It's just a one-night stand. What's the worst that could happen? Well, you could get pregnant with a rapidly aging fetus that kills you, and which then dies itself in a matter of hours, already an old man.
The Fringe team checks things out, and finds a couple of personal connections. One is that the man who was with the quickie-pregnancy woman has the same M.O. as a serial killer that Olivia investigated with John some time ago. They never caught the guy. Meanwhile, the whole rapid aging thing is a concept worked on by Walter with a Dr. Penrose, when they were attempting to grow human soldiers in about three years. The work was done on the pituitary gland, and the serial killer used to extract that gland from his victims.
Walter suspects the killer is a successful result of the human-cultivation experiment, who would need pituitary extract to slow his own aging process. The group borrows some technology from Massive Dynamic to extract the last image one of his victims saw, right from her own eyeball. Yes, you read that right.
The image, of a bridge, leads the gang to a warehouse in Stoughton, where they manage to prevent another woman's death. Dr. Penrose, who calls the killer "son," gets away, while the killer runs for it. Olivia chases him, but since he didn't get the pituitary extract he needed, he gets old really quickly, complains about these kids today with their low-riding pants, and then dies.
Fringe is now two-for-two in terms of episodes featuring couples in trysts in motels, although this one seems a little less non-skeezy than the one chosen by John and Olivia in the pilot.
"What's her name? Whoever you're thinking about? Your girlfriend or whatever," asks a woman in a black bra and panties, lounging in bed all aglow, as her partner gets dressed. "I don't have a girlfriend," says the guy, looking slightly embarrassed, and the woman says, "Yeah?" kinda perkily, as though maybe now this relationship has a FUTURE or something.
Buddy is clutching a satchel, and the woman wants to know what's in it. She hopes it's a mushroom pizza, because that's what she's hungry for right now. Yeah, it's a mushroom pizza, jokes the guy, although "jokes" is a bit of an overstatement, and he takes the satchel in the bathroom with him as he finishes getting dressed. "You're not married, are you? Not that it's any of my business. You never know about people," calls out the woman from the bed. He doesn't say anything, but she keeps babbling. "My name isn't Amber, by the way. Obviously. That's just for the club." The guy opens the satchel, and inside are all kinds of surgical tools (regular ones, not creepy-ass ones like in Dead Ringers). She asks if he wants to know her real name, like he's got any power at all to keep her from nattering away. It's "Loraine Daisy," because all her sisters have flowers for middle names, and her mom can't spell.
Meanwhile, Buddy is busy affixing a vial of orange stuff to a syringe. And now he's got some green stuff, and one way or another her mom's spelling inability is going to be the least of her problems.
After a few moments of blessed silence, she suddenly starts grunting and gasping. Buddy runs back out into the motel room, where Loraine has gotten up from the bed and is staggering around in pain. "What's going on?" he says. He turns her around, and her belly is roiling -- something's inside, pushing out. "It'll be over in a second," he says, and the implication that he knows what's going on kind of cancels out any reassurance that statement might otherwise offer. He runs into the bathroom and gathers up his surgical instruments while she stumbles, screaming, outside and into the parking lot. A couple of other guests at the motel come out to ask what's going on, with one guy offering to give them a ride to the hospital, but Buddy says he'll take her himself.
She screams all the way there, her stomach still writhing. "What's happening to me?" she shrieks. Nothing but pop-culture punishment for unprotected sex!
They get to the hospital, and he helps her out of the car -- and then he jumps back into the car and peels off, with Loraine screaming for him not to leave.
And now Loraine is being wheeled through the hospital, surrounded by ER staff -- a doctor wants to know how far along she is. "I'm not pregnant!" yells Loraine, but her distended belly suggests otherwise.
In the operating room, Loraine stops screaming -- stops doing anything at all -- as we hear this ripping sound. Her heartbeat has stopped, and the doctor quickly decides to get the baby out. He makes a bloody incision with a scalpel, and pulls out some sort of form -- we can't see much. We hear a low, guttural moaning. One intern looks like he's going to throw up, a nurse screams. Like I said, we don't really see it, but it seems like, at best, that if this were a Chinese hospital, this kid wouldn't be expecting to perform the national anthem live any time soon.
Hey, awesome! A shadowy meeting of shadowy people! Broyles is thanking an assemblage of eight to ten people for convening at this late hour. He says they received a report 43 minutes ago of an incident at the Wallace Bromley Medical Center. "While the details are still coming in, it appears to be an another anomaly whose mysteries and origins remain the sole purpose of this committee," he says. Among the attendees is Nina Sharp. Fortunately she leaves her arm skin on.
Broyles wants to identify the members of his new team, which he hopes will have more success than the last. Something tells me those people aren't even alive anymore. The committee members all have files with pictures of the crew, but Broyles also puts their images up on a couple of monitors as he rattles off their qualifications.
Dr. Walter Bishop was hailed by his contemporaries as the successor to Albert Einstein. Nina interrupts to point out Walter was committed to a mental hospital in 1991 for manslaughter, and it's his own research, as Broyles himself acknowledges, that could very well be the root of all the recent unexplained phenomena. Broyles points out that a) Walter was never convicted of anything, and b) his years in the mental institution at least serve as an alibi for him having had anything to do with the phenomena. "His knowledge makes him uniquely qualified to assist our efforts," says Broyles, "while he is in the custody of his son." Broyles has his presentation all synchronized on two monitors, not just one. A picture of Peter pops up on the other one, and Nina sneers about Peter's shady history, and that Broyles proposes to give him access to information that, if revealed publicly, could cause mass panic. Broyles says there isn't anything Peter couldn't have found out from his dad anyway, or from the fact that he's got a 190 IQ. It may be worth pointing out that Peter's big brain doesn't seem to have been aware of any of this shit going down before now, and that were it not for Broyles, Peter wouldn't even be in contact with his dad.
But Nina's not done shitting on the new team: she wants to know what Broyles was thinking when he recruited Olivia Dunham, who was banging her colleague, who turned out to be a traitor. Broyles says he was thinking that since she didn't hesitate to pursue information that pointed towards the man she loved, at great personal pain and embarrassment, "she must be worthy of our trust." Nice answer -- except he asked her to work for him beforeshe found out about John's involvement.
Elsewhere, Olivia is obsessively going over documents, unsolved cases and the like, related to John. It must be serious: she's wearing glasses. Her phone rings. "Wake up. There's something you need to see," says Broyles. What, no "hello"? No "did you catch Mad Men last night?" Nothing? He tells her to assemble the team and meet him at the Bromley Medical Center in thirty minutes.
A sleepy and grumpy Peter greets Olivia at the door of his hotel room. "Your phone was off the hook," she tells him, and he points out that it was because he didn't want to be woken up. He goes to get his father who's not in his room but sitting in the closet, wide awake. "What the hell are you doing in there again?" Peter says. Walter: "Where I've been for the past seventeen years is a mental hospital." I'm not sure if he's saying he's used to confined spaces, or if he's just reminding Peter that he does crazy shit because he's crazy. Walter tells a story about a fellow inmate who used to sing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" every night, and now he's having trouble falling asleep without hearing that song, and Peter just rolls his eyes and tells his dad to get up.
Over at the medical centre, Broyles compliments Dunham for getting everyone there in 27 minutes, so I guess since she had to stop to pick up slowpoke Peter and his crazy dad that the Bromley Medical Center must really only be a few blocks away. Broyles introduces himself to Peter and thanks him for working with them. Peter, his usual friendly self, says he hasn't agreed to anything yet, and it's really his father that Broyles wants.
Walter's still in the car, playing with the seat warmer. "I've never seen a feature like this before. It warms your ass! It's wonderful!" he tells Broyles, after the agent walks over to the car. Broyles just stares at him, thinking, "I might just owe Nina a Coke after all."
Broyles walks them through the hospital, telling them about the Jane Doe who showed up on the hospital doorstep, pregnant to term. Died on the operating table, and two minutes later was a new mother to a baby, convulsing and in obvious pain. Doctors put him in a bassinet, and were transporting him when they realized they could see him growing before their eyes. "Growing ... you mean they could see it getting larger?" asks Olivia. Nina wouldn't be questioning Olivia's qualifications if she could see her kick-ass dictionary definition knowledge. She asks where the baby is now. Broyles leads them out into the hall (Peter has to hustle Walter, who's studying Loraine). Broyles explains that the baby died after half an hour, of natural causes. Olivia's all, huh? Broyles says the baby wasn't just growing, but aging. And a couple of crime scene guys are just finished up with the bloody body of an old man in a hall doorway -- still with an umbilical cord.
"We're supposed to believe that Grandpa here was born four hours ago," says Peter, while his father, fascinated, crouches down for a closer look. Broyles asks him if he has any ideas. "Celermitosis," says Walter. "Disabling. Reversing cell cycle inhibitors." More vaguely science-sounding things. He says he'll need to run extensive tests, with the bodies in a lab. He asks for one, and Broyles is surprised Walter doesn't remember that they've reopened his old lab at Harvard. Walter's momentarily embarrassed by his memory lapse, but then recovers to call that fantastic news. Peter wants to know why, even if all this is true, what they're doing here.
Broyles waits until they're all the way back at the lab to answer Peter, telling him about the recent inexplicable series of events being called "the Pattern." "Mr. Boyles, I consider myself a fairly intelligent guy, but I'm not following you here," he says. Olivia offers up a "weird shit be happening" stab at it, but then they're interrupted when Farnsworth comes in to say the hospital got a call from someone at the motel wanting to know if the pregnant woman was OK. She was there with a Caucasian male in his twenties. Wow, look at the team swing into action! Olivia tells Walter, who seems to be doing some tests on Loraine, that she needs him to take some samples at the motel, and he ignores her at first, then rips her head off, because he can't figure this out "with a girl buzzing in [his] ear." Peter says he'll take care of the samples, because his "limited stint" at MIT did teach him something.
Over at the motel, Olivia finds ID for "Loraine Daisy Alcott," and Peter makes fun of her name, and then finds something to sample in the bathroom: a little bit of orange gel on the sink. Olivia seems to find this significant, and then she notes that the woman's things were left behind, but not his. She squats down to examine the sheets. Peter jokingly asks if she's checking the thread count, and she says that's exactly what she's doing. Then she shines her flashlight on a cabinet and asks Peter to open it up, predicting there'll be sheets in there. There are. "OK, how'd you do that?" asks Peter.
Olivia goes stomping outside. "That's how he would do it," she mutters, adding that this guy she's talking about would go to the motel rooms first and replace the sheets with medical-grade leak-proof linen, to prevent any blood spills. She explains that there was a serial killer, victims in New York and New Jersey, that she and John investigated, but they never caught him. Peter tells her she can't beat herself up because she didn't catch "the bastard" on her "first try," although I think Loraine Daisy might beg to differ, and then Olivia yells at Peter because she has to reexamine all the cases she and John worked together, to see if there was something she missed.
Peter wisely decides to focus on the case right in front of them, and asks her how the killer did it. For this, she has no answer.
Driving back from the crime scene, Olivia tells Peter that this was one of the first cases she and John investigated together. The killer would murder five young women within a few days of each other. He'd take them back to a motel, give them a muscle paralyzer; they'd be wide awake but unable to move. He'd make an incision along their gums, and then -- oh my GOD -- pull their mouths open up to their eyes, go in through their nasal cavities and take out a piece of their brains. Peter handles this description about as well as I do, but he collects himself in time to ask how this all connects to "magic old man baby" and the pregnant woman. I can't believe "Magic Old Man Baby" is not the title of this episode. She has no idea, but says the killer used an orange gel as a muscle paralyzer, just like this guy. And if it is indeed the same guy, that means he's going to kill again.
In fact, here he is, stalking into a strip club, and casting a creepy glance at a blonde woman sitting by herself. Despite the fact this guy might as well have "serial killer" tattooed across his forehead, she comes right over. "I'm Stacey!" she says, all perky. Service with a smile, that's nice. You don't see a lot of that anymore.
Back over at Boston Federal Building, Charlie is telling a bunch of extras that John Scott's memorial service will be later in the week. And you know how he was trying to procure a deadly toxin for purposes heretofore unknown? Well, he's innocent until proven otherwise. And the official line on the incident is "no comment."
Olivia gets Charlie's attention, and he dismisses the extras and grumpily asks what she's doing there. She says she left him a message, and he snaps at her about opening up a twelve-year-old serial killer case. But what's really got him all frosted is not knowing how long Broyles is going to have her on special assignment. She doesn't answer. "What the hell are you working on, anyway?" he asks. She doesn't answer that either, just asks if Charlie knew about her and John, and maybe Olivia could go five minutes without her personal life spilling over into her job. That'd be nice. Anyway, Charlie knew, because he's not a moron. She feels like she took advantage of their friendship, because he didn't say anything even though he didn't approve. "I haven't seen you that happy in a long time," he says, gently. Uh-oh! Tragic backstory we haven't heard yet!
But looks like she's going to be back to crabby for a good long while, since she has to live with the fact that she didn't see him for what he was, and didn't stop him from doing whatever it was he did, and all I can say is that it's going to be a relief when we eventually find out that John was just trying to get a hold of the toxin to destroy it, or however they're going to make him actually turn out to be a hero. "I just wanna take a shower from the inside out." Shhhh! That's the plot from an upcoming episode! Charlie says he'll get her the files.
Over in Stoughton, Buddy drives up in some sketchy looking abandoned industrial building, and I can't believe alarm bells are not going off all over the place for Stacey, who's skipping along and saying that she just started working in that place a couple of weeks ago. Suuuuure you did, Stacey. At least it's a lot better than the one in Providence, which was a real dive, she tells Buddy, who could not appear less interested. She looks around the empty ... furniture workshop? I don't know. "Most guys take me to a hotel," says Stacey. Yeah, most guys let you live, too. Let us know if anything else seems weird, Stacey. "Those windows have a really great view of the bridge," he says. "I don't care about the bridge. What do you like?" says Stacey, all coquettish all of a sudden. He says he cares about the bridge and tells her to go look at it. Hey, the customer's always right, right? So she strolls over and looks out the window. Yep, that's a bridge, alright. She's sufficiently distracted so he can pull out his syringe o' muscle relaxant, and then he walks over and starts kissing her. She seems kinda into it. Not so much into having a needle plunged into the base of her neck, though. She goes limp pretty quickly.
Back at Harvard, Walter's using his time wisely by, um, milking Jean. "What are you doing?" snaps Peter. He snaps a lot. Walter says he's finished the testing: "You underestimate me, which I suppose I deserve."
Walter says he has "wonderful news": DNA tests confirm that the woman was impregnated by a man who's the result of experiments conducted by him in this very lab thirty years ago. "So you know how this happened," says Peter. Oh, no idea, says Walter. See, the wonderful news is that he remembered where he parked his car. "You remember where you parked your car seventeen years ago," says Peter.
And because the DNA tests are done and the milking is finished, it looks like all the chores are finished, so Walter and Peter can take a break and go visit Walter's car in a rundown, vandalized shed. Walter has no trouble remembering the lock combination (after all, as Peter notices, it's pi to six digits -- Walter really lucked out when the lock he bought turned out to have that combination!) and opens the garage door.
"I can't fathom that it's still here!" says Walter. Well, that makes two of us. Peter wonders if his dad has cars stashed all over town. "Not just cars. You have no idea what I've hidden," says Walter, gleefully. Well, fine, but if I hear the word "keistered" I'm out of here. I imagine his little hoarding places will come in handy from time to time, by which I mean "every episode."
Walter starts rummaging through the car for his file boxes. There is a jar with a hand preserved in formaldehyde. "Friend of yours?" asks Peter. "Oh, I certainly hope not," says Walter. Heh. Peter walks around to the front of the car and pops the hood. "You may be able to reanimate dead guinea pigs or whatever, but I can bring anything mechanical back from the dead," he brags. Peter needn't be so flip; if there's anything this show needs, it's one hundred percent more reanimated dead guinea pigs!
So what better place for Olivia to pore over sensitive, classified case files while working on an assignment in her new EVEN MORE SENSITIVE AND CLASSIFIED department than a public park bench right out in the open at the university? Fortunately, the photos of the victims and charts detailing "pituitary excision" are nowhere near as mutilated as Olivia described. It's probably pretty hard to make someone look like their mouths have been pulled open up to their eyes. And anyway, if she were inside working in the lab where she should be, she'd be denied the opportunity to be freaked out by the ugly old backfiring station wagon that is the Fringe team's new staff car. Peter waves from the driver's seat at her. I imagine Olivia will pretend she doesn't know them.
Farnsworth helps Peter and Walter bring in Walter's files, and Walter thanks her by introducing himself to her for the THIRD time. He tells them they're looking for anything to do with sella turcica, diaphragma sellae, the pituitary gland... Olivia's all, "hey, I recognize that last one!" She tells Walter that the killer removed the pituitary gland from his victims.
Well, that narrows the search down somewhat, but Farnsworth is all, "I'm going to ask questions the viewers are going to need answered," and asks what this has to do with the woman at the hospital. Walter talks about the manipulation of the pituitary gland causing rapid premature aging, but Farnsworth still doesn't get it, so it's time for Peter to dumb it down a shade: the pituitary gland is the boss of all the hormones that cause growth, which is really all aging is. Specifically, ear hair.
Olivia has managed to instantly glom onto the relevant case file on progeria (the rapid aging desease), done by a Dr. Penrose. Turns out Dr. Penrose was a former colleague of Walter's, although he had "severe pseudofolliculitis nuchae," according to Walter (razor burn, translates Peter), and they did experiments on rapid aging. Farnsworth has already FBI-Googled Dr. Penrose, who, in an unbelievable stroke of luck (well, not exactly, for reasons that will become clear), moved to the East Coast two years ago and is a professor at Boston College.
On the drive over, Olivia calls Charlie and asks him to look for any unsolved cases where the victims are missing pituitary glands. "Oh, you say the sweetest things," he says. "Only to you, Charlie," like John isn't even cold in his grave and here are these two flirting uncontrollably. He says he'll get someone on it.
Meanwhile, Buddy's got Stacey all tied up. Her mouth is held open with clamps, and he's holding a scalpel. Hurry, Olivia, hurry! He doesn't have a suction hose to clear her mouth of saliva buildup!
Over at Boston College, Olivia and Peter easily track down the professor and he doesn't even tell them to come back during his office hours. They bring him up to speed on the case, and ask if he ever shared his research with anyone. "I must tell you both, our work was ..." "Highly theoretical?" prompts Peter, who could maybe stow his sarcastic attitude for five minutes of his life. Yes, says Penrose, but more than that, it was wrong. He says he stopped working for the U.S. government after just one year, and then he was harassed and threatened with deportation. "Didn't feel like the America I remembered from when I was a boy," he says. "That is why, as sorry as I was to hear about Dr. Bishop's incarceration, I believe it was the best thing that could ever happen to humanity." Pssst! Olivia! Tell him Dr. Bishop's out of the asylum! He'll go mental! "No one in power should ever learn what he knows." He apologizes for sounding uncooperative, but his work ended years ago, and since then he's done all he can to forget it.
Outside, Olivia thinks Penrose was sincere, but Peter thinks he's not telling them everything. Since Olivia couldn't tell her boyfriend was involved in some shady dealings, let's go with Peter's assessment of this one, alright?
Charlie calls and says he found a victim with the central endocrine gland removed and wants to know if that counts. Olivia asks him to have the body sent over to the lab. "Will do," says Charlie.
Nice work, Charlie: he manages to get a body transported to the lab, with enough time for Walter to start working on it, in much less time than it takes Peter and Olivia to get back to Harvard.
"Astrid called. She said you had news," says Olivia. That's what the audio says. The closed captioning has Peter saying, "Whatever's going on has something to do with your work, doesn't it?" Anyway, Walter says the pituitary gland has indeed been removed, and he might have a hypothesis about what's happening. It has to with a program he worked on for the defense department, to "cultivate" soldiers: a baby that would, in just three years, be the equivalent of a 21-year-old soldier. Olivia looks horrified. "The only problem was how to slow the aging process once the subject had reached the desired physical age," says Walter. Well, I'm sure that wasn't the only problem. He thinks someone has used his research and had a breakthrough, and this killer is the result: the killer needs to extract the hormones from the pituitary glands of his victims to treat himself and slow the aging process.
So the baby was just a mistake. Aw, no! He wasn't a mistake! You're never supposed to tell the children they were accidents! He was a little miracle! "Even condoms are not one hundred percent effective," Walter says, giving Olivia and Peter concerned looks. Peter's a little old to be embarrassed by his father clinically explaining that Loraine and Buddy "fornicated," too. It's not like Walter used terms like "rumpy-bumpy" or anything. Olivia figures that the painful pregnancy alerted others to Loraine's plight, and Buddy was too scared to kill her there at the motel. She's all grouchy because his MO has changed, which means they have nothing to go on.
She stomps off in a little temper tantrum. "I thought you had a way with women," says Walter to his son. He hasn't even fornicated with this one yet!
Elsewhere, Buddy is stalking around his abandoned factory lair. "Christopher!" yells someone. It's Dr. Penrose, who tells Christopher the FBI came to see him. "You got that girl pregnant," he says. Christopher nods. Penrose hugs him. "Son, we have to be so careful," he says. "Careful" like heading straight to Christopher's hideout after the FBI have made a connection between the two of them? Christopher says the pain's getting worse. "Yes, well, we're almost there. You just need to get one more and you'll be OK again."
Back at Walter's lab, the mad doctor is bickering with his son about Jules Verne and the phrase "on your mind." Are you ready for this? Verne wrote a story about the idea that the last image you see before you die is burned on your retina. So all they have to do is -- of course -- recover the electrical impulses from her eye, and for some nonsensical reason, the muscle relaxant she was given will make it easier for them to get this.
Olivia's stomped off outside to sit on a park bench looking at a pond. Peter sits down to her, and she apologizes for "losing control," and he reminds her that he's dealing with the idea that his dad's work is responsible for all those murders. He touches her hand, and then says they may have found a way to track the guy down. They need a special piece of hardware that's very hard to find. Yes, I imagine the Eyeball Death-Image Extract-O-Tron 3000 is very difficult to come by. If only we knew of some shady high-tech firm...
So over to Massive Dynamic we go. Olivia sits in a waiting area with Broyles, surrounded by massive ever-changing pictures on the walls. Broyles says he's nervous about asking a favor from Massive Dynamic, because the corporate mind is always looking for a "quid pro quo." Skid row bro! Olivia ignores this in favor of asking Broyles why John suggested it wasn't a coincidence that she was recruited for Broyles' assignment.
Broyles ignores this and instead asks if the last time she was intimate with Agent Scott, was she safe? Olivia stares at him. "You weren't, were you?" says Broyles. Olivia starts screaming and her belly starts writhing -- and naturally it's all a big fakeout, in Olivia's mind. Broyles isn't even there.
So Nina Sharp makes small talk with Olivia, and thanks her for keeping Massive Dynamic's name out of the press during the whole Agent Scott thing. Turns out that Massive Dynamic is planning a big advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld, trying to boost their image. Nina also offers her condolences on the loss of Agent Scott. Olivia tries to find out if Nina is hinting at "rumpy-bumpy" or if she's for Olivia losing her platonic partner. "No doubt some of your male colleagues are assuming that you two were intimate," she says, and grins. Olivia basically gives it away with her humorless attitude, but they're interrupted by some lackey carrying a huge case. "The electronic pulse camera," says Nina. My closed captioning tells me she called it the "millimeter wave camera." Nine says, "Travel safe," but Olivia stands there all grumpy and ungrateful.
Back at the Harvard lab, Walter is yanking out Stacey's EYEBALL, because I guess that's what the machine needs for it to work, and can I just ask at this point WHO IS THIS MACHINE FOR? A little spotlight shines on the eyeball while Walter fiddles with it and Peter and Olivia check out the monitor. Light keeps flashing and the image gradually comes into view. Naturally, it's of the bridge. And naturally, Farnsworth recognizes it right off as Sargent Bridge in Stoughton. And naturally, it takes all of twenty seconds to pull up a three-dimensional model and rotate it to triangulate the location, and our intrepid crew is off to Stoughton's lovely warehouse district.
When they arrive, Olivia orders Peter to stay in the car. "That's just not gonna happen," he says, so of course he trails after her without even a gun, like maybe ACTUAL FBI AGENT FARNSWORTH should be covering Olivia's back. They bust in on Penrose standing over a body laid out in a makeshift operating theatre. "Is there anyone else here?" she says. Penrose doesn't answer, but something in the background crashes and bangs, so Olivia gives Peter her backup gun and cellphone, so he can call Charlie and get some backup, and she takes off after Christopher, who runs down a fire escape and into the street. Peter gets distracted long enough for Penrose to connect or disconnect something, and the woman's body convulses. Peter all discombobulated fires off a couple of shots at Penrose as the doctor takes off, and maybe if Peter would PUT DOWN THE CELLPHONE he might be a better shot.
Farnsworth is back at the lab babysitting Walter, instead of shooting at bad guys, which is apparently Peter's job now, and the phone rings. It's Peter, who tells his dad he's with a woman in her mid-20s, going into cardiac arrest. Walter calmly asks if Peter has any cocaine. Peter, annoyed, says no, which is a shame for Walter, because Peter needs to shock her heart. Peter yells that he doesn't have a defibrillator, and I think it's safe to assume that your dad knows that, which is why he asked about the cocaine.
Meanwhile, Olivia is chasing down Christopher, who is grunting and groaning with the pain, and the annoyance of having chalk dust brushed into his hair between shots so it can look like he's getting older.
Peter has ripped some kind of power line out of the wall and asks his dad what the optimum voltage for cardiac resuscitation is. "Try two-hundred volts," say Walter, as though Peter has a little DIAL on the thing.
Olivia chases Christopher, who might at this point really just be trying to beat the line for the early bird special.
Peter has MacGyvered up a makeshift defibrillator, which doesn't work the first time, so he cranks it up... oh. There is a dial on that thing, whatever it is. And the second shock starts the woman's heart again. Well, good job, Peter. Let's see Farnsworth do that! "You're gonna be OK," Peter tells her. Maybe he should remember there is a serial killer and his accomplice on the loose around here?
Well, Christopher's not really much of a quarry anymore. He's slumped against some rusted machinery. Olivia approaches, looking horrified. "He should have let me die a long time ago," he says, coughing. As the light dramatically keeps flashing on Christopher's face, he's older each time we see him. He croaks out some story about Penrose keeping him alive because he loved him. Within seconds, he's dead. Hurry, Olivia! Question him!
Back at Massive Dynamic, Olivia's getting back her million-dollar damage deposit on the Eyeball Death-Image Extract-O-Matic from Nina Sharp, who thinks a woman of her talents shouldn't be working in the public sector (although Broyles is a "good man"), but at Massive Dynamic. Nina's argument, based on Olivia's desire to "make a difference," is somewhat chilling: that Massive Dynamic is of the world's ten largest economic entities, its weapons technologies shape defense department strategies, their investments sway markets and make or break presidential campaigns. As she gets into the "maintain private armies" and "preserve global equilibrium" part of the speech, Olivia finally speaks up. "You're serious," she says, somewhat horrified. Nina says a position here would speed Olivia's search for the answers. "You're referring to the Pattern," says Olivia. "Among other things," says Nina.
Back at Boston Federal Building, Broyles tells Olivia that Peter winged Penrose, and agents tracked a two-mile blood trail to Route One, and local PDs are on the lookout.
Then he starts talking about how every aspect of these cases is classified. Olivia's all "duh" except for the fact that she blabbers about it to anyone who'll listen. Broyles says certain private individuals, like Nina Sharp, have limited clearance. He wants to know if Nina told her anything about the Pattern: "Did she comment or mention anything about the details of your investigation?" Yeah, she said you were a good man, says Olivia. Anything else? "She offered me a job," says Olivia, who jokes that her response was Broyles was going to give her a raise.
Back at Walter's lab, Peter's pissed at having to sign a clearance form that involves him giving up his freedom from unlawful search and seizure. Good thing they're having the Fringe crew sign these after they've started investigating. Peter won't sign, but Walter will (Peter says it's because he's got nothing to lose, since he's already committed to a mental institution. I can't even IMAGINE talking to my dad like this all the time.
Peter stomps off, and Walter says Peter filled him in on Penrose and his "son." "It's one of the inherent pitfalls of being a scientist, trying to maintain that distinction between god's domain and our own." Olivia smiles at him. "But then you already know that," adds Walter. "What do you mean?" she asks. He says that if she's read his file, then she knows the truth about Peter's medical history. She tells him that there was no medical history in the file, just Peter's birthday. Discombobulated, Walter says he was going to ask her to keep it between the two of them, but... Olivia just stares at him.
Later, in the hotel room, Walter's mumbling numbers to himself to lull himself to sleep. It doesn't appear to be working, plus it's keeping Peter up. As you can imagine, Peter is very tolerant of this particular tic of his father's. But then, sweetly, he starts singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," and Walter drifts off to sleep. The last thing we see -- is it in Walter's head? -- is a row of bodies in what looks like a lab.