In Which We Meet Mr. Jones
"In Which We Meet Mr. Jones" is the seventh episode of the first season of the American science fiction drama television series Fringe.
The story begins when an FBI agent collapses from a parasite constricting his heart, and Olivia must meet with biochemist David Robert Jones (Jared Harris) in Frankfurt in order to find a cure.
Agent Mitchell Loeb (Chance Kelly), a friend of Broyles (Lance Reddick), is on a group mission in Weymouth, Massachusetts but fails to find evidence of wrongdoing in a truck they targeted.
He is rushed to the hospital, where the medical staff cut open his chest, only to find his heart is being constricted by a synthetic rhizocephalan-like parasite.
Not recognizing the parasite, Walter pokes it with a blade in an attempt to remove it, and it constricts tighter around Loeb's heart, further endangering his life.
Broyles explains to her that ZFT are privately funded cells in 83 recorded countries that traffic in scientific progress, not weapons or drugs.
Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) finds a sheet of code in Loeb's briefcase listing agents from their field office.
The parasite is removed, but the team does not realize that the entire incident was orchestrated by Loeb and his wife to get the information Peter extracted from Smith.
When actor Jared Harris was first cast for the part, he was told Jones was "possibly a major, important character", as indicated by the episode's title.
It executed every aspect of character and story with clarity, found an infectiously hectic rhythm that we just couldn't help but dance to - like a pied pipers song" Travis Fickett of IGN disliked the episode, criticizing it as "sloppy," the science as "repeating itself," and the fringe element [the parasite] as "especially goofy"; he rated the episode 6.0/10.
[11] Writing for Mania.com, critic Stephen Lackey thought Anna Torv's performance "felt forced", but heaped praise on John Noble.
He concluded his review, "Hopefully, next week the story will be just a little more concise, Olivia and Peter back working together and maybe at some point Astrid will actually have something important to do".
[12] UGO Networks writer Jon Lachonis stated, "If you were on the fence before, [the episode] will drag you kicking and screaming into the dark world of Fringe's science wielding bogeymen.
With this new formulation of Fringe, we get the challenge of a sophisticated crime drama mixed with sad sack characters that tempt the everyman into the game, while blowing us away with a level of wordplay and pseudo science that CSI or Alias could only have dreamed of.
