Back to the alternate universe, which is in Hoboken, New Jersey. A street sign promises cheap beer and live music, and any good Canadian beer drinker recognizes the logo as Keith's, which comes from Nova Scotia. Mmmm. Some guy who looks like Ethan Hawke's older, uglier brother watches a woman bring sunshine and smiles to everyone she meets as she walks down the street. He takes in the street scene, then balances a pen on a mailbox. The traffic rumbles the pen off the mailbox, a man stoops to pick it up, a cyclist swerves to avoid him … there are more steps to this series of events, but let's just skip ahead to the woman getting hit by a bus.
So Olivia is back to work in her new Fauxlivia identity at Fringe division. Walternate tells Broyles that they need to learn how Olivia switches between universes without consequence, and the only way they find out is if they run tests on her as a willing subject, which she won't do unless she actually thinks she's Fauxlivia. Olivia, by the way, isn't faking the Fauxlivia stuff; she really thinks she's Fauxlivia, but Olivia's bleeding through: she spots Peter (well, her memory of Peter) on the street. She spots Walter elsewhere.
The Fringe team's investigating the death-by-bus, because the same thing happened the day before, making it a real statistical anomaly. Agent Lincoln Lee's the one who picks up on the common thread of a Rube Goldbergian chain of events that killed the victims, because of the presence of a ballpoint pen on the scene in both cases – pens apparently rare to the point of being practically non-existent in this universe. Meanwhile, Alt-Charlie, meanwhile, wonders if Fauxlivia might not actually be Fauxlivia.
At the scene of a third accident that unfolds even as the Fringe team is there, Olivia spots the guy responsible (identifying him due to sexy-agent intuition or something), but he escapes via the roof of a passing truck.
The Fringe team eventually finds out the guy, Milo, used to have an IQ in the 50s but has had several Flowers for Algernon-esque intelligence-boosting treatments, and he's killing the people who want to cut off the medication that's making him smarter. They track him down, and he sets in motion a trap that ends with Olivia getting crushed under a forklift-load of cinderblock, but Olivia avoids it because of her actual unfamiliarity with this world, something that Milo couldn't possibly have predicted. Olivia doesn't realize this at the time, though. She needs a hallucination of Peter to explain it to her.
Tonight's episode is number three, an odd number, which means either we're in the alt-Fringe universe or it's one of the crappy Star Trek movies. We're in Hoboken, N.J., and there's a guy who looks like Ethan Hawke's homelier older brother standing on the sidewalk, incessantly tapping his thumb to his ring finger, a tic that is TV shorthand for "mental disorder." Across the way, he watches a woman stroll down the street. Watching her, it seems like the song "Sunshine and Lollipops" should be playing. She cheerfully gives money to a homeless man, literally stops to smell the flowers outside a grocer's, and then there are cartoon bluebirds landing on her shoulders and serenading her, and then this -- is that a fucking elk? -- animal wanders by and stoops so she can ride him down the street of this mystical Hoboken, scattering rose petals as she goes.
After the woman goes inside the grocery to buy a bouquet, the man watches a stoplight change from red to green. He sees a man who for all the world looks like Jeff Bridges reading at a table outside a café. He sees a downtown bus making its way down the street, and he sees a mailbox rattle with the passing traffic.
So: he crosses the street, heedless of the traffic -- he merely points at a car that honks at him. Reaching the mailbox, he smiles as he balances a ballpoint pen on its end on top of it, as a cyclist comes racing around a nearby corner.
The woman comes out of the grocer's, and he starts following her, only to pass her as she stops at the intersection to cross the street.
As the bike asshole slaloms his way around pedestrians instead of being on the street, a passing car splashes the mailbox, and the pen rolls off, onto the sidewalk. Jeff Bridges (who looks slightly less like Jeff Bridges when we see his full face) spies the pen, and he gets up to pick it up, grinning a little more than you'd expect someone to be smiling at the thought of merely getting a free crappy capless ballpoint pen, but the reason for that will become clear later on.
The cyclist swerves to avoid Not-Jeff Bridges -- that's why you should be on the street, you moron! -- but knocks him into the mailbox, which tips over into the street, and he goes flying into the grocer's sidewalk display of flowers and fruit. You see what happens when you bump a stranger in the ass?
The fruit goes spilling across the sidewalk, and I guess the homeless guy, having left the fruit alone up until now, figures it's fair game now that it's street fruit, and he starts gathering it up.
So now there's a big commotion on the street, and the approaching bus driver watches it and forgets that there's an intersection coming up, because that's what people who are paid to drive for a living do. Hey, there's an argument on the street! Think I'll watch that! And the woman is one of those people who -- once the crosswalk signal lights up "WALK" -- crosses the street staring straight ahead and not making sure that the traffic has actually stopped. And that's why, as the weird guy continues on his walk, we see behind him the bus hit the woman, who goes skidding across the pavement.
So Olivia shows up for work at alt-Fringe, looking a little trepidatious. Is it because Olivia knows she's not actually Fauxlivia and is worried about maintaining the deception? We'll see that that's not the case. Anyway, she strolls to her desk, looking around, and alt-Fringe must be some kind of cold place to work, because NO ONE says, "welcome back" or "good to have you back" or even just "Hi, Olivia!" and I have to point out that at the very least you'd think the person who's responsible for collecting money for the office lottery pool would come over to crabbily remind Olivia that she owes five bucks for last week. Or am I confusing it with my workplace?
Finally, alt-Charlie greets her and says, "You do remember me, right?" and Olivia remembers that he owes her $70 and he was hoping she'd forgotten that, and they hug, and he tells her she looks good like when does Olivia NOT look good, and she praises the IV drip and "government-issue anti-psychotics" as being "instant R&R" and he jokes that maybe he should "dive off the deep end" and she wonders if anyone would notice a difference and now he is telling her that he just realized that he didn't miss her at all and she wants him to admit that he was "lost" without her, and this goes on for about 20 minutes and now I realize that the reason no one said anything to her was because they just want to get some damn work done and not get sucked into an hour's worth of playful banter. And I'm just now realizing that alt-Charlie has hair again, and is not the baldy-head he was when we first saw him. Don't know why it took me so long to notice that.
Anyway, they finally leave off with that stuff and get back to work, but maybe it's just because alt-Broyles is glowering at her through the glass of his office. Walternate creeps in to alt-Broyles' office to ask how she seems. "She seems like Olivia Dunham," says Broyles, and Walternate says that for all intents and purposes she is Olivia Dunham, and is testing as such. Broyles wants to know about their Olivia Dunham, i.e. Fauxlivia, and Walternate says she's focused on the task at hand on the other side. Also, the sexiness matrix is still intact. Broyles is still annoyed that Walternate has put an "imposter" on their team, because he feels that's too big a risk, and despite all the tests they've run, they still don't know how Olivia will respond in the field. "We have no other choice. She needs to be completely immersed in Agent Dunham's life. Over time she will reach a plateau, and her new identity will become fixed," says Walternate.
Broyles asks again what they stand to gain from this, and Walternate tells him that while they have discovered some ways to cross to the other side that come with dangerous consequences, Olivia can cross without harm. "The Science Division is working up a series of experiments. We need her to submit willingly, which she'll only do if she believes that she belongs here. Phillip, if we can learn what she already knows..." says Walternate, and alt-Broyles finishes for him: "...we can begin to defend ourselves."
Walternate gets up to go, but alt-Broyles wants to know what happens if Olivia's new identity doesn't hold. "Then she'll no longer be necessary," says Walternate. Which means ... you'll let her go home, right? Right?
Now the alt-Fringe team is on its way to a case, with alt-Charlie explaining that two mornings in a row, Liberty Metro buses have run red lights, killing two people. "Now, 'Lookers' ran the probabilities, and it's a statistical anomaly," he explains. They're on their way to the crash scene, and they don't have tons of information about yesterday's crash, since at the time it was just considered a routine accident, but they do know that the first victim was Cole Arnett, a 43-year-old hospital caseworker on his way to work.
So they arrive on site, with alt-Charlie telling everyone to get their oxygen, so the agents get out their pimped-out asthma puffers, but another agent reports that the air-quality in Hoboken is normal, so no oxygen is needed. Normal for New Jersey, anyway. Alt-Charlie says Agent Lee is meeting them on site and will be calling the shots.
Lee's being dropped off by a nurse, who warns him that he needs to be back in the chamber in eight hours, or his burns will regress: "You can kiss all that healing goodbye," she says. His face does look much improved over the last time we saw him, which means it's still like a pizza, but only with burnt cheese and not burnt extra cheese.
Then it's back to work Lincoln Lee, who missed this, he says to himself, and he gets alt-Charlie to work on a victim ID, and Olivia hands him his field kit and she tells him he looks better. "You look sane," he tells her, and she laughs and he asks if she's doing all right. After the chit-chat is dispensed with, she tells him that when she pulled the gun on him, she didn't kno
w what she was doing, and Lee interrupts her to tell her that nothing happened: "You and I, we're good," he says, and they smile at each other.Meanwhile, alt-Charlie's looking at the body of the woman, with an EMT telling him that she died on impact. Charlie says, "Still have any fingerprints?" which is interesting (unless this isn't an alternate-universe thing and alt-Charlie's only asking because she's all scratched up), and the EMT tells him her right hand is probably his best bet. So he pushes a finger onto a pad on his little doohickey, and he's informed that this is 32-year-old Jillian Foster, who's from Hoboken. Anything else, asks the EMT, and alt-Charlie looks at the scattered flowers and says she liked daisies. Probably Springsteen and Bon Jovi too. Unless they don't exist in this universe. Question: would the lack of a Bon Jovi make up for a lack of a Springsteen?
Meanwhile, Olivia's interviewing the bus driver, who's crying because he'd never hit anyone before, and he felt horrible for weeks after hitting a pigeon, and unless pigeons are considered rare, exotic birds over here, he really ought to get over that.
And Lee's using a Fringe doohickey to check the area for environmental degradation, but doesn't find any: "Molecular cohesion is intact," he says, and one of the other agents asks why this is a Fringe case, then. Lee doesn't answer, but he looks around a little more, and spots the pen by the mailbox.
He shows it to alt-Charlie and Olivia, and asks when the last time was that they saw one of those. "God, a pen? I don't know. Preschool, maybe," says Olivia, and alt-Charlie says he didn't know they even still made them. This one looks new, though, with no dents or scratches, and I'd like to point out that I have a case full of old pens on my desk, none of which have "dents or scratches," and Lee says he found it by the mailbox, which is where Olivia says the bike-messenger swerved "so he wouldn't hit some old guy that was bending down."
Lee looks thoughtful, and alt-Charlie asks if they're just supposed to stand there and watch him think. "It's pretty rare finding one of these just lying around," says Lee, and Olivia thinks maybe the old guy bent down to pick it up, causing the bike messenger to swerve and hit the stand. "Like the pen started some kind of ... chain reaction," says Lee.
Suddenly, Olivia sees Peter across the street. Just standing there looking at her, with a half-frown. She stares across the street long enough for alt-Charlie and Lee to ask her what's up, by which point Peter's gone, and she just says she thought she recognized someone. She shrugs it off, and they get back to brainstorming. "So... Fringe event or not?" says alt-Charlie, holding the pen. "Not sure yet. But something weird definitely happened here," says Lee. Olivia agrees, but she's NOT JUST TALKING ABOUT THE PEN, guys.
So over at Fauxlivia's apartment, Frank is making supper and watching television, which is running some story that there's fear the smallpox outbreak in North Texas is spreading (remember, Texas is two states in this universe). He looks at a dry-erase schedule on the fridge and notes a week that he's on call -- wait, so is it just ballpoint pens that are rare? But the usefulness of some sort of WRITING IMPLEMENT is still acknowledged? Come on.
Anyway, Olivia comes home and thanks him for making supper, and he wants to know how things were today, and she says they were pretty good, and then she asks about the smallpox outbreak (twenty-two cases), because she heard things were pretty bad, and she wants to know if "Atlanta called," and Frank says no one has assigned him yet, and Olivia reminds him for some reason that he's a virologist and smallpox is one of his areas of expertise, so he may as well start packing. But he wants to talk about her and what it was like for her to be back at work. But she's kind of cagey about it, and finally explains about seeing Peter.
"Do you remember the Secretary's son -- the one who was kidnapped when he was a boy?" she says, and Frank does, so Olivia says it was him: "But it wasn't really him. It was -- it was like I was hallucinating or something," she says, and maybe Olivia and Frank should be questioning how she knows that it was the Secretary's son, given that adult Peter doesn't really look like the kid who played Peter as a boy, but anyway Frank asks if she told Broyles (no) and he suggests that she shouldn't be on field duty, and she says she needs her life back, and he says, "and I love your gung-ho attitude," I mean, he actually speaks the words "I love your gung-ho attitude," and he says it's fine if she needs help, and she reminds him that it was just her first day back so it's not surprising "that there's a trace," and he says he can take himself off call, but that's not what she wants.
And then she tries to lighten things up and change the subject by looking at the food he's making and wondering where he got the avocados and how much he paid for them, and he makes her promise to tell Broyles if this happens again, and she agrees. And then she asks if they can eat, and they can, but Olivia still looks slightly perturbed at what's going on. Or maybe she's worried about avocados blowing the household grocery budget.
Over at alt-Fringe, Lee and alt-Charlie are discussing the accidents: both involved distraction (but as Lee points out, that's the root of pretty much every accident) but they can't find any connection between the victims. The first guy has been working at a hospital for the past fifteen years, while the second victim has been working at Gregson Electric for little more than a year.
Charlie wonders if maybe they just are freak accidents, but Lee says Olivia thinks he's right, about there being chain reactions that led up to the crashes. "OK. Well now that you two have, uh, rediscovered your Vulcan mind-meld, do you think she's doing OK?" says Charlie, and now I'm wondering just who played Spock in Earth-2. Anyway, Lee thinks she is doing OK, but Charlie's a little uncomfortable, which Lee says isn't a shocker: "You let a doppelganger cold-cock you with a bottle because you didn't pick up on the fact that she wasn't your partner," he says. Charlie scoffs that Lee would have known any better, but Lee maintains he knows Olivia better. "Right, 'cause you kissed her one time," says Charlie, and Lee protests that he couldn't have known she had a boyfriend. Then Charlie asks this: "When she was having her breakdown, she kept on and on about how they were trying to make her believe she was somebody else, that this wasn't her life. This is gonna sound nuts. What if she's telling the truth? What if it's not the real her?" Lee thinks that is nuts, and they laugh it off, with Charlie getting in a final point that you cannot tell the Olivias apart.
But then Lee, looking through pictures of the crime scene from yesterday, notices a ballpoint pen on the ground near the victim. "Get Liv, tell her we got something. Someone is causing these accidents on purpose." Charlie wants to know how that's even possible: "I mean, what would be the odds?"
Well, Bad-Astrid's got the odds: zero-point-zero-zero-zero. Impossible. (I don't know who came up with "Bad-Astrid," but I LOVE IT.) Lee reminds her that they "see impossible every day," and she corrects him, pointing out that they see improbable every day. "You're asking me if it is possible to use a ballpoint pen to set off a chain of events that culminates in someone getting killed by a bus twice?" she asks. Olivia points out that since there are so few ballpoint pens out there, that finding one at both crime scenes is an anomaly itself. Which is kind of hilarious, because that means Olivia thinks it would be weirder for two ballpoint pens (as rare as they are) to just turn up at a crime scene than for someone to have orchestrated this chaos. You can understand Bad-Astrid's decisiveness, is what I'm saying.
Lee asks about the "variables," which really gets Bad-Astrid going: "Thirty-seven people in the intersection
, twenty-two cars, four trucks, two buses, wind speeds of five to ten miles an hour, and that is just to start. In total, we are talking about a hundred and twenty variables in a dynamic system of differential equations. I can't solve that kind of a problem, much less manipulate the outcome to my advantage," she says. Lee's still not convinced, even as Charlie is all, "Dude, seriously? What part of zero-point-zero-zero-zero don't you get?"And then Bad-Astrid is all quiet and Olivia asks what's up. "It happened again," says Bad-Astrid. "Bus accident, East 85th and York."
So the Fringe team is off to the accident scene, which is complete chaos. They apparently arrived before the ambulance has, and they get to work interviewing witnesses, with Lee asking a completely confused teenager if he happened to "notice a pen." The teen is all, "whuh?" because if you're a little older you at least know what pens are but if you're a teenager you're too busy sexting or whatever the hell they do in Earth-2.
Olivia's tending to the guy nearest the bus as Charlie comes over to say there was a commotion: "Dog ran into the street, distracted a bus driver. There is no way this is another coincidence." Olivia points out that this time it didn't work, because the guy under the bus is going to make it.
Then she notices an injured woman staggering to her feet ... and then a ballpoint pen rolling down the street. "It's not over," she says, half to herself. She looks around and spots Dr. Chaos, managing to stand by himself even in a crowd of onlookers on an overpass above the road. And then somewhere down the street, some poor sap puts his headphones in and starts strolling across the street and gets smacked by the ambulance racing towards the carnage. Well, if you're going to be hit by a car, I suppose an ambulance is the best possible option.
Olivia has deduced that the weird guy is the one causing this, so she goes sprinting up the nearby steps to the overpass, while he calmly grabs some poor guy's bike and throws it off the overpass, sending it crashing to the street below. The blank expression on his face doesn't change as Olivia pulls her gun on him. He's even casually put his hands back in his pockets after throwing the bike. He gets a half-smirk and Olivia tells him to put his hands on his head. He complies, but then, moments later, after a delivery van swerves to the other side of the road to avoid the bike on the street, he vaults over the side of the overpass, landing on the roof, where he turns around and smiles at Olivia. He even leans back all casually as the van very slowly drives away. I mean, is it not an option for Olivia to yell for one of the MANY LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS DOWN ON THE STREET to stop the van?
Over at the Defense Department hospital, Lee is rushing to get back into his magical healing chamber, telling Olivia to give Bad-Astrid the physical description of buddy and to run it through the database, and Bad-Astrid is already working on that. Olivia's all hung up on how the guy knew the bike would slow the truck down and swerve under the footbridge: "I mean, he didn't even look. How did he know precisely when to jump?" Lee tells her to quit worrying about how and to start worrying about why. "The victims must have something in common. There's got to be a connection we're not seeing," he says. Meanwhile, his face is starting to pulsate with all kinds of grossness (but be honest: how many of you were thinking that you wouldn't mind popping that?), so they strap him into his hyper-nanite-baric or whatever, and he's still telling Olivia to cross-check their medical files, criminal records, etc. Olivia's all, "Shut up, OK, I got it," and Lee tells her, "Someone's gotten bossy."
Now we're at a residence somewhere, where a young woman is pacing the floor when Dr. Chaos comes in. "Where have you been? They've been calling all day!" she says, and tells him he needs to call them back. He ignores her and gets a glass of water from the kitchen tap, muttering to himself: "Each liquefied thing provides an instance of the proper gift being liquid. Liquid and mass is equal. Passing through liquid and mass is the same." The girl says she'll call them if he won't. "But you won't. You see, your only action will be inaction. That's your pattern," he tells her, clarifying that ninety-seven per cent of her actions "prioritize relational bonds over other variables" and that eight out of nine times, she avoids making decisions that could result in a negative outcome. Annoyed, she snaps that she's not some collection of data for him to analyze, and they both say, simultaneously, "I'm your sister!" and she shuts up, but he continues quoting what she would have said. And every time she tries to speak, he finishes her sentences. Or sandwiches, if you're a 30 Rock fan. We learn that his name is Milo, and his sister finally gives up trying to talk, and just holds up a small toy horse, much to his consternation. "You didn't expect that, did you? Because you've forgotten what it's like to feel emotions," she says. Milo's getting edgy, but his sister continues. "You've forgotten us. Mom gave you this as a reminder, that you didn't have to do more than you were able to, that we loved you!"
"That's irrelevant now," he says, and he turns to walk away, but she tells him she doesn't recognize him anymore: "I made a mistake. When I signed you up, I didn't mean this," she says, and she holds up the damn horse again and tells him he needs to remember it. Milo slowly looks up at her, and walks away.
Over at Fringe division, Charlie is angrily hanging up on some kid who for some reason wanted to play his flute for the government agent who called looking for his mommy. Olivia laughs at him, and Charlie tells her she can talk to the witness, and he hopes it's a tuba player.
So Olivia gets on her phone and asks to be connected to the witness, and is surprised to find out that she needs a code. Charlie reminds her that that system was put in last month, and Olivia doesn't remember so she blames the head trauma. Charlie gets all pensive and the creepy music starts up as he fake-casually asks her if she remembers the time they went to Coney Island and rode the "Hellhole" and she got sick and threw up all over the person to her. Olivia takes a moment to answer, and then says, "yeah," sounding like she's lying, but then busts Charlie by reminding him the he was the one who threw up all over the person to him.
And then Olivia finds the connection between the victims: Jillian Foster consulted with Gregston Electric, which owns a subsidiary called the Ivon Medical Group, which is a vendor for Bryant Hospital, where Cole Arnett worked. Good gravy! "You're driving," says Charlie.
So they get to the place, and Charlie says, "As hospitals go, not bad," and Olivia says, "Yeah, unless it's run by an evil genius who's creating accidents to kill people," which is jumping the gun JUST a bit. Although she is joking. Anyway, at the reception desk, they identify themselves and ask to see the chief medical director, and the receptionist calls for Dr. Levin, and then quietly asks if they're being quarantined. Charlie says they're not.
Meanwhile, Olivia wanders around a little, and sees a room full of people using ballpoint pens. Although that's not what draws her attention initially. She sees Walter standing there. Unlike adult Peter, it's reasonable that she recognizes this vision: it's the Secretary, only sloppier. And smiling! She's frozen, and then Charlie's behind her, all "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" only he's talking about the ballpoint pens. Olivia still can barely speak. And then there's Levin, and Olivia asks him about the ballpoint pens, and the doctor explains that due to their mental deficiencies, a lot of their patients have trouble "interfacing digitally," like this doctor is some kind of poet. Anyway, the pen and paper is easier. Yes, it is -- which is the exact reason that its disappearance in this universe is somehow more absurd than just about anything else
we've seen.Anyway, they question him about the first two victims, and he explains that Jillian Foster worked with the Ivon Medical Group, which was conducting a drug trial at the hospital. Olivia shows him a picture of the third victim, Jeffrey Mayer, and the doctor knows him too, and is quite surprised to see him. Olivia says that they're going to have to question all their science and medical personnel, but he tells them that they're not looking for a doctor: "You're looking for a patient." He shows them a video about a study that the hospital started about a year ago, on nootropics -- smart drugs. "All of our test subjects started with an IQ of less than 65," he said. So the study was on politicians, amirite? The doctor says their aim was to increase their intelligence until they could function independently day-to-day, which Charlie calls a "worthy goal" and Dr. Levin all gloomily says, "We thought so too."
Then Olivia spots Milo in the background and is all, "That's him!" not surprising the doctor at all. He shows them video of Milo five months ago, with a measured IQ of 56, severe cognitive deficiency. There he is having difficulty with a simple puzzle. There he is rolling his eyes at $#*! My Dad Says and changing the channel to find something a little more challenging. And now there he is reciting the digits of pi to one-thousand decimal places while solving differential equations in his head. "That was after one treatment," says the doctor. "We gave him five." Each one increased Milo's intelligence exponentially, and the final phase of the project allowed subjects to be released to a guardian's care. And after that, they return the subjects to their original state, in order to determine if there are any permanent adverse side effects. "So Milo didn't want to be regressed, which is why he went after Cole Arnett," says Olivia. Levin says they thought it was an accident, and when Jillian was told, she was concerned that the delay in regressing Milo might compromise the results, so she offered to handle the case herself. And wound up dead.
Charlie asks about the third victim, and Levin explains that Jeffrey is a recovery specialist, who they contract with if somebody goes missing. "The thing is, I only put the order in yesterday. Mr. Mayer had not yet been assigned the task," says Dr. Levin.
So the agents get the contact info for Milo -- his sister, who lives in Oyster Bay, out on Long Island. Olivia's skeptical that they should go there, since Milo would have to know that that's the first place people would look, and Charlie makes a joke about never seeing any oysters in Oyster Bay.
From a second level, watching them go, is Milo. He's staring intently at them, and then we get his point-of-view (which is kind of golden-hued). Then his point-of-view gets split in half, one that shows Olivia and Charlie walking together, another that shows Olivia walking alone. It divides again. Four possibilities. And again and again. Snatches of Olivia running, yelling. There's Charlie. There's Milo's sister. There's that annoying "THE END" when you've made the wrong choice in your Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Over to Oyster Bay, where Olivia and Charlie have to break the news to Madeline Stanfield that her brother has killed three people. "That we know of," adds Olivia, just to stick it in a little deeper. She thinks there must be some kind of mistake, that her brother wouldn't kill innocent people. "I suppose he didn't think they were that innocent. You know, after all, they were trying to cut off the medication that was making him smart, right?" says Charlie, and Madeline doesn't have much of an answer for that. She doesn't have any idea where Milo might be now, and Charlie asks to have a look at his bedroom.
While he goes off to do that, Olivia breaks out the good-cop routine and looks at a picture of Madeline and Milo as children. "You seem close," she says, and Madeline says they were: "He was a lot older, but we liked the same cartoons, played the same games."
Olivia says she had the opposite: "My sister and I were close in age, but we fought over everything." Madeline asks if they're close now, and Olivia says that her sister died a few years ago, like thanks for BUMMING MADELINE OUT EVEN MORE, Olivia.
So Madeline talks about how when she was little she used to be scared that something would happen to Milo, like he'd forget to check for cars and run right into traffic. "I worried that he'd never be happy. He'd never feel like, like he belonged." Are you listening, Olivia? Olivia says it must have been hard to watch him struggle, and Madeline says it was harder for him, which was why she agreed to the drug study.
So now that they're best buds, Olivia reminds Madeline that Milo isn't that helpless person anymore: "He's dangerous, and I think you know that," she says, adding that they don't want to see anyone else get hurt, including her brother. Madeline thinks about it a moment, and then digs out an envelope, which she says is a goodbye note that says where she can reach him. Tsk! Snitches get stitches!
So outside, Olivia and her gung-ho attitude wants to call in backup to the Patricia Hotel on Lakewood Avenue, and Charlie wants to slow down because he wonders if that's what Milo wants: "He knows we're onto him. He knows his sister. What if he's trying to set us up?" Olivia's all, "Well, we can't just stand there with our highlights shining in the sunlight," so they call Bad-Astrid, who tells them that it's a mathematical problem without a solution. Olivia asks which scenario is more likely, that they go to the Patricia Hotel or don't. "Suppose he predicts you'll go there, but then you'll predict he'll predict that, so you don't go," she says. "But then he predicts that you predicted that. And he changes his plan, which means that you should go to the hotel. But then he predicts that you'll predict what he predicted too. It's an infinite spiral." Joey? Do they know that we know that they know that we know? JOEY?
So they decide (well, Olivia decides) to go to the Patricia Hotel anyway, because if Milo IS there, at least they have a chance to get him. Sure enough, he's there, and we see him watch Olivia and Charlie get out of their car, and his mind does the possibilities-splitting thing again, with Olivia and Charlie going down the street, and suddenly his outcomes involve Olivia getting buried under a truckload of cinderblock. Since that seems to appeal to him, he closes his eyes and runs the scenario backward: the blocks topple back onto the truck, Olivia goes racing backwards around the corner and takes a hit of oxygen because of a nearby street sign warning people about the poor air quality, right back to the time of 4 o'clock on a digital clock hanging over the street.
And then Milo is standing on the street watching them approach, kind of looking like an autistic gunslinger waiting to draw, only instead of being in the middle of a deserted street in an Old West town, he's on a busy sidewalk in the present day. It seems to take forever for Olivia and Charlie to notice him, and when they do, Milo smiles and starts running around the corner, the agents giving chase, running underneath a digital clock as it changes from 3:59 to 4 o'clock.
The agents chase Milo around the corner into an alley where construction work is being done, with Milo occasionally glancing back to make sure everything's unfolding as planned (we keep seeing his gold-tinted point of view). Charlie and Olivia split up, with Charlie going a different direction to try to cut Milo off, and Olivia and Milo run through a corridor. Milo's starting to clutch at his chest, and when he emerges into another section of the alley, the "Compromised Air Quality" alarm is going off and the construction workers are gathering at an emergency oxygen station. Milo's got his own puffer that he takes a hit off, and keeps on running, to the side of a forklift with a load of cinderblock.
Olivia, chasing him, has time to duck around the load of cinderblock as it comes tumbling down, and continues running at Milo. "Oh, that wasn't supposed to happen," he says, just before Olivia plows into him and knocks him against the fence and to the ground. But she can't really corral him, since she is now choking in the sick-making Hoboken air. Fortunately, Charlie has come around to get the drop on Milo, who tries to flee anyway, getting shot in the leg for his trouble. "You move again, the one won't be in your leg, buddy," says Charlie as he hands Olivia an oxygen canister.
Later, as Milo is wheeled away on a stretcher, Charlie gives her the gears about passing by a blinking "auburn diamond," which is breaking protocol. "You need oxygen to breathe," says Charlie, and Olivia doesn't get mad at him giving her third-grade science lessons, but just says she doesn't know why she did that, but Charlie knows. "Because you're a daredevil, I get it," he says. Don't forget the gung-ho attitude!
Later, Olivia takes Madeline to see Milo, in some kind of medical prison let's assume, where he's muttering too himself while poring over a tabletop computer filled ever-changing numbers. Olivia explains that the drugs had been in Milo's system too long, so the effects can't be reversed. "According to the doctors, the patterns that he sees are too complex to put into words. His thoughts can now o
nly be interpreted by a machine."Madeline says, "So, the machine is talking to him?" and Olivia gives her some guff about how Milo no longer thinks in terms that they would be able to comprehend," instead of saying, "Yeah, maybe instead of solving ridiculously difficult problems he should be out killing people."
So Madeline goes in to see Milo, and she takes his hand, stilling it for a moment and shutting him up. He doesn't look at her, and her eyes water, and in a moment he starts babbling away again, so she puts the little horse figurine on the table and walks away.
Over to Liberty Island now, in Brandon's lab. Walternate strides in, saying something about how he envies Brandon being there, with nothing to distract him, and then he sees some folded clothes, and as Brandon embarrassedly says he didn't realize Walternate was coming, Walternate says, "These are my son's clothes." Brandon explains that he thought if he used items from the other side, it would provide an associative loop to spark Olivia to cross over. Walternate collects himself to say it's "good thinking" and wants to know when it will be ready. Brandon says they're close, but all the test subjects he's hooked up to the chair have experienced high levels of anxiety, causing his readings to fluctuate.
Walternate says the solution is obvious: submerge the subject in water. Brandon's all, "Sensory-deprivation tank. Of course. The womb-like atmosphere naturally provides a state of relaxation," he says. Hey, maybe we'll go back to the old days where Olivia was in the tank in her bra like every other episode!
Brandon asks Walternate if he misses being a scientist, and Walternate stiffly says that he's still a scientist: "I just have a much larger laboratory," he says, which is kind of an awesome answer, even considering that Walternate is actually kind of evil (albeit understandably so).
And it looks like Frank is packing for North Texas, and Olivia is marveling that he doesn't know how he does it, since she's never done packing till the cab actually arrives, and he says, "Well, I'm off to deal with diseased people in North Texas, so it's not like I have to look good," he says, whatever that's supposed to mean. Oh, and nice attitude. I feel sorry for the smallpox-ridden North Texans who are going to be thinking, "Oh, shit, we're doomed. This asshole couldn't even have been bothered to shave," and then they make cooey small talk at each other, and then the phone rings which Frank says is probably the cab, which means their earlier exchange over never being finished packing until the cab arrives makes even LESS sense somehow.
And Frank goes to see about the cab, which is when Hallucination Peter shows up for Olivia again, explaining that she survived because she didn't know the protocol: "If you'd stopped for oxygen, you'd be dead right now. But you did something he couldn't factor in. You kept running. You know why you did that. It's the same reason you thought you saw Walter in the hospital. It's the same reason why you think you're seeing me now. You're not from this world, Olivia. You're not her."
She tells Peter that he's not real, and he gives her some classic Peter mumbo-jumbo about real being just a matter of perception, and he strolls towards her: "I'm a part of you that you have to hold onto. You can't forget who you are, Olivia. You can't forget where you're from. You can't forget this," he says, and touches her chin and leans in and plants a kiss on her lips. She closes her eyes, and then Frank strolls in and asks if she's OK, and she covers by saying he surprised her, and she's going to miss him. They hug, and Frank leaves, and Olivia looks haunted.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. He learned everything he needs to know about probabilities in Las Vegas this past summer . Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel[at]gmail.com.
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