FRINGE
The Chronicles of Fringe: The Traitor, the Criminal, the Lunatic and the Tank
No in FRiNGEment intended.
Note: just for the fun of taking a new angle on the show… god I got to get a life! as always your input is paramount...
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Some journeys take us far from reality. Some adventures lead us to another realm of consciousness. There are many stories of Fringe. One of them is about to be told.
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CHAPTER ONE
OLIVIA FINDS A COW
Once there were four people whose names were Olivia, Peter, Walter, and Astrid. This story is about something that happened to them while they were working for the government.
But first of all, Olivia must save John, her dying lover. To make it happen, she needs the Bishops: Walter, an institutionalized Professor to have answers and Peter, his son, to deal with the paper work.
She would never let her colleagues Broyles and Charlie have their say in the matter or change her course of action obviously. She never doubts she's doing the right thing and if it takes a lunatic to cure John so much the better, logic doesn't apply to love.
Oddly, it goes smoothly but at a considerable expense of taxpayer dollars and she gets to make a journey to the Middle East, which never gets old. She is confident that everything will ultimately go as planned which is, everyone knows that, against entropy diktat and the butterfly effect, but who cares?
The first time she encounters Walter, she is not frightened by the possible outcome of her decisions but by his appearance and present mental state.
Peter on the contrary has been reluctant from the very beginning to meet with his estranged father of seventeen years. He would have more than willingly dropped the keys to the Professor's padded cell to the bottom of the ocean given the chance.
But they meet nevertheless at the risk of great trauma and loss of self-esteem for Peter because Olivia lures him into it with basic spy threats and fake promises.
And if Walter is happy, Peter is not. To make him feel better, she appoints him official translator of Walter's truisms, but still, he is not happy.
Despite Peter's resentment, despite her colleagues' sexism and despite all the signs, Olivia is determined to proceed with her plan at all costs.
She secures an old laboratory in the basement of Kresge Building in Harvard, the very laboratory that once was the place of achievements showing a wanton disregard of embarrassing virtue or deontological ethics, --achievements made of course only for the greater good.
The Professor needs more than a standard forensics' work package, a bunch of lab tubes and a few laptops on a grid to get John back from Slimeland. The Professor needs a two year old purebred bussaurus. So she brings him the cow, and they call her Gene and Astrid will brush her teeth and lullaby her if necessary.
Not to mention the fringe benefits of free milk.
OLIVIA STEPS INSIDE THE TANK
Settled back in his initial Harvard environment and provided with the right amount of outdated technology and state of the art devices, Walter is thriving inside the limits of his gothic lab while Peter is going angrier by the minute and turning into a brooding spoiled brat because of sleep deprivation.
Fortunately, Peter finally comes to his senses when realisation sinks that Olivia has been playing him all along, and he develops instantly a profound admiration for her abilities.
When it becomes obvious that regardless of Walter's new toys, the combined intellects of the Bishops and DHS resources Olivia will not achieve her goals, against all safety protocols and sanitary rules, she transfers her lover to their secret facility.
Walter, theorising that they indeed practically live in a basement, leads her to believe that by attempting a mind meld, he will access John's memories.
Pressured to find evidence, Olivia agrees to be the subject of Walter's old pet project revival and gains the trust of Peter and Walter in the process.
In order to help her synch her Woodstock vibe to her lover's psyche, Walter doses her with a creative potent cocktail of homemade drugs inducing a comatose state, covers her body with probes and sensors and hooks her to monitors before immersing her half naked for his personal enjoyment and possible male viewers' in a dodgy saline solution.
This rusty tank being the best Walter ever possessed, he is confident that his endeavour will be a blatant success. Contact is maintained through brain-wave transmissions giving the team the opportunity to witness a live feedback of the extent of her love for John.
WHAT OLIVIA FOUND THERE
Against all odds, the experiment is successful but Walter refuses to take credit.
Now that Olivia demonstrated that she is not only immune to authority, but a true action hero, an impulsive woman and a helpless romantic, which are the cornerstone for the typical FBI agent, she follows the suspect singled out in her dream state only to discover that her lover's demise is the doing of another dysfunctional family, --and to some extent a possible industrial conspiracy.
She manages to find the evil twin responsible for John becoming a giant gummi bear and Peter makes sure he confesses, thus proving the extent of his commitment to the project.
On top of a cure for John, she digs up a tape that unexpectedly turns her world upside down. Unfortunately, her miraculously recovering lover murders her suspect and takes off forcing her into a formulaic car chase of epic proportion which leads to his death in a predictable accident, --adding quite a few hours of therapy to her list of things to do during the next decade.
So much has happened now that letting Peter and Walter go would prove to be a felony. The alternative option being to kill them, she realizes that she cannot afford extra casualties on her records and offers them a job instead.
PETER BECOMES A PART OF IT
Now that he is stuck in Boston with the rest of them, Peter has to find himself an occupation besides tending to his father every needs and providing the necessary comic relief as the resident clown.
Aware that he will never be a match to Sherlock Holmes in his lifetime, after his winning stunts at bringing an old car and a girl back to life, he chooses to multitask.
Apart from the occasional wake up call in the middle of the night, he fully enjoys the ride and begins to think that he's here to stay. Thanks to Walter, he is even supplied with a piano, a great addition to the lab equipment that keeps him from singing, which is always a good thing.
Oblivious of a medical condition kept secret by a paranoid Walter, he gets to lay his hands on incredible science prototypes, to be the witness a continuous freak show, and to work with Olivia and Astrid.
But even the prospect of marvelling at the next aging baby or at a humming beacon from Down Under is not enough to protect him from being hurt by Walter's temper and the occasional mysterious villains.
When he decides to leave Olivia and the project to go back to living by his wits, he is abducted and tortured, and forced to reveal sensitive information he does not have before being stunned by a bald telepath in a remote cemetery.
After such a painful ordeal, to make sure he will not run away, Olivia gives him a smile and an official laminated tag sporting his worse mug shot.
Pondering that being flooded with poor science fiction clichés is indeed an occupational hazard, he accepts her offer.
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what do you say? shall I continue?