Fringe S01 E16 "Unleashed" - TV Tropes

The Miracle of Pregnancy

Season 1, Episode 16:

Unleashed

Animal rights activists ransack a laboratory and unwittingly release a creature with a ferocious appetite. As they flee in an SUV, the creature follows and grotesquely mutilates them. The Fringe team, consisting of FBI agents Olivia, Charlie Francis, Broyles, and civilian consultants Peter and Walter Bishop, arrives, and Walter sees evidence of different creatures' marks on the bodies. Olivia realizes one of them is missing, and after interviewing a student at MIT to try to identify the victims, she realizes they were animal-rights activists. While conducting autopsies on the bodies, an animal control team at a different site is killed by the creature after investigating a call.

While investigating the animal control team deaths, Charlie is attacked by the creature, but it fails to kill him after Olivia arrives on the scene. Walter explains he believes the creature is a man-made chimera, which has the best genetic traits of many different creatures, including a lizard, bat, and wasp. He had tried to create the creature years before, but his experiments failed, and concludes that someone else must have taken up his research. Though initially thinking Charlie was healthy after the attack, they realize the chimera's stinger injected him with its larvae, and that he has less than 24 hours to live.

After experimenting with poison fails to kill the larvae in Charlie's body, Walter believes that mixing the chimera's blood with Charlie's will stop the larvae from attacking and bursting out of his body, as they did in the other victims' corpses. Olivia learns one of the victims, Jonathan Swift, was the son of a scientist who tests on animals, and was killed while breaking into his father's lab. They also realize the chimera was created based on work by one of Walter's peers, not Walter himself.

After several sightings, the Fringe team move into some nearby storm drains to bait the chimera with its larvae. Feeling somewhat responsible, Walter locks himself in with the chimera and ingests some poison that will kill him within the hour, believing that if it kills him, the chimera will only be killing itself. He manages to shoot the chimera in time however, and they use its blood to develop a cure for Charlie.

Tropes in this episode include:

• Animal Wrongs Group: Animals First! They only fall short of the 28 Days Later group that causes the Zombie Apocalypse by unleashing a far less contagious problem.
  • Bonus points for the imbecile that apparently saw what the monster was before releasing it, especially because he's the lab's main reseacher's son!
• Artistic License – Medicine:
  • Walter seemed to acquire all ultrasound images in 3D mode, which would be quite unconventional. The ultrasound machine also looked outdated, while the ultrasound images were high resolution 3D images you would expect from a state of the art machine.
  • The ultrasound image remained stable while Walter was moving the probe in circles.
  • Astrid stuck a needle in Charlie's belly to obtain blood, but there are no large blood vessels there, and she would likely withdraw peritoneal fluid instead of blood.
  • It is proposed that the bat immune system, because it is so efficient at eliminating disease, is necessary to prevent rejection in the hybrids. This confuses transgeneic manipulation and xenografting, but even beyond that does not make sense. In order to reduce the chance of rejection, the immune system should be suppressed. This is why transplant patients are maintained on immunosupressants.
• Autopsy Snack Time: Walter is munching on a wrap found in the victims' car after examining their bodies.
• Badass Transplant: While Walter says the creature is a trangenic species, he then starts talking about rejection suggesting that some attributes may be a result of xeno-grafting.
• BFG: although the 50-caliber incendiary rounds did not seem very incendiary.
• Chest Burster: Larvae leaving the body. It literally rips the the person's torso open with buckets-worth of worms spilling out.
• Don't Be Ridiculous:

  Peter: Hey, we're looking for big bird.

  Walter: Don't be ridiculous. Perhaps a pterodactyl...

• Double Standard: Rape, Sci-Fi
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Or in this case hybrid larvae love their mamas. The larvae stop feeding on Charlie when their mother's blood is injected into him, presumably because they now think he is their mother.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: The stinger of the creature is used to impregnate.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Johnathan and the scientist are pulled through the door (off camera) as they scream.
• LEGO Genetics: Termed "accelerated Darwinism" by Walter, but having nothing to do with natural selection or evolution as described by Darwin.
• Monster Is a Mommy
• My God, What Have I Done?: Walter believes the creature is a result of his work. It's later revealed it's not, but he still feels he's responsible.
• Our Gryphons Are Different and other Mix-and-Match Critters in Walter's notebook.
• Settle for Sibling: Peter flirting with Rachel
• The Worm That Walks: The larvae.
• Zipping Up the Bodybag