Recap / Fringe S01 E15 "Inner Child"

"This was definitely not in the blueprints." - Dennis the demolition expert

Season 1, Episode 15:

Inner Child

A demolition team is about to bring down a building when one worker is drawn to an area not marked on the blueprints. Inside the area they find a path to the building's foundation, and in the darkness, a boy. The boy is taken to a children's hospital and the Fringe team is contacted. The construction workers examined where the boy was found and determined it had been sealed off for seventy years and could not determine how the boy got inside. The boy does not speak, and Walter explains some of his medical conditions are a result of living underground for several years. Olivia seems to be the only person that the boy reacts to, and she helps to coax him to cooperate in his treatment. At one point, she encourages him to eat by sharing candy with him, but he only places the yellow pieces in the form of an arrow for her.

Meanwhile, Charlie Francis receives a fax, which he recognizes as a taunting invitation from a serial killer known as the Artist, who kills women and displays them in gruesome poses. Charlie contacts Olivia at the hospital requesting her help, but as she takes notes, the boy attempts to take her writing tools. Olivia gives them to the boy, and he writes, upside down, a name. Olivia and Charlie, along with other agents, later find the body of the Artist's latest victim, who has the same name that the boy wrote down earlier. Later, the boy provides an address, and Olivia and Charlie race to the location, but this time find nothing. Only later do they learn that a second victim was taken from that spot moments before they arrived. Walter comes to believe the boy has an empathic connection to the case.

Walter seeks to use a neural stimulator to understand the boy's empathy, but Peter only allows it after Walter devises less invasive methods. Though the child's mind is difficult to understand, they obtain a third location. Olivia, Charlie, and other agents set up a roadblock in the area and check all vehicles going through it. Olivia spies a van with a yellow tree-shaped air freshener, and recalling the child's candy display from earlier, determines that the Artist is inside. The killer attempts to escape, and Olivia stabs him to death with his own knife during the struggle.

Olivia and Broyles arrange the transfer of the child to an adoptive family, in large part to keep him away from Eliot Michaels, an alleged “social worker” who wants to claim him for CIA research. While in transit to his new home, the boy makes eye contact with the Observer, September, with whom he shares a resemblance.

Tropes in this episode include:

• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Low Oxygen environment notes -
    • We are told the child is from a "low oxygen environment", but the construction workers did not seem to have any difficulty breathing in the tunnel and we are told rats and insects (rather aerobic creatures) are also in the tunnel.
    • Athletes actually train at high altitudes because the low oxygen environment produces more red blood cells and greater lung capacity, which can produce a temporary competitive edge. People who have not acclimatized to these heights do suffer from hypoxia and altitude sickness. So it seems more likely that the construction workers would have been ill from going into the tunnel than the boy becoming short of breath from leaving the tunnel.
    • Oxygen toxicity does occur, but is not just from a higher then normal fraction of oxygen, but requires that the oxygen is delivered at an elevated partial pressure. At normobaric conditions this would be very rare when oxygen is less then 50% of the inspired fraction, so we can generally tolerate higher then normal fractions of oxygen for short periods with no difficulty.
    • Normal room air is 21% oxygen, so how would they put him on 5% oxygen unless they sealed him in an airless room?
    • The idea of the low oxygen environment all depends on the idea that the tunnel was sealed off to prevent entry of oxygen, but if that were true the boy (not to mention the rats) would likely have succumbed to suffocation long ago from carbon dioxide build up. Unless there was enough moss to consume the carbon dioxide (but moss would of course produce oxygen).
  • Lactobacillius notes -
    • Lactobacillius commonly colonizes mouths, gastrointestinal tracts, and vaginas, but it is not found in our blood unless we are ill. Therefore the absence of this bacteria on blood work is normal.
    • Perhaps Walter meant the bacteria was absent in the gastrointestinal tract or the boy lacked antibodies indicating exposure to lactobacillius. As far as I know no study has been done to evaluate how frequently people do not have lactobacillius as part of their flora, but it is probably rare.
    • This still does not explain why the rats, moss, insects, and dirt, in the tunnel (which the boy was exposed to) had been sterilized of this bacteria.
• Artistic License – Medicine:
  • "Low Oxygen" treatment -
    • Medical grade oxygen (the oxygen hospitals would have in tanks) must be at least 99% pure oxygen by volume. The amount of oxygen a patient receives is varied by the flow rate and how the oxygen is delivered, not by the percentage of oxygen in the tank. There would not be any tanks "with low oxygen content".
    • If an "oxygen" tank only contained 5% of oxygen, what would the other gases be that would be stored in the tank? Diving tanks usually have concentrations of oxygen close to room air, but hypoxic mixes are sometimes made for deep dives under increased pressure, where helium is added.
    • An individual receiving 100% oxygen through a nasal cannula is usually inspiring an oxygen concentration of around 25-40%. It seems like it would be simpler to deprive the child of oxygen, by having him inhale helium through a nasal cannula then have a special hypoxic air tank created.
    • Longer exposure to a high inspired fraction of oxygen may eventually produce pulmonary edema, but "cause his lungs to fill with fluid and drown him where he lies" is clearly an overstatement.
    • An increased respiratory rate (tachypnea) as the child exhibits is a typical finding in hypoxia or acidosis as we try to increase the oxygen intake or decrease the carbon dioxide. Pulmonary signs of oxygen toxicity would be a ticking sensation, cough, and eventually shortness of breath.
    • The machine being dialed to 8 when the child is being treated with the "low content oxygen" is actually used to cauterize wounds during surgical procedures. It has nothing to do with oxygen delivery, and the words "bipolar", "monopolar", and "coagulate" are identified easily.
  • A child with obvious language difficulties clearly should have his hearing screened. If not an auditory brainstem response or audiometry exam, at least an otoacoustic emission should be performed. Looking in the ear (i.e. we examined his tympanic membrane) just does not cut it.
  • While Vitamin D deficiency can indicate nutritional deficiency or lack of exposure to sunlight, there is nothing specific about Vitamin D deficiency to say he grew up in the tunnel.
  • When the nurse runs in because the child's monitors are beeping, she says, "His BP and his heart rate are spiking". However, his blood pressure is not being monitored and the nurse does not take his blood pressure.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: The Artist. He acts fairly nice, sometimes pretending to be a cripple, but only so to get close enough to kidnap women.
• Innocuously Important Episode: It takes a long while to become apparent, though. Only midway through the final season is it revealed that the child is related to the observers. In fact, he's the (imperfect) clone of September, the Observer who helped Walter save Peter's life. Because of his beneficial mutations, he ends up being the key to saving humanity from the Observer invasion.
• Mad Artist: "The Artist". He's a lunatic that kidnaps women, kills them and then does plastic surgery and other stuff on them to match his view on beauty, which boils down to making them all look like Marilyn Monroe Expies. He also likes to notify the FBI when he's in town so they'll find his "art works".
• Not Growing Up Sucks: It is implied that the child may have been sealed in the tunnel for 70 years and just appear to be around 10 years old due to "environmental conditions".
• Social Services Does Not Exist: Olivia goes to the medical physician Dr. Winick to help get the child placed in foster care. I'm a doctor, not a social worker.
  • Well, maybe the point was throwing off the CIA agent? The idea was making the kid disappear, and it's obvious that social service wouldn't be secretive enough. Best use a background but trustworthy person.
• Squick: The meat packers sold the Artist plastic sheets already covered in cow blood.
• The Empath: The child's ability actually goes beyond picking up emotions, as he also "intuits" names and addresses.
• Theme Serial Killer: In this case, he kidnaps women, kills them, and then changes their appearance so they'll become his idea of "pretty" before posing them up in someplace public. He also likes to fax the FBI about his "displays" before they happen.
• Would Hit a Girl: Plus kill her, make her look like how he wants and then put the body on display like it was Marilyn Monroe.
• Wild Child:
  • Feral children usually have profound difficulties relating to others and understanding emotional cues. It is unclear why social deprivation would lead to someone developing a greater than normal ability to intuit emotions (and how did this relate to sharks?). This sounds a little like saying that someone who grew up speaking only Russian would actually understand English better then someone fluent in English because by not being exposed to English they have become more sensitive to the English language. As it turns out though, from revelations in season 5, the boy was naturally more emotionally intuitive; it wasn't a result of his circumstances, but of his nature.
  • In the reports of abandoned and abused children who were not exposed to language, the children usually remained quite limited despite efforts at rehabilitation because language skills must be acquired during a sensitive period of brain development. However, the child in this episode is able to understand speech and write without instruction.