The shortwave radio from the pocket universe starts beeping one night out of the blue. Astrid is the first one to hear it, so she looks for Walter to decode the pattern of beeps. Unfortunately, he's in the middle of an acid trip and existing mostly in a world of his own imagining. I say "unfortunately," but that's where the Fringe team is concerned. For us at home, it provides a wonderfully bizarre glimpse into Walter's mind. While Peter and Olivia track down the source of the signal, believing it will lead them to Donald, Walter and Astrid remain in the lab to deal with miscellaneous hallucinations.
The running theme of Walter's trip is his fear of once more becoming the Walter of yore – the man who nearly destroyed two whole universes and regarded himself as a god. That part of him is represented by Carla, the lab assistant who died trying to eradicate some of Walter's more dangerous work. During his trip, though, she seems to be guiding him towards just what her real-life self fought to avert. She strokes his ego and whispers that the Observers would revere a man of his brilliance. She leads him to a hidden journal full of dangerous ideas, even as a hallucinated Nina Sharp tries to lead him back onto the path of goodness.
Peter and Olivia eventually find the signal's source, but there's no Donald. Instead, there are two Resistance fighters and the Junior Observer left in their care by Donald some 15 years earlier. They've since named him Michael, but he hasn't said a word in all the years they've cared for him. He only seems to perk up (by Observer standards) when reunited with Olivia, whom he remembers from the other timeline.
There is a veritable ton of other weirdness and plot developments, including hints as to where Walter's solution may ultimately lead. There are also winged fairies, a Gilliam-style animated sequence, an appearance by Gene (sort of) and other strangeness that may or may not make sense in the full recap. Stay tuned.
Previously on Fringe: Walter and someone named Donald made a Betamax tape showing some of his Plan to Defeat the Observers, but rather inconveniently neglected to catch Donald's face on camera. Now, in the future, Walter has no idea who Donald may be. Other parts of the PDO seem to be falling apart, too, like Walter not being able to find the child Observer in the pocket universe like he'd planned. He did, however, find a shortwave radio with its tuning dial stuck on a specific frequency. Distraught over some of his emerging thoughts and behaviors, Walter went to see Nina Sharp, who looks even more stunning with her starkly silver hair. Walter pleaded with her to remove the brilliant parts of his brain that he felt would doom him to becoming the haughty, naughty Walter of before.
Formerly Harvard University. A searchlight fondles the exterior of the building for a moment before moving on. How nobody has uncovered the Fringe team living and working there may be one of the bigger mysteries of the show. Yes, they get in and out of the building through a tunnel, but still. If you knew Walter Bishop was one of the people you were looking for, wouldn't it make sense to stake out his old lab? Or at least pop in once in a while? The guy who was just there to feed the pigeons doesn't count. Anyway, Astrid is asleep when something starts beeping somewhere in the lab. She wakes up and whispers for Walter. Getting no reply, she reaches for the Observer-killing gun under her cot and begins to skulk around. She is, by the way, wearing a pretty cute little pajama set. Just because you're fighting the impending apocalypse doesn't mean you can't sleep in adorable jammies.
She follows the unfamiliar sound into the lab proper and finds the shortwave radio. Where it seemed broken before, it's now lit up and beeping. Something moves in the shadows behind her. She gives a start and turns to see... "Walter!" she exclaims, chiding and relieved all at once. "Hello, Astrid," he says. She should know right there that something is up. He goes on to compliment her hair. She asks him about the radio, but he can only go on about how beautiful her hair is. He seems near to tears. Astrid narrows her eyes at him.
In one of the lab offices, Peter lies awake, watching minutes tick by on a clock. Frustrated, he rolls over on his cot. The wound from his self-surgery last week is bleeding through its dressing just a bit. Apropos of nothing, Peter sleeps in black boxers. I figured I might as well report on what everyone is wearing to bed these days. Olivia, sleeping nearby, hears his cot creaking and wakes up. Wearing what looks like her street clothes, she sits beside him and runs her hand through his hair. Luckily, it looks like his tech-induced depilation seems to have stopped and Olivia doesn't end up with a fistful of his fluffy locks. He says he's having headaches again. "Can I get you anything?" she asks. He gives her a sweet smile and says, "No, I got everything I need right here." Astrid interrupts to tell them about the radio.
As they all head into the lab, Astrid explains that the beeping seems to be repeating in a loop. It's like Morse code, but not, she says. They all wonder if it could be Donald finally contacting them, but wonder why he would do so now. Olivia decides they need to decode the message to find out for sure. She turns to Walter for help, but he's just kicking back in his examination chair, staring at goodness knows what. "It's gonna be difficult to get any information from him right now," Astrid says, "because he dropped acid." Peter takes a seat beside him. As he calls for Walter, his voice echoes and fades as Carmen's comes to the fore, singing the Habanera. A tiny green fairy materializes in a spray of glitter over Peter's shoulder and then flits off across the lab and past a young blond woman in a lab coat. Carmen fades, to be replaced by an ominous note from the soundtrack. "Walter, are you tripping?" Peter asks. "Most definitely," Walter says.
After a brief interruption by the title sequence, Peter tries again to get Walter's attention. Walter's attention is otherwise occupied, however. "Carla Warren is here," he whispers. "My old, dead lab assistant is here to haunt me," he goes on. "The one that was burned in the fire," he reminds Peter and the viewers at home. Carla gives Walter a look that's both serene and mischievous. Peter decides to press on and tells Walter about the radio. Astrid starts to techo-babble about the signal, but Walter is more interested in the green fairy, who has just landed on his outstretched finger. Walter doesn't have much to say about the signal except that it's in A minor. "What kind of acid did you take?" Peter asks. "Black Blotter," Walter tells him, rather pleased with himself. Then he grows more serious as he explains that he was desperate to remember the plan before "he" takes over. He says Nina's going to help him remove the troublesome pieces of his brain after they've finished the plan. "I don't want to lose you, Peter. I don't want to lose any of you." He turns teary eyes towards the rest of the gang.
Peter tries to reassure Walter, but it's not enough. He confesses that he almost left the tunnels again two nights ago while everybody was asleep. He cries in frustration that he doesn't even know where he was going. "But he does," Carla says. "But he does," Walter echoes because, after all, Carla's just an aspect of his mind. Olivia doesn't quite understand, but Peter knows Walter is talking about the man he used to be. Walter chatters on about his former self like it's a separate entity impelling him to do things. (He multi-tasks by also making himself a little cake with his Easy Bake oven.) It terrifies him that he doesn't know what this other self wants him to do. "I need to figure out this blasted plan to defeat the Observers, and I have to do it quickly, to rid myself of this devil!" He notices that everyone is staring at him and asks, very quietly, to be left alone to do his work.
While Peter takes Walter to have his trip in peace, Olivia and Astrid muse over the radio signals. "What if we don't have to crack the code?" Olivia wonders. She figures if they can track down the signal, then they can figure out what it means. She pitches the idea to Peter when he returns and he says he'll get in touch with Anil for the proper equipment.
Walter chills out in his makeshift bedroom, hearing "Hurdy Gurdy Man" by Donovan in the record player of his mind. Walter watches as a streak of green sparkly light zooms around his desk. The fairy appears again, this time to fetch him a match. "Thank you, my dear," he says. She nods and then vanishes once more in a sparkly burst. Walter lights a match near his bed. The light from the flame spreads into a rainbow. He takes the candle into the lab and sees a tableau of young Nina Sharp trying to stop him from crossing through portal into the other universe. The green fairy looks over the scene. A red fairy pops into view in front of her and then they both poof away in sparkles.
Walter sits down to a watch a Betamax tape that shows Anil explaining how his signal tracker works. Why does Anil suddenly sound Scottish? Or maybe he always sounded like that and I'm just now noticing. Anyway, it turns out Walter's not really watching a tape at all and Anil is, in fact, right behind him and explaining this stuff to everyone in person. "Hey, Walter, we're about to find the signal," Peter says. "I know that," Walter says. Carla Warren is standing beside him. "Did you know there's something hidden in this lab?" she asks him. Walter glances around the lab, as if looking for the secret thing to which she's referring. He's shocked to discover Anil in the lab, even though a moment ago he seemed relatively aware of his presence. The non-tripping members of the team fiddle with the dials on Anil's tracker until they hit on a beeping pattern that matches the radio's. While the team watches a blinking dot on a digital map, we the viewers are shown the corresponding location in the real world. As the camera pans over a dark, misty forest, it settles on a skeletal hand, still clutching the gun that apparently did not save its owner's life.
Come morning, Peter and Olivia have arrived in the forest, which, according to the Giant Floating Letters, is in Willington, Connecticut. Peter leads the way with Anil's device. Peter sounds like he has a bastard of a head cold, but he seems pretty happy, all things considered. Olivia notices his good mood and asks about it. "You amaze me," he tells her. "After everything I put you through -- I did the very thing I promised I wouldn't, I left you again... I'm more than a little embarrassed, you know." He tells her he's lucky to have her. She smiles and kisses him. When she pulls away, she sees something in the distance behind Peter.
It looks like the remnants of a campsite, with an old RV that's been all but overtaken by leafy vines. As Peter and Olivia go to investigate, they come across a blackened skeleton lying nearby. Peter feels around in the leaves under the skull and pulls out a piece of Observer tech like the one he recently removed from his own neck. "It was an Observer," he says, just in case we didn't already realize that. Olivia finds two more bodies, one an Observer's and one a Loyalist's. "Looks like they were killed in a firefight," Olivia says. She thinks it must have happened 10 or 15 years ago, based on the decomposition of the bodies. Peter finds another skeleton slumped over the RV's steering wheel. "I think we just found Donald," he says. He notices an early model Observer gun on the dash. Olivia wonders where the signal could be coming from if Donald has been dead all this time.
While Peter resumes looking for the signal with Anil's device, Olivia checks the dead man's pockets. She finds his wallet, checks inside and casts a look of sadness and recognition at the dead man. Meanwhile, Peter has tracked the signal to a relay perched high in one of the trees. He calls out to Olivia to tell her that it's boosting the signal from somewhere else. When Olivia comes out of the RV, he sees her mood has darkened. "What's wrong?" he asks. "The body behind the wheel? It isn't Donald," she says. She looks down at the wallet and this time we see what she sees: Sam Weiss's driver's license. He's bowling with the angels now.
Back at the lab, Astrid gets a call from Olivia with the latest details. The name isn't familiar to her because of that whole "different timeline" thing. She asks Walter, but he's never heard of Sam, either. Olivia tells them he died while protecting the relay, so at least they know he was a hero, even if they didn't know him this time around. "Is there a possibility that Sam Weiss was Donald?" Astrid asks. "I don't think so," Olivia says. She's seen enough of Donald on the tapes that she can tell his body type and hair color were different from Sam's. She says Peter's recalibrating the tracking device so they can find the original of the signal.
Astrid goes back to doing... whatever. All that matters is that she turns her back long enough for trippy Carla to start cooing to Walter again. "She won't see you now," she says. He heads off for parts unknown, but Carla calls him back. "You're still cold, Walter." So he starts off in another direction, but Carla tells him he's just getting colder. "This is absurd!" Walter hisses at her/himself. "Just tell me what it is you have me looking for!" She is, of course, talking about his secrets. Walter says he can't imagine what she's talking about and she says that doesn't sound like the Walter she knew. "He once told me, 'There is no god in this lab but me.'" Walter conjures up a slightly younger Nina Sharp to help defend him. Carla is unmoved. She suggests Walter could go off to New York and share his secrets with the Observers. A man of his "staggering intellect" would be revered, she says. Walter can't help but look a little proud of himself, but he refuses to do her bidding when she tells him to leave the lab.
Astrid hears him arguing with himself and calls out to him, but he's beyond hearing her. He dashes off to his office with Slightly Younger Nina Sharp in tow. Unfortunately, it's not respite he finds, but Carla, sitting on his desk with a bit of a come-hither look in her eyes. "Warmer," she says. "You're burning up - and I know how that feels." He leans towards her as if pulled by an inexorable force. Something creaks underfoot. Walter steps back to see a small panel in the floorboard. He lifts it up and pulls out a book. "Put it back, Walter," Slightly Younger Nina Sharp tells him. "That's your life's work," Carla says. "The work I came to burn the night I died." When Walter looks up, he sees a horrifically charred Carla standing in the doorway. The green fairy appears over the book to waggle a chiding finger at Walter. He waves her away. "Perhaps just a peek," he says. Slightly Younger Nina Sharp looks like she's going to cry.
thing you know, Walter's in a taxi, looking fondly over his notebook. There's a device that looks like a blender with a jet engine where the pitcher would be. "Ah, my matter displacement invention for removing food from cans," he reminisces. The cab driver leaves to get change for Walter's fare, so now Walter is free to babble in relative privacy. He looks up from his book. "What's 'black umbrella'?" he asks. "Why is it in my head?" Carla Warren sits beside him, wearing fabulous sunglasses even though it's cloudy out. Also, even though she's not real. She just gives him a teasing smile and says nothing.
A knock comes at the window and a man in a butler's uniform offers Walter a tray of acid tabs. "Would you care for a top-off, sir?" Walter giddily partakes of another Black Blotter and returns to his book. Carla prods him to remember how he was going to start his own universe. Hopefully Walter's universe wouldn't have any giant, flying porcupine men like Belly's did, because seriously: WTF? Or, if Walter's secret plan to defeat the Observers involves sending them to a new universe, hopefully it will be full of giant, flying porcupine men.
Anyway, at the mention of the new universe, Walter starts to fight back against the growing temptation to become who he once was. That's when he realizes he's at the Observer precinct in Manhattan, having snuck out of the lab some time earlier. Walter protests, saying he wouldn't do something like this. "You're in denial," Carla says. "You've been him longer than you've been you. Why else would I be here? I'm like this journal. I represent all the things you're trying to keep buried." Walter moves to leave the cab and go back home, but an Observer opens the door.
Except it's not an Observer at all. It's Astrid who's opened the door. Walter isn't even in Manhattan, nor in a taxicab, but in the team's latest "borrowed" car, parked outside a boathouse. Poor Walter is too confused to be relieved. "What are we doing here?" he asks. "We're meeting Peter and Olivia," Astrid says. "We have to rent a boat, remember?" She takes Walter by the hand and leads him to the dock. The prospect of renting a boat cheers Walter considerably. He even does a little dance. Peter and Olivia hand a guy some cash and everyone makes their way to the saddest boat you ever did see. It looks like an old saltine cracker box someone dropped in the water. Peter points out the island to which they're headed in search of the radio signal. To Walter's acid-loving mind, it looks like Emerald City. "Oh, my," he whispers.
Alas, before they can reach the floating cracker box, a boat full of Loyalists pulls up alongside the dock. Peter tries to act all casual and pretend like they're just headed out to visit his uncle, but a Loyalist toady demands to see his papers. Peter's like, "Oh, sure, my papers," and whips out a gun. I guess the show felt like this episode was lacking in action, so a gunfight ensues. The Loyalists are terrible shots, as is customary with most television baddies. They can't even hit Astrid and Walter, who are sitting perfectly still in the boat. Olivia and Peter kill off all the Loyalists and hop onto the boat. Meanwhile, the guy that rented it to them is probably like, "Damn, I should have asked for more money."
The cracker box manages to get them to the island, where the team resumes its search for the signal. Walter seems rather happy until he sees Carla hasn't left him. He leans on Astrid for support and tries his best to ignore his dead lab assistant. Anil's tracker leads them to a nice little house somewhere inland. A transmitter is visible in the window. When Olivia walks up to the house, a gray-haired gentleman steps out and raises a rifle. He demands to know what they all want. "We're here to meet Donald," Olivia says. "There's no Donald here," the man says. He says he doesn't recognize Walter when Peter asks. A bald boy walks out of the house, much to the team's amazement. "Astrid, do you see him?" Walter asks. "The child Observer!" The child doesn't say anything.
"Richard," calls a woman from inside the house. The man with the rifle answers back, telling "Caroline" that he has everything under control. She comes out to put a protective arm around the young Observer. Olivia pleads their case to this Caroline, who proves to be more receptive than Richard. She tells him to put his gun down. "Richard, we knew this day could happen... that someday, someone would come for him." Richard keeps his gun at the ready and demands the newcomers tell him the password that was hidden in the radio signal. Unfortunately, the team wasn't able to decode the message, so they seem pretty screwed.
Walter thinks and thinks, and thinks some more. That's when a giant hand reaches down and plucks him off the ground by his head. A chorus sings "The Happy Wanderer" as the hand transports Walter into an animated land reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Monty Python work. Walter -- now animated himself -- drops down onto Gene's back and together they go traipsing off into a surreal landscape. They wander into a factory where pipes spit out a frog, a cairn terrier and a seahorse. The frog and seahorse may come from the glyphs, but where's the dog from? Oz? They pass by one last pipe and out pops the green fairy. This very motley crew comes to a tree being guarded by a knight. The frog devours the knight. Walter hesitates at the tree. A giant foot squashes Walter's traveling companions, leaving him free to access the tree, which he opens up with a key. He rummages around inside the trunk, which is full of babies for some reason, and pulls out a black umbrella.
Back in what passes for the real world, Walter suddenly says, "Black umbrella. That's the password." Only then does Richard finally lower the gun.
Now, a lot of online speculation has the knight as Bad Walter and the cow-riding one as Good Walter, but what if it's the other way around? Despite his rather forbidding countenance, the knight was wearing white, after all. It's then Bad Walter who gains access to this tree -- a Tree of Knowledge, so to speak -- where hidden memories are stored. He did remember "black umbrella" while imagining himself doing very Bad Walter things in the imaginary taxicab, and he seems rather glum when he recites the password, as if perhaps realizing he's now gaining more and more access to hidden parts of himself. On the other hand, the green fairy does appear and applaud Walter's accomplishment and his glumness seems to turn to pride, so maybe I'm the one hallucinating. Time will tell.
Everyone goes inside for a little chat. The team learns that Richard and his wife have been helping the Resistance since before it was even called that. "After a while, we acquired a reputation as people who could be trusted," he says. When Donald had to go on the run, he left the boy in their care. "He said he was part of an important plan to defeat the invaders." The last Richard heard, Donald had died. Caroline says they've been broadcasting the radio message every five days since Donald left. It's been over 20 years now. "He doesn't speak," Caroline says. "He hasn't aged a day since he came to live with us. We call him Michael." While his mother and father (for that is what they are, essentially) choke up with emotion, the boy just stares in silence at Olivia. When Richard says he wanted to keep Michael, Walter understands all too well. "I under doubted that Michael was important, that he was meant for something great," Richard says. Everyone looks sad. Someone at some point should probably wonder if this "plan to defeat the Observers" is also going to defeat this kid.
Richard and Caroline have their goodbyes with Michael while the team watches from a respectful distance. They tell him things that we don't hear, but can guess at. They wrap him up in a warm coat and cry and Michael wipes a tear from his mother's cheek. The Samuel Barber-like string music scoring this scene is just damned near killing me. Michael takes Olivia's hand and walks away from his home of the last 20 years.
Later, after Michael's gotten settled into his new bed at Formerly Harvard University, Olivia and Peter bring him a mug of hot cocoa. He probably can't taste it at all, but it's a sweet gesture. There are some moments when he's looking down at his mug when he looks uncannily like September. Perhaps he's a brother, a clone, a younger version... Didn't Walter refer to September as "Gemini" on another trip? Olivia sort of lies down at the foot of the bed, propped up on one elbow. Michael just keeps staring at his cocoa without drinking it. "I had a daughter," Olivia begins, "and when she was little, she loved hot cocoa. She used to say that of all the hot cocoa in the world, mine was her favorite." That gets Michael to try a sip, after which he rewards her with something approaching a smile. "Do you know me?" Olivia asks. "Do you remember me?" There's a long pause and then he nods, once. For some reason, Olivia has to explain to Peter that Observers experience time differently, and that's how the boy can remember them even though they met in another timeline. Then Peter's like, "Oh, hey, that reminds me I need to change my bandage from where I cut myself because I was almost an Observer myself."
Walter is off in his lab, still on his acid trip. He sits on the floor, slumped against a cabinet while scenes from his past play out around him. Everything in the lab -- including himself at certain points -- becomes an impromptu screen upon which images are projected. First he remembers comparing himself to God. Then he remembers arguing with his wife, pleading with her to believe in him. He remembers Peter dying, and then creating the portal into the other universe over Carla's protestations. Nina tries to stop him, too, but he ignores her. "There has to be a line we can't cross," Carla says in the projected memory. Walter disagrees: "My son is dying, Dr. Warren. I will not allow that to happen again." Carla quotes Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita. "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds." Walter remembers Peter -- his stolen son -- drowning in the icy lake because in this timeline, September wasn't there to save him. The image of Peter floating in the dark green-blue of the water projected across Walter's defeated from is hauntingly lovely.
With renewed determination, Walter takes his book, places it in a bowl with lighter fluid and sets it ablaze. "The journal doesn't matter," Carla says. "Even if you burn it, it's too late, now that you remember all the things you're capable of." Slightly Younger Nina Sharp appears behind him to tell him he has to keep fighting. "You're too tired to do that," Carla says. "There's nothing to burn." Walter looks down at the bowl. The flames burn, but there is no book. Either his finding it earlier was just part of his acid trip, or he secretly stashed it away (again) for safe keeping. "You've been him longer than you've been you," Carla says. Walter looks despairingly at the empty bowl, then lifts his gaze to see that Carla has vanished. Someone much more ominous has taken her place. Now, Walter stands looking only at himself. Carla was himself, as was Nina, but this other Walter -- the hubristic one of his past --- is the one who trumps them all.
...Maybe.
Tippi normally recaps Supernatural and Doctor Who, but was pulled temporarily into an alternate universe where she recaps Fringe. You can contact her at b_tippi@yahoo.com, or find her on Twitter: @TippiB.