Remember that near-accident that Olivia had on her way to her appointment with William Bell in Manhattan in the season finale? Well, the near-miss was in the alternate reality where Belly is hanging out. Back in this universe, Olivia didn't avoid the accident, but the FBI agents on scene -- including a questioning new agent, Amy Jessup (that last name can't be an accident, given a speech Broyles makes later -- someone here loves A Few Good Men) who looks to be spending a little time with the Fringe crew -- are confused because no one left Olivia's SUV and the doors are locked. After hearing about the accident, Walter and Peter show up, and shortly thereafter Olivia rockets through the windshield. Meanwhile, the other guy in the accident has wandered away and killed some dude in a nearby apartment, then, through the use of a Firewire, assumes his facial features.
But Olivia's not OK. She's comatose, and despite Broyles getting all Col. "You want me on that wall! You need me on that wall!" Jessup (or maybe because of it) with the investigating committee, Fringe division itself is having its life-support unplugged. But they didn't reckon on the touch of Peter, who awakens Olivia. She doesn't have a solid memory of where she went, but she's convinced someone's after her, and she needs to find something that's hidden.
Meanwhile, the facial shape-shifter doesn't know she's still alive, and sends a message to his superiors (via a typewriter that sends messages to an alternate dimension through a mirror -- I know) all "mission accomplished" and they tell him "Nuh-uh. She's still alive. The meeting happened. Interrogate her and then kill her."
Sneaking past security in a hospital is pretty easy if you can change yourself to look like Olivia's nurse, which is what the shape-shifter does, but by then Walter and Peter have conveniently figured out what's going on and chase the shape-shifter away. Or at least, they think they do -- but the shape-shifter in reality kills Charlie, and takes his appearance. And if you're thinking, "this is Fringe, so Charlie's probably not really dead," well, that's what the furnace in the basement of the hospital is for. Still, there's more than one of everything, right, Peter?
Peter, incidentally, after the run-in with the shape-shifter has nicked some crazy-wacko equipment that he gives to Broyles in order to convince the pencil-pushing senators that Fringe division gets results, dammit.
Also, Broyles does a little lip-locking with Nina Sharpe. Fringe with benefits!
The sound of a car accident ushers us into the season premiere of Fringe. Yes, there is more than one of everything, and that now applies to Fringe seasons as well. Some dude with blood on his face comes to in the driver's seat of his car, the source of his injury apparently the spiderwebbed windshield in front of him. He staggers out of his car and off down the Manhattan street. The other vehicle in the collision looks suspiciously like the FBI-issue SUV driven by one Olivia Dunham who, you may remember, narrowly missed a fender-bender in last year's season finale. Or did she? Yeah, she did. Only I think most of us have an idea of what might be going on here.Bloody Face makes his way through the throng of people on the street, checking out doors along the street until he finds what he's looking for, which appears to be a door that isn't chained shut. He finds one, an apartment, and runs his thumbs down the buzzers for all the units, and his scattershot technique yields an open security door almost instantly. Nice work, Mabel in 3F: you just let a jewel thief in the building!
There's a guy putting trash in the garbage chute, when he's approached by Bloody Face. "You OK?" asks the new guy, who takes off his glasses to get a better look. Must be farsighted. Instead of answering, Bloody Face grabs the guy by the throat and pushes him backward into the apartment. See, Mabel? You see? There's going to be an apartment board hearing over this.
Bloody Face drags the poor tenant, unconscious or dead (probably dead), across his hardwood floor, glasses lying cinematically in the foreground. Bloody Face has wiped the blood off his face, and looks at himself in the mirror. He's looking at the man in the mirror. He's asking him to change his ways. Or at least his face: he pushes his palms up against his cheeks, and there's a cracking sound. He presses his fingers into his face and when he removes them, his face is all smushed up, like his flesh has the pliability of Play-Doh.
Then he pulls out a little gizmo that has a cord with a plate with three prongs on it, and he sticks it in the dead guy's mouth, pushing it into the roof of his mouth, and does the same thing with a similar attachment on the other end.
More cracking, and electronic whirring, and Previously Bloody Face looks to be in some pain. There's an episode of X-Files on the television, but it's one with Mulder and not Doggett, so that can't be the source of his distress. After a moment, his facePod has finished syncing, and Bloody Face now looks exactly like the dead guy lying on the floor. Then he yanks the cord out of his mouth, and I know my computer doesn't like it when I don't eject my iPod properly, so here's hoping he did that right.
Meanwhile, back at the crash site, the FBI is already on scene, which doesn't make much sense, until when the tough-yet-still-feminine agent who we haven't seen before asks an agent already on scene who was driving the SUV, and he hands her a printed-out piece of paper with Olivia's picture on it. "Classified Secret" is printed above Olivia's picture, so it's awesome that he's just handing these out in public.
Meanwhile, Peter and Walter are at the grocery store with Walter being earnest and solicitous towards his son, and Peter being a pissy douche and wanting to be just about anywhere other than with his dad who loves him and wants to make Peter something for his upcoming birthday. Walter giddily expounds some nonsense about being the sous-chef for the Bakersfield food lab or whatever, and worked with the guy who invented Ho Hos or some such malarkey. Walter insists on making Peter custard, and Peter says he doesn't like custard and never has, and Walter at some point is just going to have to say something like, "Oh, right -- it was the Peter who died who liked custard; you're alternate-reality Peter."
Walter also plans to impress Olivia with his cooking: "I want to see her face when she eats my pudding," he says, which Peter notes is a rather disturbing thing to say, as he answers his cellphone. He listens for a moment, and then says, "What?" looking distressed.
So this accident scene investigation that has already blocked Manhattan traffic for twelve hours already has to wait for the Bishops to get in from Boston, and Peter and Walter are very concerned for Olivia except spunky Agent Amy Jessup wants to ask Peter some questions about what it is that he does, and Peter blows her off and asks for Charlie. Meanwhile, Walter just strolls over to Olivia's SUV and tries the door, which is locked, and so he yanks out a windshield wiper hook to jimmy the door, and can I just ask why no one is even trying to stop this deranged man from contaminating the crime scene?
Jessup tells Peter that people saw a man leaving the other car in the accident, but no one saw anyone get out of the SUV and the doors are locked and the seatbelt is engaged and there's no indentation, which implies that no one was behind the wheel at the time of impact, she says, which is kind of a hilarious conclusion to draw. Peter's basically ignoring her and asking if the skid marks match up with the vehicles, and she snaps that he still hasn't told her what it is he and his dad and Olivia do for the FBI, because she checked with the field office, and they told her it was ... "classified. And that you don't have access," smirks Peter. "It's not that I don't appreciate petulance..." begins Jessup, so THIS is going downhill fast. Meanwhile, Walter gets behind the wheel of Olivia's SUV, like so much for no indentation in the seat, and suddenly the hazard lights start flashing and the radio starts fading in and out, and Walter hurriedly gets out of the car and slams the door, and suddenly the SUV's alarm is going off and the lights are flashing and the engine's revving. And then that stops.
And then, in a nifty little moment, Olivia comes flying out through the windshield of the stationary SUV, and landing on the ground, face up, eyes open. Not moving.
And we're right into the opening credits, still my favorite X-Files-theme ripoff. Well, except for Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Over at New York General Hospital, Peter and Walter watch as Olivia is wheeled down the corridor with an EMT telling the doctor Olivia's vitals, and then the doctor is all, "Prep her, stat!" like SLOW DOWN with the complicated doctor jargon there! Outside, Jessup shows up, and hustles up the hospital steps, only to be met by the always-fearsome Phillip Broyles, who says they need to talk about the accident. Actually, they don't need to talk so much as he means to hand her -- whom he pointedly calls "junior agent" -- a report for her to sign that explains everything. Well, that's awfully considerate of him!
"A random traffic accident involving a federal agent. No extenuating circumstances, case closed," he tells her. Jessup looks quite confused -- that's not what happened at all! -- and starts to protest. Broyles is all, "Sign it. That's an order." And now Jessup looks like she's worried Broyles might actually kill her. She signs the report.
Inside, Walter's about two seconds away from going apeshit on a finicky bill feeder on a vending machine in a waiting room, but it eventually takes his money and he gets his Berry Kablooey or whatever it is he's looking for, just as the doctor comes in to update them on Olivia. "I'm afraid your friend's injuries were too severe," he says, adding that they were unable to restore any brain function and that patients who suffer this sort of head trauma usually don't regain consciousness. Walter spits out: "Simplified! Reductionist! Absurd!" and looks to Peter and then starts talking about how life and death are "relative terms" and babbles on about primitive diagnostics and then starts repeating that Olivia's not dead. He bolts for the ICU or wherever it is where Olivia is, and the doctor tries to stop him, and Peter says, "Doctor, please. Back off." And I guess the doctor thought, "Well, FAIR ENOUGH," and didn't c
all security on the distraught maniac ranting about life and death being relative concepts and running off into a restricted area.There's Walter standing over Olivia's unconscious body, Peter looking in through the door. Walter uses a little flashlight to check Olivia's eyes, and can barely control his shaking. "I'm so sorry, Olive," he says, fighting back tears. Peter stands there stoically, then closes his eyes and his face gets all snarly.
Time to hit the bar! Peter tosses back a whisky and taps the glass on the bar for a refill. "Mind if I join you?" says Broyles behind him. They're at "The Irish Heather." Broyles pulls out a chair and sits down. "I'm guessing you don't drink," says Peter, and Broyles points to Peter's drink and tells the bartender, "Double." Oh, we got a drink-off on our hands! Peter wants to know how Broyles found him, and Broyles can barely contain the "duh" in his voice as he reminds Peter that he works for the FBI. Then he asks Peter where Walter is, and I'm half-surprised Peter didn't just say, "Uh, you work for the FBI." Instead, he explains that Walter is in La-La land, thanks to a drug mixture, and Astrid's babysitting.
I guess hearing about the waste of an FBI agent for the purposes of making sure a half-mad scientist doesn't hurt himself or others while whacked out on drugs prompts Broyles to tell Peter that he has to go to Washington tomorrow, because the efficacy of their division is being questioned. "I've been informed that our failure to deliver any usable results is unacceptable." So I guess preparing your defence isn't as good an idea as getting plastered with Peter "Loose Cannon" Bishop in a bar, eh, Broyles? "They're shutting you down?" says Peter. You too, Peter. He snorts and wonders what they were even doing, apart from sitting around waiting for someone to die a "grisly, macabre death" or for the fabric of the universe "to come shredding apart." He calls them the cleanup crew, coming in to mop up and make everything nice and tidy for the files. "It's too late, anyway," he says, and Broyles doesn't think so, but Peter's talking about how it's too late for Olivia. So they toast Olivia and in a few hours are going to be drunkenly singing along to "Sweet Caroline."
Meanwhile, over at New York Federal Building, Agent Jessup is digging around the FBI's files, with pictures of the Fringe crew on her screen like FBI baseball cards. Collect 'em all! Foiled again by the Top Secret You Keep Out! classification on her computer screen, she unfolds a scrap of paper with a number scrawled on it -- , for anyone who thinks it might be significant. Anyway, it allows her access to the Fringe files -- wait, where did she get that? -- and she checks out the grisly, macabre death scenes the Fringe crew were brought in to mop up, like the bus where everyone was encased like flies in amber, that baby that grew up into a man in a matter of hours, and what looks to be a scene from the plane in the pilot episode. Oh, grisly, macabre death scenes -- how you've started to blend together. Looks like Jessup picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue.
Peter strolls back up to head trauma centre. He doesn't appear to be staggering too much. Olivia's cute sister Rachel is there... sweet. Grief sex, Peter. Dig it. Rachel says Ella's at a friend's house, because Rachel didn't want her remembering her aunt like this. "She had a living will. No life support. They're going to do this in, in the morning, so I've just been sitting with her, and..." She trails off. Peter looks into the room, and Rachel asks if he wants to... trailing off again. Probably "go in and say goodbye?" and not "go back to my place?" Peter nods. Rachel looks at him for a moment, and then says, "You know she liked you, Peter. Did you know that?" Like, liked liked him? Peter just kind of sighs and goes inside.
Olivia's lying there, monitors beeping. Peter sits at her side, touches her shoulder, whispers, "Hey." That's all he's able to say for a long while, and then finally says, "Goodbye, Olivia," and leans in to give her a kiss, at which point her eyes open and she intones, "Einai kalytero anthropo apo ton patera toy" and then sits straight up and screams. You gotta figure Peter's used to women freaking out like this when he goes to kiss them.
Sometime later, a doctor is asking Olivia questions. Olivia remembers her name, but she doesn't know why she's in the hospital or what's wrong with her leg. Rachel tells her about the accident. "In New York," says Olivia. Then she asks if Peter's there, and Rachel says he is, and Peter steps forward, and Olivia babbles about how she went somewhere, and Peter's all, "Yeah, New York," but Olivia says that's not it, that she was trying to get somewhere and someone was trying to stop her. She's getting agitated, and the beeping on her monitor speeds up, which is probably not good, and the doctor tells Peter that she needs to stay calm. Have you forgotten, "Doctor, please. Back off"? Olivia tells Peter, "He told me something," but she can't remember who it was but it was very important, that there's something she has to do. "There's something that I have to do, and I ... I think that our lives may depend on it." She's practically wailing. "Whose lives?" asks Peter. "Everyone's," says Olivia. And while the doctor readies a beta blocker to get her pulse down, and readies some Blue Blockers to keep her eyes safe from UV damage, Olivia pleads with Peter to bring her her gun. "Please, I'm not safe. Somebody hurt me, they did this to me. Please, Peter, my gun. I need my gun." God, sounds just like my wife in the hospital.
So Peter walks into Boston Federal Building and tells the receptionist that he needs to talk to special agent Broyles, and the receptionist instantly knows where one particular agent in the whole building is, and tells Peter that Broyles is in Washington (which Peter must have forgotten). So he asks to speak to Agent Charlie Francis, and the receptionist asks what it's regarding, and Peter says he works for the FBI as a consultant, and he hands her his card and says he needs access to a file on a car accident in New York City. She scans the card. "I'm sorry, these credentials have been revoked, Mr. Bishop," she says, and dumps the card in a shredder. Peter was not expecting that. He agitatedly tells officious shredder lady that she needs to help him, and she brightly tells him he can file a civilian request on their website, and he starts going on about one of their agents in the hospital and the agent's life and possibly officious shredder lady's life depends on Peter doing the work he needs to do, and naturally by this point the woman is glancing nervously over at a security agent who puts a hand on Peter's shoulder and Peter shoves him off, and the agent looks all, "Excellent. I was hoping to mix it up today," and fortunately for Peter, agent Jessup is coincidentally in the lobby affixing him with her best, "What the hell are you doing?" stare, and she says she'll take Peter. Peter smirks at the security guard and says, "I'm with her." Sure, now you're her best friend, Peter.
So they stroll outside and go for a car ride. Peter asks her what she's doing in Boston, and she ignores him and asks if he likes to fight: "All that time in Iraq. Mob connections. You've got quite a combative history," she says. But flattery gets you nowhere with Peter, who just says she said she was going to help him get his hands on that file -- did Peter give her the access code? But he didn't need her help at the time... Anyway, she's got the file on the seat behind him and tells him something wasn't "adding up" about the skid marks: "They were darkest at the back, not the front," she says. "So maximum torque farthest away from the incident. That means the driver wasn't slowing down," says Peter. "He was speeding up," says Jessup, and Peter figures he must have been waiting.
Jessup's got pictures from the surveillance camera in the parking garage to the accident site, and there's a nice clear picture of Buddy sitting
there waiting in his car. Jessup's identified him as George Reed of 524 Littlefield Road, in Lexington, 15 minutes away from where they are.Then she tells Peter it's his turn, and asks what Fringe division is and what it does. "Nothing. Not anymore," says Peter, helpful as ever.
So Jessup goes busting down the door at 524 Littlefield Road, and they find George Reed, lying dead on the floor. "Look at his lividity. If he was driving a car in New York, it wasn't yesterday," says Jessup. Peter says she needs to get a ride for someone. Geez, you'd think if this face-shifter was going to be stealing other people's identities, he'd at least make some effort to hide the corpses he's leaving in his wake.
So the ride Peer needed was for his dad, who examines the corpse and grosses out the FBI crime-scene dude by saying stuff like, "Feel his anus. It's soaking wet," and the crime-scene dude is plainly prepared to take Walter's word on that one. Walter notes the expansion of the "oral mucosa, the eyes and the rectum, to accommodate rapid fluid loss. He looks at the birds in the cages in the house, and notes that if it's a virus, it obviously doesn't affect birds. "Or people, at least not quickly." He tells the agent he needs the body taken back to the lab, and the uber-professional crime-scene dude calls Walter a "lunatic" and says the body's going to the morgue. Then he asks everyone else if Walter's crazy, and demands to know who the agent in charge is. "I am. Take it wherever he wants," says Jessup, looking decidedly less than sure of herself. Walter's giddy with happiness, and Jessup quietly asks Peter, "Is he crazy?" Peter just laughs and says, "Oh, yeah."
Outside, Jessup wonders in Peter's general direction why she just sent Walter a body when the FBI says Fringe division has been shut down, and Peter asks why she's doing this. "Just following the case," says Jessup, but Peter doesn't believe her, telling her not to "bluff a bluffer." Continuity note: in the first episode of last season, Peter also referred to his mad bluffing abilities. "You know, a lot of people would be scared by this. Most, actually," he says. So Jessup says, "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt..." and Peter interrupts her to smirk at her butchered Shakespeare.
And then an ecstatic Walter comes running out of the house and yells, "Peter! They said I can ride in the back with the body! Can I?" Like a little kid, heh. "Sure. Of course you can," says Peter, somehow managing not to add the word "champ" to the end of that. As an afterthought, though, he does order Walter to stay out of the medications. Walter starts to sulk when he hears that. Heh. "I think I've been waiting for you people my whole life," says Jessup, whatever that's supposed to mean.
The bell jingles over the door of an antique typewriter shop as the faceshifter strolls in. The clerk, walking with elbow crutches, asks what he's looking for. "I'm looking for a Selectric. Selectric 251," he says, and the clerk says, "Doesn't exist. They never made one. It's 245 straight to 255." "I know. I'm still gonna need the 251," says the faceshifter, looking right at the guy, and the clerk understands. "Ah. You're one of them," he says.
He goes around the cash register. "You know, it's been six years. I just kind of figured that, uh..." Anyway, he opens the cash register, digs out a key and hands it to the faceshifter. "Last door," he tells him, and the faceshifter heads to the back of the shop. The clerk calls out, "Hey. You, you tell 'em. I'm not waiting around forever." The faceshifter nods and heads back into a room, empty save for a desk with a typewriter, a mirror and a stack of white paper. It's just like my home office except it doesn't have dirty cocktail glasses all over the desk. He sits down and rolls a sheet of paper and types: "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED/TARGET TERMINATED/IN FATAL CAR CRASH/MEETING PREVENTED/REQUEST EXTRACTION."
He looks at the reflection of the typewriter in the mirror. The keys in the reflection depress while the actual typewriter does not, but still typing occurs underneath what he wrote: "NEGATIVE/MISSION FAILURE/MEETING OCCURRED/TARGET STILL ALIVE." Faceshifter chews this over for a moment, then types, "REQUEST NEW ORDERS." The typewriter types: "INTERROGATE TARGET/THEN KILL HER."
Meanwhile, Peter's giving Jessup the grand tour of Harvard. She already knows that Walter was a scientist who got sent to a mental institution. Peter says there's more than that, some good and some worse, but this is where Walter was working as a professor while also working on top-secret government projects. "We do our thing down here in the lab, because according to him, it's the only place that he can work," says Peter. Getting all caught up, here, new viewers?
Peter offers Jessup one last chance to turn back, and she's all, "Are you kidding?" and he dramatically says, "Agent Jessup, welcome to Fringe division," and throws open the doors like they're going to be walking into the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence or something and not just a room that looks more or less like a regular lab. Come to think of it, though, considering all the shit that goes on and all the freaky equipment, shouldn't Peter at least have to unlock a door or swipe a key card to get in?
Walter's there, doing the autopsy on the body in the dentist's chair, and Astrid is hanging around looking pretty, as she does, but with a tighter haircut, which Peter compliments. Walter briefly says hello to Jessup, and then tells Astrid he needs four Bunsen burners and eight metal bowls and a freezer. Astrid asks him if the bowls need to be sterilized, and Walter says the bowls aren't for the autopsy, they're for the custard for Peter's birthday, and I think that if Walter's cooking, the bowls need double sterilization, if anything. Peter angrily wants Walter to forget about the custard, but Walter refuses, and then ticks off some more items he needs: rib cutters, toothed forceps, and a bone saw. Thankfully, he specifies that these are for the autopsy, not the groceries. And then Gene moos, indignant that her agent couldn't get her a raise for Season 2.
Over at the hospital, Olivia hasn't already been through enough that she can't lie there and be lectured to by Charlie, who insists that she isn't all right, and then tells this rambling story about when he was with the Brooklyn Police Department and he responded to a domestic disturbance call, and his partner talked to the woman while Charlie was in the process of arresting the dude when there was a gunshot from the other room and the woman is standing there holding the gun, and then she shoots Charlie, and ANYWAY after about half an hour Charlie tells Olivia he was in the ICU for six days and in the hospital for two weeks, and he kept telling his wife that he was fine, even though he was shaken and scared. "Now, if you're like me, you got a gun underneath your pillow," Charlie tells her. I don't think so, because I think Olivia would have put a bullet in her head by the time Charlie's story hit the twenty-minute mark.
And Olivia looks really surprised that Charlie knows about the gun, and he admits Peter called him. "You can fool the doctors, kiddo. You can't fool me."
Then Olivia gets all weepy as she says she doesn't know what happened to her. She can't even load the gun because her hands won't stop shaking. Charlie strokes her hair and tells her that she's going to be OK.
Meanwhile, back at the Fringe lab, Walter's digging around in the opened torso of the dead body with one hand while his other hand holds a piece of licorice, because who doesn't occasionally like a little snack at work? And while Jessup watches in amazement, Walter is simultaneously directing Astrid in the making of the custard. From a nearby table, Peter says there's nothing wrong with the blood sample. Then Walter starts giggling over how he likes custard but hates flan. Can you believe the senate wants to shut these guys down?
Peter wants to know if Walter's got any theories about h
ow the guy died, and Walter's at a loss, but says the water expulsion, "though dramatic and messy, seems to be a symptom of some other process." Then Walter says he stumbled upon something that "did the unthinkable." He gathers everyone closer to look inside the stiff's mouth -- there are three indents like stab wounds. Peter's all, "What are those? And what do you mean 'the unthinkable'?" "It made me remember something," says Walter.He pulls out a videotape while Peter explains that his dad recently "took a little trip down memory lane" and has also become "wildly obsessed" with Peter's childhood. Walter tells everyone to be quiet and then shows them a video of an experiment he and Walter Bell did. There's a woman on screen, hooked up to all sorts of apparati, eyes closed, seated, swaying, smiling. "We came up with such a spectacular blend of drugs. One day, Leary" -- presumably Timothy, and not Denis -- "came by, and he said, 'You're kidding me.'" Astrid asks if this is going to make her head explode, and Walter says it will in a sense, but not physically, which must be really reassuring. "We're trying to augment her fifth, sixth and seventh charkas," he explains. Well, I suppose "explains" isn't exactly the right word, but Astrid's down nonetheless: "Throat, third eye and crown," she says. Peter looks at her in surprise, and Walter tells "Asterix," and she corrects him, not that he pays any attention. "You wanted her to see God," says Peter.
The woman on the screen is babbling about a man with a machine, with three nails that go in the mouth. "He is a soldier, from somewhere else. He's from a place that looks like this, but it's not here. He's from another universe, man. Oh, I can see him. He pushes up the machine." And then she continues blathering about how that's how they change: "They're like shapeshifters. That's how they hide. They can look like us. They can look like any of us."
Peter asks Astrid to get on the old computer box and get on the joint law enforcement database, so they can be notified immediately of any corpse that matches the description. Walter's all, "I'll stand here and rewind just a few seconds so she can dramatically say, 'They can look like any of us' again."
Meanwhile, Olivia's in her hospital room, shaking whilst trying to load her gun. The bullets scatter all over the place. See, if the U.S. already had socialized medicine, there'd be someone there to help her with that.
Up : a scene written perhaps immediately after the umpteenth showing of A Few Good Men on TBS or whatever it's called now, right down to Broyles reminding Senator Kenneth Taylor of the investigating committee that it's Colonel Broyles, thank you very much. Or "special agent, if he prefers." That's after Taylor reads him the riot act over unsubstantiated claims of invasion and reports of technology run amok, and how -- in a nod to The X-Files -- the old "X" designation and Fringe investigations have been budget indulgences for half a century.
Senator Neil Schell plays the good cop and starts to say they all have a job to do, and Broyles won't even let him finish and just steamrolls right by him, says he's had the same job in three administrations and six wars: "To defend our national security. And I assure you we are not secure. Yes, sometimes a threat is familiar. But I have come to learn that sometimes it is far worse. And when it is worse, when the threat is unimaginable, that is when we are at the door. And you thank God for that." Broyles, did you order the code red? YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID!
Schnell knows Broyles well enough to call him Phillip, actually, but says, "Without something usable, something to support the human and fiscal cost ... I'm sorry." Really? All the freaky shit that Fringe has handled over the past year? There's no evidence left of it? Maybe it's not such a great idea to be falsifying official records to remove any trace of strange goings-on.
And who meets Broyles outside on the steps of the capitol building but Nina Sharp, who can tell that it didn't go well. Yeah, because Broyles totally isn't his normal perky self. "Now I don't have to tell you how important it is that Fringe division not be shut down," she says. He tells her that he's not the one who needs convincing. "We've tried. I'm afraid that this one is out of our hands," she says, before stepping forward and planting one on Broyles, smack on the lips. She tells him to do what he always used to do: "Save the day."
Fortunately, Jessup and Peter have already received word of a corpse with three holes in its mouth, and the two of them arrive at the morgue to check it out. "They found this guy two blocks from the accident site," says Jessup, checking out the file. "The shape-shifters must leave the original body behind," deduces Peter, living up to that supposed massive IQ of his. It seems awfully risky to me that the shape-shifters would do that, but since they do, I guess there's no point in complaining. "Do you remember the girl from the video?" says Jessup, like maybe they watched her several months ago instead of, you know, like an hour ago. She points out the woman in the video said the shape-shifter was a soldier. "My father was a soldier. They do one thing, life or death." Peter's all, "They stay on mission." Wow, these two are making '60s-era Batman-esque leaps of deductive reasoning to determine that the killings weren't random and that Olivia is still in danger. And how nice for Olivia, too. She told Peter that she was in danger, but he has to hear a bizarre tale of shape-shifting killers from an alternate reality before he'll actually think about protecting her. They hustle off.
Meanwhile, the fake bald guy is outside the hospital, and figures now, in broad daylight, is a good time to bring out his facePod and just stand there glowering in the general direction of the building.
Then we see a nurse standing off in a loading dock, sipping a drink. She turns around and is startled to see the bald guy just standing there. "You scared me to death," she says. Not yet, he hasn't. He looks her up and down.
Jessup drives, on the phone, explaining that they've sent the guy's description to hospital security: "If he's there, we'll get him." You know, considering we're all accepting the fact that this guy's a shape-shifter, I'd feel a little bit better if she mentioned something about putting Olivia under armed protection, given that they don't know if the guy even FITS THAT DESCRIPTION anymore.
And there's the nurse, walking into Olivia's room. If this is the shape-shifter, this is probably after several minutes of the guy feeling himself (herself) up in his new body, like I would do. Wait, did I just say that out loud? "You're looking better," she says, and Olivia says she's starting to feel a little bit more like herself. "So how's your memory?" asks the nurse, all nonchalant. Olivia says it's all still just fragments; she remembers going to New York, and driving, but she can't remember anything past that. "It happens with head injuries. People can lose days before an accident. The best thing to do is just to keep trying, Olivia." Olivia says she was on her way somewhere to meet with someone, and she guesses someone just hit her car. She lets a "but..." hang in the air, and the nurse prompts her, despite Olivia saying it doesn't make any sense. "It's as if I went somewhere and talked to someone. And then came back to the accident." The nurse is getting progressively more interested in what Olivia has to say. She asks if she remembers who Olivia was going to meet with. "No. ... Almost. He told me something," she says. Olivia struggles to come up with "something's hidden," and the nurse, all keenly leaning over, is all, "Yes. Where?" Olivia can't remember and isn't at all freaked out by the nurse being a little too bent on getting the information out of her. And the nurse gives up. "That's really all you know, then, isn't it?" she says, almost sadly. Olivia says yes, and leans back, completely oblivious. And then the nurse jumps on
top of her and starts to choke her, Olivia struggling to hit her.That's just as Peter and Amy arrive, which is the same time as Charlie, who tells the two of them that there's surveillance of the suspect entering the lobby. Peter asks about Olivia's room. "The floor's locked up six ways from Sunday. The only person allowed in is the nurse," says Charlie. Well, that's a relief. Because there's no way the shape-shifter could look like the nurse at all.
Upstairs, the nurse is winning the fight with Olivia, and softly tells her not to fight it: "It's over." I reflexively yell, in my best Stallone, "Nothing is ovah!" Drives my wife nuts.
Jessup bursts into the room and fires a shot at the nurse, tagging her in the shoulder. The nurse seems completely unfazed, but heads for the window (gets shot again by Amy), and jumps out, landing easily on a ledge a few stories below before hopping to ground level. Amy, at the window, calls in the new description of the suspect, and that she's headed into the basement. While Amy runs back out of the room, Peter asks Olivia if she's OK. "Go get that bitch," says Olivia. Damn, Olivia -- I don't think Amy's after your job or anyth-- oh. She meant the nurse.
So anyway, there are the three of them -- Amy, Charlie and Peter -- wandering through the hospital basement corridors, and I'd just like to ask where all this so-called hospital security is, not to mention all the other agents that Jessup had dispatched, especially since Peter decides to go after this building-leaping, bullet-impervious shapeshifter COMPLETELY UNARMED, for god's sake. Maybe they cut a scene in which we find out that the shape-shifters are vulnerable to sarcastic one-liners, in which case Peter can more than take care of himself.
There's Charlie, searching a corridor. I think we all know where this is going, don't we? Why have a shape-shifter if it's not going to shift into the shape of someone already in the cast? They didn't bring Jessup in just to kill the new eye candy, and it's not like Peter's going to die, so... sorry, Charlie. At the end of the corridor is some sort of furnace, blazing away ominously. Charlie slowly makes his way down the hall, and doesn't see the nurse hiding in the pipes running along the ceiling. She slowly lowers herself to the ground behind him. When she drops to the ground, Charlie hears her, and turns and fires a couple of shots. We don't see what happens. But we already know the shape-shifter can take a couple of bullets.
Elsewhere, Charlie hears the gunshots, and then a couple more, and starts running. He bumps into Amy, and almost gets shot himself, and the two of them run until they find Charlie, standing over the top of the nurse, lying dead on the ground. Peter asks him if he's OK. Charlie, panting, says he's good. And then they all just stand around, looking at the nurse, no one thinking to check Charlie for three puncture wounds in his soft palate. Peter, crouched over the nurse, picks up her facePod.
So then Peter's visiting Olivia in the hospital, carrying a big bunch of weeds that he nicked from some overgrown abandoned lot somewhere. Olivia asks him who the nurse was. "Walter thinks that she was a shape-changing soldier from another universe. He thinks that might be where you went," he tells her. Then he wonders aloud at the fact that he can say it and neither one of them thinks he's crazy. Olivia says the nurse thought Olivia knew where something was hidden. "No matter what happened to you, and no matter where you went, Walter will figure it out," says Peter, and stunning turnaround from the first episode of the series in terms of the faith he has in his father.
Then Peter busts out the Greek phrase that Olivia yelled out when she woke up from her coma, although she doesn't remember saying it. He says his mother used to say that to him every night before he went to bed. Olivia laughs, and says, "There really isn't a point where things just can't get weirder, is there?" Not that you guys aren't going to try, right? She asks him what it means.
"It means 'be a better man than your father,'" Peter tells her, explaining that it was when Walter was already gone, and it was a code that meant "keep your people close. Take care of the people you care about." Olivia says that he's good at that. And Peter smiles and says it's good to see her again, and she responds in kind. But before the two of them can just start doing it right there in the hospital room, a nurse knocks on the door and says it's time to check Olivia's vitals. Peter was just about to take care of that, you know!
He gets up and tells her to get some rest, and heads out the door, and she stops him to ask if it's true that they're shutting Fringe down. "No," he says, and walks out the door.
So, yeah, Peter has a plan. And that involves stopping Broyles on the steps of the capitol building and presenting him with the facePod, so he can show it to the senators and tell them that Fringe can get them this tech so they can create an army that looks like anyone they want it to look like, but they are not shutting Fringe down. "From now on, we're calling the shots. We're done reacting. We're not going to be too late anymore," he says. "You surprise me, Mr. Bishop," says Broyles, instead of something like, "Yeah, kid. I got it covered. I've done this through three administrations, and have stuff in my briefcase here that would make you shit your pants if you knew what it was."
Elsewhere, Amy's working away, looking at pictures of the porcupine man from the plane, and appears to typing in Biblical references from the book of Revelation -- lines about the beast from Chapter 19.
Peter strolls into the darkened Fringe lab, and then the lights come on, and apparently Walter and Astrid have been waiting there in the dark for god knows how long to give him a surprise party, and since Olivia's in the hospital and Peter has no friends, they have to put a party hat on Gene, who moos at the indignity.
In the hospital, Olivia successfully loads her pistol, and puts a round in the chamber.
And in the basement -- not so much a reveal as a confirmation -- Charlie pushes a laundry cart up to the furnace doors, and pulls some bags off to reveal a naked, dead Charlie, whom NotCharlie throws into the furnace. I guess if your character is going to be killed off, you might as well have it done by a shape-shifter so you can continue to play the part. It's either that or frigging dream sequences.
Discuss this episode in our forums, then see vlogger Sean Crespo's possibly more twisted take on Fringe in No Prior Knowledge!