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Reviews
Fringe: A New Day in the Old Town (2009)
A very bad way for a cool character to go
It's OK for a show to kill off one of its coolest characters for the sake of dramatic impact (and possibly contractual issues). In my opinion, Charlie was just one of the best characters in this series and he deserved better than this.
The episode in not at all bad, actually, until the very last sequences, where Charlie confronts the shape-shifter alone and gets killed. Now, the shape-shifter manages in the space of a few seconds (before help arrives) to kill Charlie, use the device to steal his appearance (a process which takes a substantial amount of time as shown in the opening sequences of the episode), hide the body, get the oh-so-conveniently- stashed corpse of the nurse, shoot it (??!) and set up the whole scene convincingly enough to fool FBI agents. Also, no one bothers to actually check if the body is indeed human or shape-shifter, which is not all that hard to do, since they bleed mercury! And the last blow: the shape- shifter actually leaves his smashed-up device for the FBI to find. Very poorly done.
Fringe: Unleashed (2009)
Why so derivative?
The monster itself was pretty decent, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the special effects were not cheap-looking. Explosions and the like are easier to pull than a convincing moving monster, after all.
However, the whole activist-son-breaks-open-father's-lab-with-friends- freeing-animals-and-spraying-graffiti felt like a poor copy of a part of the plot of "Twelve Monkeys". If it was meant as homage to that brilliant film, then it didn't quite seem to work. In my opinion there is only so far you can go before a movie reference becomes an actual copy and I think this episode crossed the line. Thankfully, the ending sequence was good enough to save an otherwise mediocre episode.