There is a Monster of the Week plot this week that seems almost refreshingly unconnected to the overall story arc at first: Alan Ruck and a press-on mustache guest-star as a scientist determined to help his wheelchair-bound son walk again, and discovers that an unlikely combination of elements, injected into people, turns them into human balloons. I mean, they float. They don't swell up. They do die, however, and the trail of bodies leads the Fringe team eventually to Ruck, who is devastated when his son isn't too impressed when he finds out what's been going on in his name. In solving the case, though, Walter's puzzled that the combination of heavy elements osmium and rhenium should be lighter than air. But he's got it: the physics of our universe are starting to go all wonky, thanks to the rift between universes he made twenty-five years ago.
And bookending the main plot is (along with Walter smoking up with Jorge Garcia at Massive Dynamic) is Walter's obsession with bringing William Bell back to life, because Walter's still worried that the missing pieces of his brain are preventing him from being as totally universe-saving as he can possibly be. So: soul magnets. The bell that William, not coincidentally, left to Nina early this season. Walter science rings science the bell science to make William science appear science but it science appears not to work science. At least, not that Walter's aware. It doesn't make William Bell walk in the door, but elsewhere, after an episode of new couple Peter and Olivia being nauseatingly cute in the way couples are when they think they've invented relationships, Olivia's voice suddenly gets gravelly and more Leonard Nimoy-esque. Yes, William's soul is apparently in the Olivia's body. If nothing else that should make Peter more aware of the differences between Olivia and Fauxlivia. I imagine it will make things a little more difficult in the bedroom, unless he's a really big Star Trek.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. He thinks he knows who Leonard Nimoy was. Isn't he one of the Little Rascals? Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.
We're listening to some '70s rock and looking at a security monitor with many camera angles showing us multiple areas of Massive Dynamic, and the unmistakable sound of water bubbling through a bong is heard, and we pan down to see Walter, holding said bong, flicking a lighter closed, and he's saying, "I didn't realize until later. I woke up, and there she was in my bed. Yoko." Ono he di'n't!
He's talking to none other than Jorge Garcia, also known as Hurley from Lost. You may also know him from the cover of a Weezer album whose name escapes me. Raditude? Hurley says, "What did he say?" by which I presume he means Yoko Ono's husband, the famous composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Walter says, "What could he say? It was the '70s," and this makes both of them giggle, despite not being super-excellently funny, but such is the power of the bong that's passed between them -- which looks like it's been fashioned from lab equipment at Massive Dynamic. It probably cost about $6,000 in material. Anyway, Ono and Ichiyanagi were divorced in the '60s so I guess that's not who Hurley is asking about.
And then Walter is marveling at all the screens Hurley -- who he calls "Kevin" for some reason -- gets to watch all night. "What a magnificent job," says Walter. Keep in mind, he is high. And just when you're starting to think this is footage of the most amazing episode of Undercover Boss ever, Hurley says, "CEO of Massive Dynamic is not a bad gig either. Must be nice, all that power." Walter somewhat morosely says it was Belly's intellect that made the company great, and all he's managed to do with its vast resources is to create a new flavour of cupcake frosting: bacon-berry. And he does a little bon-appetit kiss, and I would like to remind everyone that while the idea of a frosting flavour of "bacon-berry" sounds exciting, nay, exhilarating, this is Fringe, after all. It's not real. And just because something has bacon in it, that doesn't automatically make it great! Why, just last summer I found a tube of bacon-flavoured lip balm in the gift shop of Madame Tussaud's museum in Vegas -- what wondrous treasures were there -- and I eagerly bought it, despite the relative unchappedness of my lips at the time. And you know what? It felt like I was smearing my lips with bacon fat. And if I'm being honest with myself, I should have expected that. That one's on me.
Anyway, Hurley says he worked for Bell for a long time, but Walter's the best boss he ever had, which isn't surprising. Bell probably expected his night watchman to not smoke weed all night long and all sorts of unreasonable things. Walter looks genuinely touched for a moment, and then they both crack up again, and this is replicating admirably the feeling of not being drunk or stoned whilst watching those who are and being annoyed by their amusement.
Anyway, Hurley's ready for a little more fire in the hole already, but Walter's looking at the monitors again, speechifying about the rhythm and the cadence of the beautiful symphony and other such nonsense, when he suddenly points to an ornate old-timey door that he's noticed no one ever goes through. "You know what that is, don't you? That's William Bell's office," says Hurley.
We jump right to Walter excitedly wheeling stacks of boxes into Nina's office. She's reading The First People book again. I bet she hasn't even touched the Miguel Syjuco book I sent her! It's somewhat surprising that Walter hasn't been in there already, but he says he's found the most amazing things: Animal ESP, morality detector, viral dreaming, powdered water (just add water?). Some of their best ideas! I never heard the word "hoverbikes" though, so it's not that impressive.
Anyway, Walter's been going through Bell's files because the universes are on a collision path, blah blah blah, protect the world, yadda yadda yadda. "If Belly were here, he wouldn't let everyone down," says Walter, adding that Bell would have figured out what the machine does and how it relates to Peter. "And to make matters worse, for the first time since we've been reunited, Peter is truly happy," he finishes. I'm a little confused by that. I guess he means that things are going to suck even MORE for Peter if the whole doomsday whatsis comes to fruition? Would he prefer it if Peter were his usual cranky self? Nina asks why Peter's so happy, and Walter explains, basically, that it has to do with mounting Olivia nightly. Walter didn't realize that Nina didn't know. Well, now she does, and she says it's wonderful. Sounds like she hasn't told anyone that Peter has to make sure he's with Olivia and not Fauxlivia because that will determine which universe survives. Anyway, Walter explains that his happiness is a constant reminder of the price of his failure, to which I again would like to ask: would you prefer it if Peter were miserable? And then he gives a long speech about going through the files, missing Belly, wondering if he could succeed without him. "And then I remembered how good we were together!" he says, and now he's throwing files on Nina's desk and talking about how maybe if he goes through them he'll remember his old thought patterns, and remember how he used to think back when there were no limitations, when anything was possible. Well, it's a better plan than smoking up with the night watchman every night.
Speaking of anything is possible, we cut to a couple of ne'er-do-wells climbing, hand over hand, up ropes along the side of a tall concrete-walled building, the Massachusetts Metal Depository, and then... hmm. This is odd. There are boots on some kind of concrete overhang. Not falling off, so they must be nailed on. The first guy to reach them flips around so he can slide his feet in, and then he zips the boots up and takes some tentative steps, upside down, as his partner makes his way to the second pair of boots and puts them on. And then they're interrupted by a security guard, and the camera flips around to reveal they're actually right-side up now. "Koenig! Come on!" yells the first guy, who's getting into a car, but the security guard has a gun out and yells, "Let me see your hands!" and then Koenig reaches for something, and the security guard fires, and some of Koenig's blood splatters out in front of him and floats in droplets, upward. Moments later, Koenig slides up out of his boots and drifts, lifeless, up the side of the building, until the rope, to which he's still tethered, arrests his ascent.
After the opening credits, we're in the Harvard engineering building, where Peter is running tests on the memory discs he "retrieved" from the shape-shifters. Not necessary to the audio recording he's dictating is how he retrieved them, I suppose. The memory discs, arrayed on a panel, look an awful lot like Space Invaders aliens. They're connected by glowing cables, and Peter tells everyone that the daisy-chain wiring pattern seems to have activated them somehow, revealing tons of previously undetected data. "Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea how the hell to read it," he says. His phone rings, and lets us all take a moment to admire the sleek product-placed phone that clearly identifies Olivia calling. He picks it up, and she teases him, saying that she thought he was going to sleep in, like WHY ARE YOU CALLING THEN, and he points that out more nicely than I did, and she explains that she woke up early and it's warm outside so there's this "great street fair on Memorial Drive" and Peter says, "You like a street fair?" whatever that's supposed to mean, and Olivia says she loves a good street fair: "And you're not so bad yourself." Ugh. Keep it to yourselves, guys... Which, upon reflection, I guess you are. Anyway, since he's on the way, she figured she'd pick him up, and he makes up a lie about getting up early and going to the gym, and she certainly wouldn't want to interrupt his workout, and he says he'll shower and meet her in fifteen minutes.
So she gets off the phone, and now let's all admire the multimedia console in the
product-placed car that Olivia's driving, which now displays Broyles' glowering visage, and look how conveniently located the steering wheel buttons are! Olivia operates them with her thumb! And then she tells the car to "read text" and a computer voice says, "I need you and the Bishops." Truly, what a chariot! I will surely consider this model for my vehicular purchase!And then the Fringe gang shows up at the metal depository, where Koenig is still aloft. Walter's completely delighted, and says, "'They glanced up and saw Icarus float through the sky, and taking him for a god, they stood still in wonder.'" I do think the floating man would have drawn more of a crowd. Anyway, Broyles points out that Icarus had wings, but they have no idea how this guy is staying up there. "There's no alarm on the upper windows. Apparently they used their... ability to get up there," he says, and Walter giddily calls it a marvelous way to pilfer. Nice job on the effect on the floating man, by the way. A cop reels him in, and Walter points out, somewhat unnecessarily, that the man is dead: "Assuming he is a man."
The trigger-happy security guard explains that he thought he saw him reach for a gun, so he shot him, and then the guy just floated away. They've got a sketch of what the other guy looked like, and the security guard says there's no gold or platinum missing. Olivia figures that they went to a lot of trouble to get in there, so they must have been after something. Arguably, it's less trouble for guys who can float to pull off a job like that, but we don't need to get into that.
Then there's an agent bringing Broyles a key card they found on the dead guy and after the security guard says it's not for the building, Broyles tells the agent to contact the manufacturer so they can find out what it's for. And while an agent comes over to say they discovered what was taken, Peter's over discovering the weighted-down boots that kept them counterbalanced, and Walter's struggling to examine Floaty McWeightlessness. Jesus, how long ago was he shot? I love it when it seems like the investigating officers didn't do a single damn thing until the Fringe folks showed up.
Anyway, a quick look at the guy's leg confirms that he's human after all, but his calf muscles are extremely atrophied. Makes sense in that you don't use muscles when you float: just ask astronauts. But Walter points out that for deterioration like he's got, he would have had to be weightless for some time. Also, points out Peter, the chest and shoulders are all normal.
Olivia strolls over to ask if they know anything about osmium, instead of Googling it on her magic phone like anyone else would have. If she had done that, though, we wouldn't have been treated to Peter showing off how quickly he can rattle off some information about how it's a durable metal used in electrical contacts and fountain pen nibs. Really, fountain pen nibs? Olivia says the warehouse is missing a substantial quantity, so she thinks that's what the thieves were after. Peter says that's weird because osmium isn't particularly valuable, but Walter points out the irony of the crime: osmium is the heaviest element on Earth: "It's like using balloons to steal bowling balls," he says.
Over at Frost Aerodymanics, guest star Alan Ruck is talking to a co-worker about how something would require the cockpit be resistant to radiation at higher altitudes, so maybe they should blend it with a slightly denser compound.
The other guy from the robbery is in the car park as Ruck and his co-worker enter, and he calls for Dr. Krick, and a surprised Ruck asks "Scotty" to give him a minute, and goes over to ask what the hell the guy's doing here. "Koenig is dead. There was a guard. He shot him," he says, and Krick is a little nonplussed to find out that Koenig's body was left behind. "I had to. What do we do?" says the accomplice, and Krick tells him to go home while he figures something out. But there's more: "I've been nauseous. And my head is killing me. I didn't feel like this the last time," he says, and Krick asks if they got what he asked for. Buddy nods and starts to get it, and Krick tells him not here, ordering him to go to the lab and wait for him. Krick then goes back to his co-worker, and I can only imagine the story he told to explain why some guy who looks like he's in heroin withdrawal just accosted him in a parking lot. Buddy gets back into the car, pulling -- with difficulty -- his weighted-boot-wearing legs inside the vehicle.
Over in Walter's lab, Peter's going through Bell's old files, looking for anything related to gravity. I won't gross you out with Walter's speculation as to what a file labeled "floaters" might actually contain, but when Astrid reacts with disgust, Walter says, "Everybody poops, dear," which is true. Doesn't exactly make it a fun topic of conversation, though. There's another file, too: Personal floatation devices. Peter starts reading it: "The balloon is to be swallowed and then inflated with helium via a tube inserted into the subject's..." Thankfully, Peter stops reading, and Walter reflects on the design flaw that prevented a ton of people for volunteering. Can we be done with the zany scientist comic-relief portion of the show now?
Walter's examining Koenig's bloodwork, and finding there's no helium, nothing gaseous at all, no hydrogen or methane. But his white blood cell count is low, meaning a weakened immune system. Walter theorizes that whatever's making him float is also attacking his body's defences. "Whatever it is, I think the effects are wearing off," says Peter, lifting Koenig's arm, which floats gently back down again.
Olivia comes in with the news that they haven't found this guy in the system yet, but they traced the keycard to a warehouse in Allston, so Peter and Olivia are going on a little ride, which gives Walter a thrill and Peter asks him what's up. "Nothing. When your mother and I were courting, we used to take long walks in the park. But I can see for your generation that a drive to a warehouse would be just as enchanting," he says, making everyone giggle. Look, if you're getting stoned and waking up with Yoko Ono, I don't believe you're likely to call anything "courting" but never mind.
Over at a warehouse in, oh, let's say Allston, Dr. Krick shows up and uses his keycard -- we get a nice long look at it so we know it's the same as the one that was found on Koenig. As he strides through the warehouse, the other guy stands up. "What's happening to me?" he wails, and Krick looks and sees that he's bleeding from both eyes. Big deal! Same thing happened to me last time I switched contact-lens manufacturers.
So in the actual lab, Krick's working with some blue liquid and a Bunsen burner, with the floaty guy saying he doesn't understand, that Krick said if he got more of that stuff that it would be permanent. Krick says he's working on it: "You can't defy gravity without consequences. That's the problem," he says, and then tries to make Bleeding Eyes Murphy here feel better by giving him a pep talk about being a pioneer. "Men like you, your participation in this experiment will help him discover a way to eliminate the side effects."
But while Krick draws the blue liquid into a syringe, Bleeding Eyes up and dies. To his credit, Krick at least looks distressed about this. He's not a complete monster!
Back at Harvard, Walter's still struggling to figure out what's making the body float, when suddenly it drops to the ground like a sack of potatoes. He tells Astrid to put the body on a table and notes that it's dropped three feet in the last half-hour. Well, really, it's dropped three feet in the last half-second. Astrid says it's like a dying balloon, which Walter rejects, because balloons don't lose their buoyancy so inconsistently. Something is eluding him, he thinks. Meanwhile, Astrid can't lift Koenig off the ground so Walter goes to help her, only to find that he now weighs a ton. Something occurs to Walter so he tells Astrid to run a test for osmium. She asks him
why that would make him float. "It can't, of course. That's what's troubling me," says Walter. Well, thanks for the "explanation."Elsewhere, Peter and Olivia are using their driving time (presumably after having sex first) to be annoyingly cutesy -- in this instance they're apparently deciding on "full disclosure" of things about the other that annoy them. Olivia's finally figured one out, only instead of saying "don't you know how to use a damn razor?" she says that when Peter's rubbing her back when they watch television he gets distracted and just turns his hand in a circle over and over again, and he disputes her version of that, and they're absolutely nauseatingly adorable. She tells him that it's like he's burrowing through the muscle into the bone, and she doesn't like it, and he smilingly agrees to no more "burrowing" and by this point I'm praying for some sort of vehicular-based monster to wipe out their car and kill the both of them. I mean, it's not like there's going to be any more episodes beyond this season, so I would be happy at this point if these two cutesy-poo lovebirds died happy and we'll spend the rest of the series watching the world fall apart, the end.
Anyway, Olivia burbles about how she loves "full disclosure" and Peter seems a little nervous about it and wants to clarify how it's supposed to work, only he can't come right out and say, "So do we have to tell each other if, for example, we kill a bunch of shape-shifters in an impatient attempt to figure things out for ourselves?" Olivia teasingly asks if he's "holding out" on her, and says it's a great game if two people are playing. Yeah, what's a better game than two people telling each other what they don't like about each other?
Anyway, thank god they find the warehouse. Inside, Krick's hard at work with some tool that is whirring and filling a pan with blood -- and then a foot drops heavily into the pan too. Oh, gross. Bleeding Eyes is now missing a foot. Krick then goes to work trying to scrape something off the protruding leg bone into a Petri dish, and then notices a security guard or someone letting Peter and Olivia into the place. This wrinkle does not appear to please him.
Nearby, Peter and Olivia get inside and Olivia draws his gun. I love the fact that Olivia has her gun while Peter doesn't even bother to take his hands out of his pockets. Way to be ready for anything, Peter. They find Krick's lab, where Bleeding Eyes is sitting up with the help of a chain wrapped under his arms, suspended from the ceiling. Peter pulls out the security guard's sketch and compares it to Bleeding Eyes. "Looks like we found the second thief," he says, and Olivia notes the sawn-off foot and points out that there's a third, unless he did that to himself. Which really wouldn't be the weirdest thing that's ever happened on this show.
A clanking sound nearby draws their attention, and they check out a walk-in freezer. Inside, they find a collection of frozen, grotesque bodies and body parts. Olivia puts her gun away, disgusted, and I'd just like to ask WHAT THE HELL MADE THAT NOISE? I wouldn't be putting my gun away so quickly.
Anyway, some time later, Walter's on the scene, noting that the bodies have been dissected, but that's not what killed them: "It was the high concentration of osmium in their blood. They all have toxic levels." He shows them the injection spots on one stiff's arm. He figures the dissections were for tissue samples in an attempt at an autopsy. Peter wants to know how injecting someone with the world's heaviest element could make them float, and these days Walter pretty much starts to cry whenever someone asks him a question he can't answer.
Fortunately, Broyles has a few answers: he takes them to a nearby alley where there are eight discarded wheelchairs. Good job covering your tracks there, Krick. Can't imagine that a pile of discarded wheelchairs would raise anyone's suspicions! Broyles says the men suffered from muscular dystrophy and had been handicapped for years. Of course, knowing the answer only makes Walter angry at himself for having missed the obvious solution. Olivia wonders why these people were targeted, and Peter figures they weren't targeted at all but volunteers: "They were confined to wheelchairs for years. How could they pass up an opportunity to fly? That's a deal with the devil nobody would pass up."
Elsewhere, in a gymnasium, several wheelchair warriors play that bruising form of wheelchair rugby known as "murderball" -- not to be confused with the murderball played in certain regions of South America, which we know as "soccer." During a break in the action, one of the players, named Michael, wheels over to a table of water bottles for a drink. Krick is in the stands watching, and he tells Michael that it was a hell of a play he made, and Michael says, "These newbies don't know how to play defence." Oh, so I bet you "pwned" them, huh? Then Michael gets called over to his team, because the teams congregate on the side of the gym away from the water bottles, which doesn't make any sense.
Krick goes and sits back down, and notices someone else in the stands, in a wheelchair, watching the game. After a moment, he says, "Tough sport, huh?" and the guy nods, and says, "Brutal. Must be quite a rush." With some prodding from Krick, the kid admits he's never been healthy enough to play, and when Krick asks if he wishes he could, the kid says, "I wish a lot of things. But I stopped believing in leprechauns and miracles a long time ago." They threw in the timely "leprechauns" comment because St. Patrick's Day was fast approaching! Krick says: "What if I told you I could give you a miracle?" and the kid looks at him, suspicious, and I can't believe Krick doesn't just get beat up all the time by people he approaches, wheelchairs or no.
Back at Harvard, Walter is picking out heavy chunks of osmium from Koenig's blood, which was sent over from the morgue so he could isolate it. But don't think he doesn't have a little job for Astrid! He asks her to "dispose of the excess," which in this case is several cartoons of human blood. She looks at the blood-spattered cartons, glares at Walter, rolls her eyes and goes off to do it, grumbling "I went to Quantico for this?" under her breath, even though this is hardly the least objectionable task she's been asked to do, plus this is almost the end of the third season already.
Over in the office, Peter and Olivia are trying to find a connection between the victims, but they're coming up empty, so of course Peter will take any excuse for a break to go stuff his face and he suggests they go get a pizza at "Regina's" but it's OK because he says they'll take the confidential health records and investigation files of the super-secret Fringe division in the car with them to the pizza place.
So they ask Astrid and Walter if they need anything on their pizza run, and Walter, smiling, asks for some licorice, which Astrid says she'll get from a vending machine for him, and she's still grouchy because she's on blood detail, and then she lays into Walter. "You're the motherfucker who should be on blood detail! We're fuckin' switchin'!"
In the hallway, Peter and Olivia start holding hands and Peter says "This smiling is kinda freaking me out, right?" and speaking of smiling, there's Nina, who's also smiling, and Peter and Olivia quickly drop their hands like Nina's blind and won't SEE them or something, and she says she came by to drop off a file that Peter requested from Massive Dynamic. "But please, do not let go of a beautiful woman's hand on my account," she adds, because all Olivia and Peter need is for someone ELSE to be overinvested in their relationship. Peter, because he is a genius, guesses that Walter told her. "Yes, and he's very pleased, as am I," she says.
Olivia, being nosy, wants to know what the file is, and Peter, sounding a little too obviously like he's covering something up, hastily says it's just some background research on shape-shifters. Fortunately for Peter, he's saved from having to lay on a bunch
more lies when Broyles calls Olivia's cellphone, so she excuses herself, and Nina takes the chance to tell Peter that he's made a wise decision to go forward. "You deserve to be happy. Both of you," she says, forgetting to add, "Plus we all die if you don't."Inside the lab, Walter's getting more and more upset at not being able to solve the problem, and Astrid's got more bad news: they're out of licorice. But she got him mints! I wouldn't toy with him, Astrid.
He accepts the mints, and starts ranting about how whoever enabled those people to float is altering the basic properties of osmium, making the heaviest element lighter than air. Well, maybe he knew not to talk when he had a mouthful of mints, I'm not talking about anyone in particular, Walter. "He's defied physics! Our entire universe exists in a delicate state of equilibrium. And we know what happens if that balance is upset? It could cause a chain reaction!" And he rants like this, about chaos being caused, and he dumps a mint in a handy open two-litre bottle of cola that's right there, causing it to gush up in a fountain of caffeine and artificial flavour and colour. Good thing they were out of licorice! What would he have done with that? I suppose he could have used it as a straw on the cola...
Anyway, Astrid shrieks like Walter's HEAD just exploded, and Nina comes in and sternly says she doesn't imagine they're preparing for a science fair, and I'd like to remind Nina that a) Walter is your boss now and b) any time is a good time to put Mentos in a Diet Coke, or in this case, mints in cola.
Walter sullenly says he'll get a mop, but Astrid says she'll do it, because she's been relegated to lab janitor anyway. Walter's gone all mopey very quickly, so Nina asks him what's wrong and he says he needs Belly's help and can't do this alone.
"I know he's dead. I know that. But maybe we can bring him back," says Walter, pulling out one of Bell's research projects, a file labeled "Soul Magnets," which I must insist on calling, "Soooooul Magnets." Walter says Belly posited that a person's soul or consciousness continues to live on after death, and just needs a vessel or a host to return to. Nina says it was one of William's "more extreme flights of fancy," but Walter will not be deterred, saying all he'd need to do was to prepare someone by inserting a microscopic soooooul magnet inside them. Sure, what could be simpler? Well, apparently it could be done using injections, food, or a cup of tea.
Nina's quite skeptical, but Walter wonders what if Belly's already, you know, inserted a soooooul magnet in someone. "Then all we have to do is to figure out how to trigger the magnets to summon the soul back into the host, and he'll be back here with us," says Walter, who has become so frustrated with how hard it is trying to figure out what made these guys float that he wants to switch to figuring out how to bring a dead man back to life. Walter's excitement quickly fades to despair, and he starts talking -- AGAIN -- about how Belly cut out parts of his brain, and he doesn't think he's capable.
"Walter, it was never your intellect that made you exceptional," says Nina. Penis, right? I KNEW it. "You're brilliant, of course. But it was your imagination, your boundless creativity," she continues. Oh. She concedes that he's not quite whole, but the best parts of him remain. (Knew it.) Walter asks what if he fails, and she says he won't. Because he can't. And it looks like they're going to kiss, but we go to black.
And then we're at Krick's... house? I can't imagine they're in the warehouse, which is probably still covered in cops. The kid from the murderball game is there too, and Krick gives him an injection. The kid at first doesn't feel anything, but within seconds has started to float up out of his chair.
Krick tells him to try taking a few steps, and the kid -- named Vince -- does, his toes the only part of his body still touching the ground. After giving walking a try, Krick helps Vince, seeming tired by the effort, back into his wheelchair and gives him weighted boots -- that I imagine were recently worn by one or more dead men -- and warns him to keep them on at all times when he's outside, or he'll just float up into the atmosphere. Vince says he doesn't know how to thank Krick, who says he doesn't have to: "I just wish I had enough to make it permanent. Unfortunately, that was the last of my treatments," he says, "casually." The bait is on the hook, and the kid wastes maybe a second before asking how they get more. Whatever you do, don't go down to the 7-Eleven. Their osmium is in small batches that are relatively expensive -- Costco is a much better option.
Over at Harvard, Walter has taken Nina's advice -- get creative! -- and is somehow using liquid nitrogen to melt the osmium. That's because the laws of physics -- always slightly loose on this show anyway -- have gone all screwy. Up is down, left is right, hot is cold, etc., so the cold liquid nitrogen is melting the osmium. As it liquefies, Astrid spots some white stuff in it. "A mystery element!" says Walter, who is getting his groove back by the second. He tells Astrid to call Peter and Olivia to tell them they're coming over with something to show them.Meanwhile, over at Krick's house, the doctor is helping his son out of his wheelchair and into bed. Michael notices his dad's dressed like he's going out, and Krick says he's got some work to do back at the office. "It's nearly midnight," points out Michael, and his dad blames this new project that is keeping him really busy. He sits on his son's bed and stares into the distance for a moment and tells his son he's close to something big: "A breakthrough that'll change everything. Change lives. But the answer is just out of my reach," he says, and Michael confidently says that his dad will get there, because he's never failed before and won't this time. The guy clearly worships his dad and figures he can do no wrong. Must be nice! My daughter's four and she's already figured out what an idiot I am. Krick says good night, and pauses for a moment in the doorway before saying, "See you in the morning."
Over in Walter's lab, Peter's looking at the white substance under a microscope, and Walter says he's identified it as lutetium. Peter points out that it's extremely dense, just like osmium, and Walter acknowledges that the two shouldn't even be able to form a molecule, let alone one that would make a human being float. Which doesn't explain anything for anybody, but Olivia's mainly interested in finding out where this guy would be getting a limited supply of lutetium. Walter says it's mainly found in meteorites and, because he's Walter, jumps to the possibility that the perpetrator's from outer space. That would hardly be the least likely thing to happen on this show, but the gang quickly figures out where there's an abundance of meteorites. Boston still doesn't have a Meteorite Hut franchise yet, so it must be the Museum of Science and Lutetium-Stuffed Meteorites.
That's where Vince is fiddling with the skylight controls, and then floating gently down past some planet models suspended in the air, down towards a pedestal displaying a sizeable chunk of meteorite, and a nearby glass case displaying a few more. He makes his way over the glass case, and then makes the mistake of setting down his flashlight, which must be pretty heavy, because when he lets go he starts to float upwards again, and he grabs the flashlight to ground himself.
Outside, the Fringe gang is pulling up, meeting Broyles, who tells them that BPD's sending over a unit, and the curator says there's a night watchman on duty and all the wings are individually locked from the inside. "Seems pretty solid," he says, and Peter's the one who spots the weighted boots near an outside wall. "Not solid enough," he says, and the Fringers pick up the pace a little.
Inside, Vince is pushing a bunch of buttons on a security panel -- while hanging in the air -- which disables electric eye beams in front of the doors, and he lets Vince in, who wants to make sure he disable the alarm. "I did exactly what you told me. The way we practiced," he says. Krick managed to turn Vince into a superthief pretty quickly! Krick grabs hold of Vince's arm and hauls him through the wing over to the meteorites.
Meanwhile, the night watchman is guiding the Fringe team through the museum and confidently saying that if they were being robbed, he'd know, because they've got cameras on all the doors. "They didn't come in through the doors," says Peter. Well -- actually, Krick did! So much for your cameras, night watchman, and I don't mean Tom Morello.
While Krick is busy scraping stuff off meteorites, Vince is the one who hears the approaching Fringe Justice team and sees the flashlights sweeping through the wing, and when Fringe arrives, Krick takes two seconds to think things over before bolting while the night watchman fiddles with the locked door. Poor Vince starts yelling, "You can't just leave me!" I'd probably add, "Dr. Krick of Frost Aerodynamics! Don't leave me, Dr. Krick of Frost Aerodynamics!" Vince unbuckles his weighted belt, and quickly rises up through the planets, before grabbing a hold of an astronaut, realizing that maybe the open skylight ought to be respected. But his hand is slipping.
While Olivia stops the disappointingly easy to catch Dr. Krick by firing a bullet through the door he's about to exit through, Peter goes racing up the steps near the floating Vince and leaps on him just as Vince loses his grip, sending them both towards the ground, not falling as fast as you normally would, but still hard enough to smash the meteorite display case. There's going to be an awful lot of disappointed field-tripping students tomorrow.
So now Krick is in jail, with a snazzy orange jumpsuit on, and Michael comes in to see him and he's being accompanied by the Bishops for some damn reason. "No one will tell me what's going on," he tells his dad, and Krick confesses that he hurt some people in wheelchairs while trying to help them, because he wanted to fix them. "I did it for you, Michael. When it was perfected, I was gonna give it to you," he says, but Michael doesn't appreciate his dad thinking of him as something that needs to be fixed. Krick backtracks and says he wanted Michael to be happy. "I was happy. I went to bed at night knowing I had a father who loved me," says a horrified Michael, who then rolls away and goes from worshipping his dad to hating him just like that. You know, if he plays his cards right, he could probably extort some guilt presents out of his dad. Need a new Xbox?
Michael leaves, with Peter going with him. And as if Krick isn't having a bad enough time right now, he's got to put up with Walter lecturing him on the folly of Daedalus crafting wings for Icarus, who flew too close the sun which melted his wings and he fell to his death. "Suppose that makes me a lucky man then," says Krick sarcastically, and Walter says, "Other parents weren't so fortunate," points out Walter. Yeah, like the mother of your former lab assistant. But Walter's not there just for sanctimonious lectures. He needs to know how Krick did it.
Krick explains that he was contracted to develop a new alloy for military aircraft -- a metal dense enough to keep pilots safe from ground fire but still allow for flight. He wasn't having any luck, and then he combined two rare elements: "And that's when it happened. I'd combined two of the densest elements on earth, and somehow the result was a new molecule, a molecule lighter than air."
Well, this doesn't really answer anything for Walter, who'd already figured out the basic ingredients. But he goes straight to Nina to tell her that Dr. Krick isn't responsible because his serum should have worked -- the laws of nature are changing on their own. "Our universe is starting to break down because of what I did twenty-five years ago. What we've seen happening on the other side is starting to happen here," he says, and Nina notes that he seems to be taking the news rather well. That's because Walter -- who's got the soooooul magnets file with him -- says he's figured out how to stop it.
Meanwhile, over at Harvard -- not at Walter's lab but across campus -- Olivia is meeting up with Peter and joking about how Peter wants to make out in front of college kids and not his dad, and Peter ignores that Olivia seems rather turned on by the prospect of making out in front of college kids, and tells her that he hasn't been entirely honest with her: "Whatever is happening between the two universes, whatever our fate is, I'm right at the centre of it." Olivia says they're all working together to figure it out. Peter says he knows they're
all trying to help but it's not their faces in the drawing but his. So he's been working on something that he didn't want to tell anybody about because he can't trust the FBI and Walter's too protective and so Peter can't trust his judgment. "But I do trust yours." Olivia looks just a tad concerned. "But I don't want there to be any more secrets between the two of us. So full disclosure." Olivia looks fully concerned now, like she's thinking, "Uhhh, all I really wanted was for you to do a better job rubbing my back."Over at Massive Dynamic, Nina's rolling her eyes at Walter bringing up soooooul magnets again, because William is gone and Walter can't bring him back.
Walter thinks he can though, and thinks he was right about the trigger, and his eyes wander over to the bell behind Nina's desk, the one William left her. "I think there is an instrument that can draw Belly's consciousness out of its new vessel." He goes to pick it up, and Nina figures he cannot be serious, and Walter blathers on about a person's soul being energy, which cannot be created or destroyed. "No matter where Belly's consciousness is, the harmonic vibrations emanating from this bell will draw it forth from whatever vessel he chose before..." Nina tries to take the bell back but before she can, Walter rings it. Then he looks deep into her eyes, and starts to get excited. "Belly?" he says, and an irritated Nina says it's still her. Not that this deters Walter, who says if he's right, wherever Belly is, he'll find them. They both look over at Nina's door.
But we cut to Peter's secret Harvard lab, where he shows her everything they know about the machine, every schematic, every piece of data and diagnostic. Olivia walks through the lab, and looks at the display of the Space-Invaders memory disks. "Are these..." she says, and Peter says yes, they're memory disks from dead shape-shifters. "How did you get them?" she asks, and Peter doesn't say anything, and she nods as she gets it. And while he's explaining that they're still working but the information is encrypted, Olivia seems a little discombobulated by a faint ringing sound. "I've run it through every code-breaking program that I know, but so far I can't break it."
And then Olivia, without turning around, says, "That's because the decoder key is in my office," and Peter doesn't appear to notice that Olivia's voice suddenly sounds like she's been smoking a pack a day for the last thirty years. "What? At the FBI?" he asks, and Olivia (Bellivia?) says, "No. At Massive Dynamic." S/he turns and looks at Peter. "Hello, Peter. It's nice to see you again." Gah! So: just when Peter and Olivia have worked things out and Olivia has gotten over her resentment at Peter boinking her alternative-universe doppelganger, she goes and gets herself possessed by the soul of an 80-year-old genius scientist. I hate when that happens!
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. He's glad to find out Joshua Jackson isn't perfect. He gives bad backrubs! Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel[at]gmail.com.