Fringe S1E11 (2009) Part I - “Giant, Slimy, Spiky, Slug”

Spoiler Level – Low

The Show – FBI agent Olivia Dunham investigates crimes involving mysterious phenomena with the help of fringe scientists Walter and Peter Bishop.

Oh, Fringe! I have such conflicted feelings towards you. Science aside, I think Fringe is a legitimately good show with wonderful characters and compelling stories.

On the other hand, it has some of the worst science of any show that’s ever aired. The entire point of it is that the scientific consensus is always wrong and the pseudoscience the main characters use is always right. Fringe intentionally blurs the line between good science and bad, and it perpetuates the idea that a lone genius written off as a crackpot knows more than the scientific community as a whole. I’m going to need a separate post about why this is so bad, but for now let’s just focus on one example of bad science.

"Precognition" and "psychokinesis" are on the same screen as "dark matter" and "nanotechnology." That makes them all equally legitimate sciences, right? From Fringe.

The Scene – Today, I’m going to address the episode Bound (S1E11). Just before the opening credits, a professor lecturing about pathogens collapses and dies. A “giant, slimy, spiky, slug” crawls out of his mouth and slithers away rather speedily. The fringe team arrives, uses a thermal imager to find the creature, and captures it. They also find yellow powder, which they determine is “like eggs” and that their growth is activated by stomach acid. Further studies indicate the creature is a single cell, a giant version of the common cold virus. There’s so much more, but it will take me long enough to go through everything wrong with the last four sentences.

Pro tip: When handling viruses, it's best to wear two sets of gloves. Tongs are typically not required. From Fringe.

The Science – Viruses are tiny. You can’t see them with the naked eye or even a conventional microscope. That slug is millions of times larger than the viruses that cause the common cold. (Actually, many viruses can cause colds, but rhinoviruses are the most common.) So let’s take their premise. If someone supersized rhinovirus, would it look and act like the slugs in this episode? Not even close. Let's focus on the superficial aspects first.

Rhinovirus. Not giant, slimy, or slug-like. But it is kind of spiky. So that's something. From Wikimedia Commons.

Viruses are well-ordered. Rhinoviruses, like many viruses, form shapes called icosahedra, something you’re familiar with if you’ve ever rolled a 20-sided die. This is because viruses are extremely simple, and rhinoviruses are simple even as far as viruses go. They’re just genetic material inside a shell (called a capsid) made of a small number of proteins. An icosahedron is an easy shape to form with just a few types of basic building blocks.

Viruses don’t move by themselves. A giant virus would not slither along the ground. It would pretty much just sit there. Viruses can only get around our bodies by hitching a ride in the blood. They need us to cough or sneeze to help move them to new hosts.

Viruses aren’t hot. Detecting a creature with a thermal imager would require it to be warmer than the air around it. This works for warm-blooded animals such as people because we keep our bodies at a specific temperature (37°C) different from that of normal room (20-25°C). Viruses, simple as they are, have no such method of regulating their temperature, nor any reason that they’d need to.

Fixing the Scene – This is pretty basic. The shape of the cold virus is well-known. If you want to show a giant rhinovirus, just scale it up and use a large icosahedron. Also, keep it immobile and at room temperature. Of course you don't have to stick to the common cold. You can get more interesting shapes with things such as ebola or bacteriophage, although the latter is not a virus that infects animals. This brings up the more important issue of how the virus behaves, which will have to be addressed in another post.

A more realistic depiction of a giant cold virus. From Wikimedia Commons.

Next Week – More fundamental than whether the creature looks like a virus is whether it acts like one. Let's compare and contrast. Mostly contrast.