Ghost Network Busters!

S01E03

You know that creepy guy in your office who likes guns and knives a little too much? Maybe he was once one of Walter's test subjects and he has a lot of metal in his blood, which effectively makes him a receiver for secret transmissions between the ne'er-do-wells at work on the pattern.

Buddy gets these visions in his head of traumatic events that come to pass, like an attack on a bus that traps the passengers in a clear substance, like insects in amber. Who possibly has the technology to make such a nefarious weapon? Do you even have to ask? Really, shouldn't the Fringe team hire someone to just stay on standby by the Massive Dynamic lab?

The bus attack was carried out in order to retrieve a small data disk from a drug enforcement agent who heard some South American drug buddies talking about the Pattern, so it's really starting to seem like Olivia is one of the few people who didn't already know about the pattern.

So since Buddy is receiving transmissions between Pattern agents, the Fringe team uses him to chase down one of them -- but he steps in front of a bus rather than be taken into custody. All this to retrieve a little disk that no one knows anything about, laments Olivia. She'd probably feel even worse if she knew that Broyles was just going to turn it right over to Nina Sharp.

What else is Nina up to? Well, you know how when you get a new computer and you use a cable to transfer files from your old computer to your new one? She's doing pretty much exactly that with John Scott.

A shadowy figure enters St. Anne's cathedral and sits down in the confessional, and tells the priest it's been three months since his last confession. Three months? Multiply that by about a hundred and that's about how long it's been for me. I feel like I should have taken notes, because I'm sure there's some confession-requiring stuff that I've forgotten, should I ever decide that I'd like to go to heaven. He asks the priest if he believes God talks to people, and the priest pretty much has to hang up the robe or answer "yes." Well, then, how about the devil? "Do you have something to confess, my son?" asks the priest.

Buddy, getting a little verklempt, says he tries to be a good man, but he sees things. And we flash through what this guy sees. A man in a suit getting on a city bus. Sitting down, he looks at the other passengers, specifically at a woman with a backpack.

"It's happening again, and I'm scared," says Buddy, back in the confessional. Scared of what, asks the apparently bored priest. "Of what's going to happen on the bus!' says Buddy.

Which is this: as the bus enters a tunnel, the man opens up his briefcase, and calmly takes out a gas mask and straps it on. This does not fail to escape the notice of the other passengers, but before they have too much time to react, the man pulls out a shiny metal canister, pulls it open an inch or so, and rolls it down the aisle. It spews smoke, and as the other passengers start to freak out, the man calmly walks down the aisle and picks up the woman's backpack.

In the church, Buddy is getting more and more agitated, and the priest has asked if he's hurt someone. Buddy bolts from the confessional and runs off through the nave.

The man on the bus steps off, totally forgetting to get a transfer. He pulls off the mask and gets into a car waiting nearby. Fortunately the bus drove into an ENTIRELY DESERTED tunnel in the middle of RUSH HOUR.

Back at the church, the priest chases the confessor, who drops a piece of paper as he hurries out. "Roy, I know it's you!" yells the priest. So much for the privacy of the confessional. The priest picks up the crumpled piece of paper, on which is drawn a black-and-white picture of screaming bus passengers. Judging from the utter sense of despair, I'm guessing this is from a Monday-morning commute.

Back in the tunnel, one police car has shown up, with one cop all, "Come on, move it along," at least until he shines his flashlight into the bus to find the passengers frozen in some kind of plastic or gel filling the entire interior. That's no excuse for being late for work! You should have left a little earlier!

We're at Mount Briar Cemetery for ... John Scott's funeral? Really? They still haven't buried him yet? He must be getting a little gamey by now. Olivia looks like she's going to pass a kidney stone from taking in the whole military funeral. Also, John's mother keeps staring at her with an inscrutable expression. Smirk? Knowing smile? Senility?

After the ceremony, Charlie catches up to Olivia ("Libby," he calls her) to tell her she did the right thing by showing up. The bureau's already got one black eye as it is, and the last thing it needs is another espionage scandal. She says John's mom was staring at her as if she were blaming Olivia for John's death. Charlie says that as far as John's mom knows, John died a hero serving his country.

"A hero," snorts Olivia. "He was using me. And he told me he loved me!" She's more annoyed at John telling her he loved her than John selling state secrets, I see. "I wasn't gonna tell you this. But he said he loved me too," says Charlie. Olivia stares at him for a moment, then cracks up. Charlie stays entirely stonefaced, but before we can contemplate whether Charlie was serious or not, Broyles pops up out of nowhere to speak to Olivia.

Upbeat rock music plays as we watch an establishing shot of Fenway, which takes us into a ... diner? Really? OK. It's the Bishop boys, with Walter putting his own medicine into his iced tea. He says he made it himself in the lab. So now Peter has to worry about his dad being a METH HEAD on top of everything else.

Peter excuses himself, and walks down the lunch counter. Back at the table with Walter, Peter's phone vibrates, and an exceedingly confused Walter suddenly turns into Unfrozen Caveman Scientist, pawing at it. Peter strolls down the diner counter before suddenly stopping and grabbing a guy sitting on a stool. "You thought I didn't see you all day?" he snaps. He grabs the camera from the counter and flips through the images of him on the computer, and then takes the memory card. "You were supposed to check in before you came home," says the guy. Peter warns the shutterbug that if he tells anyone else he's home, that Peter's going to come after him first. I for one would be terrified at the thought of Joshua Jackson coming after me.

Peter goes back to his seat, and Walter struggles to remember the important message imparted when Peter's phone started buzzing. "Something about a bus," he says.

Broyles shows the Fringe crew over to the bus, telling them that CDC was called in but it was determined that the attack was not biological. Not that the people on board are any less dead for it. "It's horrible. They're like mosquitoes trapped in amber," says Walter. Olivia wonders why they didn't use something conventional, like plastic explosives. "Impact. Whoever did this wanted attention," says Peter. Broyles wonders if it's an attack at all, or something else entirely. Bag 'em and tag 'em! Olivia says they'll need to dig out the personal effects to ID the victims and notify the of kin. Hey, perhaps the of kin wouldn't mind the life-size statues of their loved ones, preserved for all eternity!

Meanwhile, the man with the canister is going through the backpack with another guy in some kind of ... ancient foyer? It looks kind Da Vinci's Code-ish. Whatever they're looking for, it's not there, and the second guy gets on the phone and speaks ... Latin? It's not subtitled. "Quomodo peregemus," he says. Read my mind, pal. He walks away, up some stairs.

Over at a modern looking office, Roy is trying to concentrate on some paperwork, but the flashbacks are kicking in again. He flips over a sheet of paper and starts drawing a person and then rubbing it in charcoal and dotting red for blood dripping from the hands. One of his co-workers, passing by, says, "Roy? What is that?" Roy looks at the drawing, of a woman, arms splayed, hands bleeding. "I don't know," he says, practically choking. This is why no one wants to sit to you in the break room, Roy.

Back at the Harvard lab, Walter's examining a chunk of the bus material. Peter asks what it is. "Tricky. Just tricky," he says. It's tricky to rock a rhyme, to rock a rhyme that's right on time. It's tricky! How is it? Tricky! Tricky? Tricky! Tricky? Man, no one can use the word "tricky" in my presence. That always happens. It's a serious problem; my wife's considering divorce. All Walter has determined so far is that it's a silicon-based aerosol, and it solidifies somehow.

How can Peter help? Well, by playing Bach's Mass in A Minor. Walter suggests the "young lady down there" can score them a piano. Peter rolls his eyes and reminds Walter, for apparently the hundredth time, that that's Astrid Farnsworth. "You always resisted your lessons, too. Lack of commitment, son, was always your problem," says Walter, who goes on to gripe about his son not choosing a profession yet. Hey, "con artist" is a kind of profession!

Peter sarcastically suggests that he should have followed in his dad's footsteps, since Walter's work has "obviously brought so much joy to the world." Peter, no, that's Three Dog Night. You're thinking of Three Dog Night. But suddenly Walter sharpens and asks Peter who the guy in the diner was: "You in some kind of trouble?" Peter laughs it off, and says the guy was just harassing the waitress, so Peter just told him to knock it off. "Oh, I see," says Walter,

clearly not buying it.

The bus investigation has commandeered a warehouse with the victims laid out, awaiting identification, their personal effects scattered about. What a lucky break! Someone was using a video camera on the bus to document their mundane rush-hour commute! Even more fortunate: the same solidifying goo that froze and suffocated everyone in place didn't gum it all up! And Olivia, who apparently has a photographic memory, instantly notes from a half-second flash on the video screen, that a woman's backpack seen in the video is missing from the bus. They quickly ID the woman as Evelina Mendoza, a federal employee: an undercover drug enforcement agent.

Olivia brings in Mendoza's handler, Grant Davidson, for questioning with her and Broyles, who says from her file it looks like Mendoza was an exemplary agent. Grant confirms she was, and then says three months ago she was tasked with infiltrating the East Coast representatives of a Nicaraguan drug cartel. Man. The most danger I'm exposed to at work is getting ink all over my hands from changing the fax machine cartridge.

Davidson says Mendoza recently called him to say she wanted out, because she got scared after hearing some drug lords talking about the Pattern. Even South American drug lords know about this thing? Man, was Olivia ever out of the loop. Grant says they were supposed to meet, but she never showed. Broyles says it appears as though the attacker was after something in her possession; does he have any idea what that could be? He doesn't and apologizes for not being more help.

Olivia takes Grant to the morgue so he can officially ID the body. They stare at Mendoza, laid out on the gurney. Olivia asks if she has any family. "There's a brother she doesn't talk to," he says, before having to turn away from the window. "I didn't realize how hard this was going to be," he says. Are there any male-female colleagues in this FBI not sleeping with each other? Olivia jumps at the chance to make this all about her, and says she knows what it's like to lose someone you've worked closely with.

Grant asks if he can "say goodbye," and he goes into the room to stand over the body and caress her arm.

Back at the Harvard lab, it looks like Astrid managed to score a sweet-sounding piano for Walter to noodle around on and not do any work. Olivia strolls in, and the sight of Walter playing the piano makes her smile. "Should I even ask?" she says. Astrid says the music really helps Walter concentrate, because as soon as Peter started playing, Walter was able to lock in; he's recreated the material found at the scene. "I hear you play the piano," Olivia says to Peter. "He doesn't just play; he's good. You should hear him," says Astrid, like LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU ARE ALL DONE FLIRTING WITH EACH OTHER. Walter blathers on about the composition of the material, and Olivia wants to know who would have the technology to make something like this. "I'll give you six guesses, and the first five don't count," says Peter. I guess that's because the first five would include SD6, Rambaldi, The Dharma Initiative, The Hanso Foundation... Olivia instantly guesses "Massive Dynamic!" and at this point Olivia should just stake out Massive Dynamic all the time, and save herself the trouble of constantly going back and forth.

Olivia's phone rings; it's Charlie, saying he's got something she's going to want to see. Later, he's leading her up the stairs of some apartment building, saying a priest alerted him to this guy saying something about the bus attack, before it happened. Roy McComb, high school graduate, works at an escrow company, where BPD is picking him up.

Olivia says he doesn't seem to fit the profile of a mass-murderer. "No. I didn't think so either," says Charlie. Then he leads her into Roy's room, which is covered with ghoulish drawings of death and destruction. Charlie tells her she's looking at depictions of hundreds of attacks, accidents and disasters over the past year, all of them dated before the events took place. Not just pictures either, but models, including one of a broken plane. "Is that the flight from Hamburg?" asks Olivia. Charlie nods. Look! There's an angry little Broyles stomping around and making fun of an FBI liaison!

The Fringe team watches Roy through a one-way window as he sits in an interrogation room. Peter lists a few of the disasters that Roy drew and skeptically asks if they think Roy could have been involved in all of that. Broyles admits that he doesn't: "But that doesn't make me any less interested in finding out where he got his information." Broyles adds that there were several cases that didn't receive media attention, and every one of them was drawn before the incident even happened.

Charlie goes in to talk to Roy, who seems helpful and co-operative, if nervous, as Charlie starts rifling through a pile of drawings to ask Roy about.

Wow, another faceoff between Olivia and Nina Sharp! Nina says the compound is supplied to a dozen labs, and any one of them could be where it was stolen from. Olivia reminds Nina that when they met, Nina said science and technology are at the point where they're impossible to control. "So far, all the science and technology that I've run across has been very tightly controlled by Massive Dynamic," she says, adding that every case has a connection back to the company. Nina says Olivia has it backwards: Massive Dynamic is so awesome that everyone uses its products, so sooner or later everything has a connection back to Massive Dynamic. Well, maybe, but we're not talking about products like Microsoft Word here, but advanced weapons technologies. Still, that's a much better argument than her second one, which points out that all the cases so far happened right in Olivia's "backyard," so does that mean Olivia's a suspect? Olivia is too stunned by Nina's dingbattery that she can't even respond, "That's because I live in Boston, stupid." Probably wants to keep that job offer open.

One of Nina's minions return with the files or whatever on this stuff, and she again demonstrates her higher level of clearance when she casually mentions that this stuff was used once before, in Prague, but with fewer casualties. But if Olivia had access to the case files, she'd know all this already, wouldn't she? I don't know how Nina earned such a high clearance level, since she never shuts up about this stuff.

Back at Roy's interrogation, Charlie is asking -- wait a second, why is Charlie leading the interrogation? He's not part of the team! Anyway, Charlie shows Roy his newest masterpiece, the woman with the bleeding hands, and asks if this is going to happen too. Roy says he knows it sounds crazy -- he himself thinks it's crazy -- but whenever he gets these feelings, it helps to get it down on paper. Or building it helps too. So it's kind of a supernatural masturbation, I suppose.

Roy says he's been getting these feelings for about nine months, which Broyles tells the fabulous Bishop boys is roughly how long they've been aware of the Pattern. "Meaning what, exactly?" asks Peter. Broyles says he's not sure. Maybe he should put McNulty on it. Still, Broyles doesn't think Roy's lying, and Peter says he's certain Roy isn't, because apparently Peter is an awesome poker player who can read people's tells. Yeah, don't mind the FBI with their years of training and experience, Peter: you play poker, after all.

Olivia shows up in time to hear Walter put forth his Occam's Razor hypothesis (i.e. the simplest solution is usually the right one), which is that Roy is psychic. "Theoretically it's all quite possible," says Walter in the face of Broyles' skepticism. He figures Roy doesn't have any control over his abilities -- he can't read people's minds -- but he's linked psychically to a person or small group of people responsible for these events, or even just discussing them. Broyles is all "I'm skeptical" so Walter wants a chance to prove it. Broyles asks him how he would do that. "Am I required to keep him alive?" asks Walter. Hee. Olivia overplays it, telling Walter th

at that would probably be best. Walter sips his coffee cup thoughtfully.

Afterwards, Olivia asks Broyles about what Nina said about the compound being used before. Broyles confirms it and brushes off Olivia's protests about not being allowed to know the background of her own cases with some vague statements about "bureaucratic maneuvering" to keep it free from "political meddling." "Which means that sometimes I don't tell you everything for your own protection," he says. "With all due respect," says Olivia (and it's never really wise to start a sentence that way), "that's not good enough." She says if she's going to do this job, she needs to know what she's dealing with. "And you will, when you're ready," says Broyles, adding that until then, she'll need to trust him (which the closed-captioning hilariously transcribes as "you'll need to cross me").

Oh, of course. We can prove psychic ability with a simple CT scan! Why didn't anyone else think of this? Walter says if Roy is picking up someone else's thoughts, it'll leave a "distinct signature." Peter wants to know if they'll be able to identify whose thoughts they are, and Roy says that's preposterous. Because yeah, that's the preposterous part. However, they may be able to intercept them. Well, naturally!

Roy's slid into the machine, but he's not in very long before he finds himself in great distress, which might have to do with how veiny his face suddenly becomes. Walter's very interested in finding out what's going on, but Peter runs in and yanks Roy out of the unit. "What did that?" he yells. "Something in the blood. Magnetic compound of some kind, dormant, perhaps a parasite." Peter translates: "The machine is basically a gigantic magnet and you've got metal in your blood. If we hadn't pulled you out, it would have ripped your body apart." "Would have been quite a mess," acknowledges Walter, like thanks for your concern. Farnsworth asks, "Why would he have metal in his blood? That's not normal, right?" Oh, Farnsworth. You're lucky you've got looks.

Back at the lab, we're getting another scene where the team is daunted by the sheer volume of files they need to go through but then Walter finds what he wants in about five seconds. He says he and "Belly" worked on this very problem, and Peter clarifies for Farnsworth that he's talking about William Bell of Massive Dynamic.

Anyway, the two of them hypothesized a spectrum of waves outside the range of those already known, which could be used to communicate information. The government, naturally, was very interested, as they wanted to use the waves to "send their most clandestine information." "Because if no other government knew the spectrum existed, they couldn't listen in," says Peter. Exactly right. "They called it the ghost network," says Walter, adding that the government wanted to take it a step forward and transmit directly from person to person. Walter tried an "iridium-based organometallic compound" in the subject's brain. Meanwhile, Peter's flipping through files. "You have got to be kidding me," he says. He shows his dad that Roy McComb used to be one of his test subjects. Oh, that's where I put my iridium-based organometallic compound!

Peter yells at his dad for almost killing a guy because he injected stuff into his brain twenty years ago. I had this exact same conversation with my dad not two days ago! Walter protests that he didn't put nearly enough in to cause that kind of reaction; it must have multiplied in his system over time. "Environment, diet," he says. Yeah. Roy's had a couple extra Big Macs too many. That's how all the metal in his blood got there. Peter asks (well, yells, really) if his dad ever explained to Roy what he was doing, and Walter points out, not completely unreasonably, that it wouldn't have been much of a secret experiment if he had.

Olivia comes in and asks what's going on, and how Roy is. Peter says Roy's fine, "no thanks to my father's attempts to turn him into a human walkie-talkie!" Hey, that's it! The compound in the blood has turned him into a receiver of transmissions. "Someone else, it seems, and I'm jealous of this, has perfected our ghost network, and is using it to communicate. Our dear Roy is merely overhearing what they say." But ... the visions?

Well, fortunately, Walter's got some confusing things to say about that, with a handy-dandy slide show that depicts some familiar optical illusions, and says Roy's brain is attempting to interpret the sensory input he's getting through the ghost network. Well, since his depictions are so bang-on, it appears his brain is doing a fantastic job interpreting, doesn't it?

So what do they do, work on their own receiver? No, don't be foolish; that'd take too long! Walter wants to do some minor brain surgery on Roy to send the confusing visuals to his auditory cortex instead, and I don't have to be a scientist to know that this all sounds ridiculous. Not to mention FATAL. But no, this is a great idea. Walter just needs some piece of equipment that he has hidden in a wall in his old house in Cambridge, a "magnetic neuro-stimulator."

This means an errand out to the house for Peter and Olivia for some sort of equipment that'll help Walter do brain surgery. No one appears to be at home, so Olivia tries to get in touch with the owners for consent, which you'd think she'd have done LONG ago, but Peter just goes ahead and breaks in. He calls it "barely a crime" since he used to live there.

Back at Harvard, Peter readies Roy for the operation by merely asking if he's got any allergies or drug use. Nope to both. "This all checks out. Strap 'em down," says Walter, freaking Roy out a bit, and Astrid tells him everything's going to be OK. And she knows that how?

As she straps him down, Astrid really runs up her line count for the series so far, chatting with Roy about how great it is to know he's not crazy, or whatever. No, it must be so much more reassuring to know that he's back in the hands of the crazy doctor who's RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT HE'S GOING THROUGH, Astrid.

Over in Cambridge, Olivia and Peter are wasting time searching for the whatsit together when they should be splitting up. But it wouldn't give them the chance to blather at each other, with Peter explaining that he and his mom moved after Walter was institutionalized. Olivia asks where his mother is. "That's a story for another time," he says. He'd rather talk about why Olivia got into law enforcement, and if, since the psychological profiles of cops and criminals are almost identical, if she ever considered a life of crime. "No dental," cracks Olivia.

They're having no luck finding the magnetic neuro-stimulator, until Peter remembers a hidden compartment in a wall that his mom had covered off because he used to hide in it the time. He uses his knife to pry off some paneling, and finds a dumbwaiter with some old papers.

Back at the lab Walter is preparing Roy for surgery and brushing off the poor guy's feeling that Dr. Bishop seems familiar. Olivia and Peter stroll in, bearing a briefcase with Bishop's device, which kinda looks like a coil of Christmas lights. "This brings back memories," he says. "Of what?" asks Peter. Of a lifetime, Peter. Shit. Proust wrote hundreds of thousands of words when a glimpse of a magnetic neuro-stimulator caused memories to come flooding back.

Roy's strapped in now, and the device is positioned on his head, a metal headband holding it in place. There are holes in it. Walter is holding a drill. Walter is saying something about "intercranial penetration." The music is swelling ... and the tension is broken by a couple of idiot students asking if this is Poli Sci 101. "Not remotely," says Olivia.

ensations. A horse. A picture of a car gives him trouble -- he says it feels like he's tasting gasoline. "We've reached the gustatory cortex. We're getting close," says Walter, quite pleased. up is a picture of a beach. Roy identifies it but says he doesn't feel anything (except a little scared after this annoys Walter). As usual, in scenes of pseudo-science, the key is to turn up a dial, but suddenly Roy starts speaking Latin. He says he can hear voices. Yeah, but actually speak the Latin just because you're hearing it? In an incredibly fortunate stroke of luck, Astrid was a linguistics major, so she translates the Latin to mean something's happening in an hour, an exchange at south station.

Roy continues: "Where is it?" "From the beginning, it was on her person," goes the translation. Olivia grabs the file with Roy's latest drawing, of the woman with the bloody palms, and suggests "It was on her the whole time," which Astrid says could work. Olivia bolts out of there without even telling the rest of her team where she's going.

She's over to the morgue where she pulls out the DEA agent's body while she flashes back to the partner holding her hand. Somehow we get a flashback of Grant cutting open his partner's palm, even though we couldn't see it. It's safe for Olivia to surmise that from the bloody X on Evelina's palm. The flashback also shows Grant pulling a transparent plastic disc out.

While Olivia busies herself mustering up an FBI field team in less than hour based on a clue delivered in Latin thanks to impromptu brain surgery on a man who is the prime suspect in the murders on the bus, Walter is staring at his instruments. "I believe with proper demodulation you could receive satellite television for free," he says, which is Peter's cue to get Astrid to help him free Roy.

Grant Davidson shows up at the station with a giant metal briefcase, which makes no sense, given that he's just handing off a little plastic disc. He gets a phone call from a guy who gives him a meeting point, saying they want to make sure he's not being followed, the entirety of which is spoken by Roy, so Peter calls Olivia to relay the info.

Maybe the FBI's response wasn't as impressive as I thought it was going to be, as all I see are Olivia and Charley hunting high and low. Grant gets a call telling him to head for the Dewey Square exit, and Peter passes that on to Olivia too.

Olivia spots Grant at the exit, but before she can get to him, he's subtly bumped by Buddy from the bus. A second or two too late, Olivia orders Grant to turn around with his hands up. He turns around, but his hands are clutching his chest, which is bloody. Grant collapses. Worse luck: he doesn't have the briefcase, but it doesn't take too long to find it, because obvious metal exchange briefcases never take too long to find, and Olivia and Charlie manage to corner the guy. Well, perhaps not "corner," exactly, given that they leave him room to very deliberately step in front of a bus passing by.

Olivia.

So what was it all for? People in white coats in labs that look as advanced as anything you might see in a toothbrush commercial open the briefcase, which contains foam cut perfectly to accommodate a small slide-open case in which is a translucent yellowish plastic disc. Grant really went to a lot of effort to wrap the thing up all pretty, didn't he?

Later, Broyles shows it to Olivia and says they don't know what it is, but they're hoping the guys at NSA might have some ideas. "So eleven innocent people died today, we risked losing another by drilling through his head, all for something we know nothing about?"

Broyles asks if she ever smiles, and points out they ID'd the shooter, whose fingerprints link him to two other Pattern cases. "Not only can we put a face to these people, but we know they're communicating, and how. I'd say that's an impressive day's work." Yeah, seems like a fair trade for eleven lives, Broyles.

And I guess she's earned some trust, because he says there were three models in Roy's apartment that have to do with things that haven't happened yet, and he wants Olivia to have a look. Olivia looks absolutely thrilled, but he didn't say anything about overtime pay. Like she hasn't had a long enough day already.

Later, everyone's still hanging out in the Harvard lab when Olivia comes in, like don't you people have ANYWHERE to go? Roy's not hearing voices anymore, and they figure that when the FBI showed up at South Station the Pattern folks knew the ghost network was compromised and have stopped broadcasting on it anymore. Peter, sitting at the piano says, "Any requests?" and Olivia says "Bach," which Peter says is "too stuffy" and then he starts playing "Someone To Watch Over Me," like WHY DID YOU BOTHER ASKING FOR REQUESTS anyway?

So here's why Broyles took off: to meet with Nina Sharp to hand over the disk. The music tells us this is supposed to be a big reveal, but who didn't see that coming? She figures it's not the only reason he's there, and that another reason might be Massive Dynamic's interest in Olivia. Broyles says it's premature to be poaching his agent after her third case, and Nina smoothly says she didn't get where she is without being able to immediately judge someone's talent, which is kind of funny given that last episode she was crapping all over Olivia (and the rest of the Fringe team), although that could have just been devil's advocate stuff. She asks if he isn't being a little protective of her, and he says he's protective of all his agents. "I want nothing but the best for her," says Nina, which sounds kinda creepy. "Of course you do," says Broyles, which also sounds kind of creepy, but then again, his deep voice makes most of what he says sound ominous.

In another toothbrush lab, Nina hands over the disk to some white-coated guy. "We found another one," she says. He looks at it under the microscope, and says the crystallization is intact and there's no discernible loss of oscillations, so it might be just what they need to break the encryption.

Speaking of that, Nina says she heard they're making progress. "See for yourself," says the guy.

He leads her over to a computer monitor as he says they finally stabilized the link and have been pulling information from the disk for the past seventy-two hours. "Let me know when it's finished," says Nina.

On the screen, under "John Scott" and "Link established -- data transfer stabilized", numbers scroll down the monitor. Lying on an enclosed bed is John, wires attached to his scalp. Still dead, I suppose, but getting enough screen time still to warrant his own slot in the opening credits.

By Daniel

Grant asks if he can "say goodbye," and he goes into the room to stand over the body and caress her arm.

By Daniel

Charlie goes in to talk to Roy, who seems helpful and co-operative, if nervous, as Charlie starts rifling through a pile of drawings to ask Roy about.

By Daniel

Well, back to the matter at hand: DRILLING INTO ROY'S HEAD. There is blood dripping down his face. Walter tells Roy he believes there are metal clusters in the visual centre of his brain, and he's going to try to move them to the part that processes sound. Yeah, sounds solid, Walter. Peter starts showing Roy pictures on flash cards so Roy can describe any sensations. A horse. A picture of a car gives him trouble -- he says it feels like he's tasting gasoline. "We've reached the gustatory cortex. We're getting close," says Walter, quite pleased. up is a picture of a beach. Roy identifies it but says he doesn't feel anything (except a little scared after this annoys Walter). As usual, in scenes of pseudo-science, the key is to turn up a dial, but suddenly Roy starts speaking Latin. He says he can hear voices. Yeah, but actually speak the Latin just because you're hearing it? In an incredibly fortunate stroke of luck, Astrid was a linguistics major, so she translates the Latin to mean something's happening in an hour, an exchange at south station.

By Daniel

Olivia.

By Daniel

Speaking of that, Nina says she heard they're making progress. "See for yourself," says the guy.

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