The Same Old Story
After a newborn baby rapidly ages into an 80-year-old man, Fringe division agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) and consultants Peter (Joshua Jackson) and Walter Bishop (John Noble) investigate.
It is revealed that Dr. Claus Penrose (Mark Blum), an expert in progeria, is working to help his son Christopher (Derek Cecil) stay alive, as he suffers from rapid aging syndrome.
The woman is identified as having recently left a local motel, and Olivia finds evidence that points to a past serial murder case she and her former partner John Scott were not able to solve.
Walter takes both corpses back to his lab and determines that the woman had only been pregnant minutes before giving birth, her child having a preternatural form of accelerated aging disease.
Unseen by the Fringe division, Dr. Penrose visits an abandoned warehouse and meets the murderer, Christopher (Derek Cecil), his son, who suffers from rapid aging syndrome.
Walter hypothesizes they can discover the location of the crime by looking at the images left in the woman's optical nerves induced by the paralyzing sedative.
Borrowing an electronic pulse camera from Massive Dynamic, they discover the image of a suspension bridge near Stoughton and identify the likely location from which it was viewed—the same warehouse that Dr. Penrose visited.
Olivia chases off after Christopher, who eventually succumbs to his rapid aging and dies, while Peter, after nicking Penrose with a bullet, confers with Walter to apply a makeshift defibrillator to bring the victim back to life.
They wanted to find a balance between standalone stories and serialized content, and studied procedural dramas such as Law and Order and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation for inspiration.
For the scene in which they remove the victim's eyeball, the special effects crew created a mold based on actress Elizabeth Stanley's head.
[4] VFX Supervisor Christopher Scollard explained that for the eye's last vision, they used "a lot of actual photographic reference on the set and on the location," which they then used to "take that imagery and composite it into the various computer monitors and displays in the lab.
[5] Other guest actors included Betty Gilpin as Loraine "Amber" Daisy Alcott, Bernie McInerney as old Christopher Penrose, Carmen Goodine as Amy, Ty Jones as a doctor, and Karin Agstam as John Scott's sister.
Josh Jackson of Paste Magazine disliked the "deus ex machina" aspects that "neatly solved the puzzles of the first two episodes", and also criticized perceived "plot contrivances" like how the serial murderer immediately began aging once interrupted from killing his last victim.
Despite these flaws, Jackson said he would tune in next week because he would "rather have a show err on the side of unbelievable than unremarkable, and I'm interested to see if Abrams has any more tricks up his sleeve".
