Fringe (TV Series) Of Human Action (2009) User Reviews

Mind Control

[claudio_carvalho · 8/10 · 23 January 2017]

When the fourteen year-old boy Tyler Carson is kidnapped, the NYPD surround the car with the abductors; however they kill each other and the kidnappers drive away with Tyler. The Fringe Division is summoned to investigate the mysterious case and soon they learn that Tyler is the son of the engineer Dr. Carson, from the Massive Dynamic. Their further investigate shows that Tyler has mind control powers and the supposed abductors are two respectful car salesmen. When Tyler kidnaps Peter, Dr. Bishop tries to find a means to save his beloved son from the evil teenage boy.

"Of Human Action" is a good episode of "Fringe" with an entertaining episode. The connection of Dr. Bishop with his son is a great moment of the show. The secret about the evil Tyler is a surprising plot point. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Of Human Action"

Great Episode, Awesome Twist!

[musicrocks8047 · 9/10 · 20 May 2011]

I am a big fan of Nina Sharp, and it seems one can always be certain she is up to no good! I felt this episode in particular was quite well acted by all and enjoyed the father son dynamic growing a little deeper between Walter and Peter. As always Anna was lovely as was Jasika, I find her more and more appealing as each episode progresses. I've quite enjoyed seeing Astrid pick up some of Walter's traits! And to top this episode off they leave us with a nice little twist in the form of a letter from Nina to Bell. I must say that I have been waiting some time to see Nina contact Bell and hope it pans out into something real nice:-)Great acting, an emotional roller coaster ride, and a letter to a parallel universe, this episode has definitely entered my top five!

Walter Bishop: Once you are given the order to put on the headphones, do not remove them under any circumstances. If you do, you may die a gruesome and horrible death. Thank you for your attention and have a nice day.

Oh Well, Really!?

[Hitchcoc · 7/10 · 30 October 2023]

I couldn't help but think of that Twilight Zone episode where the freckle faced boy, Billy Mumy, has the ability to wish people into the cornfield. So everyone has to do what he says. He is petulant and unstable. Here we have a kid on drugs who can make people do whatever he wants. He is angry with his father who said his mother was dead when, in reality, she was an drug abuser who eventually straightened out her life. What is interesting is that the kid did horrible things and knew every minute what he was doing, using his powers to kill. Yet in the end, he is not held responsible, getting a slap on the wrist. I see many of the viewers were angry about this portrayal. Of course, the last minute or so, they drop a bomb on us again. Too much.

Fathers and Cloned Sons

[XweAponX · 10/10 · 21 May 2012]

In a "Diversion" Fringe Episode, we are given a diversion. What appears to be a Kidnapping involving a Massive Dynamic employee, is again not what it at first appears to be.

These five Fringe episodes depict our wait for the "Leader of the First Wave" to make his move - Dream Logic, Earthling, this one, August and Snakenead: These are all unrelated, Non-Pattern cases.

These are provided to give us background on Walter, Peter, The Observers, and Massive Dynamic.

An Attention-Deficit Disorder kid Tyler Carson (Cameron Monaghan) has been "kidnapped" by two used car salesmen. This is humorous enough, but when police catch up, they mysteriously kill each other off and one jumps from a high parking structure. Splat!

Walter correctly assumes "Mind Control" in this one - He was wrong about this in "Dream Logic" but he is correct this time.

I view these cases are "Fringe Practice" - They have nothing to do with "The Pattern" but they give Fringe Division good experience in dealing with strange events. Walter becomes Strangely Lucid when the threat shifts from the Tyler to Peter.

Because it was not the kid who had been kidnapped. It was the Kid all along. He has a Pez Dispenser full of drugs that were designed to allow pilots to interface with an airplane flight control.

But the kid, being ADHD, Testosterone-ridden, Angst Filled, with the addition of the Massive Dynamic drugs: As Walter says, "It's a Mind Control Cocktail."

Walter has to figure this one out on his own, he usually gets help from Peter, but Peter has been selected as a Taxi Driver for the kid, and has enough to worry about. Walter gets help from Olivia in a turnaround, they decide to "crash" the kid like an errant version of Windows Vista.

But the NSA thinks the kid wants to sell Massive Dynamic secrets to a foreign government: Therefore it becomes a race as to who can catch them before Peter becomes Collateral Damage. Fortunately, Fringe Division gets there first.

This is what happens when a Kid thinks he just a Kid and not a Massive Dynamic Experiment. Nina Sharp has found a way to report these goings on to William Belly on the other side, she has a quantum-entangled old Silicon Graphics "Dumb Terminal" which can send messages to the other side just like the typewriter at the secret place in Brooklyn. I used to have one of those, they are nothing but a keyboard attached to a Monochrome CRT that echos what you type. They used to make them in El Cajon, California, on Main Street. Maybe on the other side, the factory is still there. But on this side, that factory has been trashed long ago.

This is the irony of Massive Dynamic: They have access to the best state-of-the-art tech, but Nina uses an Anachronism to communicate with William.

At the very end, we get to see the scope of the "Tyler" experiment. Like everything else they do, it is "Massive." - and it occurs to me that this should have been exploited in season five. They literally had an army of Tyler's, who when a few years older might have been able to be recruited to fight the observers. You wonder, what ever happened to these guys? There was also the super soldier from season one episode two, they also had a room full of those guys as well. And they also had "Joseph Meegar", who could electrocute people just by thinking about them. Massive dynamic spirited them away, all of them. Some of them we never heard about ever again, others, like Nick Lane, became integral to the season two storyline.

Whatever happened to all of these massive dynamic experiments? Also this shows that Nina Sharp was not exactly quite upfront with fringe division as she was pretending to be... sure, she was an ally, but she was responsible for all of these experiments.

Sadistic Kid on his way to visit his mother

[markus-21-507725 · 6/10 · 16 May 2021]

Tyler Carson discovers his mother has not died in a car accident, and that she is still alive. So he decides to find a way to go visit her.

There is two ways to travel to her: A: By normal transportation - maybe have friends helping him, or B: Highjacking and forcing people to drive him.

He picks B.

His plan was most likely to use guns, knifes, and grenades to force people to drive him to his mother, and killing anyone standing in his way. By good timing, he accidentally ingests an experimental drug his father developed, which gives him the ability to control other people minds - making him more powerful than just with ordinary guns or grenades.

Again, he has the choice to just "mind-control" someone to drive him peacefully to his mother, instead the evil kid decides to take advantage of any person holstering a weapon, and makes them either shoot them selfs, or kill others. All the killings were completely unnecessary for his mission, and took only place for the kids personal amusement.

Although the idea for this episode was genius, I was really upset about the ending, where the kid is made a victim. I was hoping someone puts a bullet in the evil kids brain to stop his killing spree, or at least he is arrested and charged for all the murders he committed, instead they just tell him to go home. I understand it is not his fault he ingested the drug, but it was his personal decision to kill people for his own amusement. It kind of reminds me of when a maniac goes amok shooting people, then the news media makes it look like it's not the shooters fault, but the weapons fault.

Good plot, wrong message!

The Reviewer's Conundrum

[A_Different_Drummer · 6/10 · 15 March 2015]

This review penned (digitized) 2015 and yes the reviewer is aware of how wonderful the prior reviewers thought the episode was.

We beg to differ.

The big metaphysical issue here is, at what point does an episode have to live or die or its merits? Or conversely does a clever ending retroactively "fix" what came before..? Until the last three minutes of the story, this was one of the least impressive entries in the series.

Way below par.

The core story is a riff on a Star Trek episode which itself was a riff on a Twilight episode which was a riff off a 50's comic book short story which for all I know was a riff off something that Julias Caesar stole from Plato.

That is not the point.

The point is that the scary scary maladjusted kid who killed people as though they were playthings turned the soft moral centre of the series into something very uncomfortable. This was an uncomfortable episode to watch, to find someone to identify with, and TV writers never aim for uncomfortable, if they hit it, it means they made a mistake.

The ending that the reviewers loved? Clever yes. Interesting yes. Able to make up for what came before? No.

An unpleasant episode, on so many levels...

[omero-omero · 1/10 · 28 October 2022]

It is a real pain to watch the whole ordeal happening like in a B-movie style splatter script, clearly devised by the writers to confuse the audience with a continuous barrage of twists and red herrings fanned out. Even when each one of the actors are convincing in their performance, most of the main characters appear to chime a cracked bell note. Almost no advancement is made in any aspects of the main arcs, a bowl of noodles with some strong spices thrown in for good measure. A Massive Dinamic entanglement of differently colored strings, none of which make any sense at all.

Even Tyler makes no sense at all, when after mind-controlling everyone on his path for fun and selfish fullfilment, he just walks away without even considering tipping the only one person had him interested, even for a very brief moment. *SIGH*

weird episode

[filmfreak_london · 4/10 · 2 April 2023]

I felt compelled to write something about this episode and I will do that will long sentences since now you have to write a whole dissertation to publish a review. Every sympathy you might've had with the kid is instantly gone when innocent people are killed. I knew it also from the very beginning that the kid was doing these things. They could have made it different so you would really root for the kid. In the end that kid is just a huge a**ho*e. That was the worst episode to me so far. Nothing happened to the main plot either. I hope it will be better in the next one. I still have to type words.