Following my Person of Interest rewatch, over the course of 2023, I’ve decided to rewatch the sci-fi series Fringe (2008-2013) over the course of 2025 (two episodes a week). While Person of Interest deals with questions of surveillance and AI, Fringe is sort of a mad science Doomwatch meets X-Files.
I’ve bought the boxset on Apple TV during a previous sale, but apparently it’s also available on itvx.
These are the watch notes for season 1, episode 1, “Pilot“
0:10 Opening the first episode with a plane mid-flight is likely a sort of pun on the first episode of US shows being called a “pilot”.
1:42 flying through an electrical storm, the in-flight cabin displays show static, implying the content is being delivered as an analog signal. I don’t know enough about ’00s planes, but that seems off? Maybe just a way of conveying disturbance, but in a way that only has broad resonance with people born before, what, 1995?
2:28 I can’t tell what the pilot is saying, but I assume it’s “This takes place after 2001, you’re definitely not supposed to open the cockpit door to check on a disturbance.”
2:53 It’s funny that the title sequence for a 2008 TV series, which was designed to evoke documentary-style shows that deal with occult esoterica, now looks like a regular YouTube channel ident for some 19 year old.
3:16 the motel advertises that their televisions are “color”. It’s not an anachronism, but by 2008 you’d need to consider installing an extra device to continue to watch digital broadcast television on a black and white set.
3:18 I think Olivia’s phone is a BlackBerry Pearl 8100 (2006)
3:49 The “Pearl autopilot system”, allowing the plane to land without a pilot, turns out to be a sci-fi invention, albeit a plausible one. The sad thing is that autoland systems, developed in the 1950s, used to be an actual thing for planes landing in UK airports. The context in which it existed, where 1950s London could have poor visibility but the conditions would be fine otherwise, didn’t exist in the US, so there wasn’t an appetite for spending the extra money in US built planes. And when London cleaned up its smog issue, there was no compelling reason for continued use. Technological development seemingly went backwards.
07:30 “Standard level-four hazmat suits are required to go in.” In the US, hazmat is graded on the scale A-D, for a contamination event, Broyles should have specified “level A”. (I assume this was a confusion between “hazmat” and “biosafety level” – e.g. the BSL-4 lab in the movie Outbreak.)
07:30 Two FBI field agents (and one CIA) are selected to go into the plane, but not a specialist (eg CDC)?
10:00 Olivia would like more information that what the CDC provided in a fax. You’d hope, years into the US post-9/11 push for inter-agency information sharing, they’d be using email by then?
10:00 Compared to the rest of the series, Broyles is a massive ass in the pilot.
10:30 Wait, did they just set fire to the plane in situ on the runway of an international airport, or did they move it elsewhere first?
12:00 Olivia and John find pressurised cylinders in the trash, and identify the previous contents by smell? Pretty sure that hazardous chemical cylinders are going to be labeled, even in shadowy underground labs. It’s just basic safety.
13:54 Olivia uses an “inter-office” search engine apparently shared between the FBI, DoD, CIA. It looks terrible, even by 2008 web accessibility standards.
18:00 “IQ at 190, which is 50 points north of genius” – Olivia is specifically using the original 1916 IQ classification system. Later revisions don’t use the classification “genius”, since it was later felt that a single score couldn’t encapsulate the meaning of the term. But Olivia is old school.
21:10 “I just got here, honey” This pilot has Peter talking like a film-noir detective, which I assume just disappears by the next episode.
40:46 You can see that they’ve successfully booted the computers (with CRT monitors) from the lab that have been sitting there for over 17 years. If we assume that Bishop didn’t immediately get sent to St Claire’s, and that they weren’t brand new, those PCs are from 1990 at the earliest and maybe predate Windows 3.0.
49:28 Both patients have ECM electrodes attached. The props are white ECG crocodile clips attached to ECG pads, two or three each on the body, two each on the temples. (Those pads won’t stay attached when submerged in water, and you clearly see them peeling off later.) We can just accept that they’re usable as EEG (Electroencephalography) electrodes.
Even in 2025, EEG still seems a bit mad-sciencey. But I suspect there’s eventually going to be a mainstream consumer marker for electrodiagnostic wearables (beyond the pulse measuring smartwatches). For example, the Emotiv MN8 headphones from 2020 incorporate EEG – but don’t really offer a compelling consumer use yet beyond stress measurement. Xtrodes now sells a variety of dry electrodes. Imagine dry EEG being incorporated into HUD glasses (or AR) for use as a health sensor, but also as a control interface. We could have Zoomers walking around looking like Brainiac by 2035.
49:30 So what’s going on with the green display. Firstly, lol, it’s clearly been built with the expectation that it appeared on an older CRT (they disappeared between scenes, replaced by Dell flatscreens) since they simulate the visual artefacts of old screens. I guess it’s to illustrate the brain signals aligning, but it’s unreadable in short bursts.
54:00 For about a second we see inside the storage unit lab that there’s a late 80s “midrange” IBM AS/400 (B-series)
54:32 Olivia reconstructs the face she saw on her vision quest using facial composite software. I’m assuming this is a mock-up rather than actual software as it feels a little more like videogame character design screen
55:36 There’s a lamppost sticker with the address “www.glowingmonkeys.com” which was almost-certainly an attempt at a transmedia element (a fringe-science blog) which was quickly abandoned.
56:30 I love it when characters have absurdly large personal offices. Architectural plans specified “event space”, but some exec decided to put a single desk and two chairs in there.
58:33 There’s at least one CRT left in the lab – a 70s/80s wood-panelled Panasonic TV with a “rabbit ears” antenna. (I can’t find the model, close to CT-2012 or CT-9010 in appearance.) As I pointed out earlier, this episode is set just a few months before the original analog TV switch-off deadline in the US.
59:50 The police go up to, at least, the third floor of an apartment building, and somehow there’s a secret basement lab under the kitchen? Wouldn’t that just be the apartment below?
65:00 Ah the old, “you, an FBI agent, are bound by rules while I, a civilian, am not”. Imagine how that would be regularly abused if it worked in the real world.
65:08 Post-9/11 American TV drama teaching us, yet again, that torture always works and is good, actually.
65:30 “All agents are required to set up a backup blood supply in case we’re wounded.” I don’t know if it’s true that the FBI actually keeps autologous whole blood packs for all field agents, but on a practical level this means each of them having a new blood draw every month. Just the practicality of this makes it seem unlikely. (Instead it could have just been the case that she knew he had recently donated blood and that they could track it down?)
66:00 Olivia arrives with a cooler containing a blood pack. It’s red, so likely whole blood. (Packs of plasma, missing the red blood cells, have a yellow honey appearance.) Normally these bags would have multiple barcodes on them, bit the collection date is handwritten as July 2006. The Federal deadline for all blood products to use ISBT 128 bar-codes was April 2006, so the FBI’s blood collection here is not compliant. Also the label just says “Scott, John” (in a weird LED font, intended to evoke embossing tape?) so they have an organisational system that could cause severe issues if two people had the same name. We later see that there are barcodes at the bottom of the label (0BA04R2024 0A07G09280) but I think these are product/lot numbers for the bag, not the blood.
67:00 Broyles: This information is classified, so I can only finally reveal it to you at the bottom of some stairs in a public building.
71:40 Olivia recovers the package containing a microcassette and a UK passport. Both of which are now of far less utility than 2008. Can you imagine finding a microcasette today? People can’t read CD-ROMs anymore.
71:57 Fortunately Olivia uses a Sony M-570V (2005) to record messages for “Diane”, and it uses microcassettes and not the competing mini-cassette format.
72:38 The whoosh sound effect when Agent Scott dramatically pulls off his electrodes was a choice.