While a construction worker is sucked into a Pennsylvania field -- or actually, under it -- and attacked by a subterranean beastie, Olivia is trying to get back into the daily routine. She does this by going along on a multiple missing-persons case that Peter found on his own, of whom our Pennsylvania worker is only the most recent. After Walter concludes in the lab that a contact paralytic was used in the apparent abductions, Peter and Olivia head out to brace an ex-doctor named Hughes who visited the families of the disappeared. All that happens there is that Olivia's new super-hearing nearly makes her shoot Peter in the face (good thing she's still a lousy shot). The ex-doc turns out to have lost his wife in childbirth 17 years back, so it's no surprise when his supposedly stillborn son becomes a prime suspect, what with the child's coffin turning up empty and a tunnel leading down from the bottom of the grave. But it's not like Hughes is about to explain, having hung himself in custody. It's left to the Fringe team to figure out on their own that the late Mrs. Hughes had lupus, which is why Hughes had to alter the baby in utero with scorpion and mole rat DNA to help it survive its mom's overactive immune system. As you do. Olivia and Peter end up tangling with the horrid teenaged critter underground, to its detriment. Having been referred by Nina Sharp to a guy named Sam Weiss, Olivia finds him in a bowling alley, in what promises to become a beautiful guru-protégé friendship. And Peter and Walter are going to go fishing together. Meanwhile, Faux Charlie continues to cultivate Olivia's trust and promises to help her remember her recent adventures, while the Typewriter From Hell tells him to jog Olivia's memory. Somehow it's spookier coming from a typewriter.
Discuss this episode in our forums, then see vlogger Sean Crespo's possibly more twisted take on Fringe in No Prior Knowledge!
Oh, shit! We've somehow traveled into a parallel universe where I'm the recapper for Fringe! Despite my never having seen a single episode before now! And God only knows what Daniel is up to in this reality. Well, there's nothing we can do but make the best of it, and try to get through this together. Something tells me we'll all be safely back home by January.
We open on a rural field, where in the midst of some kind of vegetable, some enterprising farmer has succeeded in raising a bumper crop of giant white letters that read "Lansdale Pennsylvania." There's some construction happening to the road running alongside the edge of the field, but it appears to be wrapping up for the day. As a couple of workers get set to climb in a pickup to leave -- the pickup's radio muttering softly about six recent local disappearances in what I'm sure is a totally extraneous detail -- one of them returns to the field to pick up some stuff he forgot, despite his coworker fretting about missing an impending kickoff. The worker takes his time, though, pausing to regard the ominous scarecrow looming over the field. Well, at least it's supposed to look ominous, but the noisy crow perched on its shoulder seems pretty unintimidated. Probably because it flew right out of The Stand. In fact, the worker comes over all curious about what the crow could be trying to tell him. As the truck's radio, apropos of nothing, plays "Poor Little Fool" by Ricky Nelson, the worker ventures into the field to see what's what. There appears to be a small puddle of some blue fluid on the ground. A hand-shaped puddle, although it's hard to get a good look at it with all the leaves in the way. So as the signal bell at the nearby train crossing starts ringing, the worker squats down for a closer look. What an extraordinarily awful idea; it's bad enough to find oneself in a Fringe teaser in the first place without compounding your doom by ignoring an actual, literal alarm. Sure enough, the hand-shaped blob suddenly grabs the worker's hand and drags him bodily head-first right into the ground in less time than it takes to read this sentence. Even if you're a speed-reader. His coworker, who wouldn't have been able to see any of this through the thick crop, is left calling, "Raymond!" to an empty field, save for the impassive scarecrow and the Walkin' Dude on its shoulder. Neither of them seem to care that he's going to miss the kickoff after all.
After the titles, we're in New York City. Specifically, Olivia's soon-to-be-former hospital room. The cuts on her face are healing normally, looks like. She's dressed to leave, and a health care professional snips off her wristband. Olivia stretches her newly freed hand -- which shakes only briefly -- as Peter looks over at her with concern. Before handing Olivia her new cane, he jokes that he's checking it for a hidden ninja sword. One would expect him to know that samurai swords are much sharper. Olivia's just glad to be leaving the hospital. "I'm no good at sitting around," she says, already limping House-style to the door. "You're also no good at letting people help you," Peter remarks. That just gets him drafted into carrying her suitcase. He shakes his head, either in regret that he couldn't keep his mouth shut or in disgust that Olivia doesn't have a rolling suitcase like everyone else.
As he helps her to the FBI SUV, Peter seems aware that someone's watching them, although he doesn't actually see sweaty Fake-Charlie staking them out from inside a parked car. Stay low, Fake-Charlie -- it would certainly be awkward if someone spotted you. What would the real Charlie be doing here, anyway?
I assume we're now under Lansdale, Pennsylvania, despite those giant letters not having much of an apparent root system, because Raymond the construction worker comes to in an underground tunnel. He pops open his Zippo and discovers that his legs seem to be coated in that blue slime. They also appear useless, because he commences dragging himself painfully along the floor of the tunnel. Only to soon find it littered with the grisly remains of a dog and God knows what else. Suddenly, around a bend in the tunnel comes the silhouette of some creepy-ass stunted humanoid puppet. And it clearly does not want to be friends. It drags Raymond off down the tunnel despite his screams and struggles. Where's it taking him, somewhere more private than underground?
Back in Boston, Peter and Broyles are having a little expository stroll outside. Sounds like the FBI is coming through on Peter's whole shopping list, including new housing for the Bishops. Only the C-130 transport plane is hanging things up. Yeah, that's been my experience, too. I find that a DC-8 is easier to get one's hands on and works almost as well. Peter hands Broyles a case file he stumbled on while trolling the database for Olivia-like cases. It's Lansdale, Pennsylvania, of course, the town of six missing persons. Four of which apparently "disappeared into thin air." After asking how she is and getting an unconvincing "She'll be fine" as an answer, Broyles gives Peter the green light to look into it.
Olivia walks into the Harvard lab just in time; Walter and Astrid are doing a reenactment of Olivia's car accident, using a toy car on the table, a cluster of IV bags on a stand as a counterweight to rapidly pull the toy car forward, and a frog as the hapless passenger. As the car stops abruptly and the amphibian goes flying through a bullet-time array of Polaroid flashes into a waiting fishing net, Olivia is neither traumatized by reliving the incident nor offended at being compared to a frog. In fact, she looks kind of touched as Walter shuffles through the pictures and hands them to her, saying, "No matter what I try, I can't make the frog disappear." Yeah, I think it normally takes more than a car crash to trigger a dimensional breach. And even if he succeeded, what then? Wait for it to reappear and start croaking in Greek? After addressing some complaining from Astrid, Walter tells Olivia that she was missing for an hour before she came through the windshield. "He thinks you traveled to another universe," Astrid informs her, as though this is news. Walter starts explaining to Olivia about alternate universes, until he realizes from her patient smile that they've discussed this before. She could at least admit that having a semi-crazy guy who forgets what he's told people is handy for filling in new viewers. Instead, she says she went somewhere and met with someone, "But the rest is like a dream I just can't quite remember." Yeah, neither can we. Damned inconvenient for that meeting with William Bell to take place during the summer hiatus. Walter says she might recall eventually, and starts getting all verklempt about having thought she was dead. "I don't know what I would have done," he says. Well, he probably would have gotten his ass crammed back into St. Clare's, for starters. She's touched, but he can't leave a tender moment alone, lightening the mood by saying she appears to be fine now. "Appear to be?" she teases gently. Walter explains, "Traveling to an alternate reality has its consequences," but doesn't share what those might include. Instead, he gives her what I'm sure he intends to be a reassuring wink. Either that, or he's briefly closing one eye to make sure he's not seeing two of her. Suddenly Peter calls across the room to Olivia, "You feel up to going for a drive?" Well, it's five hours, according to Google Maps, so she'd better be.
Those "Lansdale Pennsylvania" letters are really suffering from their lack of roots right now, because they've drifted clear out of the field and are now positioned dangerously across the road in front of the Fringe team's approaching SUV. It pulls up to the busy crime scene that the field has now become, and Olivia and the Bishops hop out to greet Sheriff Golightly, played by H!ITG hall-of-famer Charles Martin Smith. He used to be in everything, but I haven't seen him in much since he admitted defeat in his long, futile struggle with male pattern baldness. Dude played a high-school kid with a combover in 1978, for God's sake. Anyway, the sheriff isn't happy to see the FBI, but he has to admit that the six missing persons cases he's reported have recently become seven. Noting Golightly's grumpiness (and perhaps some of the other attributes that even at a young age led him to be cast as a character named Terry the Toad), Walter observes, "We are all victims of our own gene pool. Someone must have peed in yours." That doesn't really convince Golightly to let them go tramping in around his crime scene until the locals are done collecting evidence.
Well, at least not without him, because one edit later, he has led them right up to that blue puddle beneath the scarecrow. "Have you seen something like this before?" Golightly asks a clearly excited Walter, handing over some of the blue spooge in a Ziploc bag. "Absolutely not," Walter says happily, and goes on about the auspicious air before scampering off with his prize. Instead of bothering to explain his father's odd behavior to the sheriff, Peter just nods up at the scarecrow and says, "I bet you he knows." The scarecrow's like, "Don't look at me, I'm just a particularly ominous red herring."
Back at the sheriff's office, Walter's busy transferring the goo from a syringe to a vial while Golightly is showing Olivia and Peter the sparse evidence he's collected to date. Olivia reaches for it, but Golightly wants to give her a hard time about jurisdiction before he hands it over. She starts to argue with him, but becomes distracted by a fly buzzing around the room. And not just the buzzing; when it lands on the desk, she can hear its little fly feet skittering on the wood, and its little fly hands rubbing together. It's kind of disgusting, actually. I'm half expecting it to turn to her and say, "Wow, you look like crap. And I'm not just saying that to flatter you." It doesn't, but this experience has her so out of it that Peter has to come to the rescue in dealing with the sheriff, noticing a big old fishing lure displayed on Golightly's windowsill and recognizing it by name: "Night of Desirable Objects," he says, which as far as I can tell isn't a real thing outside of the this show other than an album by Snakefinger. Picking it up for a closer look, Peter claims to own one just like it, and he and the sheriff geek out about night-fishing tackle as Golightly forgets his objections to the team now that he's got an obscure shared hobby with one of them. Once again, Peter is hopping over that line between polymath and dilettante. Meanwhile, Olivia silently wonders what the hell's up with herself. But thanks to Peter's people skills, the team ends up walking out with the evidence box. Olivia gets on the phone to Charlie to say she's sending him a victim sheet to go over.
And add to, possibly, because when she hangs up, she has no idea that on the other end of the line, Fake Charlie is being made to look extra-evil, with some loud and booming minor keys and a camera angle right out of the Adam West Batman. Just to remind us that this isn't real Charlie, but Evil Fake Charlie. It's such a shame that they killed off the real Charlie, but I suppose that when an actor who looked exactly like him showed up to play the shapeshifter version of him they just couldn't pass up the opportunity. Anyway, Fake Charlie stumbles into the typewriter store, looking pretty sick to his stomach and growling, "I need the back room. Now." The proprietor hurriedly gets out the keys, though when he can't seem to bring himself to put them in Fake Charlie's Fake Hand, Fake Charlie has to snatch them away. Then he heads back inside that creepy-ass empty room that looks like a cult temple, except for the electric typewriter on the table that tell us it's only Hell's Typing Pool. He sits down at the big electric Underworldod and types, "TARGET TRUSTS ME COMPLETELY. SHE STILL BELIEVES I'M HER PARTNER. AWAITING YOUR INSTRUCTIONS." Let's hope nobody switched typewriters on him, or he's going to be waiting a while. Unfortunately, the commercials start before he thinks to take a closer look at the manufacturer and say, "Oh, Brother."
Back at the Harvard lab, Peter and Olivia are going through Sheriff Golightly's piss-poor case files and learning "wildly helpful" facts relating to certain townspeople's liking for apple pie and flannel shirts. Bored, Peter goes to raid the lab's fridge for a soda. He encounters Walter, who is just now spilling some of the blue goo from the field in Lansdale on his unprotected fingers. Peter pleasantly asks him, "How's it going, Walter?" "I plan to urinate in 23 minutes," Walter reports. "Good to know," Peter says. Hey, he asked. Besides, as Walter informs him, it's relevant to Peter because Walter's going to need help with his fly. "It seems this substance from Pennsylvania is a paralytic," he says, happily holding up his newly useless extremity. And by "extremity" I mean "hand," of course. He might want to save his elation until he knows how long it takes for the stuff to wear off. And until he knows that, I would strongly advise him to wash that numb meathook thoroughly before he uses it to operate... um, himself. Peter's not too horrified by this line of discussion to conclude that this means the abductor used the goo to paralyze his or her (or, let's face it, its) victims, and asks Walter if it's traceable. Walter says it contains mutated human DNA. "Perhaps a whole new stage of human evolution," he marvels. "Wouldn't that be fantastic?" Actually, on this show, wouldn't that just be Thursday? Peter says he doesn't think "fantastic" when the thinks "mutant." "We're all mutants," Walter says, bending over his microscope. "What's more remarkable is how many of us appear to be normal." Peter just looks down indulgently at him, like, "'Us?' What do you mean 'us,' Cracker Barrel?"
Peter returns to Olivia, who has had some sort of breakthrough. Seems the guy with the flannel shirts, a fellow named Andre Hughes, was seen at the homes of two of the disappeared people when Sheriff Golightly went to interview their families shortly after they vanished. "What are you thinking?" Peter wonders. "I'm thinking you drive," she says, already on her feet. Under normal circumstances, one might expect Peter to object to another five-hour drive on such a tenuous lead, but I'm sure he's hoping to be in Framingham by the time Walter comes asking for help getting his thing out of his pants.
Back in Lansdale, another train is going by. Under Lansdale, a man in work boots tramps through the tunnels with an electric lantern, until he finds the body of Raymond the construction worker. "Aw, hell," a deep and quite human voice says, planting the point of a shovel in the tunnel floor. Do you really have to bury someone who's already underground? While we ponder this imponderable, the camera tilts up, all the way through the crust of the earth the surface, into which is planted a mailbox marked "HUGHES." A mailbox which the Fringemobile is just now rolling past on the long dirt driveway up to the house, which looks a lot like the one in the X-Files episode "Home." Which I'm sure is a total coincidence.
Peter and Olivia mount the steps to the front porch, and probably wonder to themselves if Mr. Hughes's nickname isn't "Digger," what with the shovels and the muddy footprints everywhere. Peter peers through the front curtains, Olivia knocks on the door, and a shovel point thuds against the bottom step. "Aw, hell," says a newly familiar voice, and its owner, played by a very scraggly and muddy John Savage, asks who they are. Olivia identifies herself and Peter, smiling unthreateningly as she asks to talk to Hughes. Kicking off his conspicuously filthy boots, Hughes invites them in, all helpful. As he ushers them through the front door, he goes on about what he claims is his nightmare existence of maintaining water wells. That must be why he's all dirty, which certainly rules out the possibility that he's been rooting around underground in a town where seven people have recently vanished. He's certainly spending a lot of time complaining about it, although it doesn't really get much more convincing the more he talks about it. As he goes to wash up, Olivia asks him, "Is there someone else in this house?" "No," Hughes lies simply before stepping out of view. "There's someone else in this house," Olivia quietly insists to Peter, and tells him to keep their host busy while she goes for a snoop.
A doctor has just wrapped up a follow-up exam of Olivia, and she's still changing out of exam gown (displaying a hell of a bruise farm on her back under her ever-present black bra) when Nina Sharp walks right in, saying she hasn't had a chance to visit since Olivia's "accident." Olivia says she's fine, but Nina warns that the physical part is the easiest. Without giving away how much she knows about what Olivia's been through, Nina reminisces about her own cancer diagnosis and her sense of betrayal. "The realization that my own body was fundamentally foreign to me. That it was a threat." Writing something on a pad, she warns Olivia not to overlook her latest ordeal of many. The note is the contact info for "Sam Weiss, the man who helped put me back together," Nina says, handing Olivia the slip of paper. Olivia starts to demur about needing a psychologist, but Nina says, "He's not a psychologist. When you're ready, I believe he can help you." Hey, does this mean Olivia's going to get a robot arm?
At the Hughes residence, Agent Jessup is among the agents and uniformed officers searching the place. Well, actually, they're searching; she's just wandering around like she's thinking about buying the place. At least until she spots a cabinet door marked with a big green cross. She opens it and discovers a small, self-contained shrine inside, complete with a Bible. It opens right to a yellowed newspaper clipping from September 18, 1992: "Eveline Hughes and baby die in childbirth, cause unknown," reads the headline. Behind the clipping is a note: "Andre - Don't blame yourself. It was God's will. Your wife and child are with him. -- Pastor Lisburn." DUN DUN -- wait, what?
From there, we leap -- in more ways than one -- to the Harvard lab, where Peter hangs up the phone and reports that Olivia just told him that according to Agent Jessup, Hughes may have killed his wife and child. Yeah, I said we were making a leap. Agent Jessup is sure making things happen in this case despite not having any lines. "Finally, some good news!" Walter crows. Off Astrid and Peter's confused looks, he says, "I assume we can dig them up?" He carps about not having been able to examine any bodies despite seven missing persons. Well, that's because they're missing, Mr. 196 IQ. Astrid heads out to get an exhumation order. Maybe she should get one for herself while she's at it, considering how seldom she seems to get out of this basement.
And from there we go to the graves of Eveline Hughes and "Baby Boy Hughes," who according to their respective tombstones died in November 1991, ten months before the date on that press clipping Agent Jessup found. Way to put the "news" in "newspaper," Lansdale's primary print media organ. The coffins are being noisily craned to the surface, in what is apparently the middle of the night. Meanwhile, Andre Hughes is alone in that holding room back in Boston, and nobody appears to have noticed that he's taken down one of the wire frames that suspend the fluorescent light fixture, which is now flickering and swinging from one end and generally making the tiny room look haunted by a poltergeist. What's Hughes doing with the wire? Eating it, apparently. Who knows how long it's been since anyone brought him any food? "Hughes is hiding something, we're going to find out what it is," Peter boasts to Sherriff Golightly. Hughes continues getting some iron in his diet, now grunting and bleeding from his gums. Mrs. Hughes's coffin is opened, and she looks about like you'd expect a woman who's been dead almost two decades to look, only sadder. Hughes is now twisting his wire into a loop. Maybe he's just flossing? Baby Boy's coffin is opened. Try to look surprised when I tell you that it's empty. "There's no body," Sheriff Golightly murmurs no astonishment, displaying exactly the kind of investigatory acumen that make his case files such a scintillating read. Looking at the hole chewed through the bottom of the box, he adds, "Looks like something dug its way in." "Or dug its way out," Olivia corrects. Indeed, when they go back to look inside the now-empty grave, there's a narrow but clear tunnel leading straight down into the earth. And to think the kid never even got a name. Well, I'm giving him one right now: I'm calling him Billy, which is short for, what else, William S. Burrows. "I think we have some questions for Mr. Hughes," Olivia says. Mr. Hughes, however, is still hanging in his supernaturally-lit holding room. Literally.
At the Federal Building in Boston the morning, Olivia stumps off the elevator with another agent, who leads her down the hall to Hughes's holding room. Apparently nobody has bothered to check on him overnight or even all morning, because he's still hanging by the neck from the wire sculpture he made for himself. Well, at least the Hughes family plot at the cemetery is all nice and fresh for him now.
Over at Harvard, Walter has been busy poking at the mortal remains of Eveline Hughes, and has discovered that she had a very advanced case of lupus. Peter is surprised, because it's never lupus. Walter says it doesn't really mean anything to their case, other than that Eveline wouldn't have been able to have children. Well except for the fact, as Astrid reminds him, that she did. Walter insists that's impossible; since lupus supercharges the immune system, "Her own body would have destroyed the fetus." Well, apparently not, as Peter says, what with the son having survived long enough to not only exit the womb but eventually his coffin. "Brave little boy," Walter muses, probably wishing his own son could have been a little more self-sufficient back in the day.
Sheriff Golightly is looping crime scene tape around Hughes's yard. Unfortunately, his lack of imagination may well prove fatal, as he's going about this by hammering wooden stakes into the yard. Now, say you're a sheriff in a Philadelphia exurb, and you've recently seen with your own eyes evidence that suggests recent disappearances are connected to some unknown creature that lives underground. Are you going to spend a morning hitting that ground really hard? Or is that something you might delegate to a deputy? Yes, I thought so. Golightly fails even to notice that mounds of grass are spontaneously rising from the ground behind him.
Meanwhile, back in Boston (specifically the parking ramp under the Federal Building), Olivia asks how Hughes could have gotten away with his rather time-consuming suicide plan, never mind being left hanging there until rigor mortis set in. "We're looking into it," Broyles non-answers (we will actually never find out), and adds that Hughes' body is on its way to the Harvard lab right now. Suddenly Olivia overhears a guy on a cell phone, and gets all intent about eavesdropping. Which would be pretty rude, if the guy weren't way on the other end of the parking garage and completely oblivious to Olivia's existence, let alone the fact that she can hear his every banal word. "Agent Dunham?" Broyles asks. Instead of answering, Olivia flashes back to the fly in Sherriff Golightly's office, and the heartbeat in Hughes's home lab. Broyles repeats her name. Ironically, that she doesn't hear.
In the lab, Walter comes rushing over to Peter with news of an exciting discovery he's made: Mrs. Hughes did give birth. "I'm glad we got that settled," Peter snarks without looking up. But wait, there's more! The placenta was still inside the corpse (which seems like some sloppy-ass undertaking to me), and Walter was able to run some tissue analysis on it. Looking at the printout, Peter can somehow tell at a glance that the baby wasn't entirely human. Although, to be fair, I think he had kind of a head start on that one. Walter confirms that Hughes was researching reproductive biology and gene replacement. So it looks like he used scorpion DNA ("an incredibly resilient creature," Walter reminds us) and maybe also that of some kind of underground varmint like a mole rat. Peter admits that since scorpions paralyze their prey, it might explain the blue liquid. It would also explain Billy's tendency to rock his victims like a hurricane. Astrid comes in and Peter updates her on the news that Hughes altered his baby's DNA inside the womb to help him survive the lupus. Astrid says that's sick, but Walter says it's brilliant. "He's created a superbaby! One capable of surviving in the most inhospitable environment." And with early 1990s technology, no less. Still, other than its survival skills, it doesn't seem all that super to me. And not to give anything away, but it'll soon prove lacking in even that department Just then Olivia walks in, having heard the whole thing (from the quad, most likely). And she thinks she knows where Billy is: in or near the house. "Or under it," Peter says. You think?
His work finished, Sheriff Golightly stows the roll of crime scene tape in the back of his squad car. He's just walking around to the front to get in when he notices the blue puddle that has appeared on the yard. Sheriff Golightly, who has personally handled some of this stuff at the scene of at least one disappearance, stares at it curiously. And also at the crack in the dead lawn that's slowly spreading towards him. As opposed to what any normal person would do in these circumstances, which would be to hop on the hood of his car. And then suddenly that crack is stretching out toward him not so slowly, and a moment later he vanishes into the earth with a scream and a plume of dust. The crow on Hughes's scarecrow caws. I think it's saying, "Didn't you ever see Tremors, you moron?"
The Fringemobile rolls up to the Hughes house, parking behind Golightly's abandoned squad car. Peter and Olivia climb out and walk into the house, calling out for the sheriff on the not-entirely-reasonable assumption that he's going about some official police business inside and not currently rehearsing his acceptance speech for the Darwin Awards. No answer, of course. Peter notices a dark smear on the wall that apparently none of the two searches turned up, and after getting some on his hands, he wipes it on the wallpaper. In so doing, he notices that the wall behind it isn't solid. He unwraps it like a present and finds a closed door behind it, which he kicks clear off its hinges. Sure, don't even try the knob, tough guy. He finds himself inside a nursery that was never used. Maybe because it isn't decorated in a Dig Dug motif. Oh, and fantastic job, Agent Jessup and search teams, managing to miss an entire ROOM.
Meanwhile, Olivia has discovered the cellar door. She calls Peter down for backup. He tries the light bulb chain hanging from the ceiling, but if that had worked, Olivia would have to put away her dramatic flashlight and we all know that's not about to happen. Although I do appreciate the fact that unlike their spiritual predecessors Mulder and Scully, these two are willing to at least try to turn on the light. Peter finds a tooth in the dirt floor and shows it to Olivia. "I think it's a canine tooth," Olivia says. Looks more like a molar to me. Following a trail of bone fragments to a missing brick in the foundation wall, they seem to have discovered a narrow opening. And again, was the warrant on the house confined to the living room or something? Peter removes a few other bricks and makes a grisly discovery: "Confirmed: dog," he says ruefully, dropping a mummified pooch skull on the ground. At least that explains what Billy was living on before Lansdalers started subsiding into the ground. As for what he's doing now, there's a long tunnel POV of the two of them trying to peer into its depths and widen the entrance, so it's clearly not empty. Olivia's flashlight beam picks out a dog skeleton in its depths. There's also the much fresher corpse of Sheriff Golightly, whose night-fishing days are clearly over, at least until tiny little bits of him start making their way into people's bait. Without moving away from the tunnel, Olivia turns and calls Peter's name. He looks over just in time to see a big scary head approaching her from the shadows, but not in time to warn her before it sinks its teeth into her shoulder and drags her off down the tunnel. Great, more wounds she's going to have to heal from. Peter dives in after her, having had the presence of mind to grab the flashlight on his way in. He catches up with them, and gets bit himself as Billy -- an animated, vaguely humanoid dirt sculpture -- turns his attention to the less gimpy target. While Peter's grappling with the creature, Olivia grabs a handy sharpened rib bone off a nearby skeleton and hands it to Peter, who simply holds it in position while Billy tries to jump on Peter and impales himself instead. Being well-nigh indestructible, even that doesn't kill it; it just makes it want to retreat, which it starts doing by beginning to tunnel away. Why Billy thinks that's a faster escape route than the existing tunnel he's already in is not at all clear. And anyway, all he succeeds in doing is undermining the driveway, causing the parked police car to drop through the ground and cut Billy in half with its front bumper. Sheriff Golightly's revenge!
Later, the yard is swarming with deputies, fishing bear traps and shit out of the ground. Looks like Hughes was trying to catch Billy all along. We catch up with Olivia, back in Boston and riding along in the car with Fake Charlie at night, and telling him as much. "Could you imagine living with a burden like that?" she asks him. "When all you wanted was a son?" He doesn't answer, but I'd just like to point out that my wife and I adopted, and we have a beautiful boy who sleeps in an IKEA bunk bed rather than a gene-spliced nightmare who lives underground and won't quit eating the neighbors. I'm just saying. The beastie-of-the-week thus dispensed with, Olivia returns to the general arc: "Charlie, what if I don't want to remember?" she asks him. "All of it. Where I went, who I met with, what he told me? What if there's a part of my brain that's trying to protect me?" Speaking like her friend, Fake Charlie doesn't think she has a choice. "If Walter was correct about you going to that other universe, whatever secrets you learned might be worth remembering." Olivia laughs at him for saying that with a straight face. "Whatever it is, we'll deal with it together," Fake Charlie offers. "I'll help you remember." Olivia looks content with that for now. But that's only because she doesn't know how he's going to help her remember.
"Are you going fishing, son?" Walter asks Peter at the lab. Well, since Peter is carrying a couple of rods and a tackle box, that's kind of a "here's your sign" question, isn't it? But instead of a wise-ass comment that for once would be fully justified, Peter answers with a story: "Once upon a time, there was a young man, probably around ten or eleven, who got it in his head that he wanted to take his father fishing. So he saved up all the money from his paper route, and bought a very special lure." He holds it up, the twin of the one from Sheriff Golightly's office. Hey, given what happened to the sheriff, maybe now each of the Bishops could have one of his own. Walter takes the lure and examines it wonderingly, as Astrid looks up from her work to take in what's about to be a Kodak moment (as opposed to a Polaroid moment, which tends to feature flying frogs). "Sadly," Peter continues, "his father was never really all that available to him, so what started out as a would-be bonding experience ended up with a young man fishing alone in a boat." Walter figures out what the story has to do with the situation at hand: "And this young man gave this to you?" Peter chuckles and looks over at Astrid, who returns to her work, and indulgently says, "Yes, Walter." Walter asks Peter, "Can I come? With you and your friend?" Peter says, "You know what, Walter?" I think that would make the trip." Walter smiles happily and hands back the lure. And now Peter will have to spend the entire fishing trip listening to Walter speculate on how Peter's "friend" disappeared into another universe. But I guess this is Peter's way of saying, "Even though you weren't there for me, thanks for not turning me into an unholy abomination of man and beast unfit for existence in the light of day." Because they don't make greeting cards for that.
Olivia soaks in her tub at home, and I'm kind of surprised she can even do that without electrodes any more. But suddenly she starts hearing these loud, wet noises and her eyes fly open. It's just the bubbles in her bath popping, one by one, and she can hear each one of them. Before the FCC can get too alarmed over the impending bubble bath malfunction, her auditory attention turns to her neighbors arguing through the walls, and another fly, and traffic outside, and crying babies, and every noise within a mile, and then suddenly it stops. Her hearing is back to normal. Was that so bad?
Apparently so, because later, she's not only dried and dressed, but out and about. In a parking lot, she double-checks the address Nina Sharp gave her. Yep, this is the place, even if it is a bowling alley. Inside, the place is all but abandoned and an old Traffic song is playing (I originally thought it was Blind Faith, which would have been an appropriate selection for a scene in a place Olivia went to just because Nina Sharp said to). A lone bowler with a gray ponytail is sending ball after ball down the lane. Behind Olivia, the guy with the graying goatee at the shoe counter says they close in fifteen minutes. Olivia asks him if Sam Weiss is there, and the shoe guy says he's gone. "Atlanta, Georgia. He met a girl. Moved away." Disappointed, Olivia makes to leave, but the shoe guy asks if she's giving up that easily. "You're Sam," Olivia realizes. Can't fool the FBI. "Nina Sharp said you'd be coming by," Sam confirms as she sits down. "Have the headaches started yet?" She says no. "They will," he warns with grim certainty. Yeah, this guy's a real ray of sunshine. Thanks a fuckload, Nina. But at least he sets her up with a pair of size-eight bowling shoes, so the evening isn't a total loss. Unless of course she's a size nine and a half, in which case when the headaches come she'll be even on both ends.
Charlie's back at his trans-dimensional typewriter. "TARGET VISITED OTHER SIDE BUT REMEMBERS NO DETAILS. PLEASE ADVISE." He sits back and waits, and soon the typewriter in the mirror taps out a response. "UNACCEPTABLE. IF SHE CAN'T REMEMBER ON HER OWN THEN DO SOMETHING TO HELP." Charlie looks up from this wildly helpful advice, thinking, Where's that goddamn Microsoft paper clip when you need him?"
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M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, follow him on Twitter, or just e-mail him at M.Giant[at]gmail.com.