In Manhattan, some sort of architectural design firm has a little power flicker as the result of a "micro-quake," which have apparently been happening frequently in New York, in advance of a macro-quake, which rattles the building. The lights go out, and Jim True-Frost of The Wire suddenly has a beam sprouting from his shoulder, and an extra half-arm, and three-to-four legs, depending on how far above the knee you consider the leg to start.
The Fringe team arrives on scene to find a building that looks rearranged on the outside. Inside, they find people fused together, fused with inanimate objects. Walter figures it's a "quantum tectonic event" — atoms fly apart, the go back together, not always the way they're supposed to.
They find Mr. Pratchitt (True-Frost), still alive, freaking out, and question him. He talks about the tremors that have been plaguing New York, but no one on the Fringe team has heard anything about that. Pratchitt keeps asking to see his wife, only it turns out he doesn't have one. Walter asks him questions to determine if he knows where he is. It's 2010, Obama is president, but on Sept. 11, the terrorists attacked the Pentagon and White House. Then Pratchitt dies, and they find a second Pratchitt head growing out of the torso. We're in two buildings, declares Walter: one is from an alternate universe.
Astrid goes through effects from the alternate-universe building: Richard Nixon on a silver dollar and a double-decker car, which triggers a memory for Walter, who thinks he knows what's going to happen. He remembers a prank that he and Belly pulled in which they zapped a car into another reality, and shortly thereafter, a car from the alternate universe was sent over, since the universe seeks balance. Which means that a building from this universe is going to be sucked over to the other side. Of course it does! Fortunately, Olivia being special and all, should be able to see the glimmering of the building that's going to disappear. She did it before: during the cortexiphan trials! Walter wants to go to Jacksonville to recreate the circumstances of the original experiment.
So they go back to the original testing centre, where Walter takes Olivia into a classroom and tells her that sixteen objects in the room are from the other side, which should shimmer for her. She looks around, but can't see anything unusual, so it's experiment time! Walter puts her on a cortexiphan drip, which he says will create an "obstacle," and overcoming it will raise her emotional state, and it was his and Belly's theory that perception is largely a function of emotion: how we feel affects how we see things.
Olivia, on the drugs, finds herself in a forest. There's someone else there, though, a little girl, which naturally turns out to be Olivia's scared young self. Olivia comes out of the drug hallucination, and gives Walter guff for doing this to little children.
And it's back to the classroom, but Olivia still can't see any glimmer. And Walter figures that it's a specific emotional response they need from Olivia: fear, like the fear she had when she was a little girl but is incapable of now that she's an ass-kicking FBI agent, but she's going to need to get scared if she's going to save the people about to disappear.
Massive Dynamic's on board to try to track the quakes, looking for a pattern. Olivia's freaked out that she can't see what she's supposed to see. So hey! Suddenly, she's scared! And she can see which building's going to be sucked into an alternate dimension. And they evacuate the building and everyone's saved.
And later, when Olivia comes by the Bishop house because she's going out for drinks with Peter, she sees him glimmering. Walter asks her to keep the secret. And it's going to be two months before we know anything else about what's going on....
It's nighttime in "Manhatan," and no, that's not a typo. Inexplicably, and embarrassingly, I missed the single T in the letters floating above the architecture firm of Dodst & Rathje the first time I watched this. You gotta figure that if you're spending that much money to make giant letters float in the air in your establishing shots, it means something.Inside, a dude (played by Jim True-Frost of The Wire, but you may also remember him -- if I may date myself -- from Singles), carries a cup of coffee as he tells a co-worker that "it's gonna be a late one." She asks him, "Is that real coffee? Where did you get that?" He mysteriously says that he has his sources, and then reveals that he has a cousin in Hawaii with a secret stash who sends him stuff. An odd conversation, that's for sure. Noticing that this was Manhatan might have clued me in right here. Originally, I just chalked it up to the fact that I don't drink coffee, so conversations about it are always mysterious to me anyway.
In the middle of it, though, the power in the office flickers and the building trembles. "This is getting nuts. What is that, six since yesterday?" says the dude, and the woman says she's from California, so she's used to it. "But this is New York. Don't you think it's strange?" he says, and she kind of shrugs. They talk about how they've heard on the news that they're just little "micro-quakes" that are "probably some byproduct of global warming."
Anyway, she's heading home, but not before telling the guy to call her if he has any extra coffee. In this case, coffee also means sex, I think.
Dude says goodnight to "Pauline," and then gets back to work, looking at blueprints. I love looking at blueprints. When I was a kid, I had a book of Batman blueprints: the Batcave, the Batmobile, everything. I totally thought I was going to build my own. I suppose there's still time...
ANYWAY, the building shakes again, harder this time, and while buddy covers his real coffee to prevent ceiling schmutz from falling into it, we see he's looking at blueprints for the "New Pentagon -- Annex IV," which is where, if you're like me and missed "Manhatan," you went, "Que?" Well, that and the fact that in the "Previously on Fringe" clips they showed Nina Sharp and her little snowglobe-smashing demonstration.
And then everything goes to hell: lights shatter and fall from the ceiling, pipes burst, and buddy's real Hawaiian coffee spills all over the blueprints for the new pentagon. The room fills with dust. Eventually, the shaking stops, and all goes black. When buddy wakes up, he's got a couple of problems. One is that there appears to be a support beam lodged in his shoulder. Like, not that a support beam fell and pierced his body, but that he is now fused with the beam. The other problem is that buddy now has a couple of extra arms and legs. His scream indicates that he is understandably perturbed.
After the opening credits, Olivia is calling Peter to let him know that they've got to go to New York, but she has to flirt with him doing it, telling him that he's won an "all-expenses-paid trip to New York City." The joke goes on for longer than necessary, with Peter demanding to speak to Olivia's supervisor, etc., and then Peter tries to keep it going by waking up Walter and telling him, "We just won an all-expense-paid trip to New York City." Walter is delighted: "That's fantastic. I've never won anything before." He's absurdly touched. He sounds like he's about to cry.
The whole Fringe crew is driving to New York, with Broyles at the wheel. Walter expresses skepticism over the possibility of an earthquake in New York and suggests a small comet is more likely. "Witnesses outside felt the ground shake, but no one saw what happened," says Broyles.
Outside the building, Broyles tells them Emergency Services didn't find any survivors. Olivia and Walter stare up at the exterior of the building, which looks slightly askew. "It looks..." says Olivia, and Walter finishes it for her: "...rearranged. Extraordinary." They head inside.
The first thing they see is a body with its faces fused together, like conjoined twins. Conjoined fraternal twins. "Oh my god," says Olivia. There's more like that through the rubble -- hands fused to heads, stuff like that. Walter's guess is that it was a "quantum tectonic event" which he says has only ever been a theoretical phenomenon. Broyles doesn't know what Walter's talking about, so Walter explains: "Imagine a sudden momentary disturbance at a subatomic level. The energy disperses the atoms, literally tearing the very fabric of reality itself." Peter clarifies: "Meaning that all the atoms come apart, but when they reassemble, they come together all wrong." Olivia wants to know the chances of this happening naturally. I don't know how Walter's supposed to quantify that, given that up until now this has only ever been a theoretical possibility, but he figures it's possible. "But if so, God has a far more disturbed sense of humour than even I could have imagined," he says. Nice that he's able to keep cracking jokes in the chamber of horrors here.
Then the emergency services guys are yelling and running because they've found a survivor, named Ted Pratchet, who's whimpering for help, while the paramedics do their best to keep him panicked by saying things like, "I don't know if we can cut him loose from that beam. He might not survive." Pratchet asks for someone to call his wife, because he just wants to hear her voice. Broyles calmly introduces himself and Olivia and says they're going to do everything they can to find his wife and get him out of there.
Broyles goes off to "call this in" because that's certainly a good use of Broyles' time, while Olivia asks Pratchet to describe what happened. "Tremors. Just like the other ones. Then a really big one that just kept getting worse," says Pratchet. He's thirsty, but the paramedic says he can't have any liquids, just some ice, which Peter goes to fetch. Daniels says, "Did Buddy have them on display to the left or the right of the cash register?" and Pratchet says, "How would I know that?"
Meanwhile, Walter's looking at a dislodged painting, and peels back a flap of the canvas. There's another painting underneath.
Olivia asks Pratchet if anything unusual happened before the disaster, or if he saw someone who shouldn't have been there. "No. Just the same things everyone saw. Yesterday, the dogs all started howling. Then all those little tremors, the microquakes," says Pratchet, but neither Peter nor Olivia have heard about any tremors in New York. Meanwhile, Walter examines the blueprints for the new Pentagon annex.
When Broyles comes back, he whispers to Olivia that Pratchet doesn't have a wife. Never did. Olivia's ready to chalk that up to delirium due to trauma from his injuries, but Walter disagrees, because that possibility would make far too much sense.
He starts asking Pratchet questions, like what year is it? Who is the president? Two-thousand and 10, and Obama, says Pratchett, respectively. I realize this episode was filmed long ago, but I'd like to think this is a shout-out to the commander-in-chief from J.J. Abrams for moving the state of the union address so as not to conflict with the Lost season premiere.
Anyway, then Walter apologizes for what he's going to ask : "On September the 11th, when the terrorists struck, which buildings did they attack?" The Pentagon, says Pratchet, and then: the White House. And then he dies. "I think I know what happened here," says Walter, but there are still more surprises in store before Walter can explain: specifically, a big lump moving underneath Pratchet's shirt. Walter unbuttons the shirt to find another Ted Pratchet head imbedded in Pratchet's torso. It opens its eyes, opens its mouth, gasps and goes silent as well. Walter closes Pratchet's eyes (both sets) and then says his theory was wrong: "This wasn't a quantum event at all. We're standing in two buildings, one of which comes fro
m the alternate universe."Sometime later -- it's daylight outside now -- Walter tells Olivia that he's asked to have Pratchet's body -- excuse me, bodies -- shipped back to the lab: "Maybe they'll provide some insight into how this thing happened." Olivia says she already knows how it happened. "Two universes colliding," she says, adding that William Bell warned her that Newton would try to open a doorway from our universe to the , and this would be the consequence when that happened. "Two objects trying to occupy the same space at the same time," says Peter, who hasn't even had the benefit of Nina Sharp's snowglobe demonstration! "This was Newton. I'm sure of it. He was here," says Olivia.
Meanwhile, back at the Harvard lab, Astrid lifts the sheet covering Pratchet's bodies and discovers that she has a limit, and this is it: "I've seen some pretty disturbing things in my time working with you, and I think I've handled them pretty well, but this? I can't do." Walter agrees that it's awful, and suggests she look through the boxes of stuff from the building, looking for anything that might seem out of place, which Astrid happily agrees to do.
She starts pulling stuff out. "I think this qualifies: Richard Nixon on a silver dollar." "That's disturbing," jokes Walter. Astrid asks Walter how, when he separates the bodies, he'll know which one is which. Alternate universe Pratchet was married, so he'll be the one with the wedding ring on his finger, explains Walter, which is awfully presumptuous. What if the alternate universe marks marriage with genital piercing instead? Astrid says, "So as far as his wife will ever know, he just disappeared? That is so sad," she says. Walter agrees, and then Astrid finds a toy double-decker car in the box of effects. "Does this mean that they drive these over there?" she asks. I suppose so, says Walter, who pauses, thinking about something. Astrid asks him what's up. "I know what Newton did. And I'm afraid I've just remembered what's going to happen ," he says.
Meanwhile, Olivia has found a security camera image of Newton at the building two hours before the ... well, whatever you call it, with his men, disguised as a construction crew. "We're running down VIN numbers. We're looking into equipment rental, but I would like to take a crew back to New York," she tells Broyles. Peter's phone rings. It's Walter, demanding that everyone come back to the lab. Peter protests that they're in the middle of something, and Walter is all, "Don't argue with me, son! Get back here now, both of you." Oh, well then.
Back at the lab, Walter's got a 25-year-old newspaper clipping that features a photo of what looks like a car in front of a statue, underneath the headline "MIT FINALLY GOES TOO FAR?" Peter can't believe that's what Walter called them back for; he knows the story, too: "MIT students fused a car to the statue of John Harvard. It was a prank. They had to cut the car away. They never figured out how they did it."
But Olivia's a couple steps ahead of Peter already, and has figured out it wasn't MIT at all but one of Walter's experiments. Walter explains that when he and William Bell first tried to generate a stable door between universes, their first test subject was a car, Bell's old Monte Carlo. "And it did not go well," he says. "First times are always sloppy," says Peter. "It wasn't our first time," says Walter, who JUST SAID it was the first test subject. Anyway, he says that 11 minutes after they made the car disappear, this car appeared from another reality. Peter asks how he knows it wasn't just a car that was pulled from down the block. "It was in 1986. The car had a CD player. It wasn't an option at the time." Oh. Yeah, it makes much more sense that, instead of someone installing a CD player in a car, a car was PULLED FROM AN ALTERNATE REALITY. So much for Occam's razor.
Naturally, Olivia's on board, and she wants to know why a car came from the alternate universe. Walter "explains" that the universe seeks balance. "We sent a car over there, so a car of equal mass came back." It's great that the universe is so specific like that. Walter continues, saying that a building from the other side appeared here, so the "laws of physics demand both sides of the equation balance." Yeah, that's hilarious. The laws of physics certainly apply here. Walter calculates -- based, I guess, on numbers arrived at predicated on the assumption 25 years ago that a car was yanked from an alternate reality -- that a building from this side will be pulled to the other side in just under 35 hours.
Olivia asks how they stop it. You can't, says Walter. "OK, then we need to evacuate the building. So how do we identify which building it's going to be?" she asks, and Walter tells her that he and Belly learned that when objects cross over, they have "an energy," which has been described as a glimmer. "I believe that in the moments before the event when the fabric of the two universes is rubbing together, that the building on this side will begin to take on that glimmer." Except, the glimmer can't be seen by the human eye. "Then how the hell are we going to find it, Walter?" asks an exasperated Peter. Walter says Olivia can see it. She's done it before, he adds. A confused Olivia stares at Walter.
After the commercial break, Walter explains that it was during the Cortexiphan trials that Olivia was the first child with the ability to identify things from the other side. "We gave you the ability," he says, sounding a little too pleased about it for Peter's liking, so Peter points out that they were conducting illegal drug trials on children: "Don't make that sound like charity work."
An increasingly annoyed Olivia says she can't see any glimmer any more. "Because I believe you stopped wanting to. When you did, there were consequences, but I was able to elicit the ability once. I believe I may be able to do again," says Walter, but Peter is quite happy to refuse more experimentation on Olivia's behalf, but she interrupts to say she'll do it, despite Peter's protests. "We don't have time, so just tell me what it is I need to do," says Olivia.
Walter says they need a plane so he can go to Jacksonville to the lab where he and Bell conducted the Cortexiphan trials. It was a day-care centre. Peter points out that Jacksonville is a thousand miles away and whatever they need they can get in Boston, and Walter snaps that what he needs is in Jacksonville. "Jacksonville is where the process worked. If I am able to do it again, it has to be there," he says. Which will turn out to be a) not true, and b) ridiculous anyway, unless Walter's saying that latitude and longitude are variables in the experiment.
Anyway, Olivia is explaining all this nonsense about a building disappearing to Broyles, who wants to know why Walter thinks they need to go to Jacksonville, and Olivia explains that the reason is basically "all Walter's stuff is there." Broyles asks if she's sure that she wants to subject herself to Walter's experiments, and Olivia says, "I don't see another choice," so Broyles asks how he can help, and Olivia explains about the howling dogs and small earthquakes -- Broyles gets momentarily excited until Olivia explains that she's not talking about the Tori Amos album ("That's Little Earthquakes, sir," she says) -- and says Walter thinks they'll happen again before the building disappears. "I'll contact Nina Sharp, ask her to have Massive Dynamic enlist their geologic division to track any seismic activity. Olivia thanks him, and then Broyles is all "Stay in touch," and she promises she will.
So the Fringe team pulls up at the Jacksonville Family Daycare, which apparently has been untouched in this empty strip mall over the past quarter-century. William Bell must still own it. Olivia triple-parks out front, but it's not like there are any customers.
As they get out of the car, Olivia looks around like she's trying to see if anything seems familiar.
Walter opens the combination lock on the door with the sequence 5-20-10. "I always use the same com
bination, though I can't remember the significance," he says. Well, I think we know some bad shit's going to go down on May 20th this year, which I'll just go ahead and assume is, being a Thursday, the date of the season finale.They go inside the centre, largely empty save for the scattered chair and table, with paintings of animals still on the walls. Walter goes and turns on the electricity, so it's good that someone's been paying the bills all these years. Olivia looks around inside, at the scattered Connect 4 and Mr. Potato Head pieces, and the cheery Our Kids Are Happy Kids! banner on the wall, and then Walter brings her into another classroom and asks her if she sees anything.
"Like what?" she asks, and Walter explains that sixteen items in the room are from "the other side." He urges her to look closely at everything. She does -- at books, terrariums, mobiles, a globe, a little house of cards that is still standing (!) -- but nothing triggers for her.
Walter looks bummed, and says they should get started. "I was hoping to avoid this," he says, and walks out of the room. Peter follows, and Olivia does too, still glancing at the objects in the room. She stops by the door, where there's a giraffe height chart. Several names are penciled on the wall beside it, including little Olive D (coincidentally the worst-selling juice in the Sunny Delight family) at 38 inches.
Peter follows Walter through a room of equipment covered with sheets, and he pulls a sheet off one piece of equipment that looks like an old dentist's chair with a headrest (or head restraint). In an adjoining room, Walter scans the stacks of banker's boxes for one marked "Patient Files, Note Books, Research Documents," with "BISHOP, W." and "BELL, W." typed on the label. The box was archived by an E. Partridge, as it happens. He takes the lid off it and starts rifling through it when he comes across a case that contains a pair of round-framed eyeglasses. He smiles, and puts them on, and then buffs a steel tray so he can grin at his bespectacled face in the reflection.
Meanwhile, Olivia has gone outside to sit on a swingset and mope. Peter strolls out and takes the adjacent swing. "I have a freakishly good memory. I remember everything. But not this," Olivia tells him, and Peter wonders if that might be a good thing.
Walter comes outside and asks if she's ready, and then suggests she might want to change into something more comfortable. Oh, it's one of those bra-and-panties experiments of Walter's, I guess.
Inside, Walter hooks Olivia up to a bunch of electrodes attached to a rainbow of colours, one for every flavour in a pack of Skittles. As he does so, he tells her, "Perception is largely an emotional response. How we feel affects the way we see the world." It was his and Bell's hypothesis that extreme emotions would stimulate perception, that acute feelings of fear and love or anger would heighten the awareness. "Open the mind, as it were. The drugs help, of course," he says. Uh, yeah. Yeah, usually ingesting drugs will alter your perception of things. If I eat an orange and smoke a joint, it's not the orange that made me mellow.
Anyway, Peter hooks the Cortexiphan -- a dark fluid -- on Olivia's IV pole but waits before plugging it into her left arm. He asks if she's sure she wants to do it, and she nods, but then Walter is all confused about which arm should actually have the drip, and he does a little belly-rubbing, head-patting thing before deciding that the left arm is, in fact, the correct one. At some point, you gotta figure that it would be just a lot easier for Walter to write down actual information instead of all his mnemonics and stuff.
Anyway, Walter tells Olivia that the drugs will "generate an obstacle." He can't tell her what it will be (or what that ACTUALLY MEANS). "It will be uniquely yours," he says, and adds that facing the obstacle will elevate her emotional state, just like running on a treadmill will elevate her heartbeat. "And then when I've got you to the proper level, well, then I'll pull you out, OK?" "I am singing in the rain," Olivia responds, which means that the "drugs are working fast," according to Walter, who wonders, half to himself, if maybe perhaps it was supposed to be the right arm, which gives Peter some alarm.
So then Walter asks Peter to turn a monitor around so he can watch her vitals while he questions Olivia, who has her eyes closed. Walter asks her to open them.
She does. She's in a forest with very tall trees. In her dream, she's seated in the same position she is in in the chair in the lab -- in the exact same chair, in fact. Walter checks her "theta rhythms," which are normal, and her "stable neocortex" is active, which means it's working. Glad that means something to somebody!
In her dream, Olivia gets up out of the chair and starts to walk. There's a flash, and she spots someone running. "There's someone else here," she says. She looks around, and a loud noise, almost a roar, makes her sharply breathe in, causing Peter to ask Walter if she's all right. "No, but she's not supposed to be," says Walter, who then tells Peter that he needs something from his bag, which turns out, to Peter's exasperation, to be pretzels for Walter to munch on.
In the dream, the forest darkens from day to night in a matter of seconds, and Olivia follows what appears to be a little girl until she catches up with her, sitting against the base of a tree, looking scared. Olivia tells her everything's all right. "Please. I don't want to do this anymore," says the girl, and Olivia tells her she doesn't have to do anything she doesn't want to do. But there's a roar again, and the wind is picking up, and the girl starts running away, and Olivia has to chase her down and grab her. Peter's concerned about Olivia's agitation, even though that's kind of the point of the experiment, and Walter tells him "She's close."
Olivia hugs the girl, who's asking her to "make them stop! Please make them stop it!" Olivia manages to calm her down, saying nothing can hurt her. Well, don't LIE to her. "That's better. What's your name?" Along with the entire viewing audience, the little girl says "Olive." Olivia looks rather disturbed by this, and she looks around. When she looks back, Olive is gone.
We can hear someone (or something) whisper "Olivia," and when Olivia turns around again, Olive is standing there, with her eyes all creepy and fucked up. It's enough to give you a jolt, and Olivia bolts upright in the lab. "Good news. It worked," says Walter, but Olivia's in no mood: "What the hell is wrong with you? You did this to little children?" Walter looks quite hurt and chastened. "We should get to work," he says.
After the commercial break, a still-agitated Olivia picks through a key ring before dropping it on a desk while Peter watches. They're in the classroom where Walter said several objects were from the other side. Olivia picks up a doll and stares at it -- causing Peter and Walter to perk up -- but then she puts it back down again. She glances around some more, and Walter asks her if she sees anything.
"Nothing. Now what? Should we find some more kids to scare?" she says, coldly. Just in case you thought her snapping at Walter was due solely to her heightened emotional state earlier. But Walter's got no idea what to do now.
In New York, Nina Sharp's walking down the street when she hears dogs howling and barking. Well, that must be it! She gets out her cellphone: "Phillip, it's me."
And Olivia's on a child-sized bed, trying to get some rest, when her cellphone rings. It's Broyles, telling her that it's started, so she gets up to tell the others. When she finds Walter, he looks miserable, watching video of a stressed-out young Olive cowering in a corner of the lab, which looks burned-out. The video is naturally in creepy, grainy black and white. From the snippet of conversation between Bell and Walter, it sounds like we're being set up to find out that Bell was the ruthless scientist who didn't care who got hurt during his experiments, w
hile Walter was the good cop. We do hear him consoling young Olive. Olivia, after realizing that it's her on the video, asks what happened."This was the first time you saw the other side. You were frightened. Started a fire with your mind. It should have worked. This is the very sort of thing that William and I were preparing for!" says Walter. I certainly hope we get back to Olivia starting fires with her mind, because that would be bad-ass. Olivia angrily says that Walter abused her and the other children, but Walter says they were trying to help: "We were trying to make you more than you were!" Olivia's not buying it: "Is that what you were doing? Or were you searching for answers to questions that you shouldn't have been asking in the first place?" Walter protests that he was a different man back then, and Olivia -- growing angrier and more disgusted by the second -- spits out that she was a defenceless child.
That's when it dawns on Walter, why the process isn't working this time around: She's not a frightened child anymore, and is in fact a kick-ass FBI agent who isn't capable of the same kind of fear that the little girl was. Eureka ... ? Walter hadn't already thought of that? "If you want to save those people, you have to find your way back to that scared little girl," says Walter. Olivia asks how they do that, but Walter doesn't know.
So there's Olivia wandering through the dark hallways of the centre. She opens a door and finds the room from the video. Blackened except for the corner where she as a young firestarter was cowering. Olivia slides into a crouching position, which is where Peter finds her. He looks around asking if this is part of Walter's test. Olivia shakes her head. He asks if she's all right, and she shakes her head again. "No. I'm not afraid of anything anymore," she says. Look at it this way: you're the obvious choice to head up the FBI's Freddy Krueger division.
We're at Massive Dynamic now, with Nina on the phone with some underling, telling them to let her know if anything changes, and then she tells Broyles, "Four tremors in the last two hours. Most recent measured two-point-six," and Broyles tells an arriving Peter and Olivia that they're increasing in frequency. Olivia seems to feel personally responsible for not being able to personally see the glimmer around a building about to be sucked into an alternate universe, and Broyles points out that she didn't send the other building over here. Plus, it's not like it's a category on her performance review chart! Peter asks about "Plan B," and Broyles says they're compiling data: "Trying to predict where the incident will take place. Satellite images, seismic activity, weather patterns." Peter offers a fresh set of eyes, so Nina escorts him to the lab while Broyles comforts Olivia by telling her that there's still time.
And so Brandon leads the Fabulous Bishop Boys through the geologic division lab, saying that they've peen plotting the epicenter of each microquake, looking for a pattern. Peter suggests regressing the data points, which Walter grumpily decries as a waste of time: "Useless attempt to impose order on random, meaningless data," he says, adding that he tried the same thing twenty-five years ago, and there was no answer to any of the "why" questions. Except mass, points out Peter.
Brandon wants to know what they're talking about, so Peter explains about the universes being in balance, and it seems to me that this is something that ought to have been shared with the geologic division already, and Brandon understands it not because it's a simple concept but via the bag of sand vs. the idol at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And Walter starts running with what Peter's talking about, asking for a pencil as well as satellite data and 3D cubic imagery to calculate cubic feet, and he'll also need a comprehensive list of all building materials used during construction, like YEAH, NO PROBLEM, and Brandon timidly says, "For every freestanding structure in New York City?" and Walter rules out the Empire State Building.
Olivia comes in and he says, "Good news. We have a ridiculous, completely impossible plan," although he might not have used all those words. Then Brandon says they can rule out the buildings in Tribeca for being too big. Walter asks if they're lofts. They are. Peter explains: "Lofts have no interior walls. Even though one of the buildings might be bigger, they could be the same mass." Well, then I guess Walter should also be asking for an exact headcount of everybody who's going to be in the building at the precise moment that it's yanked from the alternate universe, right? I mean, if balance is what the universe needs.
Anyway, Olivia tells them the guys "downstairs on the supercomputer" are crunching numbers on the first six buildings, but it's going to take some time. Well, if it's going to take a while to do six buildings at a time...
Speaking of time, Walter's watch beeps. "It's time. It could happen any moment now." Olivia wants to know how many buildings are left.
Cut to Nina's office, with Broyles looking at the list of 147 buildings. Oh, shit. They include three hospitals, a cancer treatment centre, a nursing home. Olivia suggests evacuation, but Broyles says evacuation would actually kill a lot of those people, as well as start a citywide panic that might kill thousands more. And because maybe he's looking to pick a fight with Olivia, he points out that the largest building on the list "has, what, five hundred people?" which allows Olivia to get her righteous indignation on and ask if he thinks they should just let the building and the people disappear. "There are times when the only choices you have left are bad ones," he says. So it's like trying to watch television on Friday nights, is what he's saying.
And Peter is working away in some server room or something when Olivia comes in, and he explains that he figured if he shut down all the non-essential functions, he could make the computers run faster, and I would kind of think that A) Massive Dynamic has people for that; 2) there's no way in hell Massive Dynamic is letting a con artist like Peter poke around its computers unsupervised like this; and D) Shut up, Peter. Olivia tells him that it's too late: "I failed. I failed, and I'm supposed to be the one who can stop things like this." Peter rushes to comfort her, telling her that he's never met anyone who can do the things she can do, and I can only suspect that he ain't seen nothing yet, and Olivia says she's scared. He caresses her cheek. "Don't be," he says, and leans in to kiss her. Olivia's into it, so here's hoping that power will still work if she's horny! She pulls away as she realizes that she's scared, and goes rushing out onto an observation deck where, after a moment, she spots a building, unnaturally bright -- not to mention shimmering -- in the night, in the distance. And then she gets excited, so the building fades. Which makes her scared again, and it shimmers again! Which makes her excited, so it fades. Etc.
So as Olivia races to the scene in her SUV, she's on the phone with the guys back in the lab, trying to figure out exactly which building it was that she saw. After tossing out some landmarks, and after Olivia sees the shimmer again in the clouds, Peter -- doing an admirable job of not being annoyed for being cockblocked by an alternate universe -- figures out it was the Brayson Place Hotel on 13th and Washington, and Broyles calls the hotel and yells that they need to evacuate the building.
But as Olivia pulls up, everyone is running out of the building anyway, because of the shaking. So maybe the Fringe team should have been monitoring emergency lines? Olivia goes racing towards the building and grabs the hotel manager or the front desk dude or the doorman or whoever and asks if everyone is out of the building. "I think so," he says, which is good enough for Olivia! They start running for the other side of the sidewalk, then stumble and fall while the shaking intensifies -- they try to hold on
to the curb but the force of the vacuum starts pulling them back, and the hotel manager loses his grip. Olivia is either dragged with him or she lets go to try to help him -- either way he's wrapped around her and she manages to grab a post on the sidewalk and hangs on for dear life. Behind them, the building vibrates and roars, and then everything is silent. Olivia and the manager get up and stare at the empty hole in the ground behind them. "I guess it's safe to say that you've got the rest of the night off work," says Olivia. Yeah, hilarious! Dude's got no job! Plus his iPod was probably in there!In the Federal building, Olivia and Broyles watch as a newscaster explains that there was not a single casualty when hundreds miraculously escaped what federal authorities are calling "an unscheduled controlled demolition" at the hotel, and their explanation is that the building was supposed to be destroyed with no trace left of it, just at a different time? Olivia says "the conspiracy nuts" are going to have a field day, and I don't know that it's fair to call them "conspiracy nuts" when THERE ACTUALLY IS A GOVERNMENT COVERUP, and Broyles makes some wry comment about how Olivia would be surprised at what you can make the general public believe, although I believe the conspiracy nuts aren't really the general public and that's Olivia's point. "You saved a lot of people," he says, and I realize that Broyles made a phone call, but it sure looked like people were racing out of the building because IT WAS SHAKING, and the only person Olivia saved was the guy who she delayed on HIS way out of the building, so let's not start handing Olivia her medals yet. "We all did," says Olivia. He asks her what finally activated her ability. "I think it was just time," she says.
Over at the Bishop household, Peter's on the phone, saying, "Monopoly is great. He loves the coloured money," and then hanging up and explaining to Walter that that was Astrid, who's coming over to play some games with him. "I hope she likes Monopoly!" says Walter, brightly. Heh. He asks where Peter's going, and Peter says he's going out for drinks with Olivia. "A date?" says a very excited Walter, and Peter says it's just drinks: "Apparently, that's what normal people do." That doesn't stop a giddy Walter from dancing a little jig when Peter is out of eyesight. Hee!
And there's Olivia, getting ready, and LETTING DOWN HER HAIR. I feel like a teenage boy in the '40s getting to see a shapely woman's calf! And then she smiles. Swoooooon.
Peter writes down the phone number of the restaurant where they'll be, and then the doorbell rings. Walter asks if Peter wants him to go get it. "Absolutely not. In fact, it would be my preference if you could be someplace else altogether." Walter naively asks where, and Peter suggests Chicago as he goes to get the door. He opens the door for Olivia, and tells her he knows a great place that's just a couple blocks away so they can walk. Olivia's smile is gone, and she stares at Peter while Walter watches the both of them. "Agent Dunham..." Walter says. Peter says he'll get his coat, and we see what Olivia's seeing, which is, of course, Peter shimmering. With Peter gone, Olivia looks like she's going to cry. And a miserable Walter almost makes me tear up as he says to Olivia: "Please don't tell him."
And we have to wait two months to find out what's ?
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. He cannot start fires with his mind but never stops trying. Follow him on Twitter or email him at danieljdaniel[at]gmail.com.