The answer, as ALWAYS, is LSD, and due to some science-esque-type blather, Peter and Walter go acid-tripping into Olivia's mind so they can find her consciousness and pull her out. Everyone there dresses like Olivia wants them to, so it's a very stylish world of blacks and greys, and no one is wearing Ed Hardy. It's really nice. The trouble is Olivia is hiding, and Peter and Olivia meet up with Bell and now everything is ANIMATED for some reason, and there are multiple zombies of dead Brandonate attacking, and a zeppelin escape. On the zeppelin is some guy who attacks the fabulous Bishop brothers and Walter gets tossed over but when you die here you just wake up. Peter and Bell track Olivia down in Jacksonville, but before Peter can save her HE gets hit by a military vehicle driven by some nefarious dudes chasing after young Olivia. So it's up to Belly, and he saves Olivia, knowing that he's not going to be coming out (despite the Fringe team's plan to put his consciousness into a computer).
So thus endeth Bell, at least for now. There's a lingering question as to who the dangerous zeppelin guy was -- the theory is that he is a dangerous guy from Olivia's past. Only when Peter asks her about him, she says she doesn't recognize him. But she knows who he is nonetheless: "He's the guy who's going to kill me." She delivers this information with all the emotion you might say, "He played a judge on that one episode of Law & Order."
Oh, and also Broyles trips his balls off.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. He wonders if Fox is overdoing it if they want Fringe to join its Animation Domination lineup. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.
Walter's humming a tune as he affixes his brain-tampering headgear to Olivia (who is still William Bell). Apparently they're playing "Name That Tune" but it seems to be the worst game of Name That Tune ever because Walter can't hum and Bell doesn't even know the right names of well-known songs like "The Girl From Ipanema" which isn't even the song Walter's humming anyway. It seems this has been going on a while, because Bell wants Walter to "try something else" and Walter says Bell is taking all the fun out of it, which hardly seems possible, as it looks like everyone is having a shitload of fun.
Walter checks with Peter to make sure the temperature is correct (64 degrees) and then with "Astro" to see if she's ready. Astrid has apparently decided to fight absentminded-professor fire with fire, and shoots back with, "Just about, Wally," which actually startles him.
Peter wants to make sure this is safe, and Walter says, "Perfectly. If everything goes according to plan, the electrical current will latch onto the dominant consciousness which is Belly's and coax it into its new residence." That's great, because things always go according to plan here, right? Saying "If everything goes according to plan" on Fringe means exactly what "Barring some unforeseen circumstances" did on Seinfeld: it meant shit is about to go down.
The "new residence" that Walter is talking about is the corpse -- being kept cool by hundreds of ice cubes -- laid out on a slab near Peter, who is still all grouchy with his arms crossed because he wants to know if this will be safe for Olivia. "No offence," he says to Bell, who takes none. Walter says Olivia's mind is still peacefully at rest and won't be aware of any of this. But he still wants everyone to take a few steps back. This doesn't exactly fill Peter with confidence, but maybe he just means that Bell's been eating a lot of cheese today.
Anyway, Walter asks Belly if he's ready, and Belly responds with a chipper "Aye aye, captain," because these two guys are still having the time of their lives, and Astrid flips the switch or pushes the button or whatever and then the corpse wriggles and writhes and ripples, partly because of the electrical current but also because this guy clearly wasn't a prime physical specimen even when he was alive. Then there is crackling and popping and the lights go out, but the corpse has not been reanimated, and Bell is still inside Olivia, still not in the way Peter wants to be.
Walter tells Astrid to reset the circuit breakers and to tell the medical school that they're returning Mr. Spencer. He snaps the last bit at the dead body itself, like he's blaming the corpse for the fact the experiment didn't work. Mr. Spenser does not respond, which I suppose is pretty much the entire problem. Astrid at least has the consideration of whispering a "sorry" to Peter, who continues to glare.
Later, Bell is washing his hands in the sink when Peter stomps up and demands to know what they do now. "I guess we try and find another brain-dead host," says Bell. The good news is that summer-blockbuster season is just around the corner, so that shouldn't be too hard. But Peter wants to know why he thinks it will go any better this time around, since the other body fit all of Bell's parameters, and they were lucky to find him in the first place. "I have a new idea. You said that if you didn't find a suitable host in forty-eight hours that you would just go away," says Peter. Bell stares at him. "Are you suggesting that I die?" he asks, and Peter just smirks. In fairness to Peter, Bell did say that. "I'm suggesting that I want Olivia back," says Peter, and then another light bulb shatters and Peter says "And I'm losing patience," and then Bell looks terrified and for a moment it seemed like Peter was about to go all Carrie all over this place, but then it's Olivia saying, "Peter, help me!" and then she collapses.
So 911 gets called and the paramedics are wheeling Bellivia down the hospital corridor, with one of them telling the doctor that she's had no response to four milligrams of Lorazepam, and the ER doctor wants to know how long she's been seizing, and the paramedic says twenty minutes which Peter corrects to twenty-five, so the doctor wants to start her on a Phenytoin drip. Walter says that's wrong, and the doctor and the nurse take exception, instead of what you'd like to think they'd do when a person is dying right in front of them, which is just actually ignore the Bishops, but Walter presses on and says Bell can't tolerate Phenytoin, because he's anemic. No matter, because Bell's crashing now so the doctor's getting the defibrillator ready, at 360. Walter fears that's too much, but Peter tells him to just let them do their job. "What if his consciousness changed her physiology? A charge that size directly into her heart..." Walter asks Peter, but Peter says the doctors have to do something. The doctor's about to go ahead with the defibrillation when Bell grabs his wrist. "Doctor, I've been jolted once today. If you do it again, you will kill me and the young woman I'm living inside of," he says. Does the doctor have anything to cure the creepy old man voice coming out of the young woman? Because that would at least be a start.
Well, whatever they did, Bell is resting up by the time the opening credits are over, only now he has to face an angry Broyles, who says Bell told him Olivia was perfectly safe. "And I believed that she was. With the rats, it was nearly two weeks before I began to see any complications," says Bell, and probably the only thing preventing Bell from being punched to death by Peter for that sort of unscientific conclusion-leaping is that he's in Olivia's body. And Broyles is all "What rats?" and Bell starts blathering about the rats he first did soooooul magnet experiments on thirty years ago, who went nearly two weeks before the host's consciousness got lost. "I never anticipated that it would happen more quickly in a human," he says. Humans being exactly the same as rats, after all. So now Broyles is all, "what do you mean 'consciousness got lost'?" Yeah, that can't be as ominous as it sounds, right?
"It seems that at a certain point the brain can no longer accommodate two people's consciousness. So one just went away. And no matter how hard I tried, I was unable to retrieve it," says Bell. Yeah, that's pretty much exactly as bad as it sounds. Peter doesn't exactly look thrilled. Broyles reminds Bell of his forty-eight hours promise, and Bell's all, "Yeah, Peter has already put forth his 'just go die already, old man' proposal" but he says that he can no longer simply leave. Peter asks why not, but Walter's already figured out the answer: "Because at this point, your consciousness is the only thing keeping Olivia's body alive." Presumably fed up with Bell by this point, Peter asks Walter how long before Olivia's gone for good, but Bell answers anyway: "I don't know exactly, but based on what we've seen thus far, I would say, no more than a day." Worse news: you've been wrong before, Bell.
So back at the Harvard lab, Bell and Walter are putting their senile, drug-addled minds towards pulling Olivia's consciousness back out. Bell suggests activating her chi, which is kind of hilarious. Yeah, just go under Olivia's system preferences and slide the "chi" switch to "on." Walter dismisses it because it would take dozens of sessions spread over several days, much longer than the twenty-four hours Bell now thinks they have. But Bell's got another idea: "What if, instead of trying to find a way to pull Olivia out, we try and find a way to go in?"
Meanwhile, Peter and Astrid are discussing the situation, and Peter has floated the possibility that Bell would let Olivia die just to go on living. He's not entirely sure, but still: "On the list of accomplishments for William Bell, cheating death would certainly rank No. 1." Astrid's skeptical but considers it nonetheless.
The scientists come back in (Bell cutely, coming from Olivia's
body, calls Astrid and Peter "kids") and say they think they've found a way to bring Olivia's mind back and remove Bell's: whole brain emulation. Naturally, it's another one of Bell's old projects, one that describes how an inorganic host can house organic material -- they've got an old computer, and they're going to put Bell into it. Or, rather, Walter is delegating that task to Astrid. "It's very self-explanatory," he says, not helpful at all. The scientists leave, forcing an extremely confused Peter and Astrid to chase after them, all "what the fuck?"Walter says they're going to enter Olivia's mind in a "simple variation" of what they did when Olivia and good 'ol John Scott shared a dream state. Man, ex-boyfriends get brought up in the weirdest ways on Fringe.
All they have to do is tune their own brains to match the electric field of Olivia's. That's why Bell's looking for the neurosensors, over on the back shelf by the fish food. Peter, skeptical as ever, points out that entering Olivia's brain required an electromagnetic probe and mass quantities of hallucinogenics, and Walter is all, "Of course! LSD!" And now Walter is asking his son if he's "ever tripped" and then he's babbling about how Olivia's mind will be a maze-like iteration of her psyche, and since Peter knows her better than anyone, they need him to guide them. Without waiting for Peter to say OK, Walter's ordering Astrid to mix up two thousand milligrams of LSD, and they need some sugar cubes.
Then Walter drips some acid on the sugar cube, and tells his son not to be nervous, because "there are things in this very lab that are as mindblowing as anything that I've experienced while tripping." This could very well make Peter more nervous, not less, especially since he almost died once from drinking something he shouldn't have. Anyway, Peter eats the sugar cube with Walter explaining that he's added an accelerant to the acid so Peter will feel its effects sooner, and that once they're in Olivia's mind they should all be very cogent and I would just like to know on what he is basing THAT hypothesis. Anyway, he goes to help Bell and Astrid tells Peter not to worry; she'll be watching the monitors to make sure he's OK. Peter, a little choked up, says it's not himself he's worried about.
"I'm pretty sure there's a good reason why we can't enter each other's minds. What if we kick something loose in there?" Except I guess you can enter each other's minds, so does that make you not worried? Astrid says she thinks Peter's Olivia's only hope. So now he's got THAT pressure on him.
Then Broyles comes in to see how things are going. Peter starts staring at him and tries to rub his hand on Broyles' head (try to imagine how impressed Broyles is by this). Oh my god, this guy does the best Broyles!
"You're bald," Peter says, full of wonderment, and then he leans in and stage-whispers conspiratorially to Astrid, "I think he's an Observer." Astrid tells him it's OK, and sends him over to Walter, who's starting to look a little glassy-eyed himself. Broyles stares at him. I love how often Broyles looks like he wonders how the hell he's supposed to justify the various Fringe budgetary items.
"Drugs?" he says, skeptically, to Astrid as she injects our heroes, who are all now sitting in their chairs and tripping. "Yep. Lots of 'em," says Astrid, and then she goes over and stands by Broyles, watching as the three acid droppers lose consciousness.
We're with Peter as he suddenly "wakes up" on a busy city sidewalk, on an overcast day with everyone dressed in various shades of black and grey. It's kind of like how you imagine Velvet Underground concerts in the '60s. Peter has just barely put his sunglasses on for some reason when he hears his father yelling his name. He looks around, and then spots Walter. "I think you'd better help me down," says Walter, who is on top of a city bus, because of course he is. And now the bus is pulling away! Thrilling action coming up right after this commercial break!
Except that's not what we get; at the tail end of what appears to have been some sort of action sequence that was presumably cut short, Walter is just all of a sudden on the ground and bitching at Peter for grabbing him by the crotch of his pants. "Hey, I broke your fall, didn't I?" is Peter's reaction, and Walter snaps about being spared no embarrassment. "I thought you said none of this was real anyway," says Peter. Walter: "I said that everything is a product of Olivia's subconscious. My feelings are definitely real." Hey, since when does ANYTHING embarrass Walter?
Anyway, there's no sign of Bell, which doesn't concern Peter, because A) they're there for Olivia anyway, and B) we already know he kinda wants Bell to die. Walter elects to just start wandering the streets to look for Olivia, and Peter points out that it looks like everyone raided Olivia's closet. "More likely, she equipped them according to her preferences," says Bell. I commend Olivia's subconscious United Nations. I'm afraid any visitors to my mind would find a city populated by a million Marisa Tomeis. Walter says something about Cortexiphan subjects experiencing a strong desire to blend in, to stay in the background: "They were designed that way." Yeah, it wouldn't have anything to do with not wanting to be experimented on, hey?
Anyway, Peter's about to ask for a little clarification on "designed that way" when Walter notices a series of bright flashes coming from near the top of one of the Twin Towers, which are standing in Olivia's subconscious. "I believe it's Morse code!" he says, and then goes rooting around in a garbage can. Peter assumes Walter's going to eat the chocolate pudding he finds, like how much of a jackass can Peter possibly be, but Walter just wants the foil lid so he can signal back. "It's Olivia! She found us!" says Walter, delighted, after a short conversation via Morse code. Jesus, it's your subconscious, Olivia, pick up a cellphone or use mental telepathy. Peter tells his dad to tell her to stay there, and they're on their way. You could probably at least suggest she meet you in the lobby.
Back in the real world, Astrid and Broyles don't see much outward change in the sleeping trio. "Do you really think it's possible to upload a person's consciousness to a computer?" he asks Astrid. Instead of saying "no" like a sane person would, Astrid says she's just following Bell's instructions. Also, who is she to say that The Lawnmower Man couldn't happen in real life? And then Broyles starts to fixate on a piece of Walter's red licorice. "I never understood why Walter was so drawn to licorice. But look at it. The swirl... it's Bernini's spiral altar at St. Peter's. It... doesn't end," he says. Awww yeah, Broyles likes to party.
Astrid goes from confused to comprehending, and asks if Broyles cleaned up the lab equipment behind them, and Broyles, who certainly strikes me as a "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean" kinda guy, confirms he did touch the tray with the sugar cubes. "Sure. Why?" he asks, not taking his eyes off the licorice, and Astrid says, "Have you ever taken LSD?" THAT finally gets Broyles' attention.
Meanwhile, Peter and Walter are no closer to the Towers, which loom even larger than they ought to in the distance, as Peter notes. "It's Olivia's mind assigning importance. Our surroundings represent her emotional landscape, don't forget," says Walter -- and now they got trouble.
He notices a creepy guy across the street staring at them. It's Olivia's stepfather, and Peter and Walter duck around the corner, because that's going to work. They peek around, and the stepfather is still standing there glaring at them. Not only that; suddenly everyone on the street stops what they're doing and starts staring at them. Cars screech to a halt in the street and the drivers get out and stare. "Walter, I'm getting a bad feeling about this," says Peter. Probably because he saw Inception too.
So any suggestions? Walter says, "Run!" and Peter and Walter take off runni
ng, and the crowd chases them, and it sure is a good thing that there was no one on the street in the direction they were running. Still, they can't outrun the mob forever, so they grab a cab that's handily parked in the street with the keys in it and no driver. They haul ass down the street -- not a lot of traffic on the streets in Olivia's mind -- and are chased by a couple of dark sedans that force the Bishops onto a cross street that takes them out into a calmer area of the city. They screech to a stop, and when they get out, Walter excitedly says, "Peter, I made a skid!" Please GOD he'd better be talking about on the street.And now they're in the lobby of the World Trade Center building where they see Nina Sharp among the hustle and bustle, and Walter says she's a sight for sore eyes. They explain they think Olivia is somewhere near the top floor, likely in Bell's office, so she leads them to the elevators, and she tells them this special elevator will take them right there, and Peter looks suspicious, and Nina runs her card through the reader, with her arm looking very android-y. The doors open, and Walter heedlessly plunges right ahead and would have stepped right into an empty elevator shaft had Peter not grabbed him, and I'd just like to add that empty shaft or no, when are people going to stop doing that head-down-stomp-right-into-the-elevator-without-waiting-for-people-to-get-off-first thing?
Nina goes to give Walter an extra push, but Peter pulls Walter aside and shoves Nina in instead. Aaiiiiieeee! Splat. Fortunately, I imagine Massive Dynamic has the technology to rebuild her entire body. Peter, acting like it ain't no thang, calmly takes Walter to another elevator. "She tried to kill us! You saw. Why is everyone trying to kill us?" says a shaken Walter on the elevator ride up. Peter doesn't have an answer for that, but they both agree they don't like the place.
The elevator eventually opens on a long white hall with an M. Bell nameplate on an office door at the end of it. Walter warns Peter to be ready for anything, but I don't think anybody was expecting to see not only William Bell instead of Olivia, but William Bell as a cartoon. The animation is similar to A Scanner Darkly, if not quite as fluid or, um, good. Rotoscope Lite, where the characters really don't look very much like themselves. Bell admits to misleading them because he was concerned that if they knew it was just him there, Peter wouldn't let Walter come rescue him. "Belly! Why are you a cartoon?" says Walter, half-delighted. Bell looks down at himself like he hadn't really considered it, but then notes, as the Bishops have come into the room, that he could ask them the same question. Sure enough, the Bishops are cartoons as well. And the question never gets answered.
So it's not like there's a sense of urgency or anything; Bell's got time to fix himself a drink as he explains that he found himself on the street but after a cab tried to run him down, he sought refuge in his office. He suspects that when his mind entered Olivia's, her ego became confused. "She initiated the darker parts of her subconscious, allowing her deeper fear to run rampant," says Walter, picking up Bell's theory and running with it. He says she was never aware that Bell's mind entered hers; as far as she knows, one minute she was fine and the minute she was adrift in her own innermost thoughts. Well, sure, let's go with that until you find out you're wrong again about the consequences of Bell's mind possession.
So the upshot is that Olivia's not lost in her own mind, she's hiding -- which Belly says is much worse than if she were just lost, where she'd at least leave a logical trail. "If she's hiding, I'm afraid we're looking for a needle in a haystack. Walter despairs that they can't expect to find her if everything seems hostile and alien to her.
Peter, though, figures Olivia would do what Bell has done -- find a safe haven to hide out. "There is a whole world out there without rhyme or reason. Where would you like to start?" says Bell, but I think he's just looking for an excuse to stay in his office and keep drinking.
Back in the office, Broyles sits staring, open-mouthed, into space, and he's startled by Astrid's approach. She gently tells him that she brought him some food. He stares at it, and she tells him, like you'd tell a sick five-year-old, that if he wants she can take it away, and reminds him that what he's going through is only temporary. "No, it's the infinite. It's all around us," he says, and Astrid indulges him by looking around.
And then the weirdest thing happens: Broyles shows his teeth. I'm not sure what he's -- oh my god! Oh my god! Broyles is smiling? And now he's laughing! He says he didn't see it before, but now he knows it followed up: "Death. I saw death. All of it. And it was me," he says. Astrid looks downcast. It's kind of a bummer to watch your boss tripping his balls off, I guess. Then he asks her to please hold his hand, which she does. She pats him on the shoulder, and he gapes at her.
Meanwhile, the Bishops and Bell have made their way to the roof of the tower, where there's a red zeppelin moored. They look out at the city, which is actually a hodgepodge of landmarks and landscape... we can see the Eiffel Tower in the distance.
Peter says they should look in Jacksonville, which Walter incredulously says is the last place Olivia would go, but that's his point: Olivia knows that's the last place anyone would look for her.
The distant sound of screeching tires gets them looking down over the side of the building, where they can see several cars parked haphazardly on the street facing the lobby, with dozens of ant-like (from this height) people streaming into the building. "I assume that's about us," says Walter defeatedly, which was kind of funny, but they don't have too much time to contemplate that before the door opens behind them and half a dozen... zombie Brandonates? OK, why the hell not? In for a penny, in for a pound. Anyway, the zombie Brandons stagger out, blood spattered on their lab coats and around their mouths, so the men sprint for the rope ladder hanging down to the roof from the zeppelin. Well, "sprint" is the wrong word, because the animation leaves a little something to be desired and has them kind of waddling.
Naturally, the ancient Bell reaches the ladder first, followed by the slightly less ancient Walter, and Peter starts fending off the zombies with his kung fu, also taking the time to untie the single knot tethering the zeppelin to the building. But as the zeppelin starts moving away, he's accosted by another zombie, and he's backed up against an air intake fan on the roof. So you know where this is going.
He takes down one zombie and throws the other into the giant fan, killing it more dead than it already is, and then he starts sprinting for the dangling ladder, and only has to jump about twenty metres off the side of the building to catch it, and the men are away.
While Peter futilely searches through a window with binoculars, Walter and Bell chill in the control room, or whatever the hell you call it on a blimp. Walter tells Bell that he should have known Bell had no intention of dying, that time they were over there getting Peter back, because Bell actually said goodbye. "As long as I've known you, you've hated goodbyes," says Walter. "I suppose that's true," says Bell, sounding not in the least interested.
Then Walter starts whining about how he needs Bell, because he doesn't know what to do about Peter or the machine, or how to get past this one level on World of Goo. Bell says when they were young and foolish and had too much power and too many dreams that no one could stand in the way of -- ZZZZZZZZZ. Oh, sorry. Anyway, he says they needed each other then, because back then they didn't have the wisdom of humility but they do now so the path Walter chooses will be just and I swear somebody better shoot somebody or somebody better turn into some kind of monster soon, because this half-baked philo
sophizing is turning me homicidal.Then we see someone somewhere else cutting a hose, spilling amber fluid, and in the control room, the fuel gauge suddenly starts heading left with an alarm sounding. Peter comes in to ask what's up. "Fuel gauge," says Bell calmly, not at all like they're seconds away from running out of fuel. So Peter heads to the engine room, which he finds is chained and padlocked shut. There's also fuel spilling out from under the door. Fortunately... I guess?... the key to the padlock is hanging nearby, but no sooner has Peter freed the door when it's kicked open, knocking him down, and there's a dude pointing a gun in his face asking Peter how many of him there are. Peter says it's just him, and the dude tells him he's got a flare gun. "You don't want to get shot with a flare gun," he says, begging the question of whether you'd want to be shot with ANY gun.
Obviously the guy, in a white T-shirt with an X on the chest, knows that since Peter can't operate a razor he can't fly a zeppelin by himself, which is confirmed when Walter comes doddering in, wondering what's going on.
The dude asks Peter's name, and Peter tells him, and the dude says, "Nice to meet you." See, that's nice! You can always be nice, even when brandishing a flare gun! Then the guy grabs a parachute from the wall, and fires his flare gun at the inside wall of the blimp, tearing a hole in it. Clutching the parachute, he gets sucked out through the hole. Clutching no parachute, Walter gets sucked our after him, while Peter's hanging on to a support beam yelling his dad's name.
Walter hurtles towards the falling thug and actually manages to grab onto him -- but the thug just pulls his ripcord, and when his fault is sharply arrested by the parachute, Walter plummets once more, all the way to the ground. Instead of splattering, though, he wakes up, discombobulated enough for Astrid to have to soothe him. "Oh, damn. I'm back," he says. On the plus side, Broyles is freaking high, so you wouldn't have wanted to miss that!
Back in Olivia's brain, Peter is tying up the zeppelin right in the middle of a Jacksonville street, so I guess the empty fuel tank wasn't any kind of big deal? Bell assures him that Walter will be fine, because he has so much experience as a cartoon man in someone else's mind. "Who was that guy?" asks Peter, and Bell figures it's someone unpleasant from her past.
Bell looks around to get his bearings, then points in the direction they need to go, but they'll need a vehicle. He asks Peter if he drives a motorcycle, because he would LOVE to ride on a motorcycle. He starts walking, and then he and Peter argue about which direction to go in, because Bell assumes she'll be at the daycare, but Peter says she won't be, and I'd like to point out that they're in a world in which the Twin Towers are still standing and a five-minute drive from the Eiffel Tower. But Bell acquiesces, probably at least partly because Peter has spotted a motorcycle for them to ride.
Back in the Harvard lab, Walter has decided he might as well throw a few more circuit boards into the computer that's ostensibly going to hold Bell's brain. Broyles, still ridiculously high, stares open-mouthed as a cartoon bird lands on Walter's shoulder. He whistles at it to get its attention, and it works, and then he waves and makes that strange face where he shows his teeth again. Walter looks up, briefly, and then goes back to working on the Bellytron 3000, but he drops some sort of special tube and it's the last one they've got so he's got to modify something by cannibalizing a tube from his phonograph blah blah blah.
Back in the brain, on the Jacksonville outskirts, Peter rides while Bell clings to his shoulders. Ass, gas or grass, Belly. Nobody rides for free!
As they arrive at the clearly marked military base, supposed super-genius Bell asks where they're going. The drive through the military buildings, get off the motorcycle, and then walk up a hill -- on the other side of it are the residences, identical bungalows stretching off in all directions, all the way to the horizon.
Peter explains that Olivia once told him that she sometimes thinks about what it would be like to just be normal, and that the last time she remembered feeling normal was the day before she met Bell and Walter at the Cortexiphan trials. I have to assume that if Leonard Nimoy weren't animated, his expression wouldn't convey "whatever" quite so callously. Anyway, Peter thinks she's down there somewhere, in her house, that day, hiding out.
Bell wonders how they're supposed to find her, when all those houses look the same, and Peter says her real dad painted the door red, and told her it was good luck. "The army told them it was against regulations, but he was an important man, so they let it slide." Yeah, the army's usually pretty good about things like that, right?
So after searching for what must be quite some time, the sun is starting to set, and Bell says there aren't many streets left: maybe the door was painted green again after they moved away. "It wasn't," says Peter, instead of THIS ISN'T ACTUALLY THE JACKSONVILLE MILITARY BASE, IT'S OLIVIA'S MEMORY OF IT. And anyway, there's the red door right there.
Peter stops the motorcycle, but doesn't get off. He takes long enough that Bell finally asks what he's waiting for. Peter wonders what if he's wrong and she's not in there? He's taken them so far off course. Bell simply says he should have thought of that back at the zeppelin, which is certainly a sensible way of looking at it.
So Peter walks up to the front door, and opens it, and is thankfully NOT a cartoon anymore when he goes inside (there's blinding white light behind him as he does so). He steps in, and Olivia's right there, and they hug, oblivious to the family of three (with a young blonde daughter) sitting down to supper, watching them. Olivia says there were all these people trying to hurt her, and this was the safest place she knew. Peter says he understands and he's here to help, and he'll explain everything later, but she's safe and it's OK for her to come back.
The little girl watches intently from the table as Peter caresses Olivia's cheek, and then stops, frowning. Olivia says she's scaring him, but he calmly says that she's not Olivia. He can see it in her eyes. Oh, sure, now he can tell whether it's actually Olivia just by looking in her eyes. Olivia protests, but Peter won't be swayed.
So the little girl gets up from the table and walks over. "I just needed to know it was you," she says, in her little six-year-old lisp. Peter smiles at the adorableness, and young Olivia explains that people have been tricking her, but she knew the real Peter would recognize her. Ha! Hasn't his terrible track record on that score been a major plot point?
Anyway, all of a sudden big Olivia and the parents are gone, and the house is decorated for Christmas, and young Olivia turns at the sound of approaching footsteps. It's Olivia's stepdad. I guess he must have found them by following the GIANT RED ZEPPELIN. Olivia and Peter run out the door -- and they're cartoons again -- and Peter yells, "Run!" at Bell, who looks down the street and sees several army vehicles approaching as the darkness encroaches. One of the jeeps chases Peter and Olivia up on a lawn, and then they run to join Bell, but Peter's running too fast and Olivia's hand slips out of his. She's just about to be mown down by one of the jeeps when Peter pushes her out of the way -- but that means the real Peter is violently jolted awake, freaking out. "I found her! She's here! I gotta go back!" he yells, while Walter tries to comfort him and Astrid wails about not knowing what to do. It's easy enough to miss in all the commotion, but if you've got this episode recorded, go back and check out the priceless look of amazement on Broyles' face. "It's up to Belly now," says Walter. "I lost her. I lost her," says Peter, clutching at Walter's chest.
Back in Olivia's mind, the little girl and the octogenarian are naturally outrunning a
n entire mob of people, including soldiers with M-16s, and then Bell trips and he tells Olivia to go on without him, but instead she turns and walks back toward the advancing mob and says, "Stop. I'm not afraid of you." Obligingly, they stop. By the time Bell has clambered back to his feet, young Olivia has become regular Olivia again.The mob is pretty much frozen, everyone standing there slightly swaying, and Olivia asks how. Bell's theory is that Olivia should have felt safe inside her own mind, except, Olivia has never actually felt safe. "You are your own worst enemy, Olivia. You took the opportunity to let your fears overwhelm you." Geez, give her a lecture inside her own mind? But she just fought back, so in the end she's as strong as he and Walter always figured she was: "And now you know it too." Olivia asks what happens , and Bell tells her to go back, but he won't, because for her to survive, he needs to leave. "I don't understand," says Olivia, and I can't believe people on this show don't just go around saying "I don't understand" every single day. "You don't have to," says Bell. Then lightning and thunder start crackling and rumbling, and Bell says that's Walter, right on time. He asks Olivia to tell Walter that he knew the dog wouldn't hunt. Lightning flashes again, and Olivia looks up into the sky, and when she looks back again, everyone -- the army, Bell -- is gone.
And then there's Olivia waking up in Walter's lab, Peter and Astrid smiling from ear to ear as they realize it's her. Walter tells her to lie back and rest, and then he goes back to check the Consciousness Monitor and gleefully announces that there's just "one glorious consciousness." Olivia asks what's going on, and Peter asks her what she remembers. "I remember you. And I remember William Bell was there," she says.
Meanwhile, Astrid looks to see that the computer screen is warning her: "Error 670: Soul not found". It didn't work, she tells Walter. "He's gone. William's gone," he says, sadly. And then Olivia is finally finished reuniting with her boyfriend enough so she can pass on Bell's message about how he knew the dog wouldn't hunt. Walter nods and quietly explains that Bell would use that expression when he knew something wouldn't work, and Astrid, who is supposed to be pretty smart herself, points out the stupid soul computer was Bell's idea, and Walter says Bell knew he wasn't coming out, and he hates goodbyes. He fights back tears and walks off, and Astrid looks sad, and then brightens up enough to go welcome Olivia back.
Later, Walter's mourning in his office when Astrid comes in with a plate of cookies, and a tablet computer onto which she's downloaded some episodes of Zoom which is some educational show from the '70s that I've never heard of, onto a tablet computer for him and she offers to watch it with him if he wants, and despite Astrid being about a million different kinds of awesome, Walter says he'd like to be alone a little while longer. She nods and tells him to take his time, and leaves. Smart woman: left the computer and the cookies.
Olivia's doing some paperwork or, I don't know, her taxes or something in her apartment when Peter shows up, looking a little more rested than the last time she saw him, and they beam at each other and then hug and she asks if he's hungry, and he says "no" instead of "in a sense."
In the kitchen, he asks how she's feeling, and she says it's like she's just woken up from a really strange dream, and she thanks him for coming to get her. Peter jokes that it's not as dangerous as crossing into another universe, but he tries, and then he half-jokingly wonders what they're going to have to deal with , and she says she's not afraid to move forward anymore.
As her toast pops up, Peter sees what she was working on at the kitchen table: a sketch of the dude from the zeppelin. He asks Olivia who he is: "I saw him in your mind. You had him locked up in a zeppelin. He was just flying around trapped in there."
Olivia blithely says she hasn't seen him before: "But I think that he's the man who's going to kill me." Peter's shocked by this, clearly as much at how she said it as what she said. She said it like you'd say, "I gotta pick up my dry cleaning tomorrow." Geez -- when her fear disappears, it disappears.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. He never should have taken the brown acid. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel[at]gmail.com.