Television Review: Power Hungry (Fringe, S1x05, 2008)
Power Hungry (S01E05)
Airdate: 14 October 2008
Written by: Julia Cho & Jason Cahill
Directed by: Christopher Misiano
Running Time: 47 minutes
By the time Fringe reached its fifth episode, the series appeared to have settled comfortably into its procedural form, and the result is an instalment that begins to look distinctly "regular" in a very predictable way. The weekly anomaly, the investigative routine, Walter's eccentric leaps of deduction and the obligatory teaspoon of mythology drizzled over the final scenes: every component is present and correct, yet assembled with so little surprise that Power Hungry often feels built from a template rather than written.
The episode begins with a typical cold open introducing Joseph Meegar (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), an ordinary man from Worcester, Massachusetts, who supports his elderly, ailing mother Flora (Marylouise Burke) by working as a courier. Joseph labours under an unusual affliction: whenever he becomes angry or excited, the electrical and electronic devices around him go haywire. This quirk escalates into catastrophe when he delivers a package to a Boston firm whose receptionist, Bethany (Diane Davis), he has long been infatuated with. Finding himself with her in a lift, an ill-timed slip of his mobile phone — her face displayed on its screen — creates an excruciatingly awkward situation that snowballs until his agitation sends the lift plunging downwards. Everyone aboard perishes; Joseph alone miraculously survives.
Broyles summons the Fringe Division to investigate, and the team swiftly determines that the victims were electrocuted rather than killed by the fall, while Walter detects enormous residual quantities of electromagnetic energy at the scene. In the meantime, a shell-shocked Joseph returns to his delivery company, is sacked on the spot, and inadvertently causes a machine to injure his boss. Still reeling, he goes home to his mother and, in the cruellest of the episode's ironies, causes her pacemaker to fail, killing her.
Walter begins to speculate that the disaster was caused by the man who survived the fall, a line of reasoning that carries him back to experiments he conducted in the 1970s, in which human test subjects were injected with specific electromagnetic frequencies so they could be homed in on by pigeons. Meanwhile, Olivia continues to endure ghostly encounters with the deceased John Scott, who insists he truly loved her and, more usefully, assists her with the investigation; it is thanks to him that she learns the identity of Joseph Meegar as the man responsible for the incident.
Before the team can apprehend Meegar, however, he is snatched by Jacob Fischer (Max Baker), a rogue scientist wanted by Interpol for unethical experiments, who has been luring test subjects through late-night television commercials promising hair growth or, in Joseph's case, increased self-confidence. Walter devises a method of locking onto Joseph's unique frequency, and the Fringe Division duly uses a flock of pigeons to track him down; Fischer is arrested while Joseph is taken to hospital. Afterwards, Walter explains to Olivia that during her experiment in the isolation tank, part of John's consciousness fused with her own, now manifesting itself through her visions. In the closing scene, Broyles hands Olivia some of John's personal effects, including an engagement ring, confirming that he truly did love her.
The formulaic, predictable character of the episode is best illustrated by this procedural storyline. The protagonist who unwittingly causes mayhem around him is an ordinary, downtrodden man with whom the audience is plainly meant to sympathise — a figure by now thoroughly familiar from countless genre shows. He is played by Moss-Bachrach who, being visibly younger here than when he played his best-known character in The Bear, looks a tad too attractive to be wholly convincing as a man who never stood the slightest chance with Bethany. To his credit, he does well with what he has been given by the scriptwriting team of producer Jason Cahill and renowned playwright Julia Cho, from whom one might reasonably have expected rather more distinctive material.
The actual villain of the piece fares considerably worse. Jacob Fischer is a one-note, generic antagonist who barely appears in the episode at all, and whose anti-climactic surrender near the end only underlines the creators' lack of inspiration. A menace built up through Interpol files and sinister experiments deserved a far better payoff than a quiet capitulation.
Equally deflating is the resolution of the previous episode's cliffhanger, handled in simple, rationalist fashion: there are no ghosts and no afterlife, and John is merely the manifestation of fragments of consciousness lodged within Olivia's mind. Whilst this quasi-scientific explanation is in keeping with the series' general orientation, it nevertheless looks far too much like the convenient "it's only a dream" trope, deployed to dig the writers out of a hole they had fallen into. The revelation that John harboured genuine, noble intentions towards Olivia adds a layer of melodrama that the episode has not entirely earned.
Christopher Misiano's direction, at least, is solid throughout, and works especially well in the pigeon-homing sequence near the end, which deftly mixes suspense, action and humour — easily the episode's most memorable passage. It is a pity that the rest of Power Hungry rarely rises above the competent and the ordinary.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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