Fringe TV Show - Neither Here Nor There - Fringe Recaps, Fringe Reviews, Fringe Episodes | TWoP

Recapped by Daniel · Aired 2011-09-23

I guess the good news is that in the time since we've left our fearless Fringe investigators, a truce has been declared with their counterparts from Earth-2. So no sending shapeshifters to power up Doomsday devices! I'm looking at you, Walternate! The bad news is that there's still plenty of ill will to go around. Olivia's handing over some boxes of files to Fauxlivia, and also dealing out plenty of attitude. "This isn't gonna work, this truce, because you're not trustworthy," she says, and Fauxlivia offers her default smirk and suggests Olivia's the problem, that she's incapable of trust. Olivia tries pointing out that Fauxlivia kidnapped her and stole her life, so pardon HER if trust isn't exactly her for-TAY, but Fauxlivia saucily says living Olivia's life made her all the more homesick for her own universe: "Must be hard to develop trust in people when all you've got is yourself." Fauxlivia's sliding over boxes of files of her own; hers are black. Like her heart. There's a little more Maury Povich-style "You don't know me!" stuff between the two of them, and then Olivia says "happy reading" adding Fauxlivia will likely find a lot of the cases familiar since she and her people were responsible, and Fauxlivia's all "ditto." They're in some sort of cavernous room with bright lights and some sort of computer monitoring thingy on the wall, and as Olivia walks away, we see just a brief flash of Peter wink in and out of view.

Do the Observers ever like to eat out in nicer places than these diners and greasy spoons they keep rendezvousing in? Some place with a little more privacy? The Observer strolls in to one, where December is already waiting, sitting at a table. Nobody in the diner says, "Holy shit, another one!" The Observer sits down and the two of them start talking about a problem December is alluding to: "It is impossible. The timeline has been rewritten. He was erased. And yet traces of him continue to bleed through," says the Observer. "California Dreamin'" is playing on the jukebox, for the record. December hands over a small metallic bar and tells the Observer that it's their responsibility to ensure events play out as they were intended before his intervention. "They can never know the boy lived to be a man," says December, and the Observer promises to take care of it.

New opening credits! By which I mean differently colored opening credits. The news ones are amber, which means I lost $20 betting on "purple" in the office Fringe season premiere pool.

By Daniel

Hartford, Conn., now, where Agent Lincoln Lee -- smartly attired in a suit and in those glasses he wears, looking like a attractive man with perfect vision who likes to put on glasses for a laugh, that adorable bastard. Some of us need glasses! He raps on the door of a well-appointed home and impatiently checks his watch. The door is opened by a man in a shirt and underwear with a bagel stuffed in his gob, excusing his not-ready-yetness on the toaster for "acting up," and then we get one of those scenes of domestic chaos where two children start climbing all over Lincoln Lee, who they're very excited to see, and then everyone talks about toast for like an hour as if Quentin Tarantino were writing an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, and now one of the kids is shoving a box with air-holes poked in it in Lincoln Lee's face, and now in comes the mom to shoo everyone on their way, and Lincoln Lee is still being snotty about Danzig (played by Joe Flanigan, who was in Stargate: The Generation or whatever if that means anything to anyone), who is pointing out that sarcastic people get more illnesses. They certainly get popped in the face more often. "It has something to do with negative energy," and it doesn't take a fortune-teller to know that Agent Robert Danzig is going to be dead before too long. And meanwhile he STILL doesn't have pants on. "Don't worry! We're not gonna be late!" he says.

Cut to the two agents chasing a guy up some stairs onto a rooftop. See? It was penciled in for 9:15: "Chase Bad Guys"! I knew we were going to be late! The guy they're chasing's got a gun of his own, so it's fortunate they're chasing him through one of those steamy, rusted-out and unoccupied industrial sectors of town. Not that they're shooting at each other. You have guns! They're right there! They're not going to shoot themselves!

They chase him down off the rooftops and into one of the unused warehouses that have the lights left on down the miles of corridors of utility pipes. Lee and Danzig split up, and Danzig spots someone down at the other end of the corridor.

Meanwhile, Lincoln Lee enters a room only to find a gun at his head. But he quickly steps aside and disarms the guy (even as a shot is fired off) and knocks him down and handcuffs him to a table. "Robert, he's down!" yells Lee, but there's no reply, which doesn't mean that Robert is dead or anything HE'S TOTALLY DEAD.

Lee goes off looking for him, and eventually finds him, lying on the ground, under another dude with purplish, translucent skin crouching by him who's startled by Lee's approaching. There's a spark and some kind of crackling noise and Translucent Man hurls himself through a nearby window and half-jumps, half-flies down through another window on a lower floor in the building opposite. Lee, not able to fly in this universe (not in the other universe either, right? I forget. It's been a few months), decides not to launch himself out the window and instead goes back to check on Danzig. He's fine, except for that he's dead and his face appears to be crystallizing. C'mon, creampuff, get up. Walk it off.

By Daniel

After the commercial break, the Fringe team is on the scene, which consists of Olivia and -- huzzah! -- Astrid! My first thought was, "Well, that makes sense. With Peter gone, I guess Astrid would have to start filling in in the field" until I realized that THERE HAD BEEN NO PETER AT ALL. And then I smiled for a few minutes with the show on pause.

Olivia examines Danzig's body in the ambulance and then gets out to go talk to Lee, who is moping against a police cruiser. Astrid gets in the ambulance and she tells Walter via phone that she's there, and she's got on some sort of headset with a red light on it, and the headset appears to send a squeal of feedback into her skull.

As Olivia goes over to talk to Lee, she's watched by the Observer who's standing behind the police tape talking to another Observer who I don't think we've seen before. Good thing these guys are just supposed to observe and not get involved -- they're only just standing there creepily dressed alike and observing a crime scene looking like they're huge Adjustment Bureau fans.

Anyway, Olivia introduces herself to Lee, and you're all, "Hey, they already know each other!" Except that the Observer conversation reminds us that that was "before things changed," which sounds awfully ominous. Olivia goes over the details with Lee about what he saw. He wants to know who she's with, but all she'll say is that it's with a special division and she's not allowed to disclose any more than that.

So Lincoln Lee describes the man with the translucent skin: "It's like what you see on Robert's face, but more of it," he explains. Olivia wants to know if Lee saw anything in his hands, like some sort of device that could have done it. Lee didn't, but he's requested a field office medical examiner. "He's good. He's thorough." Like Maude Lebowski's doctor! Olivia's all, thanks, but we got this, and sure enough, Danzig's body is already being trundled off to get on its way to Fringe division. This gets Lee pretty agitated: "You're some division coming in here and taking over! You won't even tell me who you are!" Olivia remains calm and won't answer Lee when he asks if she knows who the suspect is, which only makes him angrier, because this was his partner. "Maybe you can't understand that. I'd like to talk to someone else," he says, like he's not happy with the service at Olive Garden and he wants to speak to a manager. Except there is no one else, and Olivia says she's sorry for his loss, and gets in her SUV and drives off, while Lee studiously checks out her license plate number as she leaves.

By Daniel

Over in the Harvard lab, which looks more or less the same -- maybe even a little less cluttered? -- Walter is... well, he's pulling a dead pigeon in a casserole dish out of the fridge. So the lack of Peter has really been detrimental to his eating habits.

He's arguing with Astrid over the temperature and barometric pressure, because he feels like there's something different: "This whole place has felt funny for the last week," he says, suggesting again that traces of Peter have lingered. After all, if Peter had simply been completely winked out of existence, there would be no reason for Walter to feel as though things were different. Astrid, who is going through the Fringe-2 boxes, just chalks it up to Walter's grumpiness over agreeing to work with the other side, which he doesn't exactly deny: "That man cannot be trusted. I don't care what he says. I have looked into his eyes, into his soul. And who would know him better than me?" he says, while he prepares a syringe for another one of his unholy experiments. Astrid points out that Walternate has plenty of reasons to hate Walter too. That's probably without even knowing about Walter's penchant for cooking naked.

In her office, Olivia's trying to go over Danzig's file with the sound of Astrid and Walter bickering over going through the case files as background noise. They're so loud that out in the corridor, a passing Lincoln Lee hears, and starts to listen. And maybe someone can explain to me why, since Fringe seems to be a somewhat bigger deal in this Peter-less universe, they're still in a ridiculously unsecure lab in Harvard? And I know Walter is scared to venture outside the lab, but wouldn't that mean it would more likely have a, you know, LOCKED DOOR to prevent anyone, like Lincoln Lee here, from just waltzing in, while Astrid is saying something like, "Walter, we're fixing the world. What other choice do we have? Thank God that machine didn't blow everybody up. You know, it could have."

By Daniel

Lee walks over to where Walter is working on the dead pigeon, and Walter takes no notice of him other than to hand him the dead bird and tell him to hold it, which Lee does without complaint. Lee tries to explain he's looking for something, but Walter shushes him and injects some sort of serum into the bird, which then flies out of Lee's hands and around the lab, to Walter's delight. Astrid is also thrilled when she comes back with another box of files. "You brought it back to life!" she says, and Walter tells her that it's actually still quite dead. Oh, of COURSE. Lee's all, "Who ARE you people?" just as Olivia's coming in, not at all happy to see him. And then the bird does plummet to the floor, completely lifeless again. "There's still a few kinks to work out," Walter mutters.

Olivia goes over the traffic camera photos Lee's brought with him, which is how he tracked her back here, and she lectures him on how he and whoever helped him do this without a warrant is in a lot of trouble, and he rolls his eyes and refuses to leave without some answers, such as what division she's in, what they're dealing with, and whether Fringe can take care of the ticket he got for parking in a student lot without a permit. Olivia has opted for the always-mature silent treatment, and eventually just says she'll just give his department head a call, and he's all, "Oh great! We get cellphone reception down here!" and threatens to call his friend at the New York Times to tell him that there's an FBI division operating out of Harvard with a man who can make dead birds fly. You, uh, might want to work on your story pitch a little bit, Lee. Don't forget: the Times is the good one.

Anyway, Astrid comes to Olivia with another phone with Broyles on the line, and Walter helpfully tells Lee, "If you really want a story, you should look under the dome. I'm growing an ear." Never hurts to have a spare, I suppose. It's hard to see the dome at first, obscured as it is by the huge on-screen graphic of plants that exhorts everyone to check out Terra Nova, and the recap equivalent of that plug is me saying I will also be covering that one for TWoP so I hope it's either really good like Fringe or terrible enough to mock mercilessly whilst still being good enough to stay on the air.

By Daniel

Broyles called to tell everyone there's another body, so the team (well, Olivia and Astrid) saddles up, with Lee saying he's coming along: "I was at the first crime scene. Maybe I saw something that I haven't told you yet. Maybe that's why I came here," he says. Olivia just stares at him and then says fine: "You can get fired later." Astrid grabs her headset from Walter -- he fixed the squelching, he says -- and they're off.

They arrive at the scene of an accident, with the front end of a car wrapped around a pole. One female, about 30 years old, says the dour agent who greets Olivia, and says the only witnesses were some kids in the street, indicating said kids giving statements to police. He says no one saw what happened after the crash, but they should have some background on her by now. Olivia checks out the purple translucent face of the dead woman in the car, and then Astrid steps in -- she has some difficulty getting a hold of Walter, at first, because he's got "Rockin' Robin" blasting on the stereo and he's making microwave popcorn, and then he settles in to watch on television the images Astrid is relaying back, including a stocky FBI agent. "Don't let that hamfist touch her!" he orders Astrid, who diplomatically tells the agent that she'd like to do a preliminary. Walter's remote examination: "Burn mark like the other victims. Pupils are dilated. That looks like a hematoma on the right clavicle," he says, with Astrid adding there's one on the right jaw. "Rigidity indicates premature rigor mortis. I need to check her anus. Have that large lady there help you lift her," says Walter. Astrid slowly straightens up and hesitatingly tells the agent that she needs to check her anus. I'd just like to point out that the impending anal examination has not prompted Walter to slack off one bit from shoveling popcorn into his mouth. And I wonder if Peter's vanishing act means Astrid's paycheck is a little heavier?

Meanwhile, Olivia and Lee are digging into the victim's background. Commuter Nadine Park parked her car at the train station, about four blocks from her, at 10:45 AM. "She was still behind the wheel, so maybe he was waiting for her in the backseat. He wanted to attack her when there was no one else around. She struggled for a bit and then hit the lamppost," says Olivia.

By Daniel

Lee looks over to where the witnesses -- who all said they didn't see anything -- are talking to police, except, "one of these things is not like the other," says Lee, and Olivia sees what he means: one of the witnesses is sitting by herself, looking almost catatonic on a park bench. Olivia gives Lee a long look, all "don't think you can endear yourself to me by making yourself useful," and then goes over to talk to the witness, who -- and this probably has some significance beyond anything I can think of -- is also named Olivia. Witness Olivia doesn't seem to find as much humor in the coincidence as our Olivia does, but she probably thinks Olivia is bullshitting anyway when she brightly says they share a name. Witness Olivia at first admits only to hearing the crash, but our Olivia presses: "Your friends said that they were out in the field but that you were here on the street. So I was kind of hoping that maybe you saw something they didn't." Out in the field? What were they doing, midnight farming? Kids today! Witness Olivia says she doesn't want to get into any trouble, and our Olivia promises she won't, and Witness Olivia says she came out to the street to get better cell phone reception, and then she shows Olivia a cell phone picture, and for once this show doesn't take the chance for some sort of cell phone placement. Anyway, the picture is of Translucent Man, which Witness Olivia appears to have taken from several feet in the air ABOVE Translucent Man, not to mention close enough to him that there's no way he didn't see someone taking his picture.

So our Olivia begrudgingly tells Lee, "Now we have a picture. Nice catch." Lee's all, imagine what I could do with more information: "Freaky see-through killer, two apparently unrelated murders." And Olivia has to tell him: "It's not just two."

So it's time to bring Lee in, which means he gets to meet Broyles back at presumably the federal building. Broyles hands him a couple of forms to sign, one of which raises his clearance, the other acknowledging that he'll be prosecuted is he tells anyone what he's about to see. Broyles is, as usual, his typical glowering self that presumably has Lee's spine compacting into a cube even at just the idea of spilling any secrets.

And what he's about to see is a room full of gurneys topped with dead bodies in body bags. "The first attacks were three days ago. All we know is their hearts stopped," says Broyles. They don't know what happened to them, what Translucent Man does to affect their skin this way, what he gets out of it. They can't find a common link between the victims: "Different ages, races, blood types, some had high cholesterol, some didn't," says Broyles. Given that they're grasping at such straws as cholesterol levels, Lee tells them that Danzig had Crohn's disease and took iron pills for it. Olivia exchanges a look with Broyles, who strides out without a word, leaving Lee to stare at his partner's dead body and haltingly blather on about him being like family, and how Danzig believed everything happened for a reason. "I'm having a hard time believing that there's a reason for this," says Lee. Look, if your partner and millions of others are going to subscribe that trite "everything happens for a reason" philosophy, the least you can do is accept that sometimes the reasons are shitty, and the thirty-odd corpses in this room can attest to that.

By Daniel

The Observer's going shopping, with a little wire basket and everything, in some rinky-dink second-hand electronics components store. If the Observers ever showed attention, I'd imagine shopping in a place like this would be like the "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" Staples ads with parents shopping for school supplies. He finds some sort of switch component atop a coiled cord, and he puts his finger near it, which zaps it with a little spark of electricity, and he removes the switch from whatever doohickey it's attached to. The shop owner comes strolling up, having found the electron gun from a '58 color RCA that the Observer was looking for. "I had to take apart the cathode ray tube to get to it, so I'm gonna have to charge you full-price for the TV," he says, and can I just ask what "full price" for a 53-year-old behemoth television set would be today? Five dollars? There a big demand for those? The Observer says he wants the switch too, and the owner looks it over as well as the other pieces of equipment he's picking up, and asks what he needs all this stuff for. The Observer cocks his head. "I need to erase someone from time," he says, because why not risk having the shop owner call the police on the freaky guy who's buying spare electronic parts and speaking cryptically about obliterating someone?

Back at the lab, the body of the dead woman is arriving, but Walter has disappeared. In this universe, Walter is too scared to leave the lab, so they figure he's gotta be around somewhere; Astrid goes to check the bathroom while Olivia checks Gene's stall. As soon as they're out of the room, Lee hears some noise coming from the good ol' isolation tank, and then a scared, drenched Walter flings open the door. "Is it safe to come out? Is he gone?" he asks, but Lee has no idea who this man is that Walter is freaked out about. "There was a man in the mirror! And when I turned around, he wasn't there," says a very agitated Walter, who only calms down after Astrid and Olivia rush back, Olivia soothingly telling him that whatever it was, everybody's all there now and Walter's OK.

By Daniel

Astrid goes to get Walter some dry clothes (while Walter strips down naked right there in the lab), and Lee and Olivia have a hushed definition over whether Walter's all right or not. "Well, that depends on your definition of 'all right,'" says Olivia. My definition usually means there isn't a need for a qualifier like that, actually. Olivia says Walter is functional, except when he's not. "But he is often quite brilliant. He just never had anything to tether him to the world," she says. You know, like a grown son who was recently erased from existence.

Walter, dressed only in a towel, notes the engagement ring on the woman's hand and calls it sad. "I don't think there's anything sadder than when two people are meant to be together and something intervenes," he says, and if you'll excuse me, I have to go put some ice on my head for the bump that just rose up after the script hit me in the head.

And then Walter gets spooked by the noise of one of those old-school ribbon printers, and Astrid tells him it's just the test results he wanted: turns out that the victims don't all suffer from iron-related diseases -- which was Lee's suggestion and which Walter calls, "clever, but wrong," and which Lee calls a long shot. But all is not lost, because they all suffer from health problems -- gout, hair loss, kidney diseases -- which were all caused by some form of heavy metal poisoning: lead, zinc mercury. How about absentminded-professor-itis? Because Walter is only just now realizing that he's not wearing any pants. (Astrid goes to fetch him some.) The sheer number of victims indicates this can't be a coincidence (the poisoning, not the, uh, pantslessness) but the levels of metals in the victims' blood have returned to normal, suggesting he's taking particles from their blood. And we're only halfway through the show, so Walter's not going to have a hypothesis on this yet.

By Daniel

Elsewhere, Translucent Man does creepy things with syringes and vials of unidentified fluids! He injects some into his forearm (through some sort of socket) which seems to loosen it up and decrystallize it a bit. Then he scribbles some info into a notebook.

So assuming that the connection between the victims indicates they're not randomly selected, Olivia turns her investigative focus to how this guy is selecting his targets. Meanwhile, Walter is telling Lee about how the woman's tissue will make her an excellent specimen: "Finding healthy tissue for experimentation's harder than you might imagine," he says. Walter still isn't cool with the criminalization of grave-robbing, I presume.

Lee's shocked to discover that Fringe won't be returning the bodies to their families. Olivia says they can't: "Because we can't disclose how they were killed. The families are informed that they have gone missing, that we will continue to look for them," she says, and Lee is absolutely horrified: "Those families are going to spend the rest of their lives wondering what happened to their loved ones, looking for answers," he says, and as cold as Olivia is in the Peter-less universe, I'd think she'd at least understand why someone might have a problem with this policy. And then we're hit in the head with the script again, as Lee asks if she can imagine what it would be like to have that hole in her life. A Peter-shaped hole? Well, Olivia's not even aware it's there yet. OH WAIT EXCEPT SHE IS.

Walter is even more matter-of-fact: "People die. It happens. Sometimes they even die twice," he growls, so I'm guessing that in this time stream, Walter still pulled Peter over, and Peter died anyway? I'm kind of excited about the idea of Peter Bishop dying twice.

Olivia's got another reason why they can't release the bodies, though: "That would mean we would have to file documentation, which would draw attention to Fringe Division. And we cannot have that. It may not be a good enough answer, but it is the truth."

The ethical debate will have to wait, because Astrid says one of the victims' credit cards just registered a charge, and dead people do not use their credit cards. Well, I haven't watched The Walking Dead yet, so I'm just going to have to assume that's true. (Walter, for one, says they do, but everyone ignores him, acting all grumpy-like. At least he's dressed now.)

By Daniel

Their excitement is dampened when Astrid realizes it's just an auto-renewal on a monthly commuter pass, but Lee points out the killer picked up his last victim in the commuter rail parking lot. And after the victims' locations are plotted, they realize that there are four kill zones centered around commuter rail stations. Olivia starts barking orders, telling Lee to come with her, while Astrid is to call Broyles and get Translucent Man's photo out to the station police and organize teams of agents to watch the stations.

Meanwhile, in his hideout, Translucent Man is still making calculations in his notebook, at least until he starts to tremble. He clutches his forearm, with its fluctuating transparency levels. He turns his hand over, and grosses everyone out as a bloody fingernail slides into place on his left forefinger. And then, giving me shivers, he pulls the nail RIGHT OFF HIS FINGER. Then he examines it, smiling, his see-through skin adding a skullified touch of creepiness. He is SMILING. His unholy lips are pulling upwards against his teeth. FLAG ON SHOULDER?

Over at Avon Station, Olivia and Lee sit in a car and watch while teams of other agents check in over the radio with nothing to report. Olivia takes the inactivity as the perfect time to tell Lee that she knows what it's like, having lost a partner herself. She tells the story of John Scott and the pilot episode of Fringe, which obviously makes no reference to Peter. "During the investigations, my partner was injured. What happened to him was horrific and unexplainable. It affected his skin. Like your partner, but different," she says, adding that she checked Walter out of the mental institution so he could solve the case and save John. "But even Walter couldn't save him," says Olivia.

Lee looks like he's about to try to say something comforting when an Agent Roach announces over the radio that they've got him at Grove Hall Station, so he and Olivia peel out.

The aforementioned Agent Roach and his partner Agent Frazier are driving through an industrial area with train tracks and tankers and the like, and you know that with this much screen time and dialogue given to a couple of bit parts like this that one of them's going to end up dying. Ooh, especially when they're in a place that's all steamy like this! Sure enough, after they get out and chase the suspect into a warehouse, Frazier gets dragged underneath a rail car. By the time Olivia and Lee arrive, Frazier's lying on the tracks, Roach is down himself, having been shot.

By Daniel

Lee tends to him while Olivia heads for the warehouse. Inside, she can hear movement, and we see Translucent Man setting fire to his notes and burning them in a big barrel. Hobo style!

So Olivia's got the drop on him. She yells for him not to move, and he stands there, briefcase in hand, looking rather unconcerned. And I don't know if he's super-fast or Olivia's reaction time is suddenly super-slow, but he swings his briefcase and knocks her gun away, then starts throwing her into beam and shelf with little effort. He makes the mistake of throwing her into some barrels (empty and stacked, naturally) that are near her gun, and just as he's readied a syringe to stick her with, she knocks him away with an elbow and empties several shots into him.

Outside, the shots get Lee's attention, and he climbs up the side of a railcar to see into the warehouse -- it looks like Olivia's fine, which seems to fill him with much relief, so he climbs back down to keep attending to Roach, who seems to be coming around. "It took ... my gun," wheezes Roach. "It's OK," says Lee. It's not OK! Taxpayers pay for those! The FBI's not made of guns! "There's more than one," says Roach. Well, that fills Lee with a little more urgency, and he senses someone ducking behind a railcar behind him. So he draws his gun and starts tracking the guy, finally stepping from behind a railcar with his gun leveled, only to see a semi-translucent Robert Danzig there, firing a gun of his own. Fortunately for Lee, he's a better shot, and hits semi-Danzig three times. That gives Lee plenty of time to stand over the body and stare grimly at the corpse of whatever it is.

It's later now, dark, and amidst the swarm of police and EMTs, Lee asks who these things are and what they're looking for. "I think the better question is what are they," says Olivia, and then she doesn't answer that question either.

Then we get a point-of-view shot indicating someone is watching them, and it turns out to be a version of Nadine Park, the dead woman from the car accident. She's standing on the steps of one of those huge fuel storage tanks, and struggling to keep her skin from being translucent. As it becomes something more resembling normal skin (albeit skin that belongs as a "before" picture in a Proactiv commercial), she turns and walks up the stairs.

Over to FBI headquarters in Hartford, with the traditional overhead shot. Is that really Hartford? Or is Los Angeles standing in for everywhere? Anyway, Lee is going through a box of Robert's personal effects, including Danzig's FBI ID card. We see him put a few keepsakes in his travel bag when a co-worker walks up and silently hands him an envelope. That guy has no lines because then he gets paid more, right? I just can't imagine receiving an envelope at work handed over wordlessly by a colleague.

By Daniel

Anyway, he opens the envelope and seems to be surprised by the certificate that he finds inside, and checks the envelope again. He seems lost in thought for a moment.

Over at Walter's lab, Astrid is trying without success to piece together what some of the burned documents say, but it's too badly scorched. Walter starts rambling about how this reminds him of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. "We used to have the book at St. Claire's. The mental hospital where I lived for sev..." he starts, and Astrid finishes "...seventeen years." Just a little on the touch of rudeness, but it seems like she did it to head off an anger-induced memory of Walter's.

Although if you want to keep Walter happy, you should probably let the new guy know that it's not wise to show up without any gumdrops for Walter, who gets in a snit when Lee shows up, rudely having not brought pockets full of sweets for the avuncular mad scientist. "That's a pity," sniffs Walter. Olivia is a little friendlier, teasing Lee about the Bureau getting on his case for putting so many miles on their car, driving from Hartford. This is her flirting, Lee!

He thanks her for releasing Robert's body, since he knows she must have had to pull some "significant" strings. "Why would you do that for me?" he asks. Olivia says she knows he doesn't have the answers he wants, but she hopes this brings him some closure. Lee thanks her.

And hey, Lee is right on time to see Walter's discovery -- a cookie-sized device with protruding wires pulled from the corpse of translucent man. He shows it to Olivia and darkly asks if it reminds her of anything: "A biological-mechanical hybrid. These are different -- they're human. And for whatever reason, they don't work," he says. Olivia wants to know if Walter's suggesting -- well, she doesn't finish that sentence, because Walter hisses that he told her that man couldn't be trusted. Lee wants to know what's going on, while Astrid urges Walter not to jump to conclusions. "All I do know is that this tech isn't from here," he says, and Lee is all, "Not from here? You mean like China?" like SHUT UP AND LISTEN FOR A DAMN MINUTE, NEW GUY, and Olivia just quietly says, "No. Not China."

By Daniel

So Olivia takes Lee into a manned security checkpoint, where she tells the soldier she needs an ID for Lincoln Lee. The sergeant gets Lee to put his hand on a scanner and then starts gathering his information: Badge number, blood type, medications, history of mental illness. Lee gets increasingly uncomfortable with the increasingly personal questions, but he answers them all (that's "no" on the mental illness, by the way). The ID card is fresh and ready to go, so I assume Lee has to do some sort of orientation? Well, maybe Olivia is the orientation. She leads him down a hall full of personnel. Everything looks brand-spanking new, and some of the workers are actually installing monitors. Suddenly a soldier escorts them through another set of doors, and then leaves them behind as an electronic voice says, "Initiate scan." The lights go red, there is a flash of white and some wind, and Lee is thoroughly discombobulated at this point. "Please remain still," nags the recorded voice.

Of course, this is where Olivia decides to jabber on about how she does know what it's like to have a hole in her life. "It's been there as long as I can remember," she says. Olivia, the machine said to stay still! Anyway, she says that when she joined Fringe, she somehow knew she would find answers. But that's as far as she's going to get with the personal revelations, because the scanner powers down and the access doors in front of them open up, revealing some sort of busy scientific facility, with dudes in white Hazmat-esque suits walking by. Directly across from them is another set of doors leading out. "What's beyond the door?" he asks, and Olivia says, "Sometimes answers lead to more questions." And sometimes not answering questions leads to the same questions getting asked again!

Not Lincoln Lee, though. He steps out into the facility, and we can see Peter's Doomsday device to one side, so I guess this is the hangar that houses it, filled with more stuff. Looking up, he sees cloudy skies through the roof on the other side of hangar, and looking back through the windows above the doors he just came through, blue sky.

But that's still not as freaky to him as what happens . Olivia, only kind of sassier with long red hair and a -- what's that word -- smile on her face comes through the doors opposite. She chuckles when she sees Lee, but mostly ignores him and strolls over because Olivia's got something to show her. Olivia hands over the box: "It was powering a new form of shapeshifters," says Olivia, and Fauxlivia plays dumb. "Human shapeshifters. The ones we encountered before answered to Walternate. You were wondering why I don't trust you," says Olivia, who has the amusing big-sister role in this relationship.

By Daniel

Fauxlivia seems a little less sure of herself, but snickers anyway and says she'll look into it, and she sashays away.

Lee is speechless over what just happened, and then he looks up and it's like holy shit! A zeppelin! Lee, if you want to be really freaked out, wait for that zeppelin to pass over the blue-sky windows.

And finally, we're back outside Walter's lab, where the Observer is sitting on a bench and getting his jury-rigged device ready.

Inside, Walternate is crushing something with a mortar and pestle, which he adds to some white liquid he's heating on a Bunsen burner. Looks like milk, which makes sense, because he's in his pajamas. He shuffles past a guard in the hall (gets the guy's name wrong, twice) and into his office, where he's got a fold-out bed set up, and there's also an aquarium and a television. Sweet setup! I wonder if my boss would let me do that? Probably not, given that I don't have four walls -- not much room for a bed, either.

Anyway, Walter settles in with the remote control. Outside, the Observer powers up his doohickey, lifts the lid over the special switch, swallows a couple of times (little nervous?) ... and then closes it again and shuts off the machine. He looks back again at the lab, then stands up and walks away.

Inside, Walter's drifting off to sleep, so he shuts off the television -- and then is utterly terrified when he sees a reflection of Peter in the screen. He starts yelling in horror, bringing Agent Tim running in from the hallway, where he finds Walter clutching himself on the side of the bed, muttering about seeing the man again. "It was the man from the mirror," he says. Agent Tim starts mentally filling out his transfer-request application.

Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. He's a little confused why the Peter-less world isn't all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel[at]gmail.com.