therefore I Cannot Move It
Walter seems to be confusing a paralytic with an anesthetic. Numbness is the sign of an anesthetic; not being able to move is a sign of a paralytic. I can numb your hand with lidocaine, but you’ll still be able to move it. On the other hand, I can paralyze you with pancuronium and you’ll be unable to move, but still feel everything.

4. Where’s House When You Need Him?
While lupus makes becoming pregnant — and carrying the child to term — very difficult, it does not make it impossible.
I’m impressed that Walter can find a malar rash on the skin of a corpse 17 years dead.

5. Dig Them Up
Since when do they open exhumed caskets in the open air, in public?
I would have like to see the search warrant/court order for the exhumation Exactly what information did they have on Hughes? An extremely vague note that may possibly if-you-squinted-your-eyes-right suggest he might have something to do with the death of his wife? He was seen near 3 of 7 missing persons? He, according to his constitutional rights, refused to give blood? He has a chemistry set?

6. String Him Up
That was a time consuming and elaborate way to hang yourself. Why not just use your shirt? What was that wire rack anyway?

Bad medicine, an unoriginal story, and another chimera as the bad guy all add up to the Doomsday clock moving one minute closer to midnight

All in all, a rather unexciting way to start the season. Though, to give the writers credit, they are just starting what seem to be several intriguing plotlines.

The Plot: The episode starts out with head on collision between two cars: a silver one and a black one. A wounded man stumbles out the silver car and runs down the street. He hides in a nearby apartment building and kills man who tries to help him. He then uses a strange machine to change himself into an exact replica of man he killed.

The black car is identified as Agent Dunham’s, but she is nowhere to be found and the evidence suggests no one was in the car at all. Peter and Walter arrive on scene and find a junior FBI Agent Jessup in charge. Walter jimmies the lock of the car open and looks around. As he leaves the car, it suddenly turns on and Agent Dunham comes crashing through the windshield and onto the road. She is rushed to the ER in critical condition. The doctors do everything they can, but Olivia remains in a coma (or maybe brain dead, the writers can’t make up their mind). Later that night, Peter comes in to sit by her, and Dunham suddenly regains consciousness and shouts a line of Greek at him. She has no memory of what happened other than she met with someone somewhere and there is something important she has to do or everyone will suffer.

Peter, Walter, and Agent Jessup team up to track down the driver of the silver car who they determined was purposefully trying to hit her car. Finding a body that matches the driver of the car, only more decomposed than it should have been, they bring it to Walter’s lab for autopsy. The examination reminds Walter of an old experiment he did (what doesn’t?), and he plays a tape of an old ESP project. The subject of the experiment warns of a soldier from another world who has the ability to shapechange, just like the one they are facing now. Belatedly, Peter and Agent Jessup realize the soldier still means to kill Olivia, so they rush to the hospital. Meanwhile, the soldier has killed and taken the appearance of Dunham’s nurse; he tries to weasel some information from her, but when he is unsuccessful, he starts to suffocate her. A couple of bullets from Agent Jessup send the nurse running but Charlie manages to catch her. There are some more gunshots, and when Peter and Agent Jessup arrive, Agent Francis is standing over the nurse’s dead body. Agent Dunham is safe and the soldier from the other world is dead — but is that that what really happened?

1. They Canceled ER, Didn’t They?
A sloppy ER/hospital scene.
“Possible brain herniation” — that’s a secondary diagnosis. What’s causing the brain to herniate? She’s probably bleeding inside the skull from the trauma, which in turn forces the brain down.
Pupils non-reactive — but are they dilated or fixed?
Blood pressure 180/20. Can one really measure of diastolic pressure of 20, particularly in an ambulance? 160 is quite a wide pulse pressure.
Instead of telling the EMTs to “prep her” when she is coding, how about actually doing something about it — like starting CPR?

2. Brain Death or Coma?
Olivia’s sister implies they are going to take Olivia off life support in the morning. What life support is that? Her heart is beating and she is breathing on her own. This isn’t brain death; it’s a coma. There is nothing to stop.

3. It’s All Greek to Me
For the record, here’s what Agent Dunham said: Einai kalytero anthropo apo ton patera toy

4. Eye See You
You can hear the cardiac monitor speeding up, but yet her heart rate on the machine remains the same at 72, a normal reading. While a beta-blocker would lower the heart rate, her heart’s not going fast enough to need one — and you risk dropping the pulse too low.

5. Silent Lividity
A short time after a person dies, their red blood cells settle to the lower parts of the body since there is no longer a working heart to pump them around. This results is a purplish discoloration of the skin which is known as livor mortis, or lividity. It starts at about 1-2 hours, and reaches its maximum at 6-12 hours. It persists after that, but becomes masked by other changes of decomposition. So all it could really tell Agent Jessup was that the victim had been dead around 6-12 hours; nothing to indicate he couldn’t have been in a car accident the day before.

6. Unpalatable
I think they’re confusing the palates. The soldier seemed to be putting the nail-plate directly behind the teeth, which is the hard palate not the soft palate (which is father back in your mouth than you think: feel the roof of your mouth all the way back until it switches from hard to soft).

7. Her Father Wasn’t in Intelligence, Was He?
It takes Agent Jessup several hours after they learn that they are dealing with an enemy soldier to suddenly realize that he is still going to try to kill Agent Dunham? I see she has the making to be just as incompetent an investigator as Dunham herself was last season.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the “cocktail” Walter mixed to help him sleep. Sleep, hell, that concoction would knock out an elephant! It contained Valium (diazepam, an antianxiety drug with strong muscle relaxant and sedative properties), Haldol (haloperidol, a classic antipsychotic drug which is also a strong tranquilizer), Seconal (secobarbital, a barbiturate and another strong sedative), and lorazepam (Ativan, another drug from the Valium class). Unless he has developed one heck of a tolerance for these drugs, Walter should have been asleep for the rest of the show, if not the entire season.

Though it introduced a new hero, as well as a spooky new villain, the episode was rather “meh”. The medicine was pretty bad, but I’ll give them credit for the typewriter scene, which was cool. The Fringe Doomsday Clock remains where it ended last season, five minutes ’til midnight.

In addition to watching the television show Fringe, I also read the Fringe comic published by WildStorm. The comic takes place years before the show, and features two stories per issue — one a continuing story featuring scientists Walter Bishop and William Bell, and a second stand alone story. This post is about the continuing “Bishop and Bell” storyline, the third chapter in particular.

When we meet William Bell in the first issue of Fringe, it is 1970 and he is a twenty year old college student at Harvard. He meets up with Dr. Walter Bishop and becomes his lab assistant.

The next issue takes place at some undetermined point later. Dr Bishop and William Bell are still working in a lab at Harvard. There is reference to experiments the duo performed “last year.” William Bell is also referred to as “Dr. Bell” which suggests he has had time to complete not only his undergraduate degree, but also his doctorate. Depending on how much credit you want to give him for being a genius, that would make it 4 to 8 years later, so the story takes place sometime between 1974 and 1978.

Why is this important? Because the timing seemed off to me — and it turns out I was right:

Neurontin is the brand name of Gabapentin, a drug originally developed to prevent seizures. Gabapentin wasn’t discovered until 1973 and was an experimental drug for years after that, so it’s unlikely that the doctors would be able to get there hands on any. Even if their mysterious “Soap Company” benefactors somehow managed to obtain a supply of the medication, it wasn’t known as Neurontin until 1983.

I’ll also point out that injecting serotonin into the body is not a good idea. It doesn’t cross over from the blood to the brain well (which one assumes is where they want it), and it acts as a potent vasoconstrictor (causes the blood vessels to clamp closed) in the bloodstream. High levels of serotonin in the blood have been linked with fatal lung and heart conditions.

Injecting LSD into the body — probably not the best idea either, but for different reasons (mainly due it being a potent hallucinogen). Speaking of LSD, it’s the chemical structure the worker holding the clipboard is looking at in the second story in issue #3.

A good season finale for Fringe. Lots of mysteries were tied up, or at least explained, but enough were left for next season to explore.

The Plot: Nina Sharp has been shot by David Robert Jones and is rushed into surgery. Agent Dunham and her team review the surveillance tapes and notices that Jones did something to Sharp’s bionic arm. After she recovers from surgery, she tells them that he stole an extremely powerful power cell that had been hidden there. Sharp tells Dunham that Jones was once an employee and protégé of William Bell, and he was fired for reasons she refuses to articulate. She goes on to tell Dunham that Jones is hunting for Bell so he can kill him. If Dunham can stop Jones, though, Nina will guarantee her a meeting with the elusive Bell. Nina goes on to explain that Bell is currently living in an alternate dimension, and Jones is trying to travel to that dimension to pursue him. Pulling all the “x-files” the FBI has, Dunham is able to come up with a pattern to the “Pattern” which points to Reiden Lake as the epicenter.

Meanwhile, Jones has set up a strange machine in a New York City street. It emits a high pitched whine, and then open a shimmering doorway into another dimension. A truck comes barreling through, but is cut in half when the unstable doorway closes. Jones later tries the same trick on a soccer field, but this time an unfortunate player is cut in half. He heads to Reiden Lake to try a third time.

Over in Massachusetts, Walter has gone missing. Peter tracks him to an old beach home the family owns. Digging through various boxes, Walter finds what the Observer sent him to locate: a machine that plugs dimensional holes. He and Peter head for Reiden Lake, because Walter tells Peter that’s where he opened the first doorway.

Dunham’s team meets up with the Bishops, and together they confront Jones. He has opened his doorway and is about to go through when Dunham shoots him, again and again. He shrugs off the bullets, explaining that while the radiation from the teleporter may be slowly killing him, in the meantime, it has made him more than human. He finally enters the doorway, but Peter uses Walter’s machine to shut the gate, cutting Jones in half and killing him.

As the episode ends, Walter stands tearfully over a grave labeled “Peter Bishop, 1978-1985″ — so the Peter we know must be the Peter from the alternate dimension. Olivia finds herself transported to the alternate world where she meets with William Bell in his office in one of the towers of the World Trade Center.

1. I’m As Shocked As You
The medicine in the emergency room scene was pretty spot on, so no complaints from me there.

2. It Keeps Going and Going and Going
I like the way Jones was being particularly careful with the energy cell, like it was on the verge of exploding. Meanwhile, Nina had just schlepped it around in her arm, swinging it this way and that, not careful at all.

3. Flight 19, Where Are You?
“The Pattern” works best when it is all fictional. Trying to work in the Bermuda Triangle just cheapens it for me — especially as all good skeptics know, there is no real mystery there at all.

4. A Little Dry
I’d expect more blood out of people cut in half.

5. You Must Learn To Govern Your Passions; They Will Be Your Undoing
There is little Leonard Nimoy can’t add a touch of class gravitas too — well, except this (and this).
Actually, I was expecting more from him. It sounded like he was on the verge of cracking himself up.

A good episode. I liked that it actually answered some questions, which was frankly more than I expected. Of course, there’s still a bunch left for next year. Anyway, it was a good episode — good enough to move the clock back to 11:55

A rather unexciting episode of Fringe overall, despite several clever plot concepts. Definitely a “sum of the whole is less than the parts” week.

The Plot: A young woman is desperately trying to get to a hospital when she suddenly catches fire and explodes. Agent Dunham and her team are called in to investigate. Through dental records, they are able to identify her as Susan Pratt, a 29 year-old toll booth attendant. They search her apartment and find a large check made out by a mysterious lawyer, a lawyer whose office seems hurriedly deserted. Walter initially suspects spontaneous human combustion, and then deduces that Susan was a pyrokinetic (think Firestarter) who could not control her own powers.

Meanwhile, Agent Dunham is having recurrent hallucinations. Walter tells her that she is experiencing déjà vu, which he explains are visions of an alternate reality. The next time Dunham has one of the hallucinations, she investigates and discovers that in this reality, Susan had a twin sister Nancy. Sure enough, in our reality there is a twin sister too, and Olivia’s team rushes to Nancy’s apartment, but she has been kidnapped. Luckily, Peter has invented a machine that can pull sounds from an apartment window which was melted during the kidnapping. Uncovering the sound of a phone dialing, Olivia is able to trace a call made to Sanford Harris’ phone (if you can’t remember, Sanford Harris is the new a**hole boss at the FBI who took over earlier in the season). She and Charlie track Harris to a warehouse where he and the lawyer have locked up Nancy and are experimenting on her. In the final confrontation, Nancy is rescued and Harris burned alive by her pyrokinesis.

The episode ends with a variety of short scenes: Olivia confronts Walter about the experiments he and Walter Bell performed on her and other children, Nina visits Broyle to discuss the reappearance of the Observer, Walter discovers the missing original ZFT manifesto just as the Observer walks in and tells him it is time to go, and Nina is shot by masked men in her apartment building.

1. Walter’s Reality, Quite Different From My Reality
A myth is an unverified fact? I’m sure Zeus would be happy to know he’s factual, merely unverified.

2. Again and Again
That is an interesting explanation for déjà vu. Just saying.
Would Robert Frost approve?

3. Too Close a Look
There are so many things wrong with Peter’s electron microscope/Geiger counter/mp3 player. Here are just a few:
Electron microscope samples have to be specially prepared.
At electron microscope level, there would be so many natural grooves and bumps in the surface of the glass that it would have tremendous background noise. Even an LP or CD at that level of detail would have so many imperfections it would be hard to hear the actual sound.
A flash fried window captured that much sound?
Peter was somehow able to reproduce the sound perfectly down to the exact voices and tones of a dialing phone?

4. Irony
I had to laugh when Walter told Olivia she was a good investigator — she’s anything but. For instance, she missed the entire closet full of gray clothes and the check from a mysterious lawyer that all tie into the emotion spewing guy from episode 17.

5. Y Kant Olivia Read?
Olivia is a cornflake gal. Is that anything like a Cornflake Girl?

A plainly mediocre episode. Not bad enough to advance the clock, but not good enough to gain some time. (With just one episode left, it is extremely unlikely the Doomsday Clock will run out…this year at least. Fringe has been renewed, so I’ll continue the clock next year.)

They almost made it for a complete episode without screwing up the science…almost.

The Plot: Strange murders have been occurring in Boston, murders where the victim has their spinal column ripped open and have been drained of spinal fluid. Agent Dunham and her team are called in after the second murder. While examining the body, Walter finds traces of Treponema pallidum, the bacteria that causes syphilis — only it’s a variety of syphilis that has been extinct for decades. They trace the syphilis to the CDC who note that they recently sent a sample of that very syphilis to Lubov Pharmaceuticals. The CDC also mentions that the same research lab ordered RND-390, a component of the rapid skin growth bioweapon seen previously.

Olivia and her team raid the lab — only it’s not a real lab, just a split-level house in a residential area. They arrest a wheelchair-bound scientist named Boone and bring him in for questioning. He admits to working for the ZTF and having developed the rapid skin growth weapon, as well as playing a role in whatever is terrorizing the city now. He tells Dunham that he will help her, only they need to rescue his wife who was kidnapped by the ZTF to ensure he keeps working for them. Eventually, Boone admits that his wife is not a hostage, but has been dosed with a contagion that has turned her into the killer stalking the city. If Dunham and her team can capture his wife, he will concoct an antidote and then tell Dunham everything he knows about the ZTF.

Dunham, Peter, and Charlie capture the wife and brings her back to the lab where Walter and Boone have concocted an antidote. The cure is a success, unfortunately Boone died of a stroke while making it. He leaves a videotape for Dunham naming names. He doesn’t know much, but reveals to her that the money man behind ZTF is William Bell.

1. Free Samples
The CDC is a little free with their germ samples, aren’t they? Particularly the bioweapon ones.
And they know the lab is in a residential area, but don’t seem to think twice about it.

2. It Goes to Eleven
How does giving cerebral spinal fluid to his wife going to cause Boone to become paralyzed? If that’s the case, then everyone who ever had a spinal tap would be in a wheelchair.

3. FBwhat?
Astrid gets the “Only Agent Actually Investigating” Award for her finding-the-club-stamp moment.

4. Billy Squire
Taking too much spinal fluid is not going to cause a stroke; if anything, it’s going to cause a herniation (the brainstem is pushed downward over sharp bony prominences and damaged — and not in a good way). At the least, it’ll give him a nasty spinal headache.
Because it’s not a stroke, the medication tPA (tissue plasminogen activator, a “clot busting” drug) is not going to do any good. And even if it were a stroke, tPA is not necessarily a good idea. If it is a stroke caused by a clot, then tPA is indicated, but if it is a stroke caused by bleeding in the brain, then tPA will make it worse. There are very specific rules about giving tPA to minimize the risk of bad outcomes.
Regardless, you don’t stab someone in the neck with a syringe of the medication.

5. K.I.S.S.
Why inject the antidote into the spinal column at the cervical spine (neck level)? It’s a tough shot, and runs a risk of injuring the cord. Since the CSF circulates throughout the spinal column as a whole, injecting the medication at the lumbar level will have the same effect, only be easier and less risky.

Everything was going for this episode, and I was going to move the clock back again, but then they started talking about stroke and tPA and lost all benefits. The clock stays in place this week.

A surprisingly enjoyable episode this week. The science mumbo-jumbo was kept to a minimum and storyline kept moving quickly along.

The Plot: A mother is pushing her daughter in a stroller through Grand Central Station singing a song about a circus elephant. As they wait by the tracks for the next subway, Olivia suddenly appears and pushes the mother in front of the oncoming train, killing her. Olivia suddenly wakes from her sleep with a start, realizing she had dreamed the whole thing — until she sees the report of the suicide on the morning news.

Olivia and her team go to New York to investigate the death, but the evidence — including a surveillance tape — point to suicide. Her husband, however, pleads to Olivia that his wife would not have committed suicide. Walter suggests that possibly Olivia somehow compelled the woman to jump.

Olivia decides not to go back to sleep. She takes caffeine pills and drinks cup of coffee after cup of coffee. She finds herself in a restaurant full of happy couples. Suddenly, one of the wives starts accusing her husband of philandering and stabs him repeatedly with a steak knife. Olivia is beside her, helping her drive the knife in. Again, Olivia wakes up with a start — she has dreamed of another death. Investigating at the restaurant where the stabbing took place, the owner tells her a blond man with a scar was sitting in the booth she had dreamed herself sitting in. Reviewing the tape of the New York suicide, a blond man with a scar was there as well.

A search of governmental databases reveals that the man in question is named Nick Lane and was once a resident of St Jude’s Mental Hospital, until he came into a sudden inheritance and checked himself out. He also seems to have been familiar with the mysterious ZTF manifesto. The staff psychiatrist describes him as “hyper-emotive” — someone whose mood influences those about him. Looking through the patient’s chart, Olivia discovers that he was treated with the experimental drug Cortexiphan — the same drug she was once treated with. Walter reveals that during the Cortexiphan experiments, children were paired to reduce their anxiety. He suggests that Olivia must have been paired with Nick and a mental bond developed that allows her to dream what he is seeing. Thanks to the Cortexiphan and his unstable mental state, Nick is broadcasting his emotions to those around him. When he felt suicidal, the mother picked up his emotions and committed suicide. When he felt abandoned, the wife picked up his feelings and stabbed her husband.

Walter places Olivia under hypnosis in an attempt to locate Nick. They are able to find Nick’s apartment, but not before he has lured a stripper there and caused her to commit suicide. By the time the team reaches his apartment, Nick is already gone. Exploring his place, they find an entire wall dedicated to the Pattern. About this time, news reaches them that Nick has been spotted. He has gone to the roof of a tall building nearby and is prepared to jump to his death. He’s not alone though, his emotions are spilling so much that there are about twenty other people on the roof with him, also ready to jump. Walter tells Olivia that because she was also treated with Cortexiphan, she will be immune to Nick’s powers. She climbs to the roof and confronts him. He remembers her from the experiment, but she doesn’t remember him. He hands her a gun and asks her to kill him. She shoots him in the knees instead — he collapses and it releases his hold on the others. He tells her regretfully that someday soon, she’ll wish she had killed him. As the episode ends, Walter is watching an old videotape of the Cortexiphan experiments — a tape featuring a very young Olivia.

Not too much science to dish on in tonight’s episode, so I’m just going to go stream of consciousness here.

1. Circus Circus
According to Wikipedia, Nellie the Elephant is a perfect song to sing in order to time CPR correctly.

2. The Count
For something that was supposedly not detecting any radiation, the Geiger counter was certainly clicking a fair amount.

3. Showtime
Walter wants to see Pippin, a musical about Charlemagne’s deformed son, Pippin the Hunchback. The song he is quoting is Corner of the Sky.

4. Stripper or Not
Continuity error: When the stripper is first shown looking in the mirror in Nick’s apartment, she is topless. When the scene flashes back to her, she’s suddenly wearing a bra (what can I say, I’m a guy — I notice these things.)

5. Torre! Torre! Torre!
Just for the record: Walter mentions Nick was using the Torre attack when playing chess. Who was he playing?

6. Clues?
Thanks to some recent articles on the clues in Fringe, I’m looking for them everywhere now. I saw the light pattern in the windows in Walter’s hotel, but now I’m wondering about the 7 of clubs shown prominently on Nick’s table.

7. Continuity
Nice to see the some of the threads begin to tie together — particularly the Cortexiphan and the ZTF manifesto (both from Episode 14)

8. The Wall
I would have loved to have time to study the Pattern wall in Nick’s apartment.

An enoyable episode this week, that restores some of my faith in the show. The Doomsday clock goes back to 11:56

This episode seemed to have potential — strange creature from lab released by animal rights activists that proceeds to terrorize the countryside. But then the bad science and awkward storyline kicked in.

The Plot: A group of animal activists break into a research lab and frees all the animals from their cages. They also release a particularly nasty creature hidden in the back of the lab. The monster shows its gratitude by promptly killing one of the activists and a scientist who tried to stop them. It then hunts down and kills the other activists as they are fleeing in an SUV.

Agent Dunham and her team are called in the next morning when the wrecked car and shredded bodies are found. One of the dead bodies is moved back to the lab where Walter performs and autopsy and finds a stinger of some sort buried in the body. He also finds hundreds of larval worms in the body, apparently implanted by the creature. Unfortunately, by this time Charlie has encountered the monster and been attacked. He survived, but has become implanted with the larvae as well.

Walter has deduced that the monster is a transgenic animal — composed of the genes and attributes of multiple species. He is worried that it may be based on his work because he experimented with transgenics years before. For once, the “science” turns out to be unrelated to his research.

Walter theorizes that the only way to kill the larvae inside of Charlie is to transfuse him with some of the monster’s blood so that the larvae will get confused and stop feeding on him. The team traps the monster in the sewers and kills it, but they collect enough blood to transfuse Charlie and save his life.

1. Worry Wart
After all the other episodes where the plot was based on Walter’s research, why is he suddenly worried about the morality of it. Plenty of people have died because of his work already this season.

2. Blue Genes
Transgenic animals have been used in research for years. They are animals that express genes from other sources, or express specially modified genes. Walter seemed to be talking about transgenics taken to a whole new level — plus he was confusing it with xenografting (transplanting parts from different animals) with his talk about rejection.

“Accelerated Darwinism”
A nonsense phrase and a particularly stupid one at that. The theory of evolution applies to natural selection, and the selection here was man-made, pretty much the opposite of natural..

3. Keep the Needle Away From Me
Astrid is told to draw 25cc of blood from Charlie and she sticks the needle in the belly? She might get some peritoneal fluid, but the big blood vessels are deep in the abdomen. Why not just draw blood from the arm like a normal person?

4. Lucky Shot
Where was the incendiary part of the incendiary 50 caliber rounds? And wouldn’t incendiary rounds have made it that much more difficult to get blood from it.

5. Ultra-Special
That was impressive resolution on that out of date ultrasound machine. Even more impressive was how the picture stayed perfectly still despite Walter waving the wand all over Charlie’s chest. (That last sentence should get some interesting Google searches)

6. The Belly of the Beast
So the idea was that by giving Charlie some of Mama Monster’s blood, the baby monsters would get confused (in that “can’t tell self versus non-self” way), and thus miraculously die off (cause of death? Confusion.) So how did the proteins on Mama’s blood cells get into Charlie’s peritoneal fluid so fast, if at all? Why not just inject an anti-parasitic into the peritoneal fluid, thus bypassing most of the side effects Charlie would suffer.

7. Random Thoughts
Apparently the monster has either blue curaçao or Windex for blood.
Johnathan Swift?
Clearly Walter missed Aliens when he was in the asylum or he would have known to look up.

Another week of bad science, and characters acting, well, out of character. The Fringe Doomsday Clock gains another minute and stands at 11:57 (meaning that all the gains from the good episodes before the break have been lost).

There were two interlocking stories on tonight’s episode of Fringe. One of which contained a serial killer, and one of which contained Fringe science (if by “fringe” you mean “in no way connected to the actual laws of science”).

The Plot:A demolition crew is ready to implode an old building when one of them gets a strange feeling and runs back inside. He and his co-workers find a hidden basement that appears to have been sealed off for years, and in it, huddled in the corner, they find a naked, pale, bald ten year-old child.

Meanwhile, the serial killer known as “The Artist” has reappeared after a three year absence and sent a taunting note to the FBI.

Olivia and her team interview the strange child (hereafter called “Lex Jr”) in the hospital. He is having some shortness of breath and the doctor wants to put him on supplemental oxygen. Walter stops her and lets her know that Lex Jr is from a low oxygen environment and needs less oxygen, not more. Sure enough, Walter’s right and Lex Jr starts to breathe better. He seems to form an emotional bond with Olivia. He grabs her pen and writes a name upside down — and it turns out to be the name of the serial killer’s latest victim.

Olivia visits Lex Jr again, hoping for more clues about the killer. This time, he writes an address down for her. She goes to the address, but can’t find anything. It isn’t Lex’s fault though, it was Olivia’s: the murderer’s van was parked at that address and she missed it. While in the hospital, she meets a social worker who remarks that Lex Jr will likely be leaving the hospital soon.

Walter thinks he can provide a way for Lex Jr to talk. Olivia brings him to the lab where Walter hooks him up to the neural stimulator (remember that from episode five?). About this time, the social worker appears in the lab, only he’s not a social worker — he’s a CIA agent and wants the boy. He agrees to give Olivia and team one day to find the killer before he returns for Lex. With Lex’s help, and an assist by Peter, Olivia manages to track down and capture, if not kill outright, the Aritist. In the end, Olivia finds she can’t hand Lex over to the CIA and has the friendly doctor from the hospital set him up in a good foster home instead.

1. When is More Less?
The “Lex lived in a low-oxygen environment” concept bugged me. For one thing, if the hidden basement was that oxygen poor, the demolition crew would not have been able to breathe down there.
And later, when Walter tells the doctor to put Lex on 5% oxygen, what was the other 95%? Hospitals don’t keep tanks of less than 100% oxygen sitting around. If a little oxygen is needed, the flow setting is low. If more is needed, a higher flow (and fancier masks) are used. Remember, room air has 21% oxygen and if the team wants to go less than that, they’d need an air-tight room and would somehow have to remove the oxygen from it. You can’t just use a near-empty oxygen tank because all you’ll get from that are a few minutes of extra oxygen and then back to room air.

2. If a Bone Shatters, and No One is Around ti Hear It, Does It Still Hurt?
If he lived his entire life in the dark, he would not just be low in Vitamin D, he’d have rickets, a bone disease caused by long term Vitamin D deficiency.

3. Oxygen or Cautery
The machine they made a show of turning on before placing Lex on his “low oxygen” nasal canula had nothing at all to do with oxygen or air flow. It was the control panel for a electrocautery machine — which uses an electrical current to cut through tissue and/or cauterize wounds. It is a common piece of surgical equipment. You’ll notice the buttons were labeled monopolar, bipolar, and coagulate.

4. The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades
For someone with an extreme sensitivity to light, he was sure kept in a brightly lit room. How about some sunglasses at least.

5. Call the Amazing Randi
Let me get this straight: Lex can not only read the mind of the serial killer — oh sorry “empathize” with him — but he can miraculously express it in English, a language he cannot speak and isn’t even sure which way is up when he writes it (but he fixes that one fast). I could almost accept it if he drew a vague picture of what the killer was seeing, but for him to give a specific name or address when it’s likely the killer wasn’t even aware of them…

6. When Being Cheap Costs
The meat packing company sold used bloody drop cloths? And they didn’t find this strange? And The Artist didn’t have the common sense to spend a few bucks extra to buy clean ones?

7. Code
Ars Technica has a couple of nice articles (especially the second one) on “The Fringe Code.”

Because of the nonsensical psychic powers, the complete misunderstanding of basic science, and pretending an electrocautery machine is an oxygen machine, I have no choice but to resume the Fringe Doomsday Clock countdown, and the hands move up a minute to 11:56.

The second good episode of Fringe in a row. Maybe my Doomsday Clock threat is working

The Plot:The episode starts with Mr. Jones, the enigmatic villain who escaped from a German prison several episodes ago through the use of Dr. Bishop’s teleport machine. He was shoved in a decompression chamber the minute he arrived, and now he finally emerges 2 weeks later. Everything should be fine, but he notices a distinct tremor of his hands.

Meanwhile, a newspaper vendor in the city dies in a particularly gruesome way. In a matter of seconds, his skin grows over his eyes, nose, and mouth and he suffocates to death. On first hearing about the case, Bishop suspects ceramides were involved. Agent Dunham, on her part, suspects that Mr. Jones is behind the death and is determined to find him.

One of the junior FBI agents determines that Jones’ late lawyer had access to a warehouse in Texas that, after years of lying dormant, had its power switched back on the same day Jones escaped from prison. Broyles is just about to order a raid on the warehouse when Mr. Jones turns himself in to the FBI at the Boston office. He refuses to speak to anyone but Agent Dunham.

For once making sense, new head honcho Harris refuses to let Dunham talk to Jones, telling her that doing so would be giving in to a terrorist’s demands. Instead he sends Dunham on the raid on the Texas warehouse. The raid turns up evidence that Jones had been there, and when one of the FBI agents (coincidentally, the same one who located the warehouse in the first place) dies of the same weird condition, the team knows Jones is responsible for the strange disease.

Dunham and Peter Bishop track down the manifesto of the ZTF, the group Jones is associated with. It tells of a coming war between two realities with only one surviving. By now, Dr. Bishop has discovered that the strange disease is caused by toxin absorbed through the skin that causes hyperactivity of the “protein responsible for scar tissue.”

Back in Boston, Jones refuses to talk to Harris, but does give him a list of supplies he requires. Dunham returns from Texas and meets with Jones. She hands him the supplies he requested and he promptly uses them to make an anti-surveillance device so no one can overhear their conversation. He admits that he is responsible for the two deaths, but tells her he wants to prevent any more. Before giving her anymore information, he tells her that she must take the key he brought with him and take it to an abandoned amusement part. Once there, she finds what appears to be a box of old children’s games. A note tells her that she must pass the “first test” — mentally turn off all the lights in a box — with her mind alone before Jones will tell her anything else.

Dunham tries the test, fails, and is convinced it is nothing but a game Jones is playing. She confronts him again, and he tells her it is not a game, but reality. He then tells her that she is special because she received treatment with the drug Cortexiphan. It turns out that this is a drug designed by Massive Dynamics — by Dr. Bell himself in fact — which is supposed to “remove limitations” from the mind. During their conversation, Jones collapses, suffering from after effects of teleportation; effects which are hinted at, but never explained. He is rushed to Bishop’s lab where Dr. Bishop manages to resuscitate him. Dunham has Peter Bishop rewire the light board so it looks like she passed the test. Jones relents and tells her the location of a bomb containing the compound that causes the disease. The FBI rushes there to find that the bomb is wired with an array of lights, just like the “test” Dunham was given. The only way to defuse the bomb is turn out all the lights without touching the device. Olivia decides she has to try and manages to mentally turn off all the lights with just seconds to spare.

Afterward, when she goes to talk with Jones, she discovers he has escaped the hospital where he was transferred by punching an enormous hole in the wall. The words “You Pass” are scrawled on the wall. Meanwhile, Walter has been reading the ZTF manifesto and discovers that its typewritten pages exactly match the print produced by his old typewriter.

1. Would a Fat-Free Diet Help?
Ceramides are lipid molecules common in cell membranes. As Walter says, they play a role in cell differentiation. On the other hand, he’s mostly wrong when he also mentions cell growth. Ceramides don’t seem to play a role in overactive cell growth — just the opposite actually — they appear to inhibit cell growth. (And being a lipid – a fatty molecule — it has nothing to do with the scar tissue protein implicated later).

2. Not Quite Far Enough
Performing her emergency tracheotomy, Agent Dunham successfully cut through the skin, but neglected to actually cut into the trachea — the key part of the procedure. She just slid the tube into the loose tissue in front of the trachea — though it ended up being a moot point.

3. Rescue Me
Unexplained bradycardia. An EKG is a good call.
They confused cardiac arrest (the heart stopping) and heart attack (lack of blood flow to the heart causing damage). Nitroglycerin is good for a heart attack, but won’t do any good for a cardiac arrest.
50cc is not enough saline to resuscitate anyone; it’s only about 1 ½ shot glasses of salt water. A normal resuscitation required liters of fluid. Though to be fair, Walter orders the saline and never states why; it is Peter who tells us it is for resuscitation, and he might not know what he’s talking about.

4. Lying or Stupid?
Mr Jones didn’t tell Olivia “where or when” the bomb was going to go off? He may have neglected the where, but he certainly told us the when — 16 hours.

5. Elementary, My Dear Watson
Some interesting choices for the movies and book mentioned in this episode. I’m suspicious they may be clues, or at least hints.
The Land of Laughs. I actually have the book in my library (but not the edition shown). A very good book. Among other themes, it deals with reality versus fantasy. Since they explicitly singled out the book by name, I suspect it’s important. I’ll have to reread it.
Charade. Good movie. Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn. Deals with people who aren’t what they seem. Good guys are bad guys and bad guys are good guys.
Rear Window, the only Jimmy Stewart/Grace Kelly movie. A classic Hitchcock suspense thriller.

There were hokey aspects (Dunham’s psychic powers, alternate realities) and questionable medicine, but there was enough cleverness in this week’s plot to allow me to overlook them. I particularly liked the manifesto and the twist that the bomb had to be deactivated just like the test she only beat by cheating. I’m moving back the clock another minute, and the Doomsday Clock now stands at 11:55. (Of course, now we have to wait until April for new episodes, and I will have forgotten all the clues and the show will have lost all its building momentum.)

From week to week, it seems to vary: Agent Dunham is shown as either very competent or very lucky, and this was an episode favoring luck over skill. Despite that, I thought it was one of the better episodes of Fringe.

The Plot: A passenger on an airline flight notices a sudden nosebleed. He goes to the restroom, checks himself out in the mirror, and then runs a test on his saliva. When the results comes back positive, he is mortified. He rushes out and tries to convince the stewardess and steward that unless he was given some sedatives immediately, everyone on the flight will die. This, unsurprisingly, does not sit well with them. He retreats back to the bathroom where he transforms into a giant porcupine-sasquatch that proceeds to attack the other passengers and terrorize the plane, which shortly crashes into a field.

Agent Dunham and her team are called in to examine the wreckage of the crashed flight. The porcupine-man’s body is found and taken to Bishop’s lab. The good doctor finds “evidence of an extradural hematoma, probable epistaxis” and a glass disc embedded in the victim’s hand (similar to the disc found in the Jell-O Bus episode).

Agent Dunham looks through the passenger manifest and by using Agent Scott’s memories is able to identify the victim. She also identifies a suspicious person among his contacts, Daniel Hicks. When Hicks is brought in for questioning, his nose begins to bleed just like the original victim’s. Before he succumbs, Dunham is able to get a name out of Hicks: “Conrad.” Luckily, Dr. Bishop is there and orders the man be sedated and brought to his lab where he is placed in medically induced coma to slow the transformation. Bishop recognizes that a designer virus is to blame, and is able to concoct a antidote — but isn’t completely sure it will work.

Broyles tells Dunham that Conrad is a mysterious developer of biological weapons that law enforcement agencies have been trying to capture for years. As coincidence would have it, he is due to arrive in Chicago any day now to complete an arms deal for the virus in question.

Seeking information, Agent Dunham goes back into the isolation tank to delve into Agent Scott’s memories. Scott sees her there — though he shouldn’t be able to — and tells her that he was a deep cover agent for the NSA trying to catch Conrad. The two victims of the virus were also deep cover agents. He tells her to trust Hicks.

Dunham orders Hicks to be brought out of his coma and given the antidote. Through an undetectable two-way radio, he is going to guide her through an arms deal with Conrad. She and Peter Bishop fly to Chicago and manage to bluff their way into a meeting with Conrad’s men. Everything goes well until the antidote stops working and Hicks starts to transform again. Bishop has to sedate him to keep him alive. Peter does some fancy verbal footwork, but eventually their deception is exposed. No worries though, because they are able to summon the nearby FBI agents rescue them as well as capture Conrad.

As the episode ends, Dunham goes back in the tank a final time to say goodbye to Agent Scott.

1. Identity Issues
If the victim’s DNA was “completely rewritten,” (Peter’s words) how were they able to identify him through his blood?

2. I Swear, It’s For My Attention Deficit Disorder
I wonder how much dextroamphetamine 30cc is, since Dr. Bishop doesn’t give a concentration. 30cc is a hell of a lot of fluid to inject into somebody — it would hurt like hell, if you were able to get it all in (for reference, 30cc is a shot-glass full of liquid; a usual injection is less than 1cc).

3. Viral Nosebleed Zen
Even if the victim has a bleed around their brain (the “extradural hematoma”), it wouldn’t be able to leak out into the nose unless the skull was also fractured. (FYI: “Epistaxis” is fancy medical talk for “nosebleed”).

4. I Think Walter’s Lab is the Second Level of the Inferno
If I were Walter and autopsying a mysterious porcupine-sasquatch, I would be wearing a mask at the very least.
Walter has the equipment to keep someone safely in a medically induced coma in his lab?
Midazolam is better known as Versed, and is a short acting intravenous sedative from the same family as Valium.

5. The Return of Some Old Favorites
Once again, conservation of mass is an issue. Where did the matter to make all those spines and increased muscles come from?
And I’m not even going to mention the retained-memories from John Scott scenes — well, other than this.

Despite the isolation tank scenes and the return of Massive Dynamic, I enjoyed the episode more than I expected. I thought the arms deal in particular was handled well and gave off a palpable feeling of suspense. I’m giving Fringe a bit of a respite, and moving my Fringe Doomsday Clock back a little: the clock is now showing 11:56.

Another week, another episode of Fringe with painfully bad medicine — only this time with bad computer science as well!

The Plot: A teen age boy is on the computer when he open an anonymously sent program. Strange images begin flickering on the computer screen and he stares, transfixed. His parent find him later, dead, his brain liquefied and oozing from his ears and nose.

Agent Dunham and her team arrive on the scene. They interview parents and friends, but can find nothing incriminating. The grab his computer and take it back to the lab. Astrid tries to look at the hard drive — after all, she has a minor in “computer science” — but announces that she cannot because its platters are fused.

A second body is found, just like the first. This time, it’s a car salesman across town. The computer hard drive shows the same damage, but this time Astrid is able to determine that he had downloaded a shortly before he died. Peter takes both computer hard drives to one of his friends who is not able to track down the sender of the file, but is able to discover that it has been sent to a new location — Agent Dunham’s home. Dunham and Peter rush to her apartment and find her young niece transfixed by the screen. They are able to bring her out of the trance and she appears fine. Dunham does notice that the webcam light is on, suggesting that someone has been watching her.

Another victim is found, this time a day trader in Evanston, Illinois. The killer has gotten sloppy and there is enough information for even Agent Dunham to discover a pattern to the killings. This victim was the new husband of the mother of Luke Dempsey. Luke was the first victim’s best friend. Dunham discovers that Luke’s father is something of an incredible computer genius. She suspects he is the one behind the murders. She brings Luke in, but he won’t tell her where his father is. She lets him go, and follows him to his father’s hideout. She confronts the killer, but in the end he takes his own life.

1. Brain Fondue
Dr. Bishop: A complex combination of visual and subsonic aural stimuli, ingeniously designed to amplify the electrical impulses of the brain, trapping it in an endless loop.
That sure sounds like Dr. Bishop is describing a seizure, or actually a type of potentially fatal seizure known as “status epilepticus“.
People can die from status epilepticus, but their brain doesn’t liquefy.
Speaking of that, how exactly did this seizure-like activity cause the brain to liquefy? Was it supposed to raise the temperature so much the brain melted? That’s really too stupid for words.
And even if the brain did liquefy, why would it leak out the nose and ears? The brain is essentially in a tightly sealed container; it won’t leak out unless the container is broken (a skull fracture, for instance).
Flashing lights can certainly cause seizures in certain people; it’s called a photosensitive seizure and was the reason that one episode of Pokemon was never shown on television in the U.S. But it doesn’t cause seizures in people who aren’t already susceptible.

2. The Brown Note
My speakers can barely play real sounds, let alone “subsonic aural stimuli.”

3. Damn Viruses
Astrid: A computer virus that infects people.
I thought this idea was ridiculous when I first ran across it several years ago in the Cable/Deadpool comic book. Plus, I don’t think this was an actual computer virus. It was malware, certainly, but it didn’t have the self propagating characterstic of true computer viruses.
Yet another reason not to click on spam pop-ups.

4. The American Medical Association
There is no such thing as the “AMA Database.” The AMA is essentially a lobbying organization, it has little to do with the actual practice of medicine.

5. It Didn’t Even Start Well
That is an absolutely horrible episode title.

6. All Your Base Are Belong To Us
I know just enough about computers to realize that most of the “computer science” on this week’s episode was on par with the medicine. I leave it up to all you computer experts to do the critiquing here.

I’m afraid Fringe is rapidly reaching the point where it has gotten so ridiculous that it’s not worth an hour of my time to watch, let alone write about afterward. To this end, I have created the Fringe Doomsday Clock, patterned after the famous nuclear doomsday clock.

When the clock reaches midnight, my patience will be up and I will stop watching Fringe. After the last two episodes, the clock has been moved ahead to 11:57.

This episode of Fringe introduced a new antagonist as well as new protagonist/hostage, and also features some spectacularly bad medical science

The Plot: Agent Dunham had been kidnapped at the end of the previous episode. As this episode begins, she is strapped down to a gurney by her captors and ends up on the receiving end of a spinal tap. We manage to catch a glimpse of one of her abductors: Agent Loeb (from episode 7). Dunham manages to escape, and in the process steals some suspicious looking test tubes.

Dunham calls in reinforcements, but the FBI agents who show up subdue and tranquilize her. It turns out that there is an internal affairs investigation into the FBI “Fringe” office, and it is being headed up by an investigator who bears a grudge against Agent Dunham. Tranquilizing her was his way of letting her know who is boss.

Meanwhile, a world-famous immunologist is lecturing at Boston College when he suddenly starts choking and collapses. A giant slug-like beastie emerges from his mouth and escapes into the auditorium. Agent Dunham and her team are called in to investigate. She determines that the late immunologist was asked to head a secret CDC task force concerning epidemics. Another local doctor has also been asked to serve on the committee, and he is brought in to protective custody by Dunham. It’s all for naught though, as Agent Loeb kills him by dosing his water with giant slug eggs.

About the same time, Walter discovers that it is not actually a giant slug, but a gargantuan cold virus. The samples Dunham stole from her captors are some of the (for lack of a better term) slug eggs.

Dr. Bishop: It’s viral — nasopharyngitis — albeit a gargantuan specimen

Thanks to his poor shoe-related hygiene, Agent Dunham has now realized that Loeb is a turncoat. She heads to his house to see if she can find anything incriminating, and she does find some suspicious documents, but she also finds his wife. A catfight breaks out that ends with Olivia shooting and killing Loeb’s wife. Meanwhile Charlie asks Peter’s help in setting up a tap on Loeb’s phone. They finish just in time to hear Loeb tell his wife to kill Agent Dunham. Peter calls Dunham to warn her and that’s what sets off the catfight.

In the end, Agent Loeb is captured and when informed his wife has been killed, admits that he murdered the two scientists. When asked about abducting Dunham, he replies that he wasn’t trying to kidnap her, but instead to save her.

There wasn’t all that much science in this one, but what there was hemorrhoid-inducing bad.

1. No Virus I Ever Met
A gargantuan cold virus? Nonsense. It is physically impossible for viruses to grow that large. There are many reasons for this; for starters, here’s the square cube law.
Furthermore, they kept confusing a virus and a cell, which are two entirely different things. A virus is much smaller than a cell — it just consists of some nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) and a handful of proteins. Because it is not a cell, comparing it to giant cells means nothing.
Nasopharyngitis is not the name of a virus, it is the name of a condition: a runny nose and a sore throat, i.e. a cold. Cold viruses are typically rhinoviruses or adenoviruses.
How could it have grown so big so fast?
There are certain parasites that protect themselves in hard-walled cysts that breakdown when exposed to stomach acid, allowing the parasite to become active — so that part is not too far fetched.
Decongestants treat the symptoms of the cold (or more accurately the symptoms caused by the body’s reaction to the cold virus). They wouldn’t have any effect on the virus itself.

2. Cover Up the Slide’s Title Next Time
Simian Hemorrhagic Fever is a real disease, but it (like most hemorrhagic fevers) is a viral disease. The slide Walter was looking at was clearly labeled leptospira, a bacteria that causes (wait for it) leptospirosis. The “intricate web” he was talking about was just a bunch of the leptospira bacteria. Look at the picture on Wikipidia, it’s pretty much identical.

The plot threads of various recent episodes begin to pull together, but it seems like an incredible amount of work for a relatively modest pay off. Plus the bad and imaginary science we’ve come to expect.

The Plot:In the middle of the night at a bank in Philadelphia, and mysterious gang of bank robbers disable the security system. They set up the frequency machine seen at the end of Episode Eight (”The Equation”) and use it to turn one of the walls of the bank vault permeable. A trio of robbers enter the vault, steal the contents of a safety deposit box, and exit back through the wall — all except one robber who gets stuck in the wall when it turns solid again. His compatriots shoot him and leave him behind.

Agent Dunham and team are called to the scene. She recognizes the robber as someone who used to be in her unit in the Marines. Dunham talks to the robber’s estranged wife and realizes that she never knew him, Agent Scott did, and his memories are mixing with hers. Peter Bishop recognizes that the numbers of the stolen safety deposit boxes are related to something Walter says every night as he falls asleep. Walter recognizes the numbers as a Fibonacci sequence, and then realizes the boxes being stolen are his — he just doesn’t remember what he hid there. Peter is able to prey lose a memory and it seems that Walter invented a machine that can reach back in time and pluck someone from anywhere, anywhen. He never used it himself, but recognized it could be dangerous, so hid it away.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Mr. Jones (from Episode Seven) is meeting with his lawyer. Jones clearly is up to something, and he seems to be coordinating the bank robberies back in the U.S.

The FBI traces the robbers to their final bank, but just misses their theft. They are able to track down the thieves immediately afterward and capture one. He doesn’t divulge any information until Peter scares him with the fact that he has gotten radiation poisoning from frequency machine used during the thefts. He tells them about an upcoming meeting at a field in Westford. Looking at the map, Dunham recognizes the name Little Hill (from Episode Seven, again) and realizes that the meeting must be occurring at Little Hill Field. She and the FBI mount a raid on the field.

At the same time, the thieves set up the machinery stolen from Dr Bishop’s safety deposit boxes and use it to pluck Mr. Jones from prison in Germany. He arrives safely at Little Hill Field. They also kidnap agent Dunham because Jones has something in mind for her.

1. Lot of Hassle
It seems the thieves are going through an incredible amount of hassle to break one man out of prison in Germany. Certainly with all their money and technology, there would be an easier way. Their plan is something Rube Goldberg would come up with if you gave him an iPhone and a loud radio.

2. Shaking Hands
Tremor is a rare symptom of radiation poisoning, and generally only shows up as a late symptom during the secondary phase of high dose and lethal radiation poisoning. The robbers would be a great deal sicker by that point.

3. It’s A Secret
Patient Confidentiality doesn’t quite work the way the doctor thinks it does. It applies to what the doctor has learned and deduced through patient interview, examination, and testing. It also applies to what the doctor is told in confidence. I can’t imagine that who the patient hangs out with and talks in the hospital qualifies, especially when any random orderly can tell you.
For the record, according to Washington DC statutes, patient confidentiality can be broken when they are outweighed by “interests of public justice.”

4. Big Bird
Hepea is a made up disease. For one thing, Bird Flu did not become important (and was not known to be transmissible to humans) until the ’90s, well after the time when Walter was locked away in the asylum — so how did he learn of it? And how did Peter catch it? Even more, why would a doctor in the 1930s be a key expert when it was 60 years before there were any human cases.

5. The Eyes Have It
Once again, we hit the last thing seen by the eyes before death cliché (last seen in Episode Two), only this time with color printing.

A clever initial premise spoiled by Dunham’s botching of the investigation. The medicine/science was hit or miss.

The Story: Mark Young has just finished delivering a successful presentation at Massive Dynamic and is relaxing in the conference room. He sees a butterfly, but when he tries to get a closer look, it cuts him with its razor-sharp wings. He smashes it, but another appears, and another, and then an entire swarm, all slicing his skin with their wings. Trying to escape from the swarm, Young runs wildly and breaks through the window of the conference room, plunging to his death on the street far below.

Agent Dunham and her team are called in to exam the body. Dr. Bishop notes compound fractures and internal bleeding – consistent with the fall — but also many deep cuts, with many of them under Young’s clothes, so broken glass couldn’t have caused them. Bishop has Young’s body shipped back to his lab for an autopsy, and that’s when he notices that the cuts all seemed to be made from the inside out.

Agent Dunham receives a mysterious e-mail from the late Agent Scott, her former partner and lover. It directs her to a basement room in an abandoned building filled with boxes of toads. Bishop recognizes the toads Bufo alvarius, which are known for secreting a hallucinogen. He identifies a concentrated form of this toxin in Young’s body and deduces that he essentially died of fright (well, that and a thirty-story fall) and the cuts were all psychophysiological (i.e. psychosomatic — caused by his own mind).

Dunham decides she needs to access Agent Scott’s memories since he seems to have had a connection to Young. She goes back into the sensory deprivation tank from the first episode and discovers a memory of Scott meeting with Young and two other people. It seems that Young was selling secrets from Massive Dynamic. Young goes off with one man while Scott stabs the other. Agent Dunham is now determined to track down this remaining fourth man. Using some not-so-subtle clues from Young’s date book, she discovers he is George Morales, an infamous smuggler. The team goes on one of their SWAT-lite raids and successfully apprehends Morales. He offers tell Dunham everything he knows in return for protection from Massive Dynamic. He claims that they are behind “The Pattern” and are using it as a cover for their illegal activities. Dunham goes to confront Nina at Massive Dynamic, but while she is there, Morales dies mysteriously, his throat cutting itself open — apparently he was given the same drug as Young and imagined Agent Scott cutting his throat.

1. Psychosomaticism
Assuming that I accepted a psychosomatic cause for Young’s cuts (and I don’t — there’s simply no process by which it could work), why would the cuts be from the inside out? It makes no sense. If he were mentally replicating the wounds he was imagining, they would be external, not the other way around.

2. Toad Lickers
The toad Bufo alvarius is found in the southwestern United States. It secretes two hallucinogenic drugs, bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT, that are effective if inhaled, injected, or ingested. Bufotenin is the more potent of the two. Reports from users indicate it is not a particularly pleasant drug. In terms of fear, high doses have been known to cause extreme anxiety and a sense of impending death. Of course, the higher doses also tend to turn the face of the user a dusky purple color from vascular congestion.

3. Why?
Unrelated, except that the ad was shown during the show. Why in the world are they remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of the true classics of science fiction cinema — and with Keanu Reeves, no less?

4. Micromanaging
All the strange equipment and requisitions for Bishop’s lab, and the only thing her supervisors ever questions is an aquarium and food for toads? What about the cow? The grand piano?

5. Can’t Find Her Way Out of a Paper Bag
I’m losing more respect for Dunham’s supposed keen investigative skills every episode. The clues and answers are all spoon-fed to her. And then, when she finally is on the verge of learning something truly important, she abandons her source and runs over and accuses Massive Dynamic before actually getting the evidence. So not only is the source killed before actually divulging the important information, but she telegraphed everything to Massive Dynamic. Great job, Olivia.

I know that making fun of Wizard is like kicking someone when they’re down, but this has got to be one of their stupidest articles ever:

I doubt the person who wrote this has ever seen an episode of Fringe, let alone read an issue of the Fantastic Four. It hurts my brain to read this.

Scanned from Wizard #206

A surprisingly watchable episode of Fringe, probably the best yet. There were enough strange coincidences and evil psychiatrists to (almost) make me forget the whole nonsense of “The Pattern.”

The Story: Ben Stockton, a ten year old musical prodigy, is kidnapped by a mysterious woman after his father is put in a trance by red and green flashing lights. After Agent Dunham picks up the case, Broyles tells her that there have been four previous kidnappings, all experts in one field or another, all by the same mysterious woman, and all four of the victims ended up insane. Dr. Bishop recalls hearing of the red and green lights before, and eventually remembers that it was from another inmate at the asylum where he used to reside. It seems there was a fifth kidnapping that even the FBI was unaware of, and the victim ended up admitted to an asylum for the criminally insane. Walter recalls that the patient was fixated with an equation he couldn’t solve. Peter realizes that when that equation is expressed in musical notation, it is the same mysterious composition Ben had recently become obsessed with.

Agent Dunham figures the best approach is to interview the patient, but the director of the asylum won’t let the patient be interviewed by anyone except Walter Bishop. Reluctantly, Walter agrees to return to the asylum to conduct the interview, but while there he is sedated and held by the guards and director, who then informs Agent Dunham and Peter Bishop that he is retaining custody of Walter for his own safety. The next day, Dunham is able to procure a court order to release Walter, but it is clear the asylum director is up to something. Walter was unable to get much from the other patient except for some mumblings about a red castle. This is enough for Dunham to locate the villain’s lair and rescue Ben, but the mysterious woman is able to escape (though she ultimately meets her demise at the hands of a turncoat accomplice).

1. Nothing To See Here
The hypnotism scenes are pure science fiction, but I have no significant medical or scientific complaints other than that. A first for the show.
Does the red/green flashing cause a hypnogagic trance, or make the patient susceptible to suggestion? The show suggested both.
Agent Dunham should have stormed the castle with a team of red/green color blind agents. That would have caught Ostler unprepared.

2. Music
Walter Bishop transcribed the equation into “9 bars” of music, but it sure seemed like Peter played for longer than that.

3. Psychiatrists
This episode is another good example of Scott’s Third Law of Comic Book Physicians — when a character is introduced as “psychiatrist”, it is shorthand for “they are up to no good.”

An international thriller, with little thrills, along with bad science, atrocious medicine, and plot holes you could drive a truck through. It must be another episode of Fringe!

The Plot:An FBI agent recently back from a mission to Germany falls suddenly ill and is found to have a large parasite of some sort wrapped around his heart. Dr. Bishop gets a tissue sample from the parasite, and its DNA sequence suggests it is tied to an organization known as ZFT. This leads Agent Dunham to Germany to quiz a prisoner by the name of David Jones about the parasite. Jones will cooperate, but only if he can talk with his compatriot Joseph Smith back in the U.S. Unfortunately, Mr. Smith was just shot and killed in an FBI raid. This doesn’t deter Dr. Bishop, who hooks the recently deceased Mr. Smith up to one of his machines so that Peter can act as an intermediary and read his brain (with a little help from high voltages of electricity). The plan works and they are able to convince Mr. Jones that he is in contact with Mr. Smith, and he gives the cure for the parasite. Loeb is saved, but surprising no one, except the supposedly very smart characters on the show, seems to be involved in “The Pattern” himself.

1. The Heart of the Matter
The emergency department doctors defibrillate Mr. Loeb when he is in asystole. Asystole is the medical term for flatline, and as we all know, you don’t shock a flatline.
Later, when Loeb is in ventricular fibrillation, one shock is tried (along with a dose of epinephrine a few minutes before). When that doesn’t work, the doctor decides to crack Loeb’s chest open and perform open heart massage. That procedure, though dramatic — and it did reveal the parasite — is rarely called for, and certainly not this early in the resuscitation (and not for ventricular fibrillation). The doctor took his own sweet time opening the chest too; it would have been nice if someone had done some chest compressions in the meantime.

2. There’s an Intestinal Parasite in His Chest?
It’s a huge jump from a simple parasite like Giardia to a giant-centipede-looking-plant-like parasite wrapped around the heart, but I guess that’s just Dr. Bishop’s way of thinking.

3. Relax, part 1
When the parasite starts squeezing harder, Peter injects Loeb with some cyclobenzaprine. Cyclobenzaprine is better known as Flexeril and is a skeletal muscle relaxant used for muscle spasms such as whiplash injuries. It doesn’t have an effect on the heart, so I’m assuming Peter was giving it to Loeb assuming it would be absorbed by the parasite and cause it to relax its grip on the heart. That’s quite a jump in logic: that a moderately strong (at best) mammalian muscle relaxant would affect a giant-centipede-looking-plant-like parasite.

4. Relax, Part 2
If I were Peter, I would definitely want a sedative. He recovered remarkably quickly, though.

5. Needle in the Heart
Sticking a syringe full of adrenalin blindly into the heart is a very bad idea because of the risk of injuring a cardiac artery, but I guess that’s just Dr. Bishop’s way of thinking. Or maybe he watched Pulp Fiction too many times at the asylum.

6. The Treatment
Mebendazole — known in the U.S. as Vermox — is an antiparasitic used to treat a variety of worm infestations. A hydrolase is an enzyme catalyst involved in the hydrolysis of a chemical bond. A thermophilic hydrolase is one that is active at high temperatures (such as those found in hot springs). Which seems to have no bearing on this case.

I thought the flow of the action was better on this episode of Fringe, but the medicine and science (and science-fiction clichés) were laughable.

The Plot: At night, an unmarked van pulls into a deserted street and people in some sort of containment suits drop off a confused woman named Emily. The woman wanders into a nearby diner and a friendly waiter and cop strike up a conversation with her. She is partially amnestic and claims she was given red and blue medications. Suddenly, everyone in the diner starts screaming in pain and they start bleeding out of their eyes. The young woman tries to escape, but her head explodes.

Agent Dunham and her team are called in to the diner. They discover that Emily had a rare autoimmune disease Bellini’s Lymphocemia and she had been missing for 2 weeks. The FBI also gets information that Claire, another young woman with Bellini’s Lymphocemia, has also gone missing. The team is able to discover that both Emily and Claire were receiving experimental treatment for their disease with capsules of Strontium-90, a radioactive isotope. Walter realized that in Emily, for some reason, all the capsules detonated at once, releasing an incredible microwave beam and essentially cooking everyone in the diner alive.

Agent Dunham discovers that Intrepus, an unethical pharmaceutical company (cliché plot device #37) is involved. Peter Bishop is able to discover the location of their secret lab. The FBI goes in guns blazing with a heavily armed SWAT team (except Agent Dunham, who apparently thinks it’s casual day at the raid) and rescues Clair, just in time, and did I mention that Walter was able to synthesize an antidote?

1. Autoimmune Insanity
Bellini Lymphocemia is a fictitious autoimmune disease. First off, lymphocemia is not even a real word, or a medical term, for that matter. It is said to be incurable — but then the vast majority (if not all) autoimmune diseases are — but for some reason, Bellini’s goes into remission with radiation treatment.
Strontium-90 does have various medical uses, including the treatment of some cancers (though it can cause cancers as well).

2. Needs Protection
When doing the autopsy, Walter should be wearing some form of containment suit. As far as he knows at that point, there are high levels of radiation as well as the possibility of an infectious disease.

3. Radiation versus Microwaves
Why would a radioactive isotope release high levels of microwaves? They are at opposite end of the electromagnetic spectrum. And conversely, why would a microwave exposure leave residual radiation?

4. Smells Like Cloves
Methyleugenol is not blue, it’s pale yellow. It is one of the main chemicals involved in the hyacinth scent, but it’s found in many other plants as well. It always smelled like a milder sweeter clove-scent to me.

5. My Eyes Have Seen the Glory
How does exposing people to high levels of microwaves (or high levels of radiation) cause them to bleed out of their eyes? I would expect burns, or if the all the water in their body suddenly boiled, I would expect ruptured eyes or other organs, not just bleeding
None of this explains why Emily’s head exploded though.

6. Self-Contradicting Statement of the Week
“Subcutaneous injection marks: she was being given medicine intravenously.”
Emphasis mine. Subcutaneous and intravenous are two different ways of giving medication.

A step backwards for Fringe this week with bad science and a cliched storyline familiar to anyone who reads comics (plot #124: character has electrical powers and unwittingly fries nearby electrical equipment).

The Plot: Joseph Meegar has been the unwitting victim of an experiment by an evil scientist that has turned him into an electrical generator. It’s not a power he can control — electronic equipment breaks when he his near, especially when he is upset. When he accidentally causes an elevator accident that kills 8 people, then mangles his boss, and then kills his mother, he decides to go on the run. Unfortunately, the evil scientist has caught up with him and kidnaps him. Luckily, Dr. Bishop is on the case and trains some carrier pigeons to track Joseph’s unique electromagnetic signature so that Olivia and the rest of the team can rescue him and arrest the evil scientist.

Electrical power and electricity are not areas I know a tremendous deal about, but even I could tell the science was fishy.

1. I Have the Power
That’s a rather selective power Joseph has. It fries the clock on his bed stand, but not the digital thermometer next to it? It fries his scanner and electronic pad at work, yet his Walkman continues to work?
Is Joe generating DC or AC? It would affect how his power would kill people and affect his mother’s pacemaker.

2. Tape It
I’m a child of the ’80s, and the original Walkman generation, and I can confidently tell you that a magnetic field does not permanently alter a cassette tape. The neat thing is you can record over things.

On to more biology and physics concerns:

3. What is the Source?
What is the biological source of his electricity? Generating enough electricity to levitate (let alone start parked cars and trucks) takes an incredibly amount of juice that needs to come from somewhere. And unless the efficiency is near perfect, he’s going to be generating a lot of heat as well.

4. A Weighty Problem
How can sensors determine the weight of the people aboard an elevator when it’’s in free fall?
Joe may have been “electrodynamically levitating”, but if so, he was just levitiating in relation to the frame of the elevator, not the outside world (or he would have hit his head against the ceiling). So even if he were levitating, he still would have borne the brunt of the crash.

5. Stop Motion
I liked the way the Astrid and the GPS said the birds had stopped, yet they were clearly still flying.
Are those poor birds going to be flying in circles for the rest of their life, or did Dr. Bishop reset their beaks?
I’ll grant you that Tesla coils look impressive, but I wouldn’t think they’re particularly good at imparting magnetic charges.

6. Matters of the Heart
Assuming the heart hadn’t already started to break down and decompose (with that “thermoelectric trauma” — a term that doesn’t show up in any medical literature search), how would a “residual electrical charge” cause it to beat normally when removed from the body? The heart’s electrical system doesn’t work like that; it requires specifically directed electrical stimulation, not an unexplained uniform “charge.”

Eleventh Hour is yet another science/action/mystery show. This one is about the overly brilliant Dr. Jason Hood, biophysicist and “Special Science Advisor” to the FBI, along with Rachel, the attractive yet hard-as-nails FBI agent who accompanies him. Cloning is the subject of the first episode, as Jacob and Rachel hunt the mysterious Gepetto, a scientist who is trying to clone humans using innocent women as surrogate mothers.

The science is definitely better than Fringe, though the characters aren’t as interesting. The plot was compelling, despite a few plot holes (such as…how stupid is the surrogate mother not to realize something isn’t kosher? Or does she really think it is normal to have an obstetrical examination in an abandoned warehouse?)

If you missed it Thursday night, you can still catch it on the CBS website for the show.

1. Cloning
As Science not Fiction points out in their review, the science is reasonable, and the explanation of cloning given is fairly straight-forward and easy to understand. It’s easily the best depiction of cloning in a television show that I can recall.
For the record, the worst I can remember are the clone storylines in The Flash (Episode 18: Twin Streaks) and the live action The Amazing Spider-Man from the ’70s (Episode 5: Night of the Clones).
Why are the police running a DNA lab in a tent in the forest? It’s a delicate procedure and that’s just asking for contamination. (”The DNA appears to be half human and half oak. So let’s get the team out there looking for an Ent!”)

2. Placenta Previa
When the placenta covers the internal os (the opening between the uterus and birth canal), it is known as placenta previa. The condition is graded by how much of the os is covered. In Grade III placenta previa (mentioned on the show) — which is also known as partial placenta previa — the os is partially covered by the placenta. As you can imagine, this makes it a challenge to give birth vaginally. C-sections are the recommended delivery method in this situation*.

The classic symptom of placenta previa is painless vaginal bleeding during pregnancy, which is not what was shown on the show. Painful vaginal bleeding is more indicative of a placental abruption (when the placenta pulls away from the wall of the uterus), a much more dangerous condition**.

3. CPR
While I applaud the show for resisting the temptation to defibrillate a flatline, that has to be one of the worst examples of Hollywood CPR ever.

Television and movie CPR is almost always done incorrectly, with bent elbows instead of straight arms — but there’s a good reason for this because you don’t want to injure the actor portraying the victim. This scene was worse than that, with nearly everything done wrong, such as — in addition to the bent elbows — improperly placed hands, a patient who was up too high for good CPR, and too rapid a pace. In the end, to show he was really trying hard, Dr. Hood increased the speed of his compressions even more — but this is the worst thing he could have done. You have to give the heart time to fill with blood between compressions; faster compression means the heart doesn’t have time to fill, and the resulting CPR is worse, not better***.

Notes:
*Bear in mind that a placenta previa is fairly common in early pregnancy, and will usually shift away from the os as the uterus grows during pregnancy. So, delivery-wise, placenta previa is only a concern when it occurs late in pregnancy.

**Admittedly, placenta previa can sometimes stimulate premature contractions, which can be quite painful, but that doesn’t seem to be what was shown here.

***Though they saved the patient in this situation, it would not have worked like this in real life. She had flatlined because she had hemorrhaged and lost a tremendous amount of blood. Until that blood loss is corrected, it’s going to be impossible to get her heart restarted (especially with bad CPR).
Speaking of blood, why would there still be blood in a closed-down clinic?

A strongly mediocre episode of Fringe. At least the science and medicine wasn’t too bad this time around.

And Peter’s whining is really starting to get on my nerves.

The Plot: An explosion at a construction site occurs in Manhattan. The public is told that it was a gas main explosion, but that’s only part of the story. A 2 foot long metal egg-shaped cylinder was found in the rubble and it had apparently tunneled up to the surface from underground at high speeds and hit a gas main, causing the explosion.

Dunham and her team are called in. The object is moved to a warehouse command center, but Walter has it moved to his lab at Harvard. This turns out to be a good thing, because a thug wielding a futuristic weapon attacks the warehouse looking for the egg. Back at his lab, Walter wonders if the egg might be related to Project Thor, a plan he once worked on that featured an underground torpedo. When he and Peter hear about the warehouse attack, Walter decides to hide the egg. He sends Peter off on an errand, then sedates Astrid. He grabs the egg and flees.

Walter is eventually found hours later and tells Agent Dunham that he hid the egg, but doesn’t remember well. Meanwhile, the thug is still trying to find the egg. He abducts one of Dunham’s contacts and uses a through-the-nose mind reading machine on him. Later, he abducts Peter Bishop, uses the same machine on him, and discovers the location of the egg’s hiding place — even though Peter isn’t aware that he knows it. Dunham tracks Peter and the thug to the graveyard where the egg was hidden and guns down the thug during a chase. The egg burrows into the ground and disappears. Peter confronts a strange bald man who seems to be linked to the Pattern and has been observing events for years. He ends up on the losing side of this fight as well.

Not much to comment on science- and medicine-wise (except for the obviously ridiculous mind reading and “learning by osmosis” ideas). The rest is just nit-picks:

1. The Arrival
Sadly not related to the Charlie Sheen B-movie sci-fi flick The Arrival.
Which incidentally stars Ron Silver — who I have been reliably informed is actually a deadly assassin working for NASA. I expect this fact to show up in Fringe sooner or later.

2. Project Thor
Was the egg part of Project Thor or not?

3. Iridium
Iridium is a logical choice for a torpedo that travels through the earth as it is one of the most heat resistant metals known.
Solid Iridium is a yellowish-platinum color though, not indigo.
Astrid should have seen what was coming. Iridium is the second densest element, how was a tiny syringe going to penetrate it?

4. Mind Reading, take two
Enough with the mind-reading already — although the thug’s model appears to be an upgrade as it conveniently converts thoughts into sounds (though only mono). And uses an oscilloscope.

5. Osmosis Jones
Learning through osmosis and proximity? Nonesense. If that actually worked I would have aced every test in college and med school, and though it pains me to reveal this, I did not.
Reminds me a little too much of the discredited Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon.

6. The Observer
A bald guy who observes. Where have I seen that before?

This episode of Fringe, at least from the science and medicine point of view, was an improvement over the first two. Sure, it was still rubbish, but the cringe factor was less.

The Plot: A man boards a bus in Washington D.C. and makes eye contact with another passenger. When she puts the backpack she was carrying down on the ground, the man dons a gas mask and opens a capsule of mysterious gas. In the resulting confusion, he grabs the backpack and escapes the bus. After he leaves, the gas on the bus becomes a solid gel, completely filling the bus, suffocating and trapping everyone inside. Called to the scene, Dr. Bishop identifies the gel as a aerosolized silicon base that polymerized with the nitrogen in the air, and is able to recreate it in the lab.

Meanwhile, a mild mannered office worker named Roy McComb has been having Pattern-related visions for the better part of the past year. Dr. Bishop suspects that Roy is psychic. He ties it all in to an old project of his, the Ghost Network, which uses wavelengths “lying outside the range those already discovered” to transmit secret information. It turns out that Roy was one of Bishop’s experimental subjects twenty years before when he was trying to use “iridium-based organometallic compounds” to create a living receiver for the Ghost Network. Somehow, in the intervening years, those metallic compounds have multiplied and collected in Roy’s visual cortex (the part of the brain that translates visual input). Thus, when someone uses the Ghost Network, it gives him visions. Bishop wants to move the metallic compounds from the visual cortex to the auditory cortex so Roy can hear what is being said on the Network rather than see it in visions. Agent Dunham uses the information obtained through Roy’s abilities to capture (or at least attempt to capture) the people responsible for the bus attack. In the scuffle, she is able to recover the strange object they were after.

1. The Jell-O Bus
Is that small an amount of silicon gas really going to fill the entire bus up with gel? No, not even if it combines with nitrogen. Sure, nitrogen makes up 75% of the air on the bus, but those molecules are spread out because it’s in gaseous form. If they did condense into solid form, the nitrogen molecules would take up dramatically less space because solids are much more condensed than gases. Even if you throw in the amount of silicon gas in that canister, there still wouldn’t be enough mass to fill the entire bus with gel.

2. Dr. Bishop, Pharmacist
Dr. Bishop takes his own homemade concoction of dextromethorphan, Klonopin, and fluoxetine.
Dextromethrophan is synthetic narcotic used as an over the counter cough suppressant (it is the “DM” in Robitussin DM), and can be hallucinogenic at high doses.
Klonopin (clonazepam) is an anti-anxiety agent and sedative. IT is a benzodiazepine, the same class as Valium.
Fluoxetine is the generic name for Prozac, an anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication.
None of these are psychotics (or even anti-psychotics) as Peter suggests.

3. Ghosts or Visions
For the sake of argument, let’s say the iridium compounds in Roy’s brain did react to the Ghost Network. That still doesn’t explain why his brain would interpret the signals as exact visions or the exact words. It would more likely result in random auditory or visual hallucinations, or possibly a seizure.

4. Magnets
Wouldn’t the MRI, an extremely powerful magnet, already have shifted the metallic elements out of Roy’s visual cortex.? If Dr. Bishop’s little homemade magnetic machine can, then certainly the much stronger MRI would have.

5. Cleanliness is next to Godliness
If a mad scientist ever drills in my brain, I would hope that — unlike Dr Bishop — he (or she) would at least use sterile technique.

What will probably become my standard Fringe disclaimer: I am perfectly willing to accept “fiction” as part of my science fiction, but I do have a problem when the science [sic] violates many of the basic tenets of biology, chemistry, and physics without any explanation — not even any good technobabble. And Spoiler Warning.

I found the first episode more enjoyable — this one struck me as overly clichéd with the cold case serial killer and the all too common science fiction plots (the rapid aging, the quick pregnancy, the victim’s last vision).

The Plot: A woman is dropped off at a hospital, clearly in an advanced state of pregnancy, yet she claims she’s not pregnant. From what the viewer has seen, she apparently proceeded through nine months of pregnancy is a matter of minutes. She dies during labor and an emergency c-section is performed to save the child. The child lives for only a matter of hours, rapidly aging, and dies a withered old man.

Agent Dunham is able to tie this case into one of her older cold cases, a serial killer who removed the pituitary glands of his female victims. It also seems to tie into some of Dr. Bishop previous research, where he was trying to develop a perfect soldier — someone who aged from birth to 21 years in just three actual years. He casually mentions that stopping the accelerated aging was the problem. Bishop hypothesizes that the killer is one of these experiments, and uses the pituitary glands of his victims to stave off his rapid aging. Another victim is found, and Dr Bishop is able to use a fancy machine from Massive Dynamics to recreate some of the last visions she saw. Using these clues, Dunham and Peter Bishop are able to stop the serial killer — who dies of old age before Dunham’s eyes — and rescue his final victim

Given that Fringe is science fiction, (and thus far, not particularly original science fiction) I am willing to accept that — due to genetic manipulation — the killer rapidly ages. For the sake of argument, I will also accept that quaffing a handful of pituitary glands (of comely young women of questionable morals) every couple of years will stop this rapid aging.

But even accepting those, several items caught my eye:

1. The Pregnancy, Birth, and Child
Pregnancy is a joint relationship between mother and fetus — just because the fetal aspect has accelerated growth doesn’t mean the maternal aspect will be able to keep up. A miscarriage would seem to be the most likely outcome.
What type of c-section was that? Emergency c-sections are performed vertically along the abdomen as it’s the fastest way and scarring (and uterine rupture in subsequent pregnancies) is not an issue.
There has to be some conservation of mass. Where did the child get all the protein and other building blocks necessary to grow that fast? He would have to have been eating a tremendous amount from the minute he was born.
Funny how his entire body seemed to age — except the umbilical cord.

2. Neuromuscular blockade
Neuromuscular blocking agents paralyze skeletal muscles. Higher doses may paralyze the diaphragm and lead to respiratory paralysis and side effects are known to occur. These drugs have no effect on cranial nerves and would not in any way “freeze” the victim’s optic nerve. This woman has been dead for hours; there’s no electrical activity in those nerves left to speak of.
Apparently her eyes have no extraocular muscles.
Why the bridge? It wasn’t the last thing she saw — that would be the killer and his “father” — nor was it the last thing she saw when she was injected with the medication — that would be the killer.

3. Defibrillation
You don’t shock a flatline. It doesn’t work, and may make things worse.
In a situation like this: 1) stop the anesthetic — it’s short acting, that’s why it has to continually run during the procedure. 2) provide CPR until the drug wears off.

I’ve had several people ask me what I thought of FOX’s new show Fringe.
I liked it. It was an enjoyable action procedure with some potentially interesting characters. The science was questionable — fringe at best, pseudoscience at worst — but that’s pretty much as advertised.
I’ll certainly keep watching for few more weeks, at least long enough to see if they give Pacey Peter Bishop any actual personality.

The Plot:FBI Agent Olivia Dunham is part of a team evaluating a fatal outbreak of an unknown disease aboard a plane bound for Logan International Airport. While following up a seemingly minor lead, Dunham and her partner/lover Agent Scott manage to stumble upon the prime suspect and his secret lab. They give chase, but the suspect triggers an explosion that knocks Dunham unconscious and exposes her partner to mysterious chemicals which affect him in a similar way to the mysterious plane contagion. Doctors are at a loss and Agent Scott is placed in a medically induced coma.

Searching the internet for answers, Dunham discovers the work of a Dr. Walter Bishop, a schizotypal genius scientist who has been confined to an insane asylum for the past 17 years. She tricks his equally genius (but much more sociable) son Peter into helping her get Dr Bishop released from the asylum and working to find a cure for Agent Scott. Through a combination of legwork, questionable science, and chutzpah the team succeeds and is able to cure Agent Scott — but even more questions are uncovered.

Thoughts, good and bad, about the science/medicine:

1. The Contagion
The writers are quite vague — intentionally, I’m sure — about the nature of the “contagion” aboard the plane. It is strongly suggested that it is an infectious agent. If so, that was an incredibly fast spread of the disease. From one person infected to an entire planeload in just a handful of minutes. So the agent not only has to infect and affect a person in mere minutes, but is able to get far enough along in it’s life cycle to allow that person to become virulently contagious in the same period of time. That’s unnaturally — and I’d wager impossibly — fast.
Later, it’s suggested by Dr Bishop that it may be a “leprotic contagion.” (i.e. leprosy based). I guess (shrug). Leprosy really looks nothing like that, is a very slow infection, and is not particularly contagious.

2. The Cow
Why use a cow as a test subject? Peter Bishop says, “genetically, humans and cows are only separated by a couple lines of DNA.” That’s certainly true, but following that logic, why not choose something with even an closer DNA match to humans, like primates (monkeys and apes)? In fact, cows are rarely used for medical testing. Monkeys are used frequently, but so are mice and rats, which have an immune system and pharmacokinetics surprisingly similar to humans.
Not to mention you’ll need more than one test subject.

3. Synaptic Transfer
The whole concept of Synaptic Transfer is just plain silly. Brains do have an electrical field, but different parts of the brain have different electrical patterns – that’s why an EEG has more than one lead. Synchronizing the overall electrical pattern of two brains will not allow them to communicate or share thoughts. Medically, I’d be worried that the person who was having their brain waves “adjusted” to match the other person’s would suffer as seizure, as that’s what unwanted electrical activity in the brain tends to cause.

4. Drugs
Doctor Bishop wants to give Ketamine, Neurontin, and LSD to Dunham before placing her in the sensory deprivation tank. His choice of drugs makes a fair amount of sense.
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic — it makes a user feel as if they are outside their own body. It is used primarily as a veterinary anesthetic, but is also infamous as a date rape drug.
Neurontin (gabapentin) is a drug that was originally developed as a medication to prevent seizures in epileptics. It has also proven to be useful for treating neuropathic (nerve) pain and chronic pain. Of note, it is a relatively recent drug and had not yet received FDA approval when Dr Bishop last conducted his experiments — though it had been known for some years before that.
LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) is a fairly well-known and infamous psychedelic hallucinogen.

5. Stored Blood
Color me skeptical that FBI agents keep blood stored in case they are wounded in the line of duty. Stored blood has a limited shelf life, so they’d have to keep donating more every few months. They would also need to donate multiple units of blood because serious injuries take more than just a single unit.

6. Technobabble
“The active toxin was a magnesium based ethylene glycol…with an organophosphate trig-”
“Calcium gluconate in a thiamine base”

Although this public service ad was originally written in 1959, we can already see the formation of several of the various modern geek cliques: the modders, the cosplayers, and the copyright infringers. Little did Jack Schiff know how prescient he was being when he scripted this simple PSA about all the good stuff at your local library…

Click on the image to the right for the full ad
The art this time is by Bernard Baily, a frequent collaborator with Schiff on PSAs. This ad can be found in various DC comics from February 1959 as well as January 1966. I guess DC figured it was good enough for a second showing. This particular ad is from Adventure Comics #340 and was provided by H if The Comic Treadmill.

More PSAs

JSA Classified #23 “Nightfall, part 1”
J.T. Krul, writer
Alex Sanchez, artist

It’s a good time to be a Dr. Mid-Nite fan. In addition to his regular appearances in the Justice Society of America and cameos in 52, he has had a starring role in 3 of the past 5 issues of JSA Classified. J.T. Krul, who I’m most familiar with from his work at Aspen, has turned in a strong story in this issue. It returns Dr. Mid-Nite to his roots in Portsmouth, and is more in the vein of a horror and detective story than his last appearance, which (also excellent) was more of a standard super-hero tale. Sanchez’s art is good and fits the noir mood well, except that I’m not a fan of how he draws Dr. Mid-Nite’s costume.

In terms of the medicine, Krul has done his research and it shows. Still, there are a couple of areas I’d like to discuss:

Detective: Big fella. Did he give you much trouble?
Dr. Mid-Nite: Nothing 150mgs of Ketamine couldn’t handle. He should be out for at least the next thirty minutes.

Ketamine is a rapidly acting anesthetic. It is used medicinally in people, but is probably more common nowadays in veterinary use. In lower doses, ketamine has dissociative and hallucinogenic properties and has an extensive history as a street and club drug.

For a generally safe, quick acting anesthetic, Ketamine is a good choice for Dr. Mid-Nite. However, a dose of 150mg is too low for a man of that size. That amount is reasonable (if not a little high) for recreational use (definitely not recommended!) but it wouldn’t be enough to produce the anesthesia shown in the comic. Assuming a 250 pound (114 kg) man, an anesthetic dose would start around 800mg. It should take effect in about 3-5 minutes, and as Dr. Mid-Nite states, lasts for 20-30 minutes. Ketamine is also Schedule III Controlled Substance in the US, so this is yet another example of Dr. Mid-Nite breaking Federal and state drug laws.

Dr. Mid-Nite: You really should consider limiting your blood intake. You could suffer an iron overdose or even develop toxic porphyria.

Porphyria is a condition where there is a breakdown in the synthesis of heme (one of the components of hemoglobin). Toxic levels of precursor chemicals build up and lead to a variety of symptoms including abdominal pain, vomiting, irregular heart rhythms, seizures, hallucinations, and paranoia. Skin rashes are common as well.

Porphyria is usually an inherited disease, but there have been cases where exposures to certain chemicals have caused the condition. This is the “toxic porphyria” Dr. Mid-Nite mentions. The most extensive case occurred in Turkey in the 1950s when grain made into flour was contaminated with hexachlorobenzene. Over a five year period, nearly 5000 people were affected.

I can find no connection between drinking blood and toxic porphyria in the medical literature. Biochemically, it really doesn’t make much sense either unless the blood is somehow contaminated. If ingestion of blood could cause toxic porphyria, then patients with gastrointestinal bleeding would develop the disease, but they don’t. Frankly, the only mentions I can find relating blood and toxic porphyria are on several fringe websites that discuss — and seem to recommend — drinking blood and mention as a side effect “(possibly) toxic porphyria”. It’s not hard to notice that every website has the identical paragraph about the risks of drinking blood so it’s likely they all cribbed it from the same place, and that place was wrong. I think it’s safe to label this one an urban legend.

On the other hand, a good case can be made that drinking blood could lead to iron overload. Most iron overload situations are due to hemochromatosis, a hereditary disease where the body cannot process iron properly. Even without hemochromatosis, it is still possible — though rare — to develop iron overload by taking in too much dietary iron. There is a condition known as “African Iron Overload” that occurs among certain African tribes who brew a drink high in iron. Individuals who imbibe large amounts of this beverage develop iron overload*. I would think that regular ingestion of blood would be a similar situation.

*There is some evidence that there may be a genetic disposition involved as well as drinking high-iron beer.

Tags: comics medicine dr mid-nite ketamine porphyria iron overload

It’s that time once again to see what searches have brought people across the web to Polite Dissent. Capitalization has been added to make the searches more readable, but the grammar and spelling are untouched otherwise. As usual, my snarky comments are added in green.

Comic Related Searches

• Is Superman’s girlfriend pretty? All that matters is that Superman thinks so.
• Batman parents disappointed Death and the Maidens I think we all were disappointed with that comic.
• Clark Kent’s 8 pack abs Two better than six-pack abs.
• Green Arrow Longbow rape I’m sure we all can guess what this search was in reference to. For the record, I always though she had been.
• Zatanna naked The return of a classic search term.
• Wonder Woman groin I have no idea what they were searching for here, but I hope I answered their question.
• Lana Lang underwear ditto.
• Does Carter Hawkman Hall have a doctorate? Good question.
• John Byrne Vision Scarlet Witch genitalia I blame Chris Arndt for this one.

Medically Related Searches

• Do drug testes screen for Ritalin? I’m going to assume you mean “tests” and not “testes”, but the answer is yes — I suspect someone takingRitalin would test positive for amphetamines.
• Differance between cyst and mass A mass is solid, a cyst is hollow.
• Why is clostridium perfringens likely to grow in gangrenous wounds? You have it backwards, it is the infection with Clostridium that is causing the gangrene.
• Rh negative celebrities I have no idea. I’m A-, do I count?
• Cleaning a wound bleach Please don’t. While it’s true the bleach would probably kill any nasty germs, it would also kill many of your own cells, severely impeding the healing process.
• Rash where butt hits toilet seat Probably because somebody smeared something on the toilet seat.
• Medical term when scrotal organ burst out Painful
• Will the pregnancy test aome out positive when using the IUD? If you’re pregnant it will.

Homework

• Macbeth soliloquy she should have died hereafter. OK, here you go. From Macbeth, Act V, scene v, spoken by Macbeth:

  She should have died hereafter;
  There would have been a time for such a word.
  To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
  To the last syllable of recorded time,
  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
  Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
  And then is heard no more: it is a tale
  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
  Signifying nothing.

To Each Their Own (presented without comment)

• Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable having sex
• funny sex comics with the Teen Titans and Kim Possible
• Peter Parker adult fanfiction Norman Osborne

Miscellaneous

• Comics of nose Huh?
• Intravenous pumpkins Double huh?
• Obsessive compulsive personality disorder getting married Hope for neat spouse, or failing that, a patient one.
• Homemade defibrillator These two words should not go together.

This medical review of House contains many spoilers, so don’t say I didn’t warn you…

While House is at an Off-Track Betting parlor, a customer named Anica has a sudden seizure. House stops a passerby from starting CPR and notices that the patient has some discolored stretch marks on her abdomen. He advises the bystander to call for an ambulance and have her sent to the hospital.

Anica is admitted to the hospital and she is noted to have an anemia as well as a low platelet count. The labs also show an elevated blood alcohol level. House is suspicious that she has Cushing’s Disease. The other team members suspect lupus or Familial Telangectasia. Foreman believes that she is an alcoholic and has alcohol-related DIC (Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation).

House mentions Cushing’s Disease to Anica and she informs him that she had it last year because of a pituitary tumor that was secreting the hormone ACTH. She tells him that the tumor was removed surgically. An MRI shows no recurrence of the tumor. House thinks it may be a microadenoma (a microscopic hormone-secreting tumor) and performs a lumbar puncture. His poor technique, intentional or otherwise, ends up causing the patient’s blood pressure to rise dangerously high; House takes this as proof of the pituitary tumor but the others disagree. Chase mentions that there may be a tumor elsewhere causing the Cushing’s. A subsequent whole body scan shows a mass in the pancreas, but a biopsy shows it is not cancerous.

Cameron suspects Anica has Munchausen’s Syndrome, a psychiatric condition where patients fake being sick to gain attention. They do this by injuring themselves, faking lab tests, or taking medication to fake symptoms. To prove her diagnosis, Cameron “accidentally” leaves some medicine behind in the room. Anica believes this medicine will cause seizures so she takes it, but instead it turns her urine orange and proves that she has Munchausen’s.

House refuses to believe that Munchausen’s is the only diagnosis. He now deduces that Anica also has aplastic anemia, a disease where the bone marrow stops producing any kind of blood cell. Foreman won’t let him draw any more blood from the patient, so House tries to pretend someone else’s test results are Anica’s. Foreman catches on and she is discharged with a diagnosis of Munchausen’s.

House meets Anica outside, still convinced that she has aplastic anemia. With her consent, he injects her with insulin and colchicine. The insulin will cause a blood sugar low enough to cause a seizure, and the colchicine will cause a low white blood cell count. She is readmitted to the hospital because of the seizure, and the low WBC convinces Foreman that Anica does indeed have aplastic anemia. Dr. Wilson is consulted and he begins radiation therapy to kill off her bone marrow so that a bone marrow transplant can be performed. Meanwhile, House is reclining in Anica’s room and he notices a sickly-sweet smell. At the last minute he realizes that she doesn’t have aplastic anema but instead has a Clostridium perfringens infection. He stops the radiation and starts her on an antibiotic to cure her infection.

The medicine was dismal this time around. House is convinced Anica has Cushing’s — and the symptoms did support it — but never checked a cortisol or ACTH level: the tests that prove the condition, no matter the size of the tumor. Rifampin was a poor choice of drug for Cameron to fool the patient with as it has some nasty side effects. There are safer drugs to use to turn someone’s urine orange. Even more damning was the fact that Anica was started on radiation without a bone marrow biopsy to prove that she had aplastic anemia in the first place. In reality, the actual medicine was all just hand waving to set up the patient versus doctor Muchausen’s scenario and the Foreman versus House ego showdown.

The ethics and economics were poor as well. I hope I don’t have to tell anyone that helping a patient fake an illness is a bad thing. And the idea that House hasn’t dictated any notes in a year is frightening. At any reasonable hospital, he would have had his privileges revoked long ago and no insurance company would pay the hospital for billing that old (ninety days if you’re lucky).

The main theme of this episode was the conflict between Foreman and House, and I found it disappointingly tame. After last episode’s disciplinary committee, House has to serve under the supervision of another physician for a month — and Cuddy chose Foreman to be that physician. House tries all kinds of tricks to irk Foreman, and Foreman tells House that nothing he does will change Foreman’s mind. Repeat this about six times. Foreman was right at the end though: House came closer to killing the patient than saving her.

This episode earns a C for the mystery, another C for the solution, and a C- for the medicine overall. The soap opera earns only a C as well. This is an episode that could have been so much more, but ended up being disappointingly average.

• Previous House reviews