A couple of kidnappers seem to have the ability to make people do anything, up to and including suicide. Worse, the person they've kidnapped is the 15-year-old son of a defense aeronautics engineer at Massive Dynamic. Walter figures that the mind-control powers are transmitted by sound, so he and the team equip the FBI agents at the ransom drop with white-noise-generating headphones. Even so, it all goes wrong, and with everyone scrambling around and the kidnappers out of action, Peter's lucky enough to be the first to discover that the kid, Tyler, is actually the one with the mind-control powers. Which he has as a result of his ADD meds interacting with a brainwave enhancer his dad's been developing. Tyler takes Peter on the lam with him, while the rest of the team races against time to find them before Special Forces takes them both out. The kid turns out to be motivated by anger against his dad for lying that his mom is dead, and plans to find her again. Except that when he does, it doesn't exactly go as planned. Tyler tries to make Peter shoot his stepdad, and then does make him shoot Broyles in order to escape (only a flesh wound, fortunately). Tyler and Peter don't get far before Walter remote-jams the kid's brain and they take him down. Happy ending! Or at least it was, before we saw the coda where Nina Sharp is sending an e-mail to William Bell letting him know that he was right and mind control is possible. Even if it really only succeeded with only one of the multiple Tylers that Massive Dynamic apparently had running. Don't ask me where they got them all, or what they plan to do with them now.
Those two NYPD squad cars are certainly in a hurry, screaming around corners with their sirens and flashers going full blast. They enter a multi-story parking garage. On the top level is a car with three people inside. They all look at each other so we can learn their faces: a squinty guy with a goatee and a ponytail in the driver's seat, another suited guy with a thin beard, and a teenaged boy in the back. The two cop cars skid sideways into a position, sandwiching the sedan between them and all four officers hop out, guns drawn and leveled at the car. None of them notices the floaty letters overhead reading "QUEENS, NEW YORK," although this doesn't look like any part of Queens I've ever seen (and during a long, circuitous cab ride from LaGuardia, I once saw more of Queens than people who live there do). While one officer orders the men out of the car, another one named Williams radios, "Hostage appears unharmed," looking at the kid. After a pause, the two men look at each other and step out, hands raised. They comply with the order to get on their knees, but Beardo says, "You have no idea what you're dealing with." Of course not; the show's only been on a minute. Squinty squints up at the cop who ordered them out of the car, and the officer starts looking distinctly uncomfortable. And then he's slowly backing across the parking deck, dropping his gun on the way, finally toppling silently backward over the rail, clear down the center of the spiral parking ramp, his uniform fluttering softly in the breeze. Nobody reacts, until one of the cops takes a bullet in the neck -- courtesy of none other than officer Williams. Then she shoots the other cop down, and, clearly against her will, points the gun at her own head and pulls the trigger. In the back seat of the car, the kid flinches but doesn't look away. The horror!
After the titles, the Fringe Three are looking down over the same railing at what is now northing but a chalk outline below. Broyles briefs them: facial recognition should be able to do something with the clear security photos of the men within the hour, and ballistics confirmed that Officer Williams shot three cops, counting herself. "As far as we can tell, the kidnappers don't even have guns." As for the kid, Olivia's got the bullet on him: he's fifteen-year-old Tyler Carson, who disappeared 36 hours ago. "Walter, remember that conversation we had about personal space?" Peter asks his dad, who's either trying to read over Peter's shoulder or graft himself to Peter's back. Walter complains about what a boring crime scene this is: no bodies, no food. He doesn't even care that the bodies are being moved to his lab, because he's got it all figured out already: "Mesmerism. Hypnotism." Well, thanks for watching. "Walter, hypnosis can't make you do anything that you don't want to do," Peter reminds everyone, so Walter wanders off. Peter has found one possible clue: the kid's dad works for Fleming Monroe. "The aerospace division of Massive Dynamic," Broyles supplies. Of course.
So across town they go, to Massive Dynamic HQ. In the lobby, Walter takes in a giant video wall with MD logos and keywords drifting across it. You might almost call the display both massive and dynamic. Nina's leggy assistant leads them into the elevator, and as they get off at Nina's floor, Walter stops and looks all around him, but mainly up, giving us a spectacular view up his cavernous nostrils. "The screen in the elevator said there were 73 laboratories, is that right?" he asks the assistant, who proudly confirms it. Walter stands there amazed until Peter comes back to herd him along down the hall. As much as people on this show pay lip service to the difficulty of traveling between realities, Walter is clearly visiting, even if only mentally, a universe in which this all could have been his..
In Nina's headache-inducing office, which has everything but right angles, Olivia's quizzing the kid's dad, a Dr. Carson, who didn't even know Tyler was gone until the kidnappers called him. After he makes some excuses about what a lame dad he is, Peter tries to get things moving again by getting Nina to confirm that the two men in the car have nothing to do with Massive Dynamic. "According to the police, they're used car salesmen," she says. And they haven't even made any demands yet. So what the hell kind of used car salesmen could they be, then? Olivia goes out on a limb, wondering if what they want has something to do with secrets belonging to Massive Dynamic. Nina agrees that this seems likely. Peter asks her to elaborate, and she reluctantly says that Carson works in "military aircraft designs, piloting software, guidance systems." Carson says his work is his life, which might go some way toward explaining why he doesn't miss his kid when he disappears. "Tyler's mother died when he was just a boy. And now, if I lose him I don't know what I'd do." Obviously this hits Walter pretty hard, so he has to leave the room. While Peter goes after him, Olivia makes the usual promises that they'll find the kid. Even though on this show, everyone will just end up wishing they hadn't.
Peter catches up to Walter in the outer lobby, taking in the commanding view of the Chrysler Building. Walter's back to thinking about what could have been, clearly. "Did you know that I once shared a laboratory with William Bell?" he asks Peter. "Look how much he's achieved." He mentions that Bell was the one who introduced Walter to Peter's mother. And that it was her idea that "Belly and I would one day form a company together. He just couldn't wait, I suppose. But thankfully, she was still there for you while I was gone." As usual, Walter is all over the place.
That brown kidnapping-mobile is now driving down the road. In the back seat, Tyler gives himself a little treat out of a Homer Simpson Pez dispenser (something to do with that Simpsons scavenger hunt mentioned during the promos I generally skip over, I'm thinking) and says he's hungry. Squinty nods.
thing you know, all three of them enter a convenience store. Squinty squares off threateningly against the clerk and orders, "Give me all the cash in the register." A big, bald customer over by the coffee machine looks up. The clerk points out that Squinty doesn't have a gun, and Baldy comes over to intervene. "You really don't want to get involved in this," Squinty warns, and Baldy says he already is. He starts to take a step toward Squinty, then suddenly stops against his will, looking back at the steaming coffeepot behind him. Which, under Squinty's watchful gaze (and that of Tyler and Beardo from across the store), he picks up and empties over his bald head. Then he smashes it over same, then gets up and charges blistered-head-first into the ice cooler, where he collapses. With a disgusted look, Beardo grabs a bag of chips and starts to walk out. But the clerk is now pointing a gun at Squinty, who says, "You should have just given up the money." But since he didn't, the clerk is compelled by the now-familiar external force to put the gun down, pick up his keys, and stick one in an electrical socket. Which hurls him halfway across the room in a shower of sparks. I'm not actually sure that would; to cause a short, there needs to be a connection between both slots, plus it's better to use both hands so the current flows through the victim's heart. Not that I'm about to try it the way the clerk just demonstrated. Squinty looks at the clerk. Kid looks at Squinty. We look at commercials.
We get to see those magical moments again on the security monitors, as Peter and Olivia are now watching the tape in the crime scene that the store has now become. "Remind me to never get a job as a convenience store clerk," Peter says, as if he could ever get hired as one. Olivia exposits that the victims aren't going to be talking soon, being in intensive care and all. Peter mentions that these kidnappers don't seem to have much of a plan. Olivia sees the kid on the tape, and observes, "He looks so scared." Pretty grainy image, though. He might just be co
nstipated. Peter wonders why he doesn't run. Olivia says maybe Walter's right about the hypnosis. And Peter reasonably points out that they could just save themselves some trouble by making the clerk hand over the cash. "Why all the carnage?" Olivia flails, "Maybe they're silencing the witnesses? They don't want us to know how it works?" Her theory is coming apart before our eyes, but fortunately her cell phone rings before it collapses at her feet. It's Broyles, calling to tell her that according to their boss, the two car salesmen are awesome employees who just happened to take out a loaner car for lunch and never came back. After ringing off, Olivia relays this to Peter and wonders how they became kidnappers. Peter theorizes that they're spies, with the car salesmen jobs as their cover. Makes sense to Olivia: "Throw in Massive Dynamic and your father's theory on hypnotism and it all starts to add up." Which is a shame, because given how this turns out, they should probably be doing subtraction.Back at the lab, Walter is chipping away at the back of Officer Williams's skull with a bone saw while trying to have a discussion with Astrid about what human brains might taste like. Prying away gory sections of bone, Walter explains that normal hypnosis only boosts alpha waves, but the kind of forced suggestions Williams was subjected to might cause physical damage to the brain. Well, yes, but so might a bone saw.
By the time he's gotten that brain dug out, Olivia and Peter have joined them in the lab, all the way back from New York. Holding it up on a tray for their inspection, Walter announces, "This is not hypnosis, this is mind control." Look, he can make William's mind go up, and he can make it go down! He can move it side to side! Oh, that's not what he means. He says Peter was right about the limits of hypnosis, and points out the brain hematomas that he says are "the result of conflicting neural impulses. A conflict of mind and body." Olivia rather stupidly asks if that's what killed her, and Walter, chuckling, points out the big black bullet track that did that. "But mind control could cause brain damage." His theory is that it travels through the cochlear nerve, i.e. via sound. "An auditory trance is a far more effective path to manipulation than the other senses." Astrid points out that even if they find them, it's not safe to approach them, so Olivia tasks Walter with figuring out how to block it. "The ransom call could come at any minute and we need to be ready." Ready to go off half-cocked on an untested theory, apparently.
Back at Massive Dynamic, a very nervous Dr. Carson is wondering why Broyles and all the other agents are just standing around in his office rather than out looking for his kid. Broyles says he needs to be there for the call. Which conveniently comes right then. Olivia and Peter are back, and Nina's also in the room, when Carson picks up the phone and all the computers set up to trace the call start doing their thing. Tyler's on the other end, begging his dad to "give them what they want." Then Squinty gets on the line, demanding $2 million in unmarked bills, to be delivered near the Newark airport, at 5:00 PM. "If you're even a minute late, your son dies." Squinty hangs up before the trace can be completed. Olivia's confused: "All they want is money?" Carson says he can sell his house and cash in his stock options. By five this afternoon? Who's his realtor? "Massive Dynamic will cover any ransom," Nina cuts in. Broyles is agreeing with Olivia that it doesn't make sense. "Money's a distraction," she says with certainty. "They want something else." She tells Carson their move: "We set a trap." Oh, a trap is being set, all right.
Walter rummages through a cabinet at the lab, even bouncing something off the camera lens at one point while he sings "Baa Baa Black Sheep" to himself. Peter and Astrid watch helplessly from a safe distance, wondering what he's looking for. "He just muttered something about my childhood," Peter says, as though that's unusual. Finally, Walter finds what he's looking for: an old teddy bear. Only it's kind of special, as Walter explains: "It generates white noise, which simulates the sound of being in utero." He turns it on, and it starts emitting a noise like an ultrasound. "A teddy bear versus mind-control spies," Peter says. "Bad guys don't stand a chance." Which would not have been as funny without Walter's wounded look. Although what I think that bad guys really need to be worrying about is how quickly the good guys seem able to shuttle between Boston and New York this week.
As we now see, as they have already returned to the greater New York area. Olivia is briefing a small army of tactical FBI agents who have assembled in a warehouse somewhere. Off to the side, the Bishops are watching. "This is exciting," Walter murmurs to Peter. "You think they'll ever give me a gun?" Peter just gives him a look like, "They better not before I get one." Olivia yields the floor to Walter to continue the briefing. He starts to explain about the headphones they've all been given, but he's taking too long, so Peter rudely cuts in, "The headphones will make it so the kidnappers can't control you with sound. Now put 'em on, we're going to do a sound check." They all do, and Peter turns the knob on the bear. Walter announces, "My son Peter's teddy bear emits--" Peter looks embarrassed, but the agents can't hear a word Walter is saying. Because of, you know, the noise-cancelling headphones. Peter gives Walter a wireless microphone, which is apparently also connected to the headphones. Through it, they can all clearly hear Walter tell them that their team leaders will each have a similar mic. "You will not be able to communicate with each other directly. All commands will come through the headphones." He warns them not to remove the headphones after the order has been given to put them on. "If you do, you may die a gruesome and horrible death. Thank you for your attention and have a nice day." Heh.
At the industrial park specified in the call, Olivia's crouched up on a catwalk with a pair of binoculars, a view of where Dr. Carson is waiting with the briefcase, and a team of sharpshooters. In fact, the whole site is surrounded by hidden SWAT agents. The brown sedan pulls into view, but Tyler's not in it; just the two car salesmen in the front seat. After the car parks somewhere out of sight and Beardo is seen walking towards Carson, Olivia gives the order for everyone to put on their headphones. At the end of the catwalk, Peter and Walter don their headsets like everyone else, and Walter activates the teddy bear, which is wired up to the bank of equipment they've toted out. Suddenly the entire soundtrack is that ultrasound noise, as Olivia uses her binoculars to watch Beardo accosting Carson. Still no sign of Tyler. Suddenly Beardo grabs the briefcase and makes a run for it. "All units, move, move!" Olivia barks into her microphone. The white noise continues as an otherwise eerily silent action scene commences, with Beardo continuing to flee with the case until he's cut off by a phalanx of armed agents chasing him into another warehouse. Olivia signals her men into a flanking movement, when suddenly that sedan crashes out through the wall of the warehouse, Squinty at the wheel and fighting for control (in more ways than one, as we'll soon learn). Olivia dives out of the way and her headphones come off, just in time for her to hear the car's engine roar. That is, until it plows into something solid enough to flip it end-over-end, catching fire and emitting a nifty smoke-ring before finally settling on its roof and going full carbecue. Not looking good for Squinty right now. Olivia looks around -- Beardo's still on the move, inside the warehouse. Grabbing her headphones and popping them back on (and effectively turning down the volume on the scene once again -- it's a really cool effect), she jumps to her feet and goes in pursuit.
Meanwhile, up on the catwalk, Peter looks through the smoke and sees a figure running with the briefcase. Without taking off his ow
n headphones, he signals Walter to stay put and runs off, leaving Walter holding the teddy bear. Olivia finally finds Beardo inside the warehouse, sitting on the ground with an anguished expression on his face and a gun to his chin. She takes off the headphones so she can hear what he's saying. "Help me," he begs her, dry-firing the gun over and over. She just stares at him without lowering her own weapon, or even asking what kind of help he's looking for. Reloading, perhaps?Peter comes running out into the open in pursuit of whoever he saw with the briefcase, but appears to be suddenly seized by some kind of head pain that stops him in his tracks like a dog at the end of its leash. It's really quite impressively convincing; I assume that in simulating the sudden onset of a crippling migraine, Josh Jackson simply drew on his years of working with James Van Der Beek. He fumbles the headphones off, and the camera circles around him to reveal Tyler standing there, with a backpack, the briefcase full of cash, and a smug expression. Oh, man. Can someone help me get this fishhook out of my mouth? What a great reversal -- I totally never saw it coming. It's made even more impressive by the fact that somehow the promo monkeys didn't spoil it, even at the risk of letting viewers assume (as I did) that this would be a rip-off of the X-Files episode "Pusher." "You can lose the stupid headphones," Tyler says, popping Homer's head again. Those aren't Pez in there, I'm thinking. "They don't work." Clearly. Tyler orders Peter, "Take me to your car." And the last thing we see is Walter's wood-paneled station wagon kicking up wet gravel into the camera lens as it peels out. It's a rough episode for the Fringe cameras this week.
In the aftermath of the debacle, Olivia is working her radio trying to find Tyler when Walter comes up and asks, "Where is he?" Olivia doesn't realize at first that he means Peter. That's how on top of things the Feds are today.
Cut to the warehouse, where Beardo is telling her, not for the first time, "We were the hostages in that car." Olivia is doubtful, but Beardo insists Tyler made them do everything we saw them do. And indeed, on second viewing, that mostly holds up pretty well. Even Squinty's gaze, which seemed so squintily malevolent before, can now be read as blankly horrified fascination, knowing what we know now. The episode did a nice job of walking the line there. Olivia is doubtful, until Beardo holds up a bandaged hand and demands, "You think I wanted to saw off my own finger? He made me do it when I tried to get away." As for Peter, Beardo suggests, "You'd better pray he's not with that kid." For all the good that's going to do.
Because Peter is, of course, driving with what appears to still be a hellacious headache. From the shotgun seat, Tyler says this is the result of fighting him. "I can make it stop if you do what I say," he offers. Peter grits out a "yes," and goes limp as though Darth Vader just quit force-choking him. And then he goes right to work on the kid's head, saying, "You know, your father's worried about you." "Awesome," Tyler says drily. Peter starts to pull over so they can talk, but since Tyler doesn't want to, he forces Peter to not only get back on the road but also stamp on the gas, which leads to some very unsafe driving on this narrow two-lane road. They're just about to rear-end a slow-moving truck when Tyler says, "You ready to behave?" Again, Peter says yes, and is allowed to slam on the brakes just in time to avoid an accident. "Just so we're clear," Tyler explains, "I can make you do whatever I want. I can control all of you or just part of you." Peter explains right back, "You know what, kid? You're a real son of a bitch." So at least they've come to an understanding.
That night, Olivia shows Nina a traffic-cam photo of Peter driving Tyler in Walter's car. Nina wonders how this could have happened. "The son of one of your top scientists can control people's minds?" Olivia asks incredulously. "Surely that's not a coincidence." Nina admits that although Tyler's dad works on aerospace projects, he's been working with the pharmaceutical division lately. "What project?" Olivia asks.
And then we're looking at a fighter jet streaking through the sky, which according to Nina is actually a flight simulator running a test of a "hands-free guidance system." So the pilot can still send text-messages on patrol, I guess. That's certainly worthy of millions of dollars of tax-supported research. Olivia's reflection appears in the screen as she asks how the plane is flown, and Nina says the pilot's wearing a helmet that transmits commands from electrodes to an onboard computer. Very Firefox, by which I mean not the browser but the Clint Eastwood film that predicted similar telepathic control systems for fighter jets back in1982. The simulation shuts down, and Dr. Carson, who is also present, explains that the pilot was given a "pharmaceutical enhancement" to amplify his brainwaves. From across the room, Walter asks quietly, "Did you by chance expose your son to this so-called pharmaceutical enhancement?" Nina says that would be totally against Massive Dynamic's testing protocols, but Carson admits that Tyler might have found some he brought home to work on, for "further research." What kind of research did he plan to conduct that the Massive Dynamic labs couldn't support? See if they float?
No, I guess it was just to see if they would fit into a Pez dispenser. In the car with Peter, Tyler pops another pill from Homer's neck as Peter futilely asks Tyler the range of his mind-control powers. Wisely, Tyler isn't sharing that. He looks at a photo in his hand of a woman who might be his mother. Yes, that might be a spoiler, but it's not my fault. Peter tries again, and when Tyler tries to shut him down, Peter snaps, "Hey, genius, the second you took me, they knew that you were behind it all." Well, not that same second. It took several hundred seconds before anyone besides Walter even noticed Peter was gone. Tyler gloats that Peter didn't know himself until then. "You managed to kidnap yourself," Peter chuckles. "Congratulations. You're a criminal mastermind." When Tyler doesn't have an answer to that, Peter realizes Tyler doesn't even have a plan. "You sound just like my father," Tyler bitches. Peter isn't exactly sympathetic: "Do you really think that you're the first kid whose father didn't think he was good enough or smart enough? Take a number." Ouch.
Back at Massive Dynamic, Carson is maintaining that the drugs are designed to work on computers, not humans. "The brain is a computer, doctor," Walter insists. "It's an organic computer. It can be hijacked like any other." Oh, well, that makes perfect sense, then. He gets up in Carson's face, confirming that the kid is fifteen and still in puberty. "His system flooded with hormones affecting his neurotransmitters...opening up pathways for the uptake of psychoactive chemicals, yes?" He keeps pressing, asking if Tyler was taking any other meds. Carson confesses that the kid was on ADD medication. "And an untested brainwave enhancer," Walter accuses. "It's a mind-control cocktail. Because of this man's inability to be a proper parent, his son has kidnapped mine!" Oh, so this is all about Walter. Projection much? Olivia manages to pull Walter away before someone gets hurt.
Peter continues trying to relate to Tyler about father issues when a cop car's flashers light up behind them. Tyler doesn't want to stop and when Peter says this can't go on forever, Tyler says. "It's not even close to finished." He orders Peter to pull over. Peter does, and as they wait for he cop to walk up alongside the car, Peter tells Tyler to let him handle it. "If you don't I will," Tyler threatens. Peter smiles up into the cop's flashlight, and compliantly gets out of the car when the officer asks him to. But when the cop asks him to put his hands on the car, Peter asks what's wrong, although he's still smiling. The cop repeats the order and pats down Peter for weapons as Tyler slides over so he can see the cop. So I think we just got our answer to Peter's earlier question about the limits of his range. Because once Tyler's able to eyeball him, the cop takes out his own gun and puts it on the car's roof in front of Peter. Who then has to pick it up and point it at the cop. "Do not force me to shoot this man," Peter begs, which is totally out of context from what the promo indicated. Tyler doesn't want the cop to give away their position. Peter says there has to be another way, and then pistol-whips the cop to the ground. "Something like that?" Tyler asks.
Working out of an office at Massive Dynamic, Olivia and Astrid are coordinating the search for Peter when Nina's leggy assistant comes in to summon Olivia into Nina's office. Which is where Broyles and Nina are, and the former tells Olivia that Tyler is now considered a national security risk, so Special Forces will be taking over from Fringe Division. Well, that sounds messy. And it's all because they've just learned that Tyler bought two one-way tickets to Costa Rica before the kidnapping, which indicates he might have a foreign handler. It also indicates that he's a hell of a lot more resourceful than I was at fifteen. I couldn't even score my own Van Halen tickets. What worries the brass is the thought that Tyler might be about to hand over God knows what manner of Massive Dynamic goodies over to enemies of the state. Olivia reads the phrase "overwhelming force" on the briefing sheet, and argues that it doesn't really bode well for Peter. "We need to contain the situation on our own before it's too late," Broyles says. Thanks for stating the stakes so clearly.
Walter has pretty much gone catatonic when Olivia and Nina find him. "I can't lose him again," he mutters, because for a minute there we were in danger of letting an episode go by without a reference to Peter's past. Olivia crouches down and uses her best hostage-negotiator smile as she says Walter needs to figure out how to "disable Tyler." "Peter always helps me," Walter whines. "How do I do this without Peter?" Well, they are in New York City, where hack standup comedians are pretty thick on the ground. Surely they could rustle one up here to make wisecracks in Peter's absence. Olivia admits that Peter helps her too (some episodes more than others), "But you can do this." Nina steps up and tells Walter, "I know you're scared, but you're the only one that can help him." Walter seems to get the idea of using an EMF scrambler, whatever that is. "Sounds like a good place to start," Nina smiles encouragingly. As always, she is the master of looking helpful when it's not clear what her motives really are -- yet. Just then Astrid enters to say they've brought Tyler's computer, and he's been doing some "pretty strange searches." Oh, man, better glove up.
In another office, Astrid's showing Olivia some of Tyler's recent searches: women who died in car accidents 14 years ago. Okay, I knew the internet caters to some pretty specialized fetishes, but this is more focused than I thought possible. Olivia notices a pattern: each of the victims would be in their early 40s if they were alive today. "What are you thinking?" Astrid asks. The answer to that should be obvious, but maybe Astrid is just disoriented at finding herself outside the lab for the second time in as many months. Olivia doesn't know yet, but Tyler's most recent search pulls up a newspaper article about one Renee Davies. Whose accompanying photo just happens to be the one Tyler was holding earlier.
Olivia goes to confront Carson with the article, and upon hearing the name Renee Davies, he confesses that she's his ex-wife. Tyler's mother, of course. And not, as I may or may not have suspected, the name of former Kinks frontman Ray Davies after becoming a chick.<
/p>Tyler and Peter have stage-side seats at a strip club. Or at least I assume that's what it is, going by the high-heeled feet that are all we can see of the woman in the foreground. "This was a good idea," Tyler tells Peter, who is no doubt unaware of the effect of puberty-hormones on Tyler's Jedi powers. Kid could probably make Peter invent and build a lightsaber for him right now. "Yeah, I was fifteen once, too, but I had to talk my way into places like this," Peter says modestly, cutting up the steak he's having for lunch and saying there are easier ways to get money than how Tyler went about it. When Tyler says they aren't as fun, Peter calls him on it: "Faking your kidnapping? Jacking your dad's company? Killing cops and innocent bystanders?" Yes, poor Massive Dynamic. Tyler makes excuses as something silky drops around the pair of female feet in front of them. While he's distracted by that, Peter tucks his steak knife into his sleeve and asks what Tyler's dad did to him anyway. "He lied to me my entire life," Tyler drama-queens. "He told me my mother was dead." Peter seems to take that seriously, if not question whether anything like that might have ever happened to him.
Back at Massive Dynamic, Carson is busy justifying said lie to Olivia. Apparently his ex was kind of a drug fiend, disappearing for weeks at a time until she never came back. "I just always assumed that she would end up dead of an overdose somewhere." Then he told Tyler that she died in a car accident. "So he wouldn't know that this mother abandoned him," Carson says. Well, on the bright side, he seems to still not know.
Back at the strip club, Tyler tells his side: he found his birth certificate a month ago, and looked into the mother's name, finding out she's a rehab counselor in Maryland. Peter asks what the move is, and Tyler thinks they'll "be a family again." Presumably a family that excludes dad, whom he planned to bilk two million from. "Those cops you killed, they have families too," Peter points out. They got wives, they g--" Tyler cuts him off with a look, and presumably some headache glare-beams. The steak knife Peter hid is suddenly out in the open, and whether it's because Peter decided this was the time to make his move or because Tyler made him, it doesn't really matter. Peter struggles, but makes a fist around the handle, and finally plunges it into the empty seat to him. "That would have been your leg if I didn't need you to drive," Tyler says. "Let's go." A fifteen-year-old voluntarily leaving a strip club? Clearly his overwhelming mind-control powers even work on himself.
Olivia finds Astrid and Walter working away in one of Massive Dynamic's spare labs while sporting jaunty tinfoil hats. "Okay, we know where Tyler's going," she says. "Please tell me you've got something better to stop him with than...what you're wearing." I do so enjoy some of Anna Torv's off-kilter line readings. Walter whispers to Olivia that he's merely worried that their hosts are trying to read his thoughts. "Massive Dynamic gives me the creeps, too," agrees Astrid, who should probably know better but whose hat is at least better constructed than Walter's. Olivia struggles to follow along as Walter explains that the pilots in the test program were found to be "highly responsive to magnetic fields," so they're making a pulse generator. "We're going to crash his brain," Astrid translates. Walter says Tyler will go completely blank for a few seconds. "He may even vomit." "Which, hopefully will give you the window you need to take him down," Astrid says. But then what? Once he's back up, they'll be in the presence of a teen sociopath who can once again control their every movement, but I guess they'll worry about that later, because Olivia says, "Okay, let's pack it up. We're leaving." So, hope you're done.
Big floaty letters reading simply "Springfield" over a suburban house could only be more of a Simpsons shout-out if the place were pink (it's not). A woman works in the garden out front when Peter and Tyler wander up and the latter says, "Renee Davies?" She's all friendly and helpful, until he tells her who he is and she goes kind of blank. "Oh my God," she blurts, and he rushes into her arms. Clearly not knowing where to start, Renee asks him who Peter is, and Peter's only answer is, "Mind if we go inside?" Hello, Mind, nice to meet you.
Once that's been accomplished, Tyler sits across from his mom saying he blames not her, but his father for not wanting them to be together. She tries to straighten him out, but he's not hearing it, saying the two of them can leave now. She just barely manages to avoid laughing in his face. Just then a poor man's Greg Grunberg walks in, and Tyler's like, "Who the hell's this?" Obviously it's Renee's current hubby, Seth, so Peter suggests to Tyler that maybe it's time to go. "I think I see who's the problem here," Tyler spits at Seth, because he's an idiot. Then he casts his attention over to Peter, who unwillingly stands up, fishes the cop's gun out of Tyler's messenger bag, and points it at Seth. "Tyler, what are you doing?" Peter grunts helplessly. Yes, be sure and pin this on the kid for the benefit of the victims. That'll work.
Olivia and Broyles climb out of a Fringemobile that's just arrived, him telling her to cover the back while he takes the front. They're both wearing FBI windbreakers over bulletproof vests. Although that doesn't explain how they took a matter of minutes to cover the same amount of ground that took Peter and Tyler a two-day road trip. Broyles peeks in the front window of the house and takes in an alarming tableau: Seth on his knees on the floor, and Peter continuing to point the gun at him while Tyler and Renee watch in varying degrees of horror (i.e. none, in the former case.) Broyles says they can't wait for Walter; he's going in now. He busts in, yells, "Tyler, it's over!" and zaps Tyler with a taser, nearly winging Peter's gun arm in the process. Tyler goes down, but even with the current running through him, he's still able to force Peter to turn the gun on Broyles. Broyles just pops his eyes, and Peter lets off a shot that slams Broyles against the wall. "We're out of here. And you're driving," Tyler tells Peter. Just then Olivia bursts in from the back with her own taser, finding nobody there but Seth, Renee, and her bleeding boss, who tells her to go after Peter and Tyler. Olivia protests, but as they get a radio message from Astrid saying they're almost there, Broyles insists, "The bullet went clean through and I said go!" Olivia goes.
Outside, she flags down Astrid's Ford (I assume it's a rental, because why would Astrid need a car when she never goes anywhere?) and hops in, directing them in pursuit. Before long, Walter spots his own car up ahead. "It's them," Astrid says. As Walter gets his laptop and pulse gun ready, he says they need to be within twenty feet, and the effect will only last a few seconds. Better make it count, then. As Astrid closes the gap, Olivia tells Walter to do it now. In the car up ahead, Tyler's eyes go totally Blue Screen of Death and he seems to doze off in his seat. Peter, suddenly released from the Tyler-juju, looks over at him, just as he's starting to come around again. So Peter plows the car into a handy telephone pole. Yeah, no way does that car have airbags. And no way is it not totaled after that. Can you imagine the insurance company paying for new parts for that beast, not to mention sanding and refinishing the wood panels?
Peter wakes up to the sight of his father's silhouette blocking the sun; he's laid out in the grass in front of the car he just crashed. "You always prove to be more resourceful than I give you credit for," Walter says proudly, which is so not what I recall my dad saying when I jumped a median in his station wagon in high school. "Is that supposed to be some sort of compliment?" Peter wonders. He asks about Tyler, who is currently being loaded into the back of an ambulance while Olivia supervises. Walter says he was knocked unconscious and probably concussed in the crash, and now sedated as well so he doesn't go waking up and putting the whammy on people. Couldn't happen to a nicer kid, either. "Agent Broyles," Peter suddenly remembers. Oh, yeah, the boss he shot.
Broyles is getting his arm bandaged up by another team of paramedics outside the Davies home when Olivia comes up and quips, "See what happens when you get out from behind the desk?" Which is totally unfair, because until last week I was doubting whether Broyles even owned a desk. Broyles says he's been shot before. "First time by one of the good guys, though. Lucky for me you're a lousy shot," he tells Peter. "Oh, tell me about it," Peter fails to say. Instead, he says Tyler wanted Broyles shot in the head. "Lucky for you I was able to pull it off-center a bit." Yeah, I think Broyles might have preferred to stop it with his vest. Broyles doesn't seem as grateful as Peter seems to expect, and Peter realizes, "You're going to hold this over my head for a long time, aren't you?" "Somehow you'll make it up to me," Broyles informs him.
That night, the Bishops are back at home, an
d Peter's just wrapping up a call from Olivia while Walter cooks in the kitchen. Peter says Walter was right; Tyler's Sith Lord powers went away as soon as the meds wore off. "Which is good, means he won't do any time," Peter says, not a word of which makes sense. First of all, how is it reasonable that he won't do time just because he no longer has the power to commit more horrible crimes like the ones he already committed, and secondly, how is that good? Even Peter seems to realize that: "The kid goes on a killing spree and all they're gonna do is make him talk it out with a bunch of shrinks." He sits down stiffly, with some kind of large bandage or cast from the crash visible under his shirt. Luckily, Walter has just the thing: crepes, although Peter tries to turn them down. "You were abducted. Of course you need crepes," Walter insists, which should probably go on a bumper sticker. Peter assures him he's okay, and Walter recalls that Peter used to call them "creeps," which drove his mom batty. And Walter would know from batty. "She was a strong woman, your mother." Well, given what she had to deal with, she would have had to be.But that's not the end. In her office at Massive Dynamic, Nina is typing a message into a giant, clunky CRT device with a monochrome monitor that looks older than Peter. "William, I don't know if you've been receiving these messages but I continue to hope," she types as we hear her reading it in voice-over. She says she's updating him on the "Penrose-Carson experiments. "One of the Tylers did in fact display a rather dramatic ability for mind control." One of the Tylers? "But before we became aware of his ability, there were some unintended consequences." Meanwhile, Dr. Carson pulls a file and opens it, revealing a photo of Tyler with a different dad. "Among others, he was able to locate records of his surrogate mother and unfortunately made a misguided attempt to reunite with her." The file contains several other Tylers, at least up to "Tyler 05," all of whom have single dads with the word "Dr." in front of their names. Our Tyler was number 03. Nina continues that she's suspending the experiments. As Carson wheels his Tyler down a Massive Dynamic hallway on a gurney, she concludes, "You were right. Mind control is possible, given the right conditions. So despite the unfortunate circumstances, we can consider the project a success." As Carson continues to wheel the boy helplessly towards a blinding white light, our view of them is cut off by elevator doors clanging shut. As elevator doors never do. "As always, I hope this finds you in good health. Warmest regards, Nina." And the episode ends before anyone on the other end can reply by telegraph or carrier pigeon or something.
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.