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.