Peter Figures It Out (with Licorice)

This was a momentous week. First we had our first repeat food (licorice), as well as my first failed attempt to locate a Fringe food (Peek Freans). After much research, I found that Peek Freans, produced in the UK, are no longer sold in the US. They are sold in Canada, and I could have ordered some, but they would not have arrived here in time. Very frustrating. I called all over the Seattle area trying to locate a box, with no luck whatsoever.

I did however locate some chocolate licorice and some cookies that LOOKED like Peek Freans, and ate entirely too many of them. Was there something else I was going to talk about? Oh, right!

The show was pretty freaky this week. The shapeshifters are back, and stole the identities of a couple stoners. Then they started planting devices around town. Walter of course figured out what they were up to, and that a bridge was in the exact center of it. A bridge with the middle span missing (was this ever explained? I don't think so.)

So, Walter also builds a machine using a laptop that, by thumping on the ground, cancels out the magical transdimensional thingy that the shapeshifters are using to bring something (um, a bridge? why?) into our universe. But of course it doesn't work right, and Peter is left out on the bridge to attempt to get it working.

While he's out there an FBI agent gets vaporized, but nothing happens to Peter. When he wakes up in the hospital, he pieces together that he is not from this world, but the other one. Then he checks out of the hospital, and Olivia says that he's vanished. (Hello? Doesn't she work for the FBI or something?)

So -- in one episode Peter finally calls Walter "dad", and then renounces his dadship. Walter is going to be an absolute mess over this. But there was finally an unquestionable Walter food (pecan pie), and in one scene Walter was seen with peanut butter and what looked like homemade bread, so we know what we must do.

Taffy and Time Travel

Our "food" this week was taffy.  Technically I'm not sure that's a food, but we are living in desperate times.  We also had espresso (or coffee, possibly; I am ignorant of caffeinated taxonomy) with chocolate and peppermint in it.

This week's episode was an exceptionally good one.  After a bit of confusion about who the guy on the train was (Peter Sellers?  No, he's dead... Peter Wellers?  Weller!), I knew it was going to be a strong episode if they bothered bringing someone of his caliber in.  It did not disappoint.  He played a scientist who had invented a way to travel through time, which apparently necessitated implanting wires and various bits of metal under his skin.  Walter referred to this as a Faraday cage, which do exist and are used for shielding from electrical impulses.  Sometimes people work inside them (and always for reasons which I can't describe but Google can probably explain), but I've never heard of someone putting one inside themselves.  (Or wearing one for that matter).  But this is Fringe, so we get freaky Cronenberg visuals.

There's a great dynamic that forms between Walter and the time traveling guy; it's like they form a social club for mad scientists.  Unfortunately it doesn't last.  Walter warns him that if he goes back and saves his wife, there will be unexpected consequences.  He explains a bit about how he's struggled with the Peter thing.  The time traveler ignores him though, and goes back; his consequences are much more immediate (and maybe more merciful) than Walter's.

Peter mentioned buying some Peek Freans for Walter.  I'm not sure I've ever had any, and my two companions had never heard of them.  They're British and I'm not sure I can find them out here on the West coast, but I will try.  Walter also was seen with a piece of licorice near his mouth, although he wasn't actually eating it.  That's close enough, particularly with the rough stretch we've had lately with food.  Chocolate covered Twizzlers it is!  That's our first repeat food so far.

Next week's episode, based on the preview, looks like concentrated awesomeness.

Blue Jigglers and the Contagious Cancer Guy

Last week's episode was more than just thin on the food front: there was none.  At all.  So we were forced to do with blue Jello Jigglers (in a nod to Walter's cure for Peter's disease, which was at least a liquid).  I also brought along some blue Gatorade; I'm not quite sure what it was supposed to taste like.  Antifreeze possibly.  (Kids, don't drink antifreeze.  You'll die.  Thanks.)

On to the episode: it was fairly X-Files-esque, with some guy wandering around looking sickly; when he touches somebody, they get sick very quickly and die.  And the guy looks better.  Fringe of course puts their own twist on it, tying it to Old Walter's science experiments involving children.  Inevitably, the guy comes looking for Olivia.  I was very relieved that he didn't touch her; I was concerned we'd have to watch her get all lumpy and gross before Walter found a cure for it by rummaging around someone's kitchen.  But no.  It did not happen.

Olivia also went to see Weird Bowling Guy, who to me will forever be the drug dealer who wore a Charles Manson shirt continuously in The Slums of Beverly Hills.  I like him, and he's a fine actor, but I just can't shake the image.

Walter mentioned taffy, so it's taffy next week.  He also mentioned espresso, which I don't like, and which is not a food, but I have been outvoted, so I'm at least going to sip at it next week while I wait for Walter to mention manicotti, or maybe cheesecake.

Applesauce and a Stolen Peter (80s Edition)

It's been six days since I watched it. I could tell you that my grandfather died (true), that I had company here (also true), that I was discouraged by the complete and utter lack of food in this episode (sadly all too true), but the truth is, I forgot. I will endeavor to do better from now on.

Now where were we: Fringe, right. We ate pretzels and apple sauce in honor of Walter's culinary choices last episode, whenever that was. The pretzels were these puffy things that you cook in the oven in something like four minutes. Just amazing. And I think JayBah was enjoying her apple sauce just a little too much.

As for the episode, it was weird even for Fringe. We finally got to see how parallel universe Peter came to be in our world. I won't even attempt to explain it all, but the Walter we see here is more like our Walter than I would have imagined. It seems like they've softened him a bit, made his motives honorable where Peter is concerned, at least; but I was almost a little disappointed by this. Old Walter was a bastard. Old Walter conducted science experiments on children. Would Old Walter knowingly kidnap someone else's kid? That was an interesting question. The episode sidestepped it, although it did provide a plausible (by "Fringe" standards, anyway) explanation of how things came to pass.

One unintentionally hilarious thing: after Nina tries to stop Walter from going through the wormhole, she yanks her hand back and it's gone all fuzzy. After the Observer pulls Walter and Peter from the water, he tells them that Nina went to seek medical attention. Now what sort of medical attention do you give somebody with a wavy arm, exactly?

Oh how I missed this show. I really enjoyed the 80s style graphics and the 80s style music, as well as Walter showing off a cellphone to the DoD guys. Overall, a solid episode which actually DID deliver answers to our questions, much unlike Lost.

But no food! None. I hope this is not a sign of things to come.

Fringe... the musical?

I could not make something like this up.

Not long now...

Anna Torv is in Esquire

Anna Torv got half-naked in Esquire and talked about doing sex scenes and her love of Tim Tams. She is soooo right about Tim Tams. I think I know what we're eating during Lost night next week.

(Link may not be suitable for work viewing.)

Granola Bars and the Guy With Two of Everything

...well, I think he had two of everything.  They kind of glossed over some of the details, thankfully.

This was the "winter finale", whatever that means, and the show was unusually good.  A building in Manhattan (not our Manhattan, as things turn out) is experiencing earthquakes, then is transported from their dimension into ours, causing horrible problems for one of its inhabitants.  (I've placed the actor, by the way -- he was one of the detectives on HBO's show The Wire.)

Walter determines that Olivia is the best bet for figuring out which of our buildings is likely to vanish.  He brings her to a padlocked building in Florida that's been sitting empty for 20 years -- has anyone noticed on this show that places just sit vacant for decades, completely unchanged and not really all that dusty, considering?  But anyway -- he brings her down there, gets her in a sexy tanktop (thanks Walter!) and feeds her full of drugs so she thinks she's wandering around in the woods somewhere around Vancouver.

After a freaky woodland encounter with her childhood self, she awakens... unable to do anything unusual.  Hmmm.  But at least she's in a tanktop.  Then they're back in New York, where she gets so scared that she and Peter almost kiss, and then, whoa, she can see a shimmering building.  Which the police evacuate in about 30 seconds -- I'm sure that always works -- just in time for it to get sucked into another dimension.

Good work, guys.

Our food tonight was granola bars and tea (is tea a food?), and I brought some sushi along.  I was intending to get sushi for the Lost premiere, but the restaurant was closed.  Maybe they are Lost fans too?

There's no more Fringe until April 1st.  That will be a long enough lag that some of you (and possibly we) will forget what Walter ate tonight.  The answer is: pretzels.  He also ate some apple sauce.

Horseradish Dip and the Mysterious Nazi

I'd be lying if I told you that these were not discouraging times.  Walter's once-reliable food cravings seem to be fading, and we're left munching on whatever food happens to make a passing appearance on the show.  This week we had bacon horseradish dip.  I was skeptical about it at first, not being overly fond of horseradish generally, but the unholy combination of all the fat in the bacon and the sodium in the potato chips combined to short out my brain, and I found myself compulsively shoveling chips into my mouth for the entire duration of the show.

This week's episode began with a bunch of people dying at a Jewish wedding.  In the back of the crowd (much like an Observer) was a man standing against a wall -- one of the older (though not old enough) guests recognized him just before all hell broke loose.  The rest of the episode revolved around finding how the people died and who this mysterious guy with the short-cropped hair and the glasses was.

Walter tests the bodies and determines that they've been poisoned with some sort of highly-specific agent that only affects people with certain genetic characteristics.  This is a clever idea but I didn't find it very plausible that it had been developed in the 1940s by Walter's father.  As he admits, DNA was not even discovered until later.  How his father could have left his "signature" in the 3-dimensional model of the poison's protein ... well, it's best not to ponder these things too much.

This episode introduced us to a darker side of Walter's character.  First we have him getting genuinely angry at Peter for selling his father's books, refusing to accept Peter's apology for it, blaming Peter for the deaths of the people at the wedding (an accusation that turned out to be baseless), then using the Nazi poison against someone in a public place.  Yes, only the one guy died.  But could Walter have really known it would work on just him?  And could he have done something besides outright killing him?

It also raises the question of who the Nazi was.  Walter said his DNA analysis showed that he was over a hundred years old.  That would be about right, assuming the man stopped aging during the Nazi period.  But how did he stop aging?  Was he ever a normal human being?  Or could he be something else?

It will be interesting to see if these questions are addressed later somehow, but I fear it will be forgotten.  The shows haven't seemed to interrelate much lately.

Very slim pickings on the food this week.  Walter is seen eating something, though he never says what it is and Fox did not provide us with a closeup.  The Nazi eats an apple at one point.  Whether this is a Biblical metaphor or a humorous explanation for how he stays young ("an apple a day") is hard to say, but I don't think we'll be following his example either way.

Zombies and Devil Dogs

I was very surprised and happy to see Walter pull a box of (very old) Devil Dogs out of a secret hiding place last week.  I don't blame him; Devil Dogs are really good. Unfortunately they are impossible to find out here on the West Coast, so I had to do a bit of calling around before locating a company in New York that would ship me a box.  After explaining the urgency involved, they agreed to send some along by Priority Mail.

Neither of my fellow Partiers had tried them before, but they were a hit.  Unfortunately, I nearly managed to miss the episode because I was on the phone with a client, and arrived about fifteen minutes late.  As punishment, there was really no proper food in this week's episode.  We were reduced to going through the contents of the refrigerator when Walter is looking for a cure... but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

So: the show.  A guy walks into an office with something dripping from his nose.  I was having X-Files flashbacks again, because it looked like that black oily stuff to me -- but no, it was blood.  He collapses, bike messenger guy does CPR on him, then he gets all crinkly and spews red stuff everywhere.

Soon Olivia and Peter show up, and it's apparent that they have some kind of contagion on their hands.  They manage to (mostly) contain it to one office building though, and ... well really the whole thing was very derivative.  If you want to see this done better and much creepier rent a movie called Quarantine.

But that movie didn't have a happy ending.  Why?  Because Walter was not there to find a cure for the plague in five minutes using the contents of a refrigerator.  Walter is AMAZING, but couldn't he have said something about tiramisu, or coffee cake, or even mashed potatoes?  I think somebody is screwing with us.

Mutants and Pizza

In the real world, an electromagnetic pulse is something that destroys electronics and is generally created by nuclear explosions.  In the world of Fringe though, it makes mutants invisible, and is created by something that looks a lot like an old diesel generator in somebody's basement.  But hey, we didn't get together to critique the science involved, we got together to eat pizza!

This week's episode involved a visit to a creepy town in upstate New York (yes, they do exist) that has a deep dark secret that revolves around military experiments in the 1970s.  The X-Files overtones were even stronger than usual, but I didn't spot any overt references.  There was one nod to "Deliverance" though.

I was growing concerned about Walter's lack of food fixations -- last week we were forced to go with the food that Olivia and Peter were eating, because all Walter mentioned was cream soda.  But I was surprised and amazed when Walter pulled some very old files out from behind somewhere and produced a box of something nobody watching with me had seen.  It's glorious East coast junk food and is being shipped here from New York.

Hopefully Fringe will settle back into its previous once-weekly-on-Thursday routine and we can stop guessing when they'll air them.  We've joked about doing Lost parties but we're afraid of what we'd end up eating.  I think we'd better stick with Fringe.

Chicken Wings and the Radioactive Jerk

After a very long delay and a hiccup last week where Fox aired a repeat episode unexpectedly (forcing us to eat chicken wings and pudding for no reason), we actually managed to watch a new episode of Fringe.

As Walter mentioned chicken wings in the last episode, that's what we had -- boneless chicken wings that one of our members actually refused to eat this time around. There was some debate as to whether this was permissible, but since she ate a couple last time, we decided to let it slide.

We also had some butterscotch pudding, because Walter was seen eating some. You wouldn't think chicken wings and butterscotch pudding would go together, but, shockingly, you'd be wrong.

This week's episode involved a teenage girl who was declared brain-dead and woke up mid-organ-harvest, just after I was done eating my chicken. (I swear they time these things on purpose.) Even weirder, she starts repeating numbers and letters, which turn out to be someone's military ID and some classified launch codes.

Both the ID and the codes turn out to belong to some Navy guy who has gone missing, and further investigation shows that he was involved in a reactor accident that resulted in him being irradiated. He was given some highly experimental anti-radiation treatment that resulted in him 1) not dying, right away at least, and 2) acquiring the ability to possess teenage girls.

He's also not very nice, resulting in the teenage girl talking in a deep threatening manner and nearly setting a Russian brunette on fire (do not try this at home).

The only thing that Walter explicitly mentioned this week was a beverage, not a food, but Peter and Olivia did share a meal together, so we'll be taking next week's food cue from them.

You Cannot Be Serious

Last night was scheduled to be our first fix of Fringe in several weeks, after an unexplained lull from Fox.

But it was not to be.

I arrived with some "chicken wings", as requested by Walter in the last episode.  They were from KFC and the boneless variety.  I thought they were pretty good myself (fried in lard and sprinkled with crack, probably), but my compatriots did not seem quite as excited.

The real trouble though: Fringe did come on at 9, but it was the episode we watched last time!

After the denial lifted ("maybe it's a flashback scene!"), we determined that the new episode would air on Monday.  But we watched the re-run -- it was a pretty good one after all, and there was pudding to be eaten as well -- and after it was done Fox ran a commercial saying that the next episode of Fringe would be on next Thursday.

I'm still confused about what is going on.  The official Fringe site says Monday, the Fringe widget (visible at the bottom of this page) says Monday as well.  So I'm really, really hoping they'll air the new episode on Monday.