Fringe TV Show - Grey Matters - Fringe Recaps, Fringe Reviews, Fringe Episodes | TWoP

Aired 2009-12-10

Remember the interdimensional antichrist Olivia's supposed to have been looking for all this time? He has a name -- Newton -- and he's been a busy boy. He and Curtis from 24 have been going around removing stuff from the brains of schizophrenics, rendering them inexplicably sane. Of course the Fringe team can't let that go unanswered, especially since they know Newton is behind it, so Walter figures out that the victims were driven insane in the first place by having pieces of someone else's brain parked there for years. And that someone else is -- wait for it -- Walter himself. Unfortunately, Peter and Olivia are inexcusably slow in figuring out that Newton is going to want to put Walter's brain back together for reasons that can't possibly be altruistic. And by the time they do, Newton has Walter. Before Peter and Olivia catch up, Newton has forced Walter to reconstruct -- and worse, share -- his memories of how he built the portal between worlds. Olivia nearly prevents Newton's escape, but the evil bastard had the foresight to inject Walter with a neurotoxin, and the only way Olivia can save him is to let Newton go. Which she does, saving Walter, although the old bits of his brain fail to survive the ordeal, forever snatching away the possibility of restoring the sanity that's been tantalizing him al episode. But ultimately he does get one old memory back; the memory of those pieces of his brain about to be removed by none other than William Bell.

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Late at night, an array of courtyard lampposts illuminate a set of floaty letters reading "HENNINGTON MENTAL HEALTH INSTITUTE BOSTON, MA." Amazing how a block of text that large can get off the ground. Inside, the corridors are dark except for the light coming from the crack under a door. Behind that door, a man mumbles disconnectedly about a girl in a red dress with flowers. A pair of hands sheathed in bloody surgical gloves is at work behind him, their owner telling "Mr. Slater" -- played by Jeff Perry -- to think and it will come back to him. The hands turn out to be attached to a person, which was not always the case for that person's head. Yes, the last time we saw his face, it was still reattaching itself to a body back in October. Finally, the stolen frozen head is back in play. One also notices that its color has come back, and so has its hair. "Container," he calls to his hench-nurse, doing something with a pair of retractors. He tells Slater in a pleasant British accent, "Hold very still, and I assure you there will be no pain." In an extreme close-up, it looks like he's pulling a pale sliver of something from the living, bloody brain matter, but that can't possibly be the case. He sets the chunk into a vial of greenish gel and says to his hench-nurse, who is about as scary-looking as Scott Hamilton circa 1992, "Let's close him up." They start to fire up a piece of machinery, but the hench-nurse is getting a call on his earpiece from Curtis from 24, who is parked in a van outside and notifying him that he sees an orderly moving around in one of the windows. The hench-nurse goes to deal with it, "deal with it" in this case meaning "putting two silenced bullets in the orderly's chest." Hence the "hench" in "hench-nurse." He goes back in and tells the boss -- now busy with some kind of laser -- that they have to go. "My sincere apologies, I'd rather not leave you in such a state," he says to his patient, but they pack up and take off. The hench-nurse quickly opens an electronic lock to a door opening to the outside, and the boss takes a look around the hall behind him while following him out. Then they get into Curtis's van, which drives off. Poor Slater is left sitting there, and that's how a nurse finds him. With the entire back of his scalp peeled down, exposing his brain. "Help me," he begs. Ooh, Fringey!

By M. Giant

morning, the Fringe Three are already on the case. Olivia pulls up to a security guard, flashes her FBI badge, and introduces the three of them. "And I'm perfectly sane," Walter informs the guard. That seems to convince him to raise the gate. The guard is of course not aware that Walter will break your heart several dozen times in the last hour, but I'm giving you a heads-up on that right now.

Inside, they've already met one of the doctors in charge, a Dr. West, who played the embittered mother in "Haunted," Trash's and my favorite episode ever of Law & Order: SVU. That's the one we call "32 Short Stories About Ice-T." Catch it in reruns some time. Anyway, she's leading them down the hospital corridor while telling them about Slater, who has been there for 14 years, apparently a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia. Right up until last night, that is. "So basically," Peter sums up, "Two guys broke in, cut a big hole in his head and did what, drove him sane?" She says yep, and they can't find any physical or medical sign of what they actually did to him aside from cracking open his noggin. Walter, who is clearly not thrilled to be here in the first place, starts to say something, is briefly distracted by a disturbance off-screen with one of the patients, then urgently asks to see the patient. With a calming hand on his shoulder, Peter assures Walter that they're on their way to do just that. "We're going to see a sane man," Walter insists. "I'd like to see him when he was a patient."

So the thing we see is the four of them in Dr. West's office, watching a video of Slater when he was still batty. He's going on about the girl across the street with chrysanthemums in her hair, and gets almost violently angry when told by Dr. West she doesn't exist. Walter is clearly affected by seeing this, almost as though he has mental problems of his own. From there, their stop is to meet with Slater himself, who's got a big bandage around his head but is amazingly lucid. "What struck me is that I felt unburdened," he says. "Like my mind had had a spring cleaning. Like I was suddenly--" "Free," Walter finishes. Slater can't remember anything about his visitors aside from how polite they were. The Fringe Three are done with him, so it's time for Slater to go talk to his wife, which makes him a little nervous: "They tell me that she came to visit me twice a week. I think I remember being horrible to her." West assures him it'll be fine, and leads him out of the room. "He's a lucky man," Walter muses. "Seventeen years I was in St. Claire's, never a single visitor." Yikes. Peter goes over and starts to say something, but Walter says he wasn't trying to make him feel guilty. "Just an observation." Looks like it worked, though. Olivia wades through the chest-deep awkward now filling the room to ask Walter if he has any theories about Slater's cure. He doesn't, but is looking forward to finding out: "A remedy for insanity, as you can imagine, I've thought long and hard about."

By M. Giant

In the meantime, they go and watch the security footage of the bad guys' exit the night. Actually, Olivia and Peter watch it while Walter leans against the window eating a cup of applesauce. Peter marvels at how easily they handled the high-tech lock when leaving. "They're either very smart, very rich, or very well-connected," he says. Pretty bold guess about two people who are sneaking around doing illicit brain surgery. Olivia looks at a freeze-frame of the moment when the stolen frozen head turns around, and wouldn't you know it, Olivia recognizes him. How, you ask? After dismissing the security guard, she logs onto a secure FBI server and says she knows him from Laston-Hennings Cryonics. That gets Walter's interest -- like us, he remembers the frozen head-thefts from a couple of months ago. Olivia reminds everyone how the bad guys from the other side were looking for a leader, as William Bell warned her (and as she failed to prevent). Ever since, it seems, she's been scouring the files from Laston-Hennings, trying to figure out which head was the one they wanted. "I've been looking at these faces for the last two months," she says. Well, I'm glad to hear she hasn't been totally slacking. Peter is skeptical that their perp is a stolen head. "The dead don't rise out of their graves and perform midnight brain surgery." "But this one did," Olivia says, and pulls up a photo of their quarry in less-alive times. "Thomas Jerome Newton," she reads, and a side-by-side comparison of the two photos proves it's the same guy. "Wow," Walter says mildly.

During the ads, they've summoned Broyles to take a gander at the screen, which is also showing the headphones-shaped mark that William Bell drew for Olivia -- the one that also appears on Newton's head somewhere. Olivia has to admit that all they have is the name, which was just an alias that led nowhere. Olivia reminds Broyles what William Bell told her -- that "Newton" would try to open "a car door" from our universe to the other side. A car door? Why a car door specifically? Why not a revolving door, or a garage door, or even a corridor? "He managed to infer that the results would be less than desirable," Olivia understates. Broyles asks her to elaborate. "Global destruction. Biblical proportions," she elaborates. So much for understatement. Seriously, drama queen much? Broyles sighs and asks what this has to do with what Newton and his crew did to Slater. "You're leaving out the part where they apparently cured him," Peter says. "As opening moves go, that's pretty strange." Broyles asks what Walter's figured out so far, and Peter says he's off working on figuring out the cure. "If we can do that," Peter says, "maybe we can anticipate Newton's move." "There's no maybe," Olivia insists. "I don't know what Newton's up to, but I know what I have to do. I have to stop him." Jeez, bring the room down.

By M. Giant

Back at the lab, Walter's going through Slater's medical files, and is learning that Slater was referred to the institute by a psychiatrist named Simon Paris. He asks Astrid to try looking Paris up, because he's working on the theory that someone made Slater crazy on purpose. "The truth is, there's no cure for madness. It's a fantasy." So he figures that Slater wasn't crazy to start with. Well, if you're looking for someone who drove Slater crazy back in the '90s, my prime suspect would be one Zack Morris. He'd been trying for years. However, Astrid is coming up empty in her AMA database search for Dr. Paris. Walter tells her to check the pharmacy records for matches to Slater's prescription numbers. Astrid finds indefinite prescriptions dating back to 1995 for Slater -- and for two other people at two other hospitals, in the same week. Even I can spot a lead that obvious, and Astrid's already dialing Olivia's number. Think they'll get to the person on the list before Newton does? Or would that just be too easy?

<>At Dunwich Medical Hospital (presumably named for a distant relation of Olivia's who thought he was a hoagie), Peter and Olivia are talking to a long-term patient who seems just as normal as Slater was when we last saw him. Her thing, it seems, was a form of OCD called arithmomania. "You're obsessed with numbers?" Peter shows off. She says just the number 28. And that's the scariest concept ever suggested by this show: the possibility that there might one day be as many as five sequels to that Jim Carrey movie about the number 23. Fortunately, she woke up last Tuesday all better. She chuckles that she thinks she's still there because one of the doctors is "hoping to get a paper out of it." Well, it also made it easier for Peter and Olivia to find her. She wonders why the FBI is interested. Olivia says they might not be, and then asks to look at her head.

By M. Giant

She finds a place to sit down, and Olivia watches while Peter lifts her hair up on the side. "It's here," he tells Olivia. "Fresh scar, but there are no sutures. Looks more like the burn from a surgical laser." Can a surgical laser knit the skull back together as well? Because if not, this patient should probably get used to sleeping on extra-soft pillows. She's naturally a little freaked about Peter's discovery, but Olivia blows past that and asks her if she's had any visits from Dr. Paris while in the nuthouse. She says he only saw her for mild post-partum depression and referred her here, and hasn't seen him since. "The arithmomania just started one day." Sound like someone had her number.

In a dank basement laboratory, Newton asks Curtis for an update. Curtis says, "It should work, but we took too long getting to Slater. The first specimen's dying. The nutrient bath won't keep it alive for more than another five hours. Six if we're lucky." Speaking of shelf-life, what's Curtis still doing in this body? We know from his conversation with Gnarlie that they can't squat in one person too long or they get... well, Gnarlie. But I guess that's not as important as letting us know it's still the same guy, plus I can't really complain about Roger Cross getting work. Newton says they should get going, and Curtis wires up the specimen containers to something Fringey before following him out.

In the car, Peter reads from a file on the third patient, who was also referred by Dr. Paris. Peter says he had "the psychiatric equivalent of a cough, which developed into full-blown schizophrenia. Two days ago he miraculously recovers." His deal was that he thought he was actor Sydney Greenstreet, and constantly quoted from Casablanca. "That's funny," Peter says curiously, giving Olivia a start. "He looks a lot more like Peter Lorre," he deadpans, holding up a photo. Olivia looks annoyed at him for wasting her time. "That's a joke," Peter says. No, the rear projection of the scenery that's supposedly passing in the window behind Peter is a joke. She's not in the mood, saying she's always known what drives people. "How can I fight what I can't understand?" Peter tells her he knows she feels alone. "But this isn't just your fight," he assures her. Yes, it's important to share our things, children.

By M. Giant

Back at the lab, Astrid relays to Walter what Peter and Olivia have learned, but Walter doesn't feel any closer to an answer. Out of the blue, he asks when Slater had an organ transplant. It seems Dr. Paris prescribed an anti-rejection drug. "It suggests that not only has Dr. Paris vanished, he's a quack," he says derisively. Walter's expression suddenly changes, and his eyes light up: "Unless he's a genius." Well, as we've seen from Walter for the past season and a half, the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Later, Walter picks up a half-brain in a jar and holds it up to Astrid, Olivia and Peter, saying it's useless and dead. "Because when you remove brain tissue from a living body, you can keep it alive for a short time in a nutrient suspension, but eventually it will die. It's a problem I've tried to solve many times without success." Of course it is. Apparently, in addition to blood and oxygen, the brain tissue needs electrical stimulation. Which is where Dr. Paris's solution comes in: "He stored the brain tissue inside of another brain." Or three other brains, as the case may be. Peter and Olivia are like, say what? Walter turns on the overhead projectors to show them old CAT scans of the patients' brain, each with a little smudge in them that Walter says is foreign tissue. Hence the anti-rejection drugs. Walter says that also explains the patients' mental issues -- the different brain bits are incompatible, like trying to play an Xbox game in a Wii. Peter gets it -- it explains the mental distress, false memories, and delusions. "But once you remove the foreign tissue, then they're fine." I'm certainly no brain surgeon, but all of this certainly sounds like... what's the term? Bullshit? Just then Astrid gets a call from Dr. West, telling her she didn't find any connection between Dr. Paris and their hospital. But she did check into some affiliates. While Astrid listens, Olivia asks Walter why someone would do this, and whose brain the pieces came from. And how many more people must be driven sane before Newton has enough to build an entire brain? Astrid discreetly calls Peter over and whispers to him, so we know it's about Walter. After their little sidebar, Peter asks Walter to confirm that he never had visitors. "According to their records, Dr. Paris visited you on six separate occasions." Hmm. Perhaps this cure for insanity might end up working on Walter after all. Peter asks to look at Walter's head, and Walter nervously agrees, trying to put a brave face on it but just making me really sad. Peter finds a very old but visible scar on Walter's scalp, which must be why Walter is played by an actor with such a magnificent head of hair. Well, that explains a lot.. But then why are Walter's symptoms so much less severe than the others? Don't worry; we're just getting started.

By M. Giant

After the ads, Walter sits in a hospital gown on the bench of an MRI machine, with Peter at his side and Dr. West noting from his records that he's had MRIs before. Instead of responding, Walter whispers to Peter that these machines have "magnets that rip the metal out of the patients. And I have that tracking chip implanted in my neck." Peter assures him that it'll be fine, being made out of silicone. Which he knows how? Peter suggests Valium, which sounds good to Walter. He asks West for 50 milligrams, and when she says that's a high dose, Walter assures her, "I have quite a high tolerance." She heads out to make it so, leaving Peter to continue reassuring him, although he thinks Walter is worried about claustrophobia. Which Walter isn't. "What do you think that man did to me?" he asks nervously. Peter doesn't know, but as one always says in these situations, "We're gonna find out."

From the adjacent observation room, Peter watches Walter disappear into the machine with a gentle wave. And then we're inside the empty machine ourselves, looking out at Peter. Where'd Walter go? Olivia enters, and Peter explains that although Walter wanted to wait for the results, "There's Walter on drugs and then there's Walter on drugs." Which is his way of saying that Astrid took him home. Peter wonders what it must be like for Walter, wanting so much to stop being crazy. "He's just sane enough to realize how much he's lost." At the risk of seeming callous, Olivia points out that it seems to her like "going crazy made him a better person. Certainly made him a better father." Peter sadly says he should have visited him in the hospital. "I think you're making up for that now," Olivia says. Yes, by sitting in a hospital when Walter isn't even there. Seventeen more years of this and they'll be even.

By M. Giant

West comes and gets them to show them the scans of Walter's brain. Because apparently she's the only person who works at this hospital. Seriously, we've seen her act as therapist, administrator, pharmacist, and radiologist. No wonder she looks tired. And now she'll probably have to be the night orderly, too, since the one got shot. Anyway, Walter's scan shows three scars on the same side of the left temporal lobe. Looking at the one image, Peter tells Olivia, "Walter didn't have brain tissue implanted, he had it removed." I think we all just figured out what happened to the other three people, but let's watch the rest of this scene play out anyway. West explains to a curious Olivia that the part of the brain that Walter had trimmed "controls inhibitions, helps store long-term memory, contributes to our sense of spatial awareness." Sounds a lot like what Walter's missing. Peter wants to compare the scans of the other three patients, and overlays them over Walter's scans one at a time. And that's when he, Olivia, and West realize that the bits from Walter's brain were parked in the brains of the other three patients. So how did they not go even crazier, is my question.

At Chez Bishop, Walter is not in good shape; in fact, he suspects he's suffering from a Valium overdose. Astrid offers to take him to a hospital, but he refuses. "Violet Sedan Chair," which at first sounds like word salad, but he's actually referring to a band. "Their debut album always helps me come down from a Valium high," he pants. He wants them to go to the lab to get it. "I might puke in our car," he says apologetically. So Astrid suggests he stay and rest while she goes and gets it. Fantastic idea, leaving him alone, especially after what happened last week. But it's all worth it to keep Astrid's floormats clean.

Back at the MRI lab, Olivia thinks this sounds like the work of Dr. Paris, although she doesn't know why he'd remove pieces of Walter's brain and then preserve them in the first place. "Memory!" Peter realizes. He voices what we've all figured out by now, which is that Newton wants to open a door to the other side. Which Walter has done, but can't remember how. "That is why he can't remember!" he says, rapping on the lightboard. "He literally had the memories removed." "No way," Olivia says amusingly, wondering how Newton plans to retrieve those memories. "In theory he shouldn't be able to, but in theory he should still be a frozen head." Peter says. "He would need to implant the memories into a brain that could interpret them." Gosh, wherever might one find such a brain? FINALLY, Olivia and Peter figure it out, and hit the door running.

By M. Giant

On their way, they call Astrid's cell phone, and reach her as she's in her car on the way back to the lab. "Where are you and Walter?" Peter asks. Astrid tells him about the errand she's on -- alone -- and Peter tells her to get back toot-sweet. Astrid says she's on her way and whips the car around. I would have liked to see her pull a handbrake turn, but you can't have everything.

Walter sits sweating in his easy chair and gets up to answer the knock on the door that he thinks is coming from Astrid. But of course when he opens it, there's Newton. "Hello, Dr. Bishop," Newton smiles.

After the ads, Astrid is back at the house and has her gun out, but Walter and Newton are long gone, so the only people she can point it at are Peter and Olivia as they arrive, and that's just not the same. Having lost Walter for the second time in as many weeks, Astrid sputters her apologies, and Peter says it isn't her fault. Although Olivia gives her kind of hilarious look that's like, That's two strikes, A-Farn. Luckily, Peter has an idea: "Last week when Walter got lost, he did exactly what you'd expect Walter to do. He implanted a transponder chip into his neck so that if he ever got lost, I could find him." Snagging the little beeping remote from a shelf in the kitchen, he leads the agents back out the front door. Or Olivia, at least. If Astrid were to find Walter, she'd just lose him again.

Curtis from 24 carefully places a metal-and-wire armature over the head of Walter, who is strapped into a barber's chair in that dank basement lab. Walter asks Newton if they know each other. "Oh, we will," Newton Brits. The hench-nurse prepares to inject Walter with a sedative. "I've already had 50 milligrams of Valium," Walter points out. "Then this should be very enjoyable," the hench-nurse says, and gives Walter the shot anyway. Judging by Walter's expression, at least the hench-nurse isn't a liar.

By M. Giant

Olivia's driving a big black Fringemobile down the road while Peter navigates using the transponder. Over speakerphone, Broyles says he's sending a SWAT team to meet up with them.

Curtis presses a switch to the containers of brain-bits. All three of them light up red, and the machine on Walter's head -- wired to the containers -- sends electrodes into his temple. Newton gives Walter a lecture about the brain that's probably not necessary, considering his audience: "The human brain is a fascinating organ. But it's not static. Remove or damage a section, it reroutes the connections and grows in new pathways." But I guess if you stick a new section in someone else's brain, that someone else is stuck being bonkers for the duration. Wouldn't the host brains have tried to rewire the foreign tissue? Would it really be so easy to tug them out intact like incompatible memory cards out of a computer? "Figuring out where the old connections once were can be very tricky," Newton concludes. The hench-nurse flips a switch, and soon a computer monitor is showing a rotating 3D display of Walter's brain. I guess so they can see which areas light up as Walter's old brain bits are hooked up like so many external flash drives.

Olivia's Fringemobile, with the SWAT van behind it, pulls up to a curb. Peter follows the transponder signal down to an underground men's room (they have those in Boston?), and bursts right in with the team. No one else seems to be in there other than themselves. But Peter goes over to one of the sinks, which is spattered with blood, presumably Walter's. And a tiny chip that nearly went down the drain, after it was apparently cut out of Walter's neck. "They found the chip," Olivia duhs. Peter takes it out on a stall door. Dammit, stall door, why didn't you stop Newton from removing it?

Newton gets ready to show Walter some images so he can do some free association. "To map my brain function," Walter says dreamily. "Find my neural pathways." Then he gets kind of pathetically hopeful. "Are you trying to fix me?" Aw, poor Walter. "I'm afraid not," Newton answers, not unkindly, and nods at the hench-nurse to switch on the slide projector. The first slide is a molecular diagram, namely a benzene ring. Walter remembers sitting in the back of Organic Chem and sniffing benzene fumes with his lab partner. Then there's a boy playing on the beach. "Peter," Walter says happily. Then a bowl of what might be vanilla pudding. "Peter," Walter says again, just as happily. Then a closed casket. Oh, ouch. Walter's face crumples as he says his son's name for the third time, this time not nearly as happily. Newton apologizes, not insincerely. But Curtis, looking at the three red-lit jars, says it isn't working. Newton says they need a more powerful memory stimulant. After a moment Newton realizes, "vision alone is not the strongest trigger. Sound and smell actually work better. We need the proper context." A tear spills from Walter's eye. Tastes like context.

By M. Giant

Olivia's Fringemobile heads through Cambridge, with Peter in the shotgun seat, looking like he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a shotgun right now. Dude is in a mood. Olivia looks at him worriedly, but he just keeps scowling. They drive unawares past Curtis, who reports over his earpiece that they're here. "That's okay," Newton says. "We're done. We've got what we need." As he and the hench-nurse pack up, he pauses to give Walter another injection in his arm from a spring-loaded pistol syringe. "My apologies, Dr. Bishop," he says once again. Walter goes limp, resting his head on the table to him, his nose all but pressed against the glass jars holding the dying bits of his brain. This episode just keeps finding so many new and interesting ways to make it suck to be Walter, doesn't it?

By M. Giant

"I think there's something you should know," Newton tells Olivia. "It's about Walter Bishop. He's going to die unless you do exactly as I say." Newton claims to have injected Walter with a neurotoxin -- remember that shot we saw him give Walter before leaving? -- and now he's got four minutes to live unless he gets the antidote. "Call it my fail-safe to ensure my escape." Now that's some precise timing. Olivia whips Newton around so he can look down the barrel of her gun, and accuses him of bluffing. But she whips out her cell phone to make sure. "Hey, it's me," she says into her phone as soon as Peter answers, which seems a little casual under the circumstances, although she still never takes her gaze or her gun off Newton. In a panic, Peter tells her he thinks Walter's been poisoned. "Ask him if he sees the medical kit I left behind," Newton says, his hands still spread. Peter begs Olivia to come back and help, and confirms that there is a medical kit. Newton explains to Olivia that injecting the three vials in the correct order will save Walter. But he's not about to tell her what that order is now. Checking his watch, he says, "You have about two minutes until Walter Bishop dies. At a flat run, I estimate about forty seconds until you get back to him. Now hand me your phone. When I hear you go back into the house from Peter's phone, I'll tell you what to do." Olivia's not going for it, but in the phone still at her ear, Peter keeps begging for her help. "The choice is yours," Newton smirks. "You can have me or Walter Bishop." Oh, and he seemed so nice up until now.

Nothing has changed after the ads, except that she only has one minute and 45 seconds. Newton restates her choice, somehow seeming both impatient and smug at the same time. "Me or Walter Bishop?" "Go to hell," Olivia spits, then tosses her phone to Newton and sprints back to the house. Once inside, she demands Peter's phone (lucky Peter didn't hang up) and says into it, "Okay, you son of a bitch!" Peter starts chest compressions, and walking along though the neighborhood like an ordinary dude on the phone, Newton tells her, "Blue, yellow, red." Olivia relays that, Peter starts the injections, and before signing off, Newton says, "And Olivia? Now I know how weak you are." Ouch. I wouldn't mind seeing him toss the phone away after that, but I think we can assume he does. Olivia's face goes cold as he hangs up. I really don't give Anna Torv enough credit for how good she is, you know? John Noble gets to do all these mad-scientist theatrics, showing off his plummy voice and multi-octave dynamic range, while she's stuck trying to keep her straight-man role interesting. Which she's more than up to, while still keeping her performances subtle and vanity-free. Or maybe I'm just getting maudlin because this is probably my last recap of this show. Anyway, Peter finishes the injections, and they wait for Walter to wake up, or at least notice the trail of drool coming from the corner of his mouth. Finally he gasps awake. His first words? "Peter. I have a terrible headache. And a sudden craving for chicken wings." Yep, he's back. Peter pulls him up into a sitting position, and they all sit there, completely wrecked. And I know it would be futile, but couldn't Olivia at least try to have trace put on her phone, or start canvassing the neighborhood, or something? Or would that just ruin the mood?

By M. Giant

Olivia and Broyles walk along the sidewalk near Hastings Street (which actually exists in Boston, to my mild surprise) as Olivia agrees with Newton's assessment. "I made an emotional choice. I chose my friend over my responsibility." She adds that they don't know if Walter gave them what they needed, since he has no memory of the interrogation, plus his excised brain tissue is dead. And no sign of Dr. Paris. Olivia carps that they only have more questions. "Who is Paris? How did Newton know about Walter's memories, and why did they let Walter live?" I was wondering about that last one myself. Newton could have just as easily sent Olivia back into the house and had Peter inject Walter with soy sauce if he'd wanted, and Newton would still be just as free. Broyles philosophically guesses, "The more answers we get, the more questions they'll lead to." Olivia says they have no answers, but Broyles doesn't see it that way. "We've given our enemy a name and a face. That's something. And you saved Dr. Bishop's life. That's something, too." And at least they know why Walter is the way he is, even if all hope of fixing him is gone. Broyles insists that Olivia made the right choice; capturing or killing Newton wouldn't have ended anything, "But there's only one Walter Bishop. And we'll be needing him before this is over." He tells her not to be so hard on herself. "We're going to be needing you, too." With that he walks away. So Olivia's position is that she sucks, but Broyles insists that she's awesome. I don't think either one of them really gets how the employee-boss relationship dynamic is supposed to work.

By M. Giant

Walter is about to go in for another MRI scan. Before he lies down on the table, Peter blurts, "I should have visited you, Walter. While you were in St. Claire's." Walter easily tells him it's okay and sits down on the table. "If you had, I probably wouldn't have remembered anyway." Peter leaves the room instead of saying what anyone else would in this situation, which would be, "Oh, in that case, I did."

As Walter is slid into the scanner, a version of the Fringe theme cues up, which is an interesting omen; whenever you hear the main titles in the body of a TV show, especially at the end, it's always a sign of something significant coming up. And in this case, it doesn't disappoint. The screen slowly fades to white, until I'm expecting the words "Dr. Walter Bishop, 1946-2009" to appear.

But instead, his vision seems to focus on a surgical light above him, with a female face in a surgical cap over him. It's a younger Nina Sharp, looking like Blair Brown did at around the time she was on Frasier. "He's ready, Dr. Paris," Nina says. "The system is completely clean?" asks a familiar voice. "No sedatives? No antidepressants?" "The electrodes are in place," Nina confirms. Walter, still flat on the table but now with his hair looking darker to confirm that we're in the past -- let's say around 1995, roughly the time Slater and his cohorts in craziness went spare -- shifts his gaze to the other person in the room: William Bell himself, who's so deep undercover as Dr. Paris he's even making Nina address him by that name. Also, he looks pretty much like he did two months ago. I mean, I don't expect them to be able to make him look like Frank James in Bonanza: Under Attack, but a little effort wouldn't kill them, would it? But then I guess the show is so happy to have Leonard Nimoy they don't want to subject him to too much time in a makeup chair. Hell, they didn't even slap a goatee on him for his scenes with Olivia in the parallel universe, and everybody knows Leonard Nimoy wears a goatee in parallel universes. Bell asks Walter if he's comfortable. "I'm frightened, Belly," Walter whispers. Bell nods sympathetically, saying, "I wish there was another way. But what you've accomplished... it's just too dangerous." Walter asks, "What if we ever have to go back?" Bell assures him, "Your memory -- I'll put it in a place that only I can find." And in the process, he's fucking around with the brain of a guy who's not only already been institutionalized for the last three years, he's also ruining the lives of three innocent people in the process. Plus it must have taken him three tries to get it all out, because there's no way Bell would have had time to remove and implant all three brain samples in three different people in the window of time he'd have before the chunks started dying. Dude is a class act. Nice to see his God complex isn't a recent development, at least. He tells Walter to start thinking about the door to the other side. Walter closes his eyes and, apparently, complies. And it would seem, in addition to thinking about the door, he's probably also thinking about the neighbor girl across the street a little bit more than is strictly appropriate.