Fringe TV Show - Fracture - Fringe Recaps, Fringe Reviews, Fringe Episodes | TWoP

Aired 2009-10-01

I can't believe it took me this long to realize it, but it just hit me that the two mad scientists in last week's episode were played by John Noble and John Savage. Noble/Savage! Coincidence?

A cop car pulls up to a coffee shop bright and early. I assume they're here to respond to calls about giant letters reading "PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA" hovering dangerously over a busy intersection. But they ignore them as though they're not really there, because they're just picking up coffee. Seconds after the cop not driving gets out to enter the shop, a slim red cell phone in the driving cop's shirt pocket rings. He answers it, "Yes, Colonel?" in a very un-coplike tone, which was even more confusing to me the first time I saw this, when I thought he was just getting a call from someone named Carl. A deep, creepy voice on the other end of the line says, "It's time. Get to Suburban Station. He'll be wearing a black trenchcoat, carrying a black briefcase." The cop, not exactly looking like he won the lottery, hangs up and peels out, abandoning his partner on the crosswalk holding two to-go cups. Looks like someone doesn't like coffee that much after all.

The runaway officer walks into the busy train station, silencing his shoulder radio so he doesn't have to hear his pissed-off partner's bitching any more. He looks around among the commuters -- and the clock, which reads 7:10, and the electronic schedule boards -- but doesn't see anyone matching the description the colonel gave him. Finally he turns and sees him coming down the stairs: a guy in a black trenchcoat, carrying a black suitcase. The colonel didn't say anything about the blond ponytail, though. That makes him rather more of a standout. Clearly already prepared for trouble, the officer unsnaps his holster and rests his hand on the butt of his gun, approaching the man and telling him to set the briefcase down. When the man asks what's up -- not arguing, not fleeing, not committing any crime other than curiosity -- the officer draws his weapon but keeps it pointed at the floor. No need to overreact, after all. At this point, the electronic departure boards are starting to flicker. The officer chases away a transit cop, then makes a grab for the case. As he stars to walk away with it, the hand holding it suddenly seems to freeze solid, crackling and going rigid as the tissue solidifies. Is that briefcase full of stuff I keep getting spam e-mails about? The ones promising to make me rock-hard? Because it doesn't look like all that much fun. To the officer's horror, the effect spreads all the way up his arm, and he has just enough time to turn his crystallizing face skyward and let out a scream before exploding into tiny little cop bits. Mission accomplished, Officer Freeze.

By M. Giant

At the bowling alley where Olivia met Sam Weiss last week, she's attempting to tie the laces on her bowling shoes, but her shaky hands aren't cooperating. From behind her, Weiss gives her a tip, which she isn't so patient with, saying she knows how to do it. "Knowing how isn't the issue," Weiss says. "You suffered some wicked head trauma. Don't think about your hands, don't think about the laces. Your shoes will get tied just fine." As he sits down across from her to help her out (so that's how they'll get tied), she asks what he did for Nina. He says he taught her to eat French fries. "Simple enough, unless you've got a cybernetic, prosthetic arm. Nina was a mess." Nice guru-padawan confidentiality there, Weiss. He changes the subject back to shoe-tying. She's about to say she doesn't have time for this when he changes the subject to her sleeping. He claims to be able to tell by looking at her pale skin that she's not getting more than two or three hours. As if it's a shock that an actress with a last name like an IKEA bed sheet would have a face to match. She also admits that she has some lingering pain in her leg and shoulder. He seems surprised that the headaches still haven't started, but says to let him know when they do. And with that, they're done for the night. She looks pretty annoyed, but he's off to mop the men's room. "Come back tomorrow, Agent Dunham. We got work to do." Like she's the one blowing him off. In unrelated news, I didn't realize until this week that Weiss is played by Kevin Corrigan, or as I've always thought of him, "Other Guy From Grounded for Life." Another Fox show I never watched.

At the Fringe lab, Peter is trying to go through apartment listings in the newspaper with Walter. Despite the fact that Peter's clearly meeting him halfway by using a method of apartment searching that went out of wide usage while Walter was in the bin, he's more interested in heating his espresso in a test tube over a Bunsen burner than seriously discussing a new place to live. "I'm perfectly happy with our present accommodations," he declares. Peter impatiently says he isn't, and appeals to Astrid: "I woke up this morning to him singing an aria from Pagliacci." Yes, Peter, you're very cultured. I can't even believe how cultured you are. Astrid compliments Walter's voice, but Peter forgot to add that he was doing jumping jacks naked at the time. So maybe he should have sung something with a little more percussion, then. Astrid puts an end to their bickering by calling them over to her computer (you know, the thing that most normal people use to find apartments these days) to tell them about the train station bombing from the teaser. Except the weird thing is that she's looking at it like some scientific curiosity related to their mission rather than "Oh, my God, someone just blew up a train station in Philadelphia!" She's been spending too much time with Walter. What got her attention is that after an explosion that killed 11 and wounded 28, there were no traces of explosives found. Walter's all excited, and seeing him this way causes Peter to forget his frustration and say, "I'll call Dunham." Walter asks Astrid for his portable chemistry set. "This means bodies!" he says with completely inappropriate enthusiasm. Nothing brightens up the day like a terrorist attack.

By M. Giant

Olivia and Peter are in some big dude's AV lab, playing back the last few seconds of surveillance tape from before Officer Gillespie went to pieces. They spot Gillespie, but no bomb, seconds before the picture goes snowy. "I told her you were a genius, Joe," Peter protests. "Don't prove me wrong." Joe suggests a smarter genius, because all he can think of is that radio wave interference might have wiped that part of the tape. Looking at the time code on the screen (which I'm glad to see doesn't directly contradict the analog clock we saw earlier), Peter points out that the bomb went off twenty seconds after the static cut in. "So why did we lose picture before the explosion?" Olivia wonders. Good question. If by "good" you mean "boring."

Peter returns to the lab, asking Walter if he has any theories. Walter's response is typically elliptical, in the form of a reminiscence about a puzzle they put together when Peter was a kid. "Putting together a jigsaw of a nude centerfold was Walter's idea of how to explain, what was it, human reproduction? To his ten-year-old son," Peter chuckles to Astrid. From what I've heard, Peter should have been grateful that Walter found the time to help him with all five hundred pieces. Peter asks what this has to do with Gillespie, as if it weren't obvious, so Walter leads him over to another workbench, where he has apparently been busy reassembling the hapless officer. "Fantastic," Peter says, looking at the vague humanoid outline, some partial extremities, and the beginnings of a face on a stand. "Apart from the obvious, anything out of the ordinary?" Walter tells Peter to have a look at the multiple needle marks between the reassembled toes, a sign that something was being injected into Gillespie's bloodstream. "From his tissues, it appears to cause a chemical reaction on the cellular level that both solidifies the water in his cells and emitted massive energy, which shattered the body." Yeah, I hate when that happens. Peter asks if Gillespie did this to himself on purpose. "I stopped counting at 47 needle marks," Walter says. "I can't imagine it was an accident." The conclusion: Officer Gillespie wasn't wearing a bomb; he was one. Okay, now they've caught up.

We're still focused on Gillespie's 3-D puzzle face when we hear his wife start speaking, so for a minute it seems like she's there looking at him. But no, Olivia and Peter are at the Gillespie home, listening to his widow making the usual widow speech, which includes a reference to Gillespie's two tours in Iraq and their plans to start a family. Peter asks a pretty basic question about Gillespie's time there, but that causes the widow to ask if Peter served, in turn giving Peter a chance to remind us for later that he was a "civilian contractor based out of Baghdad." Olivia asks Mrs. G. if her husband was on any meds, and as the wife answers that he was fine, she doesn't notice that Olivia starts to pick up her mug but puts it down again when her hand starts shaking. Peter does, though, and a moment later, Olivia's hand goes to her head. There's a single-frame, red-tinged flash of something like an elevator readout as Olivia gets up to stumble to the bathroom, suffering flashes the whole way. A corridor. A finger pressing an elevator button. The Twin Towers, still very much erect. An extreme, upside-down close-up of William Bell's mouth emitting a tiny fraction of a word. Olivia in the elevator with a bunch of science types. Bell breathing from an oxygen mask. Another Bell-flash. All of them are shot through a red filter, as though they all occurred in the Brady Bunch's darkroom. By now, she has just made it to the toilet in time to retch in it. From this position, as she lowers the lid and flushes, she just happens to notice a loose tile in the wall under the pedestal sink. Way to accidentally stumble on a crucial clue, Olivia. She removes the tile, and reaches in to pull out a black plastic case about the size of a shaving kit. Inside are numerous vials of some red-orange liquid, and another case with a large syringe inside. Peter taps on the door, asking if she's okay. Dude, she just got there. Give her a minute. Instead of answering, she comes out into the hallway with the case, asking, "Mrs. Gillespie, can you tell me what these are?" She has no idea, having never seen them before. So clearly it was Officer Gillespie's job to clean that bathroom.

By M. Giant

Peter has delivered some takeout to the Harvard lab, and in between Walter almost literally going NOM NOM NOM around massive mouthfuls, he says that based on the way the serum was metabolized, it looks like Gillespie would have had to be taking daily injections for at least a year. Peter realizes that dates back to Gillespie's tour in Iraq. Astrid goes to check on whether Gillespie's army personnel file is in. While she's doing that, Walter explains to Peter that the serum is harmless at first, but then, "Some sort of trigger causes these bonds to blast apart." Peter wants to learn more, but suddenly Gene gives an indignant moo from over in the corner, presumably in reaction to Peter's choice of lunch. "If you're going to eat that cheeseburger in here, could you at least be a little discreet!" Walter hisses, cutting a look over at the cow. Peter eventually just throws the remains of his burger onto the table in the middle of Officer Gillespie's slowly resolving remains, like, are you happy, Gene? You're not the only one sharing space with a member of your species who came to a bad end. Peter asks if the trigger could be a radio wave, like the kind that caused the static on the security tape. Walter says it's possible. Just then Astrid calls over, looking at Gillespie's army file on her computer and asking, "What's cyanogen chloride?" "A chemical weapon," Peter answers instantly, and he and his father crowd around the monitor. Seems Gillespie's whole unit was exposed to the stuff. "According to this file, Gillespie should have died in Iraq," Peter says. They click on a link to something called Project Tin Man, but all they get is a scanned page reading "CLASSFIED EXPERIMENTAL MILITARY PROJECT." Oh, and then an entire platoon of Marines rappels down from the ceiling and spirits them away. Not really.

By M. Giant

In Baghdad, Peter orders "Red Russians" from the bar for himself and Olivia. That would be mint tea and vodka, which Olivia thinks sounds "weird and awful." Turns out she's wrong; it's worse. That segues into some brief discussion about Peter's time here. Or times, because there were a couple of occasions when he had to leave. Rather than trying to pursue any details, Olivia comments on the reputation he apparently has, and he admits, "I've been known to leave an impression." Before this can get too informative, he proposes a toast "to all that's weird," which Olivia can't exactly refuse to drink to. Fortunately, Ahmed returns before she has to drink any more.

Ahmed leads them to the back room of a restaurant, where one of those Iraqi doctors apparently now has a job washing dishes. Well, at least he landed on his feet. He laments his lot, in Arabic, until he switches to English and Olivia says, "We were hoping to ask you some questions." Yeah, Iraqi doctor, this isn't all about you. When she mentions Tin Man, he plays dumb, but a little encouragement from Ahmed gets him to open up. Back in the stock room, he's telling them how the program was shut down for being too dangerous. He says the subjects had been exposed to one of Saddam's neurotoxins (which apparently he had some of after all), and the serum was designed to neutralize its effects. "We treated over two hundred soldiers. Only a few of them survived." He doesn't tell us the ratio of the number of subjects that blew up to the number of subjects that were blown up. But he does remember Gillespie, as well as the names of the three other survivors. The other two are nobodies, but the third is Diane Burgess, who at this moment, on the other side of the world, is watching her daughter on the backyard swingset through the window of her house. Her husband says her bags are ready. Nice of her to make him pack for her secret mission. Back in Baghdad, the doctor says that the serum had "an unintentional by-product." You think? "It turned people into bombs," Olivia guesses. He says there weren't that many people who knew about the project (although it's too many for Peter and Olivia to track down on their own in the amount of time left in this episode), but there was one guy who argued against closing down the program: Colonel Raymond Gordon. Hey, we've met a colonel in this episode. You think it's the same one? Before Peter and Olivia go on their way, the doctor warns them, "The colonel is a vicious man. He has no regard for human life." Then why is he watching Diane Burgess kiss her husband goodbye outside her house from a parked car, if not to make sure she takes off safely?

By M. Giant

Apparently the sight of the big Capitol dome in this aerial shot over the Potomac makes floaty letters reading "WASHINGTON D.C." unnecessary. Inside one of any number of possible locations in that city, Broyles is briefing a small army of FBI agents about the human bomb they're searching for in the District. He adds that three of the four remaining Tin Man subjects are accounted for: Gillespie, the two schmoes who are now in protective custody, and Diane Burgess, about whom all they know is that she came to D.C. (this over shots of Diane Burgess's husband answering his front door to a couple of very serious-looking agents and then talking with then at his kitchen table). That's really all they know, but somehow Broyles manages to make the little they've been able to do to prevent this sound kind of impressive. Broyles gives the floor to Olivia, who explains that there is probably a "second suspect" controlling the detonation remotely, and they think it's Colonel Gordon. Since his ID photo is of the creepy colonel who's been freaking us out all episode, they seem to be on the right track. Especially since the Pentagon says Gordon went rogue six months ago. We see the Bishops standing in the back of the room (Walter nuzzling a frosted donut, in his tireless quest to reach the same weight as Gene) as she adds that they might be able to jam the triggering signal. She also adds that Diane Burgess might be unaware of her function as a human bomb, "Which means she is also a potential victim here. We're going to do everything that we can to get her back to her family alive." Just then, an agent who picked up a phone during the briefing says something to Broyles, who announces that Diane Burgess has just gotten into a cab to the Federal Center Metro station. "We have time to set up before she arrives." Well, that was a lucky break. Broyles get an early start on setting up the sequence: "Our objectives are as follows: prevent the detonation of Diane Burgess, and apprehend Colonel Raymond Gordon."

By M. Giant

An entre ad break later, they replay the last few seconds of the act, and then Peter and Olivia belatedly lose radio contact with the command center. Though fortunately and inexplicably not with each other. Peter says they don't have much time. Meanwhile, Diane Burgess's arm is starting to freeze up the same way Gillespie's did, although she hasn't taken hold of the briefcase. Now, see, right up until this moment of the episode, I've been assuming that the device sending the detonation signal is in the briefcase, and our heroes are going to feel pretty stupid very soon. But then we see that Gordon is in fact in the station, watching from a bench, unaware that Peter is watching him. As Gordon gets up to leave, Peter moves in, tackling him to the ground and commencing a crunchy beating. A small remote device flies clear, and as Peter continues thumping the highly trained Army Colonel, Olivia snatches it up and fiddles with it, as Burgess continues to congeal. Walter's up to 26, and Olivia can't figure the damn thing out, so she drops it on the floor and clubs the shit out of it with her cane. Looks like her accident came in handy after all. With the signal killed, Burgess collapses to the ground, not only properly squishy again but still alive. All the FBI's gear comes back online, and Broyles sends in his men, who have a bit of a time pulling Peter off of Gordon. I had no idea he was that invested. Olivia goes and helps up Diane. Walter claps his hands childishly, and even Broyles indulges in a startlingly uncharacteristic display of emotion at how narrowly they averted disaster: he smiles.

By M. Giant

In the lab, Walter's got one of his albums on the turntable, playing "The Air that I Breathe" by the Hollies. I guess Patsy Cline's "I Fall to Pieces" would be a little too on the nose. Peter discreetly draws a handy sheet over the nearly complete remains of officer Gillespie on the table. Think he did that with the centerfold puzzle when it was nearly done? Walter hands Peter a newspaper with a circled apartment ad. "Furnished housing for professors," Walter says bravely. "It's a nice neighborhood. Down the block from where Belly used to live." Peter happily goes off to make a call to Broyles. And Astrid makes a mental note to start bringing her toothbrush to the lab, just in case.

At the bowling alley, which seems to get its music piped in directly from Walter's turntable because the song continues there without missing a beat, Weiss has just finished measuring Olivia's hand when he declares that they're done for the night again. "I just got here," she protests. He doesn't really care, and as he proceeds to the end of one of the lanes with a ball as though to roll it toward the pins (although he's clearly got no time for finger-holes himself), he invites her to return tomorrow. "By then I will have found you the perfect bowling ba--" What's a bowling ba? Well, apparently it's what you call a bowling ball when someone cocks a gun in your ear in the middle of the second word. Which is what Olivia has just done, I what I'm sure is a pretty flagrant breach of FBI protocol. "Now listen to me, you son of a bitch," she snarls. "I am not here to bowl or to try on shoes or to have you play games with my head. I'm here because I was told that you could fix me." Yeah, maybe the first thing he could fix is this tendency to point her gun at people when she doesn't get her way. I mean, is she even paying him? Weiss simply looks down the barrel of her gun, and then behind her. She forgets about her gun and follows his gaze. There, leaning against the seats, a good ten feet from where she's standing in her new bowling shoes, is her cane. "Take care, Agent Dunham," Weiss says mildly, and walks away. Yes, he's a smug fucker, but it was probably a good idea to get out of her sight before she remembers she was about to shoot him. That practice bowl can wait.

It's sunrise at the Federal Building, and Gordon is telling Broyles what on any other show would be so many paranoid fantasies. "The enemy is among us and nobody is doing anything about it...so we had to take matters into our own hands." Okay, any other show that's not on Fox News. Broyles asks what was in the briefcase. Before answering, Gordon realizes that Broyles thinks he's crazy, like the Pentagon does. "I told them what I'm telling you. That they're here. Collecting data. Making observations. That's what's in the briefcases. They've been planning for war. And they've been passing information via courier right under our noses." "Who are they?" Broyles asks, in all seriousness. That's one question Gordon can't answer. "But I can tell you what they want," he says. "They want to exterminate us. So they are studying us. Our culture, our technology, our science. And they plan to use it against us. One way or another, we'll find out who they are. But by then, I suppose it wont' really matter." Hey, can I ask Gordon a question? Like what he planned to do after he ran out of Tin Man subjects to sacrifice? How he found out about the enemy and their plans in general? Or in particular, how he got a hold of these couriers' itineraries? I mean, honestly, what train station doesn't have a guy with a black trenchcoat and a black briefcase in it at any given moment?