i’ve been watching Fringe with great pleasure so far and i really enjoyed most of the episodes but the latest episode called “The Bishop Revival” made me feel uneasy because of the underlying “Nazi” theme to it. i am Austrian and Nazism is a touchy subject for me for obvious reasons but what most non-Austrians or non-Germans do not know is how we are made feel guilty about everything related to that dark chapter in our history. i strongly believe that it is important to learn about what happened in Nazi-Germany and the holocaust and its absolutely right that you are taught about it in history lessons in school. however, the way it is taught makes you feel guilty and uneasy about the whole deal. you know that it was just wrong what Hitler and the Nazis did and yet you also know that your grandfather was drafted into the German army and fought for Hitler because he didn’t have a choice. so in short it is a delicate subject.
what happened in the latest Fringe episode then? well, some 100 year old Nazi scientist (bear with me, this is Fringe and sci fi after all) shows up at a Jewish wedding. one elderly woman (who is a holocaust survivor as it turns out later) gets agitated when she sees the Nazi and appears to know him from somewhere. a few moments later half of the wedding guests choke to death. the Fringe team is called in and they find out that the Nazi used a scented candle to disperse a poison gas that killed every jewish person at the wedding.
as the episode progresses it is revealed that this Nazi scientist was involved with gruesome experiments (that apparently stopped him from aging) and is using a poison that can be tailored to kill very specific people like for example people with brown eyes or dark hair or whatever. so when the Nazi sees Walter Bishop at another crime scene he recognizes him mysteriously. it turns out that Walter’s father used to work undercover with those Nazi scientists and did smuggle research results out of Germany. in the end Walter concocts a poison specifically tailored to kill the Nazi before he can release the poison gas at a “tolerance conference”.
the underlying subplot with former Nazi scientists migrating to the US is hardly new; it was used in several X-Files episodes as well and it really did not bother me. what bothered me tho was that the Nazi used a Jewish wedding as a science experiment to test his poison gas. i found this quite tasteless and it made me feel really uneasy. yes it is television and sci fi and it wouldn’t work in real life because there is no DNA string or whatever that denotes that you are Jewish but still… it just was not right.
also, the “artist” who bought the German books that Walter’s father used to smuggle the research out of Germany… his obsession with swastikas and Hitler images was unsettling. considering that the public display of a swastika (unless its for educational purposes) is a crime here it it wouldn’t surprise me if that episode got censored for German/Austrian television.
i wish Fringe would start using Massive Dynamic as the “evil entity” again, i really miss Nina Sharp. or more “Observer” involvement and more “Pattern” related events please!