A creepy bald guy chows down on raw meat and jalapenos in a diner in Brooklyn and takes interest in a nearby construction site, which soon blows up. The reason? The appearance of a giant metal dildo. Er -- "cylinder," they call it. But come on! It vibrates! Anyway, it appears to have burrowed up from underground.
It happened before, in 1987, in Quantico, and the investigating officer just happens to have been an old mentor of Olivia's. He tells her that they never figured out what it was or where it came from, and then, on its own, it just exploded back down into the ground.
It seems to have to do with an old project of Walter's in which he worked on a kind of subterranean torpedo. He's very cagey, even for him, about the cylinder, and Peter's getting tired of taking his dad's craziness, and he wants to quit. But before he gets a chance to, he's kidnapped by some maniac with a crazy gun, who seems to be able to read minds with a special interrogation device, on the trail of the cylinder. Walter's already absconded with the cylinder (after knocking out Astrid with a sedative) and joins creepy bald guy in the diner. Creepy bald guy thanks him for securing the cylinder.
But creepy bald guy's already been spotted by Olivia in both pictures from the 1987 incident and from the hospital a couple of weeks ago. Broyles is amazed, since it took the FBI a year to notice him, despite the fact that he doesn't seem to make any kind of effort to hide from the FBI's cameras.
The Dildo Hunter manages to find out from Peter where his dad hid the device, despite the fact Peter doesn't actually know. Anyway, it's at a cemetery, and Walter tells Olivia where he hid it, so she saves Peter and shoots the dildo hunter. But the cylinder itself blasts back down into the earth. Creepy bald guy, lurking nearby, jumps Peter and then appears to be able to read Peter's mind. He gets away, of course. All that raw meat and jalapenos makes you sly. Also, reading minds probably helps.
Walter eventually confesses a long-term connection: Creepy Bald Guy saved Peter and Walter from drowning years and years ago, and said one day he might need Walter. And when the cylinder showed up, Walter says it was like the envelope opened and he'd received his instructions.
As Willie Nelson sings us through "Crazy," we check in with the East River diner in Brooklyn, where a perky waitress takes an order from a completely bald (no eyebrows, either) gentleman in a dark suit. He wants roast beef, as raw as possible, on a roll, with room temperature water and no ice. The waitress is unfazed, but seems briefly surprised when Baldy orders a side dish of eleven jalapenos. "You got it," she says, widening her eyes slightly at another waitress when she turns around.
Baldy's interested in the construction going on nearby, and takes out a notebook and starts scribbling in it, never once glancing at the page. After flipping open a pocket watch to check the time -- almost 3:15, which is almost 4:20! Woo! -- he whips out a pair of snap-case binoculars and scans the construction workers; the viewfinder seems to have a yellow overlay with targeting and some sort of data analysis -- not that we can make anything out.
The waitress comes back, already with his meal. Maybe it's actually the diner special. She asks about the language he's writing in, as we now see it's an incomprehensible mess of symbols. Also, he's writing right to left. "Is that, like, Korean or something?" she asks. "No," is the entirety of his reply, embarrassing her into babbling about how she was worried about missing something in her Asian studies at CUNY, which is probably code for "I never should have slept with that Takahashi -- he never called me back." He stares at her a moment longer until she leaves, and then he unscrews the pepper shaker and dumps it all out onto his raw roast beef, and soaks the entire mess with Tabasco sauce, and then adds the jalapeno peppers. He plows into the -- I don't know if this is actually recognizable as a sandwich -- creation with the gusto of a man who hasn't eaten in weeks, while the waitresses look on with increasingly undisguised disgust.
Then it's back to the construction watching and cryptic note-taking.
The ground starts to tremble. The sandwich gods are angry at the consumption of such an abomination! Or, it's an earthquake. As the other non-disgusting patrons of the East River diner start to file out, Baldy calmly gulps his water. Outside, an explosion rocks the construction site, and the massive crane totters and then falls. Chaos is erupting, but the waitress will be pleased to find Baldy at least left money on the table for his meal. He calmly puts on his hat and sunglasses, and strolls outside, towards the construction site, carrying a briefcase, to the edge of the crater. He takes out a phone. "It has arrived," he says.
Over in Boston, Peter futilely tries to sleep on the couch while his dad drowsily mutters some chemical formula. At least he's in bed this time. Peter starts angrily shouting at his dad, which only gets his dad talking about making root beer in the lab because he hasn't had one in ages, and Peter stomps off to sleep in the tub instead of telling his dad to buy a damn bottle in the store like a normal person.
Peter stomps through the federal building while some ineffective lackey tries to tell him he's not allowed to walk unescorted, but since she's escorting him, I'm not sure what the huge deal is. Olivia greets him, which is nice for the lackey, because now Peter can start acting like a douchebag in someone else's general direction.
He whines about his dad -- who's still asleep back at the hotel, having been awake until five a.m. inventorying the composition of his favorite beverages -- who also lectured Peter on wasting his intellect and education, and doing it naked. Instead of telling him to quit crying, Olivia tells Peter that the living arrangements are only temporary, since they're finding him an apartment. He tells her not to bother: all these weird things going on are all the result of Walter's work, and Peter's just a babysitter. Olivia says Peter's able to translate what Walter's saying. "Anyone can do that. There's nothing special about me," he says. Olivia cocks her head. "You're his son," she says sweetly. Aw. Part of what she means is that Walter's made it clear that if Peter doesn't stick around, he won't co-operate with the investigation: "He would rather go back to St. Claire's than work here without you. He said that more than once," she says. "Was he wearing clothes at the time?" asks Peter. Note Olivia doesn't say yes.
Over now to a warehouse in Chelsea, Mass., where the Fringe crew gets out of their cars, with Walter cheerily saying "hello" to the federal agents and guards like a politician at a campaign rally.
Broyles leads the gang inside while he tells them about the explosion and crane collapse in Brooklyn, which was attributed to a gas main explosion, which was technically true. "It's what caused the explosion that I want you to see," he says.
What caused the explosion is a two-foot high bullet-shaped metallic object, with a groove that spirals around the thing from base to tip, with a light blue light pulsating in it. "It fell from the sky?" asks Olivia. Broyles tells her it came from underground, blasting through an unused subway tunnel and into a gas main, and came to rest on the surface. It's also vibrating, at two megahertz and four megahertz. Walter's got some idea what it is, but says he won't share it with the rest of them, because it's too early. Surprisingly, no one points out that it's kind of his JOB now to tell them what's going on.
Broyles says this isn't the first time one of these has appeared; it happened in Quantico, where a colonel Jacobson led the investigation. Olivia happens to know the guy, which is awfully convenient, plotwise. Broyles says Jacobson is looking forward to a visit with her, so she goes to leave, checking in to see what Peter wants to do. "What kind of man would take off on you the minute a can of magic space soup appears out of nowhere?" He leans in close to tell her that this is the last one, and then he's gone. Olivia says OK, but doesn't look like she actually believes him. She leaves which means she misses Walter throw a temper tantrum when Broyles is reluctant to move the giant vibrator to Walter's lab at Harvard.
In Roseville, Va., Jacobson, played by That Guy! stalwart Nestor Serrano, greets Olivia with a hug on his front walkway. Inside, he talks about his wife dying last year, and says she took care of everything, and apologizes for the weak coffee. Olivia says it's fine. I mean, what else is she going to say? "I'm sorry your wife died, but that's no excuse for CRAPPY COFFEE"? Of course, this serves as a reminder to Olivia of John's death, which Jacobson knows about. Olivia gets all stone-faced at the mention of John's name, and asks him about what happened in Quantico.
Same basic idea -- a guard at the base noticed the motion sensors going nuts, and found an object. Jacobson shows her a picture of an object identical to the one that surfaced in Brooklyn. Jacobson's surprised when Olivia knows the object in Quantico was vibrating at two and four megahertz. "There's another?" he asks. She asks him if the other one is still at Quantico. Nope! Forty-eight hours after it appeared, there was an explosion unlike any he'd ever seen, and the object went down through the basement. "It exploded down, and was gone," he says, adding that Olivia can have his files, but if this shizznit is happening again, he advises her, as a friend, to get as far away as possible.
Back at the lab, Astrid is getting no further in getting any information out of Walter about what the giant vibrator is. Walter bangs a tuning fork on the table and lets it ring, while the vibrating whine gets louder. Astrid backs away. Yeah, that's a good move. You should see where that takes you.
Over at the warehouse where the -- wait a minute, the vibrator isn't there anymore? What exactly are they guarding? Well, they're not doing such a great job guarding the warehouse, so it's lucky the giant vibrator isn't there anymore. I mean, I'm no FBI agent, but if I'm posted outside some sort of top-secret operation, and some mean-looking s
cowling dude comes striding up wearing a tuque and a trenchcoat and HOLDING ONE HAND BEHIND HIS BACK, I'd probably put down the fucking cellphone and open fire, instead of asking "Can I help you?" as this guy does here. The shooter's got some kind of futuristic gun and the bullets or whatever seem to explode in light when they hit the target, and pack a lot of force, knocking his victims (i.e. every agent in the place) several feet. He finds the scientist who was examining the vibrator earlier -- and again, WHY ARE THEY STILL THERE -- and says, "You. Where is it." It's an order, not a question.Olivia's woken by the sound of her cellphone ringing. She picks it up, and the reception is crappy. Hey! She uses the same carrier as I do! A faraway voice says "Olivia." "John?" she says. The call cuts off. Yeah, dropped calls -- that's totally my network. She dials a number, and I'm assuming she's calling her cellphone company to get this charge taken off her statement, because calls from the afterlife are expensive. No, sorry, she's calling FBI dispatch to find out where the call came from, and dispatch tells her there haven't been any calls to her phone in hours. Olivia should try star-69ing him. You know, like what she and John used to do, but with a star in front of it.
Some time later at Harvard, Walter is running one of his devices over the vibrator and gushing about its "precision" right down to the "molecular bonds," and Peter snidely says something about hoping that a "giant metal suppository" doesn't represent the "pinnacle of human achievement." Right now, I kind of feel like that title belongs to Boom Blox. I was going to front and say Ulysses but I couldn't even spell that without looking it up.
Peter asks again what the thing is, and again Walter won't say, and Peter pretends to use reverse psychology but is too lazy to even do it right, and then Walter starts talking about "Project Thor" which was an attempt to come up with a "subterranean torpedo" that could be fired from anywhere on earth and hit its target on the other side, and then Walter and Peter argue about whether that's a ridiculous idea or not, and at this point I'd like to suggest to Walter that maybe the reason other people seem to be having all these breakthroughs with your research is that apparently you worked on so many projects that you just didn't FINISH any of them.
Olivia's looking at photos taken at Quantico the first time the torpedo appeared, and she notices, standing outside a gate -- nice security, Quantico, the creepy bald guy from the diner. I mean, she doesn't know about the guy in the diner, but it strikes her anyway, and she points out "the bald guy" to Peter (Olivia saying "the bald guy" is noticed by Walter as well), who doesn't know what she's on about. She toots her own horn about how good she was playing Concentration because she notices things, etc., (and as a character trait it's worth noting that she instantly noted from video footage that a backpack was missing from a bus last episode). She uses her good ol' FBI Google to bring up a picture from the hospital where the amazing man-baby died, and the bald guy is standing in the corridor. "That's him," she says, although the bald guy's face is kind of obscured in the Quantico photo. Then she says, "Wait a minute!" and brings up a photo from a recent Smashing Pumpkins concert. Sure enough, there he is. Standing backstage, watching Billy Corgan.
Henry Jacobson's working. His doorbell rings. It's Mr. Scowly from the warehouse. "Can I help you?" says Jacobson. He gets an exploding-light bullet to the chest, which sends him flying backwards. You know, maybe Mr. Scowly is actually a nice guy, but the phrase "Can I help you?" actually really sets him off? I mean, that's twice it's been said to him, before any bullets started flying.
Olivia takes the photographs to show Broyles, of the two similar-looking, similarly attired gentlemen in the photographs. He looks up at her. "Come with me," he says.
He takes her to another room where he has to swipe his card to get in. Inside are a few computers and at least two agents, and the walls are papered with dozens of pictures of Baldy in all kinds of different locations. Broyles asks the agents in there to excuse them, and the agents are all "Whee! Smoke break!" and take off. "It took us a year to find him. You found him in three weeks," says Broyles, admiringly. Not to knock Olivia, but Baldy isn't exactly HIDING in these shots. He's standing there, right in the open. Sometimes he appears to be looking right at the camera. Anyway, the FBI have no idea who he is, and I can only imagine just how terrible a job it must be to be the ones working day in, day out, trying to figure it out. Broyles needs to get Lester Freamon up in here. Broyles says he's been recorded in over three-dozen scenes, all having to do with the Pattern. Since all he ever seems to do is watch -- and he was in New York, at the construction site, Broyles tells her -- they call him the Observer. "I proposed Captain Looky-Loo, but the other agents thought 'The Observer' sounded cooler," says Broyles. His cellphone rings. He answers it, and listens for a moment. "When did it happen?" he says.
Over at the lab, Walter's playing sound at the vibrator so he can compare noises or ... I don't know. Peter's equally frustrated, and he and his dad yell at each other because Peter wants to know what this thing is. Meanwhile, Astrid answers the phone, and then hands it to Peter. It's Olivia, telling Peter -- she couldn't tell Astrid? -- that there was an attack, and the "warehouse team" is dead. They have to move the vibrator to a secure location. Peter gets off the phone and tells his dad he should have never brought the vibrator here. "Has someone come for it?" asks Walter. Peter wants to know why he would ask that, but then answers yes when his dad yells at him. Walter says they need to keep it safe. He tells Peter to go get some aluminum foil. Peter asks why. "Just trust me," says Walter. "No, thank you," says Peter. "DAMN IT! Must you always be a smart ass?" roars Walter. Walter, it's on your son's business cards. He says he needs to shield the cylinder's frequencies, or something equally ridiculous, and that all their lives depend on it. Peter says he'll go get the aluminum foil, and then Walter's going to tell him what this thing is.
As Peter leaves, Walter calls out, "While you're out, if you see a chance to get me a root beer float, that would be wonderful." Peter says, "I'll see what I can do," and let's all hope this thing doesn't blow up while Peter's in the drive-thru lane at the Harvard A&W. After he leaves, Walter asks Astrid to bring him a nearby syringe. She does so, and he thanks her by grabbing her and jamming the syringe into her neck. She's out instantly.
After a commercial break, Peter comes strolling into the lab with the econo-size carton of the "tin foil" like maybe he traveled back in time to get tin foil instead of aluminum foil. No root beer float, I see. He finds Astrid slumped on the floor, and he rouses her, asking her where Walter is.
Henry Jacobson is also being asked some questions, but he's doing it while strapped to a chair with wires attached to his forehead and up his nose, hooked up to an ominous machine, while Mr. Scowly asks him questions about the vibrator and who it was who came to see him. "She's come to you now. Think about that woman," he says. Henry's much too freaked out to respond, and Mr. Scowly cranks a dial on his machine, which sends Henry into paroxysms of pain. He orders Henry again to think about her, and then appears to be listening (he's got a headphone tucked into an ear). "See? That was easy," he tells Henry. Scowly then picks up his light-gun and fires it, perhaps at Henry?
Walter's in what could be the same diner he and Peter visited in the last episode; he's finally getting a root beer float. He starts sucking it back enthusiastically, when who should arrive but Baldy. Walter does not look in the least surprised. They chat about the glories of
root beer floats, with Walter offering Baldy a bite. He declines, saying, "I wouldn't taste much anyway." So try a root beer float with eleven jalapenos! After a little more small talk, Baldy thanks Walter for hiding the beacon. "I know you have questions. Soon you will have answers," he says. Walter looks like he doesn't want answers so much as another root beer float.Back at the Harvard lab, Charlie has shown up to co-ordinate the search for Walter, while Broyles yells at Peter, who's not shy about yelling back, about whether Peter has any idea where Walter went. It's a moot point anyway, since Olivia's alerted that Walter was picked up wandering down the median of I-95.
Walter's in a prisoner's jumpsuit, and not happy about it, when Olivia and Peter come to question him. He's actually quite co-operative, short of actually telling them anything about the cylinder other than that someone's coming for it, which is why he had to hide it. He says he doesn't remember where he hid it, or from whom. Olivia, talking to Walter like he's a child, says they need to find it so they can keep people safe. He won't tell Olivia what the cylinder is, but he figures he only has to keep it hidden for about four hours, and this is a theory he's discussed with a friend. Peter makes a Harvey reference, which is sure to make the kids go crazy.
Olivia's surprised to find out that this "friend" of Walter's is a big bald guy, and she tries to question Walter about it with Peter making snotty comments the entire time about his dad making all of this up. "Must you always be so small-minded?" snaps Walter in the face of Peter's incessant badgering. Oh, he's pissed. And he snaps at Peter to not be like his mother, always telling him what to do: "I am not a CHILD! I will not be BABIED!" he yells. I'd believe that if he hadn't been clamoring for a root beer float every five minutes. Perhaps it's the reference to his mother that makes Peter's face go flat, but he gets up and leaves. "Guilt relieved. Olivia, I am very sorry, but I think you'll understand why I don't hang around any longer." He walks out. "I upset him, didn't I," says Walter. Olivia doesn't answer, just gets up and walks out herself.
Outside, Olivia updates Broyles on Walter's general non-responsiveness, and tells Broyles about Walter meeting with the bald guy. "Oh, I know a lot of bald guys," says Broyles, like maybe he belongs to a support group for it, but Olivia's pretty sure he's talking about the Observer. She admits to being confused, which you'd think she'd be getting used to by now.
Back at the Harvard lab, Peter's going through the files -- looking for useful stuff? He's on the phone with a friend, asking for a favor, specifically work, specifically anywhere but Boston. Meanwhile, Jean the cow hangs out in the background, and I have to wonder why they don't just give the cow back, I mean is it really necessary to have to clean up cow shit all day long? Peter finds an old picture of him with his dad. What he doesn't see is Mr. Scowly, hiding out nearby.
Olivia's looking through some computer files when another agent comes in to tell her Farnsworth is on the phone. She's asking about Peter, and Olivia says he left about an hour ago, and was pretty upset, why? Astrid's surveying the lab, which is a disaster scene with tables overturned and papers and equipment scattered everywhere.
"There was a struggle here," says Astrid. Bit of an understatement, from the looks of things. Olivia gets off the phone and orders some lackey to get security camera footage.
Meanwhile, Peter's strapped down like Henry was, with Mr. Scowly readying his machine and nasal implants, Peter protesting that Mr. Scowly has the wrong guy. This time, we actually get to watch the excruciating insertion of the nasal probe. Peter sounds like he's being eviscerated. Mr. Scowly screws in his earphone and says, "You have something I need. Tell me where it is." Scowly asks, "What's the most pain you've ever felt in your life?" and then cranks a dial, and whatever the answer to that question might have been, I think Peter's got a new one.
Olivia's got a picture taken from the security camera -- one of those cameras that take ridiculously grainy pictures that are about as easy to read as ultrasounds -- and shows Walter a picture of Mr. Scowly outside the lab. Walter, showing off what a genius he is, thinks something bad has happened. Olivia says they think this guy abducted Peter. Walter's worried that Peter will lead Scowly to the thing. Also, he COULD HURT HIM, Walter! "Did you tell him where you put it?" asks Olivia. "No, of course not. I don't need to," says Walter.
Scowly asks Peter where the cylinder is. Peter says he has no idea, and wouldn't tell Scowly even if he did. Just because the guy's strapped you down and is inflicting incredible pain is no reason to be a jerk, Peter. Scowly cocks his head, listening. "But you just did tell me. Your father hid it, but you don't know where." Peter manages to convey "huh?" along with "OHMIGOD THIS HURTS" and Scowly says, "And yes, to answer your question, when this is over, I just might kill you. Depends on a few things." Then he asks Scowly when the last time his father kissed him was. "I think that's your lamest question yet," says Peter, which prompts Scowly to crank a dial again. Peter looks like he's simultaneously passing a kidney stone, delivering a baby, and having his urethra cleaned with a toothbrush. And not even a soft toothbrush, but one of the hard ones with knobby rubber things. And it's kind of stiff from old toothpaste, too. Whatever Scowly did, it seems to do the trick, as he says "Good," and then tells Peter to think of a happy time with his father, before his father went to the institution. "A time when you still believed that your father loved you." More pain from Peter, and then Scowly appears to push a button and ease it. "Aside from the car and your old house, did your father have any other hiding places?" Peter's eyes have rolled up back in his head like a cartoon character hit with a frying pan. Scowly's in the midst of yelling the question again when he stops, listens. "Thank you. You just told me where the cylinder is."
It's dark, and Scowly is driving down some country roads in a part of Massachusetts (I presume) that oddly enough doesn't have giant floating letters telling you where you are. He stops the car near a graveyard, fetches Peter from the trunk, and starts walking among the tombstones, until they come to one marked "Robert Bishop: Aug. 21, 1912-Dec. 11, 1944." "Shame you never met him," says Scowly. Peter looks thoroughly spent, but still musters up enough energy for an eye roll. Scowly leads Peter around to the back of the tombstone, where there's some freshly turned dirt. He hands Peter a shovel and tells him to dig.
And here comes the cavalry! Well, it's Olivia, but I'm sure she's brought lots of -- no, it's just Olivia. Peter's dug up the vibrator, and an excited Scowly picks it up and, hearing Olivia approach, takes off running. Olivia's not exactly going for stealth here, what with her industrial-strength flashlight (more like a floodlight) lighting up the forest. She comes up on Peter, who's using the shovel to saw through the rope binding his hands. He tells her where Scowly went, and warns her he's got a gun.
She gives chase, and she and Scowly trade rounds, with Olivia managing to clip him. Scowly stumbles and drops the cylinder, and ducks behind some cover. He fires a couple more shots at Olivia and then makes a break for it, leaving the cylinder behind. Olivia fires again and drops him. Ignoring the cylinder for now, Olivia checks on Scowly, who has checked out, with a smirk on his face. Behind her, the vibrator starts to hum, and the blue light courses along its spiral groove. There's a bright flash and a kind of drilling sound, and when Olivia looks, there's a crater where the vibrator used to be, smoke and fading light emanating from a perfectly circular hole in the ground. And in the bushes nearby, Baldy watches. He speaks into his phone: "Departure on schedule."
And then Peter jumps him from behind. He pops up again, like those inflatable punching dummies that taught me invaluable lessons about beating on people. It's Peter's turn to ask the questions now! He asks who Baldy is and what the cylinder is, and Baldy just cocks his head, like observing a new species: "The bloody-nosed douchebag is aggressive in nature. Watch out for his cutting remarks." Then Baldy starts speaking the same words as Peter, at the same time, or close enough. It's like that drama warm-up exercise where you and a partner try to say the same thing without knowing what you're going to say. Only they're really good at it. Peter's freaked out, so he throws in a curveball: "Apples. Bananas. Rhinoceros. I wanna hold your hand. Lucy in the sky with diamonds." Baldy nails it, and then continues on without Peter saying anything. "Do you really know my father? Did you talk to him this afternoon? Were you his friend?" Peter stares at him. Then Baldy lifts up a gun and pulls the trigger, but instead of a regular flash or Scowly's light-gun flash, there's kind of a whiny-whooshy sound, and Peter crumples to the ground.
After the commercial break, Peter stirs, and sits up, clutching his stomach. He struggles to his feet, and spots Olivia strolling back. The two of them lock eyes, clearly thinking, Well, that could have gone better.
Walter's playing with Dixie cups when Charlie comes in to tell Walter that Peter's fine, albeit with a minor concussion. "I'll take you back to your hotel," says Charlie. Because ... it's now OK somehow that Walter INJECTED ASTRID IN THE NECK and stole the mysterious cylinder? Walter says there's something he'd like to do before he goes back to the hotel.
Astrid's working in a room full of FBI agents as Walter approaches. She looks up, sees him, and puts her head back down. "What I did to you was very untrustworthy of me. I never intended to harm you. I was simply doing what was necessary to protect us all." She doesn't say anything to this, which is all bullshit anyway. I mean, she and Peter were helping him move the thing because someone was coming for it. So he sends Peter on a fool's errand and then knocks Astrid out and LEAVES HER THERE with a maniac on the way. I don't blame Astrid for freezing him out. Walter tries to joke that if it would help her feel any better, she could inject him, but he'd most likely enjoy it. Astrid says nothing. Well, that's all the material Walter's got, so he dejectedly turns to Charlie and they leave. Astrid glances up to watch him go. Don't forgive him! You know what they say: "Incapacitate me with a syringe to the neck once, shame on you. Incapacitate me with a syringe to the neck twice, shame on me."
Olivia shows up at the hospital to visit Peter and runs into Broyles, who asks if she's all right. She asks him if they found the cylinder. Broyles says they dug up the hole and got nothing, and they're going to bring in an excavator, but he figures they're not going to find anything. They did ID the shooter, though: John Mosley, wanted for a double-homicide in Seattle last month and a few drug-related felonies before that. "Seattle. Came a long way to get that thing," says Olivia. "Another in a long line of questions," says Broyles, politely not pointing out that if Olivia had been a better shot, maybe they could be questioning Mosley now.
Olivia spots Peter over at the nurses' station, and Broyles says he'd better get back, kind of in an awkward "I'll leave you two alone" kind of way. So she strolls over and asks if he's ready to get out of there. His chest is bandaged and his face is bruised. He walks with her and babbles about how he always thought the Pattern that Broyles talked about was nonsense. "Inexplicable things happen every day. It does not mean that there's any deeper significance." But he tells her that Baldy was inside his head, and knew his thoughts, and seemed to know Peter, and he can't explain any of that. Olivia looks at him like he's crazy, and says she didn't see anyone. So, he didn't mention Baldy back at the graveyard? Huh? "What if Walter's right? W
hat if this is just the beginning?" he says. She tells him that he took a pretty hard blow to the head, and starts babbling about how she shouldn't have tried to make him stay, and he has a life or whatever, and then he says he's decided to stay and help, because he's not going anywhere until he can explain what's going on, because I guess there's nothing like being TORTURED for a couple of hours to change your mind on staying with a job, and she beams and tells him he'll need his credentials, which were just approved, and she hands him a pass with his picture on it, in which he looks like he's being executed at dawn, and he asks if it'll get him out speeding tickets. "Maybe," she says.Back at the hotel, Peter whines to his dad about the day he's had, and says the weirdest part was him answering a question he didn't know the answer to: where the cylinder was. "How did I know that, Walter? I didn't know that. I didn't know where the cylinder was buried." "You know it, son, because I know it," says Walter, adding he didn't have to tell Peter, and mumbles a few things about knowing things through osmosis and proximity.
"You remember the night of the accident when you were young?" asks Walter. Peter starts in with the eye-rolling. Thanksgiving dinner, Peter and Walter driving. The car went off the road onto a lake? Pond? Onto some ice, anyway, which held the car for a couple of minutes, and then broke, plunging the two of them into the water. "And then you swam to shore and saved us both," says Peter, clearly tired of this story. Walter says he wasn't able to control his limbs in the icy water. "I was incapable of saving you myself. We were dead, Peter, you and I, until someone grabbed me and we were going up." He says they were saved by a man they'd never met. Who could it be? Bald with no eyebrows, you say? "As he set us down in the snow, I recall his stare, standing there in his suit, seemingly indifferent to the cold." Maybe he's Canadian! Walter says it was as if the guy was in his head and knew his thoughts. Peter's listening. "Without speaking, he made it clear that he would need me one day. Return the favour, so to speak." He says when he examined the capsule it was as though he'd opened an envelope and finally knew what his instructions were. "Instantly I knew I had to protect the capsule for him." He says he shares Peter's frustrations at not knowing what's going on, but all he knows is that Peter's sitting there alive right now. "I know you must think me insane," he concludes. "Not nearly as much as you might think," says Peter. Good! Does this mean you'll stop yelling at your dad?
Olivia walks into her house, checks the mail, checks the fridge, opts for a bowl of cereal and ... some booze! Nice! She's going to need that booze, because suddenly, standing in the doorway, is John. Not dead. "Hello, Liv," he says. She drops the bowl, and it shatters. Looks like the booze is OK, though.