Meet Joseph Meegar. He's a loser in a dead-end job to support and crabby old mother, and he's creepily obsessed with the receptionist at a firm he delivers packages to. Unlike most losers, though, when he gets upset, he seems to have an effect on electrical devices around him (you know, like Boo in Monsters, Inc. [these are the movie references available to me as the father of a two-year-old]). So this is bad news for his crush and the other people in the elevator when Bethany discovers, via his cell phone full of surreptitiously taken pictures of her, his obsession, his stress sends the elevator screaming twenty-six floors to the basement. Joseph walks away, only to get fired from his job, which is bad news for his boss, who loses his arm to a conveyor belt.
The Fringe crew is looking into it, and discover the elevator victims were electrocuted before the elevator hit the ground. In a shocking (sorry) twist, Walter once worked on a project that maybe has something to do with this.
Joseph's firing prompts some more scolding from Mama Meegar, which makes Joseph freak out, frying her pacemaker.
So how does the Fringe team track her down? Simple: helped in part by Olivia's visions of the late John Scott, they train homing pigeons to track Joseph based on his magnetic fingerprint, and find him being "adjusted" by the psycho mad scientist who screwed with his brain's wiring and turned him into Electro in the first place. Hallucinations of dead people and homing pigeons: if only all their cases were so easy to crack.
In Worcester, Mass., some schlub is sleeping the day away, until the croak of some old woman gets through his comatose state. "Joseph! You're going to be late!" she rasps. This Joseph person rouses and grabs hold of the alarm clock on the night table. It's flashing 12:00, so he picks up his watch, which shows five after three. He's missing Judge Judy! He irritatedly kicks off the covers and sits up. Taking a thermometer from the table, he takes his temperature and heart rate, and jots them down in a sloppy table scrawled in a notepad.Dressed, he walks by the old lady who was barking at him earlier, and seeing him gets her croaking again, this time for him to run a comb through his hair, for god's sake. "Dara's son, he always takes care of his appearance!" He doesn't say anything, and mentally reminds himself to rent Throw Momma From the Train. Again.
At work, there's an ad clipping tucked into the magnetic mirror in his locker. I think we're supposed to notice the "UNLOCK YOUR HIDDEN POTENTIAL" ad with its 1-800 number, but I can't help but notice the ad looking for a "Sexy Pin-Up Type Wanted for Receptionist Position." "Pin-Up Type"? So the strange phenomena on this episode is going to be the ability to clip ads from newspapers in the 1950s! Awesome!
Joseph's now in his uniform, which is really just a rugby shirt with a "Bicoastal Parcel" patch on it. Despite the fact he's clearly the losingest loser who ever losered, he's smiling. He gets out his cellphone and starts looking at pictures of some dark-haired woman on a telephone.
He's interrupted by Yelly Boss, who snaps at "Meager." "It's Mee-GAR," corrects Joseph. "Late again and you're making personal calls?" says the boss, snatching Joseph's phone. He flips through the photos and asks if Joseph is stalking this girl. Joseph takes the phone back and tries to go back to work, but his electronic tablet tracker thingy starts smoking, which is apparently the second time this week. "Your sweep's leaving, Meegar. Get on it, or get another gig," says the boss, who can head right back to Douchebag Boss Central Casting for all I care. I also don't know what a "sweep" is in this context.
On the plus side, we get to listen to REO Speedwagon cheese out "Can't Fight This Feeling" as we pan around Boston. Wouldn't Boston's "More Than A Feeling" be a better choice? Well, it's Joseph's choice; that's what he's listening to as he carries a package into an office building's reception area.
He looks nervous, and it's because the object of his phone stalking is the receptionist. He starts making small talk and she does the "one moment" finger point while tilting her head to show she's in the middle of a call, because she's got one of those little headsets that make me pretend someone is a cyborg. Looking around her desk area, he spots some Girl Guide patches pinned to the wall. She wraps up the call and signs for the package, asking if he doesn't usually have a tablet thing, and he nervously laughs and manages not to say, "It went on the fritz after my boss chewed me out for looking at stalker photos of you."
Actually, he doesn't say anything at all, just stands there as she puts the package away, and then she asks if there's anything else. He stammers out something about being a Webelo, and she has no idea what he's on about, so he points out the Brownie patches on the wall. She says she found them online, calls them "kitschy," and says she's going to put them on a jacket. This marks, let me see, carry the one ... yes, it's the one millionth time a Webelo story failed to help a guy get laid.
He's about to keep trying, when some suit from the office stops by the desk to ask "Bethany" if they're still on for drinks, and the two of them flirt with each other, so they're kind of like Jim and Pam from The Office, only if it didn't take them years to start dating. And Bethany is all "Don't keep me out too late again" and this douchebag is all "We'll see" and you're thinking, "God, save it for after work." Anyway, Joseph stares hard at Bethany, and her computer screen starts to go all screwy. While she admonishes her computer to not crash, but the F-bombs preferable under the circumstances are not allowed on Fox, Joseph sneaks off.
The elevator dings and -- after the creepy bald guy from last episode gets off -- Joseph gets on, only to have to hold the doors for Bethany, running to catch up. As she brushes past Joseph to push her button, he drops his cellphone, which flips open, on a picture of her, of course. She bends to get it, and then is -- naturally -- immediately creeped out. She stares at Joseph, and he stares back. No reason not to blatantly stare, really, right? He's got a look on his face like, "She's going to make a big deal about this, isn't she." Suddenly the elevator jerks and drops, giving everyone on board a little freakout. Then it does it again, and Joseph goes to help Bethany, but she's more worried about the stalker than the elevator and screams for him to get away from her, at which point the elevator screeches into freefall, plummeting all the way to the basement, where the bell dings before the impact sends dust and smoke into the parking garage.
On the bright side, for Joseph anyway, he's got his hand on Bethany's thigh. On the "minus" side of the ledger is that she appears to be dead, as does everyone else in the wreckage of the elevator, except for Joseph, who sits up and coughs. "Oh no," he says. Yeah, that's putting it very fucking mildly. He gets up and walks into the parking garage, and every car he passes starts up, headlights shining. "Stop it!" he yells, and runs through the garage, as cars rev to life. So even if the elevator fall didn't kill them, they'd soon be dead of carbon monoxide poisoning anyway. Nice one, Joseph.
Over in Boston, Olivia's walking with Charlie and explaining that since he knew about her and John and didn't say anything, she trusts him enough to tell him that she was visited by the ghost of John Scott the other night. Well, she doesn't say "ghost." She says she grabbed her gun, but then he was gone. "I know he wasn't there, obviously, but... I just..."
Charlie theorizes that she's wondering if falling in love with a guy who betrayed her and her country, died in her arms and is now showing up in her kitchen from beyond the grave means she should recuse herself. If "recuse" means "get some friggin' help," I'd say yeah. He tells her that she's indispensable because, remember, she's so amazing that she didn't let their relationship get in the way of taking John down. "The time John shows up for a nightcap, give him one," says Charlie. He tells her that she can't expect to get over everything that happened so quickly, but it'll get easier, and she shouldn't beat herself up too much. "You're good at that. It's a character flaw," he tells her, and she continues walking down the street and he watches her for a moment.
Over at the Harvard lab, Peter's noodling around on the piano, still looking worse for wear after last episode, plus the fact he's not getting any sleep isn't helping. Walter says he's also having trouble sleeping because the guy who tortured Peter seemed very familiar to him, but he doesn't know how. Peter doesn't want to talk about it, but Walter, frustrated, says it's important: "You cannot imagine what it's like for a man like me to not have access to parts of his mind," he says. Peter, after a pause, says, "You're doing fine, Walter," which I think is the first nice thing he's said to his dad, even if his dad is kind of overdoing it with the "this is hard for me because I'm so brilliant" routine.
Of course, Broyles shows up with Olivia, and Peter cracks, "Visiting hours! Everyone put on your straitjacket," like NICE when your dad was just lamenting his time in the mental hospital. Broyles tells them about a power surge that hit an office building, causing an elevator to slam to the ground, killing eight people. Peter asks if the cable snapped, and Olivia tells him the weird thing
is that the elevator didn't fall, but drove itself into the ground. "That's not possible," says Peter, when it seems to me to be easily the MOST plausible thing he's heard since he started working on the X-Files, I mean, "Pattern cases." Broyles has another one: a maglev train in Tokyo that plowed through a station, publicly blamed on human error but actually the result of a power surge of unknown origin. All right! The Fringe Four are going to Japan! Pack your ba-- oh, they're just heading for Worcester. Never mind.Over at the building, Peter Simmons, the building engineer introduces himself. His name's Peter too? Oh, come on! There's only like five main characters, and one of them is already named Peter! So for the sake of recapping ease, I'm renaming the engineer "Zeke." Zeke says the elevator just powered itself into the floor: "I've never seen anything like it," he says. Peter asks if the brakes didn't come on. Sure did, and the motor just kept on going, says Zeke, almost melting the brake shoes, which is technically... "...impossible?" finishes Peter. "You know your elevators," says Zeke, which Peter credits to being an MIT dropout, whatever THAT'S supposed to mean.
Olivia asks about the security camera footage, and Zeke says all the cameras were fritzed. Zeke clears out the crews working around the disaster area, because the FBI are coming through. Shouldn't there be some city cops there who don't want to give up the case and are pissed that the feds have shown up? Some Sipowicz looking guy to make jerk-off motions while the feds investigate? Zeke says it was almost as if another generator came on line and jacked into the system, overpowering it.
Meanwhile, Walter's examining the bodies and finding exit wound burns and subconjunctival hemorrhages. "Thermoelectic trauma," says Peter, and translates for Olivia that all of the victims were electrocuted.
Walter asks for the gold medallion hanging around Olivia's neck, like maybe he's going to do a magic trick. In a way, he does, because he holds the medallion's chain in the air, and then slowly lowers the necklace, while the pendant remains suspended in mid-air as everyone watches in awe. "This entire space is charged with electromagnetic energy far beyond that which occurs in nature, and there's still residual magnetic energy from whatever electrocuted these people." He says he needs to examine the victims' belongings, and one of the bodies. "Are you saying you know what happened?" asks Olivia, sounding surprised, although that's kind of the POINT OF HAVING WALTER ON THE TEAM, is it not? He's not sure yet, but everyone can put five bucks on Walter having some experiential knowledge that proves crucial...
Sure enough, back at the lab, Walter, removing the heart from a body, says he was involved in a project in which the government wanted to know if a human being was trackable by homing pigeons. Peter wants to know what possible use that could be, and Walter says, "I'm sure it had something to do with the Commies. It always did back then." Their theory was that human beings are merely highly complex electrical systems, and everyone has a unique electromagnetic signature, which pigeons should be able to home in on, in precisely the same way they know how to fly south for the winter. "But the human field was too weak, so we tried to augment it to make it strong enough for the birds to detect." It worked, but there were these eensy-weensy troubling side effects. Like every time one woman hiccupped, the lights would dim. No one could control electrical devices deliberately, but it at least seemed theoretically possible. Yeah, in the way that saying a bunch of science stuff to viewers who don't know any better makes anything sound plausible, right?
Meanwhile, the excised heart starts beating on its little steel tray, freaking everyone out but Walter, who's satisfied that this confirms his theory that someone has pursued this science a little further, and it's the residual electromagnetism of this highly charged person that's causing the heart to pump, and it's this person who electrocuted everyone in the elevator. "It was a human being," says Walter.
That human being, looking a little worse for wear, is returning to work, where a co-worker is watching a news item about the elevator failure. The co-worker lets Joseph know that the boss is looking for him, and Joseph drifts off. He finds Mr. Boynton, who's working on some machine in the back, but he's not so busy that he can't chew Joseph out for being AWOL. "I've had a really hard day," stammers Joseph. "Your day's fantastic, compared to mine," says Boynton, who then notices a red stain on Joseph's shirt. Joseph doesn't know what it is. "You know what? I'll make it easy. It's not your uniform anymore," says Boynton. Sweet! New uniform! Oh, that's not what he means. Joseph is fired. That's much worse! Joseph pleads that he takes care of his mother, which earns no sympathy from Boynton, who supports a wife and family by employing smart, reliable and capable people. "And you are none of those things," he snaps. He orders Joseph to get lost. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm going back to work on this huge piece of industrial machinery, but I will continue to yell at you and stress you out." A frantic Joseph stares after Boynton, who immediately gets his arm caught in a ... thing ... that ... well, I don't know what this is or what it does, but his arm is bloody and he's yelling. The other co-workers scramble to free Boynton while Joseph stands there and blubbers.
Back at the federal building, it's a by-now standard scene of Olivia being the only federal agent working late. Except for Broyles, who shows up with some coffee for her and asks what she's reading: Neural Distortions in Human Subjects, she says, surreptitiously sliding the Mary Higgins Clark into a desk drawer. She fills him in on Walter's theory about Electro-man frying the elevator victims: "He thinks this person was altered in some way. Extensive procedures. Chemical therapy." Broyles looks thoughtful, and then tells her about their Pattern investigations turning up a handful of "off-the-grid" clinics that solicited clients with weight-loss or hair-growth claims, only that wasn't what they were really offering. He tells her about Jacob Fischer, wanted in three countries for illegal human experimentation on unwitting guinea pigs, including one poor bastard who was pumped full of stimulants, kept awake for a year and shown a steady stream of horrific images. On the bright side, that person went on to create the Saw franchise. Broyles says he'll transfer the files to Olivia's computer, but it's not easy stuff to look at. Olivia thinks back to when John Scott told her about "2 Girls 1 Cup" and figures this can't be that bad.
Later, she's looking at the Jacob Fischer files when the lights go out, which means she's going to get her flashlight and wander around the federal building that seems to have absolutely no security despite all these classified cases they investigate.
Now, if the power's out, and the elevator dings, what should you do? Call security or check it out? Olivia opts for the latter, and is surprised to see John step off the elevator. He's still very handsome, especially when you consider how dead he's supposed to be.
"It's just me," he says. "I know this doesn't make any sense to you, and even if it did I know you don't have any reason to trust me but that's what I'm asking you to do. We don't have much time. I'm here to help." She points out that he tried to kill her. God, try to kill a woman one time and she never lets you forget it! He says he didn't, and that he loved her, and he's going to prove it to her. But not now, because that's not the way it works, he tells her, but says she's on the right track, and needs to get to him before Jacob Fischer does and uses him. And he's up and walking away. Olivia, after a moment, gets up and says, "Use him for what?" John's gone around the corner and is standing in the elevator. She asks him again about Fischer, but John just says he'l
l prove to her that he loves her, but she's going to have to wait.The elevator doors close, and Olivia races for the stairs when she sees the car's descending. Naturally, John's not in the elevator when the doors open on the ground floor, but something inside the elevator strikes Olivia anyway: the absolutely massive "Maximum Occupancy: 2000 Pounds" sign in the elevator.
This necessitates a late-night visit to Peter, who at least knows the value of a good night's sleep. She points out that sensors indicated the weight of the passengers in the elevator was a total of 1,440 pounds, but the combined weight of the victims was 1,285, leaving 165 pounds, which she thinks is the Electro-man Walter was talking about. "The only problem with that scenario is that it doesn't make any sense," grumps Peter, while Walter, nearby, shuffles his feet on the carpet. Peter figures if Buddy had been there, he would have been electrocuted too, or if not, at least flattened by the impact. Walter says if he were the source and conductor of a great amount of electrical power, he could have experienced a form of electrodynamic levitation (the science behind maglev trains, Peter tells Olivia). "So he floated. Like my necklace in the elevator," says Olivia. The only problem is that if you can do that to machines, why do it to one you're in? Duh, you can't control it, they figure out, despite the fact Walter's experiments had demonstrated that. Anyway, Olivia figures they need to be looking for small events, not big ones, and Walter finally finishes rubbing his feet so he can shock Peter and explain that Electro-man would discharge a shock much, much greater, which I can only imagine would be much, much more annoying.
Olivia's gotten Charlie to wake up the team so they can search for these little events, and they've found some anomalies in the Worcester area, mostly automatic doors and closed-circuit televisions and such, and he thinks she's "crazy" to think that someone's behind all this, which is funny considering that he didn't think she was crazy for seeing a dead man in her kitchen.
And where is Joseph? He's returning home, late at night, waking his cranky mother, who fell asleep in front of the television. He says he thinks he made a big mistake. "You? Surprise!" says Mama Meegar. Hee! She's not in the mood to hear any of his babbling, least of all his ramblings about answering a newspaper ad about unlocking his hidden potential and then going to an office where they hypnotized him and said they were going to realign the electrical impulses in his brain. That's his excuse for everything!
She's more concerned about whether he gave them money. He starts to spaz, and the lights start to flicker, and his mom has a heart attack. He's upset about that last part, even though this would seem to improve his daily life. She collapses, he hurriedly packs a bag and heads downstairs.
Two guys are walking in his apartment building as he tries to head outside; one of them we recognize from Olivia's files as Jacob Fischer, who creepily says they want to adjust Joseph's medication. "You did this to me!" Joseph yells at Fischer, while one if the henchman, behind Joseph, shoots him with a dart. Joseph blacks out.
Over at the federal building, Charlie and the rest of the agents are working the phones because no one has anything better to do than chase down the vague "events" that might prove a cockamamie theory. One of the agents gets a lead on a guy getting his arm caught in a conveyor belt at Bicoastal Parcel, which twigs something in Charlie's brain, and he shows Olivia the building's sign-in sheet, featuring the scrawled J. Hancock of Joseph Meegar from Bicoastal Parcel.
Olivia busts into Meegar's place, where she finds Mama Meegar dead on the floor. "Pacemaker malfunction," she tells Peter, back at the Harvard lab, while the crime scene guys are now working the place over. Now they just have to find him, and then Walter asks her to tell him what kind of electronic gadgets are in the room. She rattles off answering machine, television, boom box, etc., and Walter gets all excited about the boom box and goes shuffling through the personal effects of the victims, coming up with a fried Walkman. "I know how to find him," he says.
He takes the tape out, and despite the fact the Walkman is burned beyond any kind of recognition, the cassette tape is in pristine condition, which is fortunate, because now Walter can rattle off some bullshit about the tape being in close proximity to Meegar and thus retaining his electromagnetic signature. It's also fortunate that Joseph is the last person in the world to still be listening to cassette tapes. And it only gets more ridiculous when he starts going off about programming carrier pigeons with the signature, and the only thing that Olivia takes any issue with is Joseph not telling her sooner that he needed carrier pigeons, because then she could have been working on it, like she has a carrier pigeon SOURCE or something. Walter asks for two dozen, and Olivia says, "Two dozen. Great," like WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? I mean, I imagine wherever one goes to get carrier pigeons will have many carrier pigeons. It's not like it's an impulse item by the checkout line at a bodega or anything.
In what appears to be some sort of industrial area -- which is where a lot of these episodes are going to wind up, aren't they? -- Joseph wakes up to find he's strapped into some operating chair. He has a couple of metal things attached to the side of his skull. "Tell Fischer he woke up," says a goon into a telephone, and then he takes a syringe and sticks Joseph with it. Joseph doesn't seem to like this, but this doesn't seem to be having any adverse effect on all the electronic machinery nearby.
So I guess getting carrier pigeons wasn't the hassle Olivia was making a face about, because there's a bunch back at the lab, and Walter puts one in a clear tube wrapped in a Tesla coil that's going to imprint the bird with Meegar's magnetic structure. "You're not actually going to fry one of those birds, are you?" asks Olivia. "Stranger things have happened," says Walter, and he turns the machine on, and I guess it's really easy to whip up a pigeon-imprinting device because it took him no time at all, and crazy blue lightning shoots over the tube for a few seconds. "We're putting GPS chips in carrier pigeons so we can find a man who can control electricity," says Peter. He turns to Olivia: "I have you to thank for that, don't I?" "Yeah, that's me," says Olivia, agreeably.
Olivia's out in the hallway where the beauty of the Harvard (or Harvard-facsimile) architecture is marred by an ugly old pop machine plunked down in the middle of the hallway. Just think: John Quincy Adams used to get his Diet Pepsi right here! She gets a drink, and hears a noise, and thing she knows, Ghost John is there, happy that she listened to him, and then kisses her, which probably tastes like ectoplasm. No, wait, she's into it. "I didn't betray you. You know that. In your heart," he says when they finally come up for air. She doesn't say anything, but turns at the sound of approaching footsteps. It's Peter, saying he thinks the bird thing might actually work. Olivia spins back to where John was, but he's no longer there.
So Peter and Olivia saddle up in the car while Walter and Astrid get set to release the pigeons outside. So it looks like Astrid's forgiven Walter, hey? Well, that's nice and tidied up between episodes now, isn't it? Walter blows a shrill whistle and the birds flutter around, probably pooping on anything and everything in their path, and then Astrid does some computer work to track the birds that's probably a lot simpler than they're making it look here, and we're off.
The damn birds won't be able to arrive too soon for poor Joseph Meegar, who's now suffering at the hands of Jacob Fischer, who's run some wires to the metal posts in his head. "Those had to be subdermal. They can be removed later," Fischer "explains," and calmly goes on about how Joseph came to him to b
e more confident, and now he is, so what's the problem. Joseph screams that he wants his life to go back to what it was before. So wait, Joseph actually used to be less assertive than he is now?So the stupid pigeons are now hovering over one spot, what looks like an abandoned school or hospital, so that must be the place, right? Wow, that was ridiculously easy. Fortunately, the birds managed to stay above major streets and avenues! Olivia gets out of her car, ordering Peter to stay put, and Charlie gets out of his, with some other agents in tow. "I'm not gonna ask," he tells her, like god forbid Charlie be told why he's spending all this time and manpower on malfunctioning electronic machinery and homing pigeons, right?
Inside, one of Fischer's thugs tells him they've got visitors at the front entrance, so Fischer tells him to take Joseph out the back and to head to the depot. "What about you?" "He's the priority," says Fischer.
Charlie busts a window so the agents can get outside. Meanwhile, in the back parking lot, the thug tosses Joseph into an SUV passenger seat, and walks around the front, which is where Joseph brings the vehicle to life and slams it into the thug, knocking him out.
Fischer has strolled out into the hallway to meet the FBI agents, buttoning up his coat. "Get those hands up in the air!" yells Charlie, regrettably forgetting to tell Fischer to wave them like he just does not care. He holds his hands up palms inward, oddly. Olivia asks about Joseph Meegar. "I'm sorry, who?" says Jacob, sarcastically. Charlie tends to Fischer while Olivia and the other agents split up.
Olivia finds a distraught Joseph in the loading bay. He bolts when he sees her, running out back to where there's a bunch of ... cement mixers? All right. As he weaves in and out of the trucks, they all start up, and then he makes his way to the street and makes a power line spark and fall, delaying Olivia. He runs the length of a school bus, only to have Peter step out from behind the engine and thwack him with a crowbar. Peter really knows how to position himself, doesn't he?
As a bandaged, heavily sedated Meegar gets loaded into an ambulance, Olivia tells him he's being taken to the hospital so they can make sure his head's all right. "I want to go home. I didn't want to hurt anybody," he says. "We're going to help you," she tells him. "That's what they said," says Joseph who pleads again to go home, but Olivia can't let him.
Back at Harvard, Astrid and Walter are all buddy-buddy and joking about Walter not being able to remember her name again, and all I can say is that if anyone ever jabs me in the neck with a hypodermic needle to knock me out, the LEAST they can do is learn my fucking name.
Olivia strolls in just in time to get grossed out by Walter drinking some white stuff from a beaker, and he tells her it's milk from Jean, because oh, that's right, there's a COW in this lab. She declines his offer of some milk of her own, saying she looks like she could use it. He adds that he doesn't really know her well enough to say this, but she hasn't seemed herself lately. "I haven't been sleeping very well," she admits. She looks like she's about to add more, then thinks better of it and says she'll see him tomorrow, and walks away.
"You've seen him. Your friend. John Scott." She turns back towards him. He says he isn't surprised, and there's a reason. Well, this ought to be good. "I can't be sure. The brain is a mystery, but I believe, when you were in the tank, John Scott, that part of his consciousness crossed over into yours, and it's still there." Oh, well, that explains everything. Olivia says it's not thoughts and memories, like Walter suggests. "He appears right in front of me. He talks to me," she says, and he says that's because he doesn't belong there and so her brain is expelling him. Excuse me while I snort derisively. "He'll go away, is that what you're saying?" asks Olivia. Walter says he doesn't know: "You really want him too?" Well, given that he's helping her solve cases, probably not.
It's dark, and Olivia's driving, and walking down the street is John Scott. Hey, speak of the devil! Olivia and Walter were just talking about you! Olivia hurriedly parks the car and gets out, and follows a silent John around the corner and then down some stairs into a basement apartment. The door's locked for her, though, so she shoots the knob and follows John inside. She makes her way through hallways of exposed pipe. John's standing in the dark, and she flips on a light, and he's not there. But she finds a makeshift office, with shelves of boxes, with labels like "unsolved" and stuffed with documents.
Over to Broyles now, who tells Olivia that the team is still sifting through all the papers but it looks like John was investigating Pattern cases on his own. "He also knew about our friend Dr. Fischer. In fact he knew quite a bit more than we did," he says, including several other Josephs that Fischer had been subjecting to treatment. They've tracked all the others down and are getting medical treatment. Fischer's still not co-operating, but maybe six weeks in solitary will change his mind (a hilarious shot of Fischer being led into a jail cell and then glaring out through the bars on the door). Uh, has he asked her anything at all about how she found the place?
But wait, there's more! Broyles hands over a box of John's personal effects. "It would seem some of them were intended for you," says Broyles, and then he leaves. Olivia opens the box. There are some baby pictures, and a necklace, and she goes right to the ring box. Inside is a huge honkin' diamond, with "Always" inscribed on the inside. John's voice plays in her head: "I will prove it, Liv. I love you. Always."
Jesus, good luck dating again if your dead ex-boyfriend is going to keep popping in from time to time.