Episode Report Card Daniel: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Suture Up Your Future
By Daniel | Season 4 | Episode 10 | Aired on 01.27.2012
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Now that the Fringe universes are working together to bring down the nefarious David Robert Jones, let’s … bring things to a screeching halt with a Monster of the Week episode! I mean, it's not bad, as they go, but I was kind of expecting a kick-ass team-up, and not MOTW, especially not one that seemed to pointlessly hearken back to a Season 1 episode.
Instead, we get a tiny teenage girl who has random visions of people's deaths. Her father, played by Hey! It's That Guy! Currie Graham, who I know mainly from a stint on NYPD Blue but has popped up on countless shows in the past decade, sees black-suit government agents around every corner and wants to protect his daughter from becoming the object of scorn and curiosity that someone with her ability inevitably becomes.
It's no surprise that Olivia takes particular interest, both because the girl was the focus of an unsuccessful attempt for study by Massive Dynamic, and because she wonders if the girl might be able to shed some light on the dire warning given her by the Observer. No luck there, but she learns a little more about the Observers from Peter, who of course is familiar with them in a way that the people in this timeline of our universe aren't yet. Of course, she's not reassured by his saying that the Observers know what they're talking about, future-wise (although he says this not knowing that September told Olivia she had to die).
Anyway, the girl goes against her dad's wishes and decides to help the FBI prevent the deaths of many people in a courthouse bombing by someone with some sort of custody-case judge grudge. But somehow the girl's ability also kills her, due to some vague explanation about the extra electrical activity in her brain causing a stroke. But at least it brings Olivia closer to Nina Sharp, who is helpfully going to give Olivia some new Massive Dynamic medicine to help turn her into a shapeshifter, I mean "deal with the headaches she's been having."
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. Emotional father-daughter scenes usually leave him a mess of tears, but this one had no effect, which concerns him. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Olivia's looking at an array of FBI surveillance photos of Observers in various locations. It's like one of those scenes in The Bachelor when the current bachelordouche and Chris Harrison survey the pictures of the women he will deign to give a rose to, only if all the women were hairless men in '50s suits. It's the baldest Bachelor finale ever! Olivia picks one out, and says it's him. Broyles asks if she's sure, because they all look like the same man. Tsk! Racist. Olivia is sure. Broyles tells her that they've been looking at "these people" (there he goes again!) for three years (so this is much like when, in the first season, Broyles similarly let her in on the Observers -- although I guess in this time stream they're not using that name), and he's wondering why they made contact now. Olivia has no idea, but she tells Broyles about the blood sample she had Astrid run: "There was no match on the DNA, but she did find antibodies for the Spanish flu," she tells Broyles, the last recorded epidemic of which was in 1919. He's an old dude, is what she's saying. Any boogie-woogie flu? Rockin' pneumonia? Broyles wants to assign her a security detail, but she thinks the guy was warning her, not threatening her. Either way, Broyles expects her to notify him if she sees him again.
Downtown Boston. A teenage girl is sitting in a garden patch on the corner of a building, painting the flower shop across the street, when she seems to be pained by some sort of humming. She winces, then flips to a new page in her book, grabs a pencil, and starts sketching frantically, some of which she's doing without even looking at the page. We only get to see snatches of what she's drawing, not the whole picture. Glancing around, the girl fixates on a couple crossing the intersection. She finishes the drawing, tears it from her pad and chases after the couple, and without saying anything more than "Excuse me," she hands him the drawing, and runs away, looking all sad. The woman asks the man if he knows her, and he says no, and then they look at the drawing. She's a little more horrified than he is -- we still don't get to see it -- and he says, "She's talented. Twisted, but talented." The woman wants to know why anyone would draw something like that, and the man chalks it up to her being a teenager and how all teenagers play depressing music and think about how everything sucks and then tries to make everyone else creepy. He's not grumpy about it, but he still seems a little young for the half-baked "get off my lawn" attitude.