By M. Giant
Wrapped-up, mummified, disembodied human heads are being loaded up into liquid nitrogen cylinders for shipping from a Medford, Massachusetts cryonics lab in the dead of night. Because why traffic in frozen noggins when decent people are awake? There are four uniformed men at the loading dock: two guys loading the back of the truck and plugging in the refrigeration units; a guy who tells "Kurt" that he doesn't "want these popsicles to melt;" and the aforementioned Kurt, who finishes signing for them and says they won't need to worry about that. We're supposed to think he's referring to how the cylinders are being hooked up to all manner of cryogenic whatever in the back of the truck, and a locking code is entered into the keypad once the door is pulled down. Just then a white Cadillac pulls into the alley. The two loaders, annoyed, step into the headlights, wondering what's up. After a moment, Roger Cross, who you might remember as preternaturally long-lived handsome black agent Curtis Manning from 24, steps out of the car and asks, "Hey, I was wondering if I could get some directions?" One of the loaders says he's trespassing and tries to turn him away. But Curtis, who seems cooperative at first, suddenly drops his half-eaten pear on the pavement, pulls two handguns out of the back of his pants, and plugs the two delivery men repeatedly. The lab guy scrambles for cover behind the truck, not realizing that "Kurt" is also in on it until Kurt shoots him. I think then he catches the snap, though. As Curtis gets the keys from him and climbs into the truck, Kurt tells him, "Let me know if he's in there. You know where to reach m--" He's rudely interrupted by a bullet to the back. Apparently one of the loaders wasn't quite dead yet, and he's shooting at Kurt from the ground. Curtis just drives off, leaving Kurt behind. Kurt struggles back to his feet, then stops another bullet, and another and another, each one rocking him a little bit less. Now he's just showing off. Would it be that hard to return fire? Finally he goes down for good when the fifth bullet hits him in the forehead. The guard who shot him finally succumbs to his own wounds. And the last thing he sees is Kurt, his head wound staining the pavement with blood that seems to be reflecting the silvery moonlight considerably more than is strictly normal.
morning, Astrid is doing some prep-work for Walter in the Fringe lab. Specifically, she's chopping up flatworms. Walter checks her work and tells her to keep chopping. He's happy to see Olivia when she walks in (now apparently fully healed and on her own two feet), and tells her his latest idea for helping her get her memories back. "I thought that we agreed that this was a stupid idea," Peter horns in. Over the noise of the blender Astrid is now running, because suddenly she's a production assistant on Fear Factor, Walter defends the idea. Which we still haven't heard yet, so Peter passes it along to Olivia, as bluntly as possible: "He wants you to eat worms." Walter explains to Olivia about an old experiment he did with William Bell, training flatworms to respond to light, and then feeding them to other flatworms, who absorbed the original flatworms' training. "It was Belly's idea." "Because who wouldn't think to do that?" Astrid cuts in, not looking up from decanting the worm slurry she's just made. Walter explains that the flatworms transferred their memories through ingestion. So by that logic, shouldn't Olivia eat herself? Peter and Walter descend into bickering over this, while behind them, Olivia just picks up the glass and sucks down its entire contents in one goopy gulp. Wow, somebody really wants her memories back, doesn't she? She's barely keeping it down as Astrid gets her some water and Walter says he was going to mix it with strawberries. Would that really be an improvement? Then they'd just be strawberry-flavored worms, and there'd be more of it to swallow. While Olivia continues to concentrate on not vomiting, the phone rings, and Astrid smirkily answers, "Bishop's Deli." Then her face goes serious. Like anyone ever calls the lab to hear bad jokes.
By M. Giant
Those floaty letters from the teaser have not only gotten more specific, they've floated around to the front of the building. Now they read, "ELIAS CRYONICS, MEDFORD MA." The Fringe Three meet Broyles at what is now a crime scene, and he gives them the bullet about how the bodies were discovered this morning. Peter, always the crack investigator, says that means the robbery happened in the middle of the night. "That makes three cryogenic facilities in a week," he exposits. "Same M.O. as Chicago and New York." Peter wonders about motive, Broyles talks forensics, Olivia just lets all this happen around her for some reason (probably suppressing a powerful urge to respond to light), and Walter just wants to get on with the fun stuff. "Could I see the body that's bleeding silver?" he asks Broyles excitedly.
Kurt's right where we left him, but there are a few spots on his face where the skin is looking a bit...loose.. Walter presses down on one of the body's chest wounds, squeezing out a thick, grody mixture of red and gray. Peter hands him a collection tool and vial, probably because if he doesn't Walter's going to taste some of it, and Walter scoops a bit of the more separated silver stuff in, noticing, "It has the consistency of mercury." Olivia suddenly remembers she's in the scene, and suggests pulling files on the New York and Chicago thefts. Broyles agrees, and says they'll take over the investigations. Won't New York and Chicago be kind of pissed about that, especially when the Fringe team ends up not actually doing any investigating?
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By M. Giant
As she sees Peter walking over to her, he seems to suddenly turn into a flashback version William Bell, saying, "Ah-eevilo," which of course is what a recording of her name sounds like when played backwards (coincidence?), and then he says it the right way. In her flashback, Bell rings a bell on his desk. What an odd affectation, making your namesake a centerpiece on your work surface. I'd probably try that myself, if I could get a giant into my office. There's a flash of the intact World Trade Center, then of some scrawled letters upside-down and backwards (I could tell you what they say, but that would spoil it), and then she's back in the here and now. Maybe those flatworms are working after all, which still doesn't make sense to me unless she had them in her pocket when she crossed over. Peter hands her the collection vial, which contains what he and Walter are pretty sure is mercury. Now to make certain, all they need to do is get it back to the lab and inject it into Jeremy Piven.
Fake Charlie comes up behind Walter, who's even happier to see him than he was Olivia earlier. Although he notices that Fake Charlie looks rather like ass. "I didn't get much sleep last night," Fake Charlie claims, his voice a slow mumble. And given how awful he looks and how tired I am of typing "Fake Charlie," I'm just going to refer to him as Gnarlie from here on out. "A little cannabis before bedtime does wonders," Walter suggests in a conspiratorial tone, to the person he thinks is a federal agent. Gnarlie just manages a thin smile. Peter comes up just as Walter pulls a familiar device out of Kurt's possessions. I'd tell you what it is, but Walter's handling that for me: "This is the device the shapeshifter used," he says. Somehow, upon seeing it, Gnarlie looks even more like ass.
Curtis has driven the stolen cryonics truck out into the country somewhere, and he's parked out by a little pond, the perfect scene to unwrap all the heads and shave hair off of them. After which he's been tossing them away down the bank. If I were a person who thought these heads could ever be returned to life, I would be shocked at Curtis's callous disregard for innocent melons. As it is, I'm kind of enjoying this image of what looks like a sad beach party where someone decided to bury people up to their necks but couldn't find anybody to agree to it except about a dozen extras from the "Thriller" video. The scene doesn't exactly brighten when Gnarlie shows up. "You look like hell," Curtis observes. In a voice that's being sucked down even harder than before in terms of both speed and pitch, Gnarlie calls Curtis "sloppy." You know, what with the four people he killed, "including one of our own." Curtis blows it off, but Gnarlie insists, "The FBI, they have him. They understand what he is." Curtis observes, "You've been in this body too long. You're dying. You need to get back home and get fitted with a new conversion device." I'm sure Gnarlie already knows this, but maybe Curtis just wants to change the subject from his own screw-up. He even says he'd be willing to share his own device, but they both know it wouldn't work on Gnarlie. Gnarlie says he's already asked to be brought back, but his request has been refused until he completes his mission. "They're real sweethearts, "Curtis remarks as he finishes shaving the last head. He seems pretty disappointed not to have found the right brainbucket. "He's not here." The last head joins its fellows on the bank, and Curtis says there's another facility in North Carolina they can check out. And by "check out," I assume he means "rob." Because it's not like any cryogenics labs are going to have increased security with him at large stealing craniums left and right. Fortunately for him, Gnarlie suggests another idea: "Olivia Dunham is starting to remember her time on the other side. I'm thinking she may know where it's hidden." Meaning the head they're looking for. Gnarlie figures that William Bell might know about their search, which might be why he bought Olivia over. Curtis tells Gnarlie to make her remember, then, as if Gnarlie hasn't been working on that his whole time in this body. Curtis just walks off, leaving Gnarlie to contemplate what now looks like the most gruesome pumpkin patch on earth.
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By M. Giant
"Why are shapeshifting soldiers from another universe stealing frozen heads?" Broyles asks Olivia over lunch in a diner, and over the conversion device they recovered from Kurt. Man, if I had a nickel every time my boss asked me that. Olivia's theory is, "They're looking for a specific head, but they don't know where it is." Except the FBI can't even find out who it might be, since none of the labs are willing to reveal their client lists. Olivia mentions the other device they found, which Broyles reminds us that Massive Dynamic has been working on for the past few weeks, to no avail. Olivia points out that since this one looks to be in good condition, maybe Peter can work with it. "I suppose he knows a guy?" Broyles asks. Olivia points out that "he knew enough about engineering to fake his way into MIT." In other words, there's no extra money in the acting budget for one of Peter's "guys" this week, for reasons that will become apparent. Broyles is fine with giving Peter a crack at it, but he's thinking Olivia should be placed under protection. "The last time Peter showed me one of these devices, its owner had just tried to kill you." Olivia says that was six weeks ago. "So if a shapeshifting assassin wanted me dead, then I would be." And that's the kind of confidence that separates Olivia from an ordinary agent.
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By M. Giant
Walter and Astrid are about to get started on Kurt's autopsy. Or, more precisely, a necropsy, because autopsies are done on humans and Kurt is what Walter calls a "Mechano-organic hybrid." He thinks the mercury "controls the tissue, instructing it to take and maintain shapes." Makes as much sense as anything else on this show. Suddenly Walter seems to realize something and tells Astrid he needs to talk to Olivia immediately. Not urgently enough to dial the phone his own damn self, though.
Elsewhere at Harvard, Peter and Olivia have apparently broken into an electronics lab, where Peter is working on the device. He reminisces about seeing Invasion of the Body Snatchers when he was a kid. Olivia impresses him by asking which version -- "Don Siegel or Philip Kaufman?" What, no love for Oliver Hirschbiegel? Peter's referring to "the remake" and says he stayed awake for a week, fearing that he'd be replaced by a pod person if he fell asleep. Rather than wondering what kind of modern political allegory she's playing out, then, Olivia asks if this is his way of asking if she's scared. Peter denies it. "I figure if you were scared, you'd tell me, right?" Oh, Peter. That is just adorable. Then he repeats his joke from last week that she's the one with the gun. I'll hold off from repeating my joke about who she's fired it at. Now that Peter's got an oscilloscope hooked up to the device, he can somehow tell from the screen that it's online and streaming tera-shitloads of data. Olivia's phone chirps, and it's a text from Astrid: "WALTER WANTS TO SEE YOU ASAP." In other words, his message is so urgent that he can wait to deliver it to her in person.
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By M. Giant
They apparently rush right over to the lab, and Walter starts off with the bad news: "The shapeshifter's blood is 47% mercury." As opposed to that of the first shapeshifter, who had a perfectly normal blood sample. Which indicates that the first shapeshifter wasn't one at all; and that the actual shapeshifter is probably still around, and could be disguised as anyone. "And you could still be in danger," Walter says. Then he reveals the good news: "I think I may know how to find him."
If you were hoping for Olivia, Peter, Walter, and Astrid to start spiraling into paranoid accusations against each other like something out of The Faculty, you'll be disappointed. Or at least, I was. Instead, Walter replays them the old, grainy videotape of his experiment on Rebecca Kibner, whose head he pharmaceutically fucked with back in the day. On the screen, young Rebecca trips out, talking about "a soldier from somewhere else... a glowing man... he's from a other universe, man!" Walter thinks that since he helped her spot shapeshifters once, he can do it again. This seems a little sketchy to me. How hard can it be to find people who are half mercury? Wouldn't it make more sense to get a portable MRI scanner, cart it around the city, and arrest anyone who sticks to it?
Footnote: Yes, I know that wouldn't actually work.
Walking across the grounds, Olivia is on her cell phone to Gnarlie, updating him on their "progress" and asking him to ask Broyles for anything new from the crime scene. I'm sure Broyles will be impressed with Olivia's investigative acumen. "Sure thing," Gnarlie responds, and hangs up before she notices that his voice is all fucked up. He's currently in a drugstore, and he throws a slushie and a big batch of mercury thermometers down on the counter. Can you even get those any more, let alone a dozen or more at a shot? "Starting your own pharmacy?" the kid behind the counter "jokes." Gnarlie's only response is a cadaverous glare and a sharp, hostile noise from somewhere deep in his sinuses. It totally works, though. I'm going to start doing that with wise-ass cashiers myself.
Out in his car, Gnarlie dumps the slushie out the window, and breaks all the thermometers into the empty cup in one splintery bundle, his face twitching unnaturally as he does so. After sucking down the silvery cocktail, which can't be more than a tablespoon or so, he convulses some more, then watches in the mirror as his loose eye socket tightens back up. And then the glass he swallowed with the mercury kills him. Okay, it doesn't but it should.
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By M. Giant
Olivia is led down the hallway at Massive Dynamic, looking at the leggy assistant walking in front of her, and having another red-tinted series of flashbacks -- the other hallway, the other leggy assistant, the Twin Towers. Then she sees William Bell ringing his bell, then sucking on an oxygen mask, and then she's back. This is a very long hallway.
"You found another one," Nina obviouses, holding the other device Olivia brought her. Olivia explains that Peter thinks the devices store a pattern from their last victim. Nina says that Massive Dynamic's scientists agree, adding that they've been trying to reconstruct said image from the broken device, and have also guessed that "each device is tuned to a specific user." Which would explain why Charlie couldn't have used Curtis's. And, as Nina observes, it would seem to indicate that whoever tried to kill Olivia is trapped in his or her current form (coughGnarliecough). But since the one Nina's people have been working with is broken, they haven't been able to figure what that form might be. "Well this one is intact," Olivia reminds her. "Then let's take a look, shall we?" Nina invites. Christmas morning at Massive Dynamic!
Down at the lab, a burly tech geek is like, "You understand you're asking me if I can repair a piece of technology that is entirely unlike anything that has ever existed here on Earth?" But then of course, because he's a tech on a J.J. Abrams show, he brags that it'll take him three hours at most, now that he has one that works. Is he allowed to cannibalize the new one for parts? Nina tells him to get to it, then. Olivia begins to take her leave, asking them to call her if they get it working. But since the tech was clearly smitten with her on sight, he offers her a free upgrade: "I can set up a rendering program and patch you in in real time." He'll even let her log her in to the Massive Dynamic server from her computer or cell phone. Nina clears her throat at him, so he stammers that he's referring to the public server. "If it's okay with you," he adds with an abashed look at Nina. Well, it's clearly not, but it wouldn't be so good for the helpful façade Nina's been cultivating if she said no, would it?
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By M. Giant
Peter and Walter walk up to a lovely yellow house. "Rebecca always had fine taste," Walter remarks. He wonders if she'll remember him, and Peter seems pretty sure of it: "I'm gonna guess there's not too many men in her life who strapped her to a table and pumped her full of a massive amount of psychedelics." And he can say this without even having met her yet? He knocks on the front door, and watches as Walter nervously primps a bit. "Walter, you didn't--" Peter starts to ask, but lets it drop. Walter asks him to do the talking, but when Rebecca opens the door, she looks right past Peter. "Walter?" she says, taking his face in his her hands and smiling a warm hello before hugging him. Peter watches, a suspicious glint in his eye. Yes, Peter, Rebecca is played by Theresa Russell, but Black Widow was a long time ago.
Inside the house, which is quite well-appointed, Rebecca is talking about her experiences during the time of the experiments that Walter and Bell did on her, and how she was able to see a certain glow around the shapeshifters for a time. "I was recognizing people that didn't belong." She calls it "a great gift," which I don't really get. My idea of a great gift is something that has a lot of uses, a description that Rebecca's gift doesn't seem to fit. I bet her family shops for her presents from the Sharper Image catalog. Rebecca admits that she tried to contact Walter ten years ago. Walter's face goes grave as he's about to tell her he was in a mental hospital then, but Peter smoothly interjects that Walter was "traveling" at that time. If it comes up again, I suppose Peter can always say, "Did I say traveling? I meant tripping." Peter asks Rebecca if she still has that ability, but she says it's mostly gone these days. Peter gets to their point, which is that they're hoping for her help in identifying some shapeshifters today. Despite Walter advising her against it, she quickly assents. Do you think she would also agree to take a few acting classes? Because, damn.
Back in the lab, Walter sets the psychedelic mood by putting some Yes on the turntable. It's "I've Seen All Good People," which is ironic given that the point of this exercise is to help Rebecca see bad people. Also, Walter somehow has a version that skips right from the intro to the coda, which is pretty much the opposite of Fringe in general. Meanwhile, Peter attaches the electrodes to Rebecca's head, and has to put up with the way she can remember where they go better than he can. Olivia comes in and is quite friendly, introducing herself to Rebecca with a smile and a handshake and thanking her for her help. Rebecca helps Astrid find a drug that she's looking for. "I don't suppose you recall where I left my slippers," Walter jokes lamely. Olivia turns to Astrid and gives her a slip of paper with a Web address to log onto. "This looks like [Massive Dynamic's] secure FTP," Astrid says, and heads right over to log in. Hey, in all the excitement, don't forget to check that that connection is one-way, you know? Walter preps a syringe, and maybe he should concentrate on what he's doing instead of giving Rebecca the googly eyes (and possibly an air embolism). He brings the injection over, and asks if she's ready. She says she's been ready for the last ten years. Walter holds her hand while Peter injects the drug into her IV tube. As they lay her back on the table, Astrid and Olivia are online by now, and judging from what they're watching on computer monitor, it looks like Massive Dynamic's lab geek not only got the broken device working again, but has proved as good as his word to upload his rendering program in real time. The women watch as a vague head-like shape is very slowly resolving from a wireframe. "Looks like a department store mannequin," Astrid says. They sync it up to Olivia's phone, too, because this is all just way too neat-o for Olivia to worry about the risk of Nina Sharp listening in on her telephone conversations about FBI business.
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By M. Giant
Meanwhile, the Bishops are lacing Rebecca's body to the table, because Walter figures spatial disorientation can reduce the prep time. "Isn't that dangerous?" Peter asks. Walter says it's no more dangerous than "injecting her with substantial amounts of untested homemade psychoactive drugs." Well, in that case. Walter asks Astrid to pull some back-up drugs, and makes another injection. Then they flip the tabletop over, leaving Rebecca suspended face-down beneath it. Peter squats down to invite Rebecca to tell him if it gets uncomfortable. She picks this moment to recall their meeting, when Peter was just a baby. "But somewhere I saw...whoooooa, here we go!" Wow, those drugs work fast. Walter starts speaking hypnotically to her, calming her down from a freaked-out state. He walks her through an imaginary Harvard, then whispers to Peter, "Ring." Peter picks up a little mallet and taps the bell positioned to the table. It's not quite the same kind of bell that William Bell has in Olivia's brief (to date) flashbacks, but its effect on her is unmistakable: she collapses like someone just switched her off. The rest of the team converges around her on the floor, but she's dead to the world. This was not the psychedelic experience they were looking for.
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By M. Giant
Somewhere inside her head, Olivia's flashing back to Bell's bell, and then zooming into the World Trade Center, and then finding herself staring out the window of one of those towers. Wow, how much did Fringe spend building that set? "Olivia," says the voice of Leonard Nimoy behind her. "After all these years." She turns as William Bell continues, "It is so nice to finally see you again." Olivia doesn't look like she shares the sentiment. Be sure to note that the camera is shooting Bell from below, allowing the bell on his desk to dominate the foreground of the shot. Two Bells for the price of one.
Back from the ads, we and Olivia are back in Bell's office, in a world suffused with gold light and lens flares, like if J.J. Abrams combined his Star Trek style of photography with that of CSI Miami. Looking genuinely embarrassed, Bell apologizes to Olivia for the "crude" method he used to bring her here, "but there were people who were trying to prevent our meeting." He says this isn't how he pictured their reunion. Olivia's like, "Dr. Bell, I've been trying to meet with you for over a year." He tells her to call him William, or "Willem," like she did when she was a girl. And when he was shooting her full of experimental drugs, presumably. "How do you like your tea?" he asks, which pretty much takes care of any assumption that he's an omniscient figure. Olivia says she wants not tea, but answers. Like, for instance, what kind of madman gives his company a name that consists of two adjectives? But a moment later, she's sipping from a china cup, with no transition other than some funky film editing. Bell chuckles that she's "still disoriented from the timeslips," and says he had the same experience when he first arrived. "You're out of sync with this side. You're lucky. Most people who cross dimensions without your natural talent are simply torn apart." Olivia shirtily says she doesn't feel so lucky. She'd rather be shredded in the space between worlds? I'm sure she could find someone who would be willing to oblige.
Another timeslip later, she's watching him suck on an oxygen mask. Which he does not offer to share. When he's done, he says he doesn't know how much Walter has told her, or what he even remembers. Olivia says he told her what they did to her. "How you conducted drug trials on young children." Bell guiltily says they weren't trying to hurt anyone, but Olivia doesn't let him off the hook. "I've met some of the others. To say that they are permanently damaged would be an understatement." Bell laments the "unintended consequences," but he can see she isn't one of them. "In fact, you're just coming into your ability." Whatever that means. This must have been an easy scene to write; rather than having to come up with organic shifts between one conversational topic and another, you can just drop in another timeslip effect when it's time to move on. And that's what happens now.
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By M. Giant
At the end of this shift, Bell is standing on the other side of the room from where he was, but Olivia acts like nothing happened as she turns to where he is now, like a slow-reacting anchorperson trying to follow which camera is live. Bell is in the middle of telling her that a war is coming, as per his and Walter's predictions back in the day. "And we knew we had to prepare a guardian. Someone to watch the gate." Bell digresses a bit about "this side and yours," adding that he can't go back yet, or maybe ever, and very few people have ever crossed over safely from Olivia's side. However, Bell tells her that those from his side have had more success, as we already know. He says they've "developed hybrids, part organic tissue, part machine, that can do things that humans can't." He says they can change shapes. "Over here, they call them the First Wave." And apparently they've been shuttling back and forth for decades, ever since the time of their original experiments on Rebecca Kibner, if not before. Bell tells Olivia that he knows it's "difficult to grasp," but she assures him she gets it. "I don't trust you, Dr. Bell," she says, making a big deal of refusing to call him William or Willem, "or whatever cutesy name you think might appeal to my childhood instincts." As though she still had any. As the screen washes yellow and then back, she tells him about all the crap Massive Dynamic has been pulling back in her world, "To say nothing of the fact that you just yanked me into a parallel universe to warn me about an interdimensional war that I believe you are responsible for starting." She demands the truth. Bell just says, "The truth will come out. It always does." Especially on TV. But not before someone on the writing staff has figured out what it is. Calling her Livvie, he insists, "I have a unique perspective shaped by having lived in two worlds. I know the difference a wrong choice can make. Or a right one." Is he referring to his singing career? "For example, this building is still standing because different choices were made." Yeah, seems to me like it only would have taken one or two, but we don't need to get into that. He assures her that she should consider him an ally, and after another timeslip, he's telling her, "A storm is coming. Perhaps the last and worst storm of all. And when it is over, I fear there will be little left of our world." Wait, whose world, now? He says the shapeshifters on Olivia's side are looking for someone to open the door between the worlds. "If they find him, there will be no stopping them. And that is why you must find him first." Olivia's like, Who now? "You are The One, Olivia," Bell tells her. "Of all the children Walter and I prepared, you were the strongest. You were always the strongest." How lucky that she's the one we've been following all this time, then.
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By M. Giant
Some more edits later, Bell is drawing a simple design on a scrap of paper. It's three-quarters of a circle, open at the bottom, with short crosshatches across the open ends, like if the ancient Egyptians had a hieroglyphic for "headphones." He shows it to her. "It's hidden on their leader. That's how you'll know him. Show this to Nina Sharp. She can help." He says they're out of time, and rings the bell on his desk. "Olivia," he says, and she's dimly aware of Peter also calling her name, back in the present.
In the here and now, Walter calmly sends Astrid to the cabinet for a shot of nitroglycerin, and crouches over Olivia to Peter. He figures that she's being overloaded by a flood of memories. Or maybe it's just the flatworms repeating on her.
Back in Bell's office, he advises her to stand. "I think it'll be less painful that way." Yeah, we already know how that turns out. She lets him lead her over to a spot in his office near the window, telling her to remember the Greek phrase from the season premiere, Einai kalytero anthropo apo ton patera toy." "Tell that to Peter." Easy for you to say. "You're going to need him by your side. Tell it to him. He'll know what it means."
Back in the lab, Olivia's still unresponsive, so Walter sends Peter ransacking the shelves for adrenalin. I know Peter's in a hurry, but if he doesn't quick knocking shit over Rebecca's not going to be able to find anything in there.
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By M. Giant
Bell warns Olivia, "I pulled you out of a moving car. Momentum can be deferred, but it must always be paid back, in full."
Peter preps the adrenaline shot, and Walter begins counting to three.
"As I always said to Walter," Bell tells Olivia, "Physics is a bitch."
"Three!" Walter shouts. "Sorry, Olivia," Peter breathes, and Pulp Fictions her in the chest with the adrenalin shot. He's got perfect timing, because inside Olivia's head, Bell's office window shatters, and she's sucked out of it like from an airplane at altitude, her hair blowing around madly, and then she flies through the windshield of the SUV, roughly hurled back into her own world. Before even hitting the street in her flashback, she sits up in the lab, gasping and clutching her chest. Her first words? "I need to speak to Nina Sharp!" You'd think she would have had enough of sharp things for a little while after that experience.
After the ads, she's in her Fringemobile, racing down the road and talking to Nina on speakerphone. Nina tries to blow her off, saying she's about to go to Hong Kong. I guess that's one perk of being so important. "I have a message from William Bell," Olivia declares. "Cancel the plane," Nina tells her assistant. An even better perk of being so important. I assume it's a private plane, or else there are going to be a lot of pissed off people at JFK who were expecting to go to Hong Kong that night.
The Bishops walk Rebecca across the quad, assuring her she did fine. Well yeah, it was kind of them who let her down, thanks to Olivia suddenly deciding to upstage Rebecca with an even more interesting flashback. Walter says she should be fine to drive, since he gave her some kind of antidote. He stops Peter as she walks on ahead, and quietly says he wants to drive home with her. "You just said that all the drugs were out of her system," Peter says dully. Walter just gives him a look. Belatedly, Peter gets it, and asks Walter how he'll get home. "The bus," Walter says. But will Walter be able to manage that? Are we sure he's crazy enough? Peter agrees. "Peter, I need some money," Walter whispers shyly. Peter hands over a wad (with a single on the outside, so Walter can also hit a strip club if the mood strikes him), and after having to suffer the humiliation of asking his son if he can go, trying to keep it as discreet as possible, Walter grins boyishly over to Rebecca, saying, "He said okay!" He's like a fourth-grader being allowed to sleep over at a friend's house. He gets into her passenger seat as Peter walks around to say goodbye to Rebecca. As she shakes his hand, she looks up at his face, and suddenly there's a bit of a glow around his head. He wonders why she's looking at him this way, she plays it off like it's nothing. "Probably just the drugs," she shrugs, getting in and cranking the engine. Peter's like, oh, good then by all means, please drive my father home with you.
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By M. Giant
Gnarlie shows up at the lab and finds only Astrid there. She tells him where everyone is, and even offers to call Olivia for him, like he wouldn't have her number. He sewer-voices that it's okay, and he'll wait until she gets back. He even manages something like a smile. He seems to be about to leave, but then he happens to notice the computer monitor showing the reconstituting face, which is now 60% complete (although it's still unrecognizable if you don't already know who it's going to be). He asks Astrid what it is, and she tells him about their connection to Massive Dynamic. "They're rebuilding the image from the broken device." Gnarlie looks as though he'd kind of like to break Astrid.
Olivia's having another meeting with Nina, asking if she's ever seen the symbol she's just drawn for her, the one that William Bell showed her. "No," Nina lies simply, and hands it back. Olivia tells her what Bell said about it, and Nina says it must be on the leader's head, which must be the connection to the cryonics thefts. "And that's all Dr. Bell told you?" Nina asks searchingly. Olivia seems to debate whether to share more, and opts for openness. She tells him that the man William Bell mentioned would open a door between the worlds. "That a storm was coming and that the only way to stop it would be to find him before the shapeshifters did." That word "storm" gets Nina's attention, like up until now she still suspected that Olivia was making all this up. She says Bell was more worried about the eventual collision between worlds than anything else. A moment later, she's got a pair of New York City snowglobes with "Massive Dynamic" stamped on the bases. She uses them to demonstrate the "poly-exclusion principle," which means that "no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time." I think most of us learned this in middle school, but Nina illustrates what Bell thought would happen if the door between universes were ever opened -- by smashing the two snowglobes together. One is left intact, and the other is a mess that you can be damn sure isn't going to be cleaned up by Nina Sharp. That seems like an expensive demonstration, not to mention mildly dangerous. In fact, it's a good way to lose a cybernetic finger. "It's what he calls the last great storm," Nina concludes. Olivia looks down at the doodle, and has one final flashback: Bell holding up a note reading "Laston-Hennings Cryonics" while speaking the name. And yes, those words are the upside-down and backwards letters we glimpsed in an earlier flashback. Aren't you glad I didn't spoil it? Olivia looks back up at Nina and is about to share this last tidbit, just before she gets a text from Gnarlie. "NINA IS THE SHAPE-SHIFTER. DON'T TRUST HER. GETOUT NOW." Ooh, well played, Gnarlie. Olivia abruptly takes her leave, but not before Nina expansively promises to do whatever Massive Dynamic can to help. Olivia nods politely, hearing the sound of thunder outside. Must be a storm coming. Or somebody sliding an anvil down the laundry chute.
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By M. Giant
Out on the sidewalk, she exits the building to find Gnarlie waiting for her. He tells her a SWAT team is on its way. "As soon as they verify you're out of the building, they're gonna shred this place. Let's move." That would seem like overkill if we didn't know he's lying. He leads her around the corner and into a graffitied alley, as she confesses she almost told Nina everything. "I gotta call Broyles." Gnarlie asks what she means by "almost," and she says she knows where the head is: "Laston-Hennings Cryonics," she blurts. Aargh! Nice move, Agent Dumbass. She's just dialing Broyles's number, but then she gets yet another text message: "RENDER COMPLETE." The message is automatically replaced with the finished image of what Massive Dynamic is pulling off the device. And of course, a moment later, Gnarlie's face is looking up at her from her phone display. There's more thunder, and they stare at each other. I think I know which of them is more busted.
The first shot back from the ads is poor Olivia flying through the air yet again, splatting into that wall of graffiti. Despite his deteriorating condition, Gnarlie doesn't even look winded after presumably having hurled her there. She gets up and rushes him, but he takes her down again, kicking her while she's down. Then he turns away and takes out his phone. "It's me," he says into it. Which is not a helpful identifying statement at the best of times, but its meaning is particularly elastic under the present circumstances. "Laston-Hennings Cryonics," he says. Just then, Olivia kicks out from behind him, knocking his knees out from under him. The throwdown recommences. Why are two people with guns wasting all this energy in a physical altercation in the first place? As though the same question has finally occurred to her, Olivia goes for her gun, but he grabs her wrist and the bullet goes right past him. He bounces her off the pavement again, and the gun clatters out of her reach. A guy in a suit comes up the alley to intervene, and Gnarlie pulls out his own weapon and shoots him. Problem solved. But the distraction has allowed Olivia to reach her own gun at last, and she pumps a round into Gnarlie's torso. As with Kurt, he just glares at her for a while, then finally remembers he has a gun of his own. At last Olivia takes him down with a shot to the forehead, and collapses across from him. A copy of Van Gogh's self-portrait stares impassively out at her from the mass of graffiti, silently reminding her, "At least you didn't find another ear."
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By M. Giant
Rebecca and Walter arrive at her house, but when she invites him in, he declines. He's only got fourteen minutes to walk back to the bus stop. She marvels about how the day wasn't what she expected. "The best days and the worst days rarely are," he says. Which was this? Finally he gathers the courage to do what he came back with her to do: apologize. Wait, what? He starts to tell her that he was wrong to take advantage of her, back when she was young. She not only declines the apology as unnecessary, but kisses him gently on the lips. "I've wanted to do that for so long," she says, and adds that Walter made her special. You don't need Walter's 196 I.Q. to know the right answer to that, which is that she always was. "Under twelve minutes," he Rain Mans, turning to go, and smiling to himself as he leaves. He looks pretty satisfied for a guy who could have totally just gotten some and didn't.
Olivia sits with Broyles on a park bench. Is his office being fumigated or something? Has he become claustrophobic? He recites all the platitudes that are called for in these kinds of situations: she had no choice, it was Gnarlie or her, it's not her fault, and it wasn't even Charlie in the first place. Now that I think about it, I'm actually not sure how often that last one applies in these kinds of situations. Olivia's still pretty wrecked, partly because of course she's just recently realized Charlie's been dead all this time, not to mention the fact that Gnarlie kicked her ass so bad she might have to do something desperate like go back and see Sam Weiss and deal with his bullshit again. She's still having trouble processing all the trouble the bad guys are going through, "To open a door to the other side? Who are these people and what do they want? What did we do to them?" Before we can all descend into enough half-cocked theorizing to fill a dorm room, Broyles tells her something that definitely isn't going to cheer her up: "Laston-Hennings Cryonics was hit fifteen minutes before our protective detail arrived. They took everything." Olivia realizes this means they found the right head. "William Bell pulled me to another universe to give me a warning. That's how important this is. And I failed." Broyles insists, "Olivia, we'll find them." She wipes her nose and tries to buck up. Well, I mean, not to defend Olivia after she blabbed to Gnarlie when she should have known better, but it's not exactly her fault that William Bell sent her home at ballistic velocity. Maybe if he'd slapped a skateboarding helmet on her when he had the chance, all of this grief could have been avoided weeks ago.
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By M. Giant
But he didn't. So now, in a lab somewhere else, a cryogenic cylinder is opened, revealing a shrink-wrapped head in a cloud of vapor. It's unwrapped, and the head is shaved, revealing a tiny raised mark in the shape of William Bell's doodle. Curtis eats another pear, watching the stage in the process: there's a pale, naked body on a slab, wrapped in plastic from the waist down. The head, now unwrapped, is positioned near the severed neck. But judging from the way the silvery puddle beneath is being sucked up and the wiggly bits of the exposed neck are visibly knitting themselves back together, it won't be severed for long. As if this isn't scary enough, the reconstituting corpse is played by Sebastian Roche, last seen almost killing Jack Bauer. Still want more scary? Fine -- his eyes pop open. Okay, I think my work here is done.
M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, follow him on Twitter, or just e-mail him at M.Giant[at]gmail.com.
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