A teenage girl is declared dead and then wakes up screaming numbers when they take her organs. Seems like it is zombie time on Fringe, which I'm guessing means we don't get any good Observer or other side stuff, or more about Walter's missing brain pieces in this episode. Turns out zombie girl Lisa's has top-secret military codes in her head, and starts speaking Russian when told that there is a missing soldier who would know these codes. It seems that the formerly brain-dead girl somehow absorbed soldier Rusk's brain and made a psychic bond between them. They think he's somehow using her to communicate with the world. Meanwhile, her mom thinks that God is responsible for Lisa's sudden reanimation and doesn't want our Fringe friends poking around in her daughter's brain. Lisa, of course, decides to act like a teenager and runs off to a junkyard in order to see Rusk, where she sees someone else who killed Rusk. And all of a sudden Charlie is there. And not dead Charlie? Wait, what the hell is going on here? Turns out that this is a leftover episode. That's annoying. Stupid Fox, this is what DVDs are for. Not to play it on a different night, confuse everyone and then have characters alive again. That's just bizarre. They should have at least billed this as a bonus episode or something. New seems very misleading.
Anyway, in this random stupid standalone episode, that has an annoying girl who isn't a zombie but is somehow possessed, as soon as they find the dead guy, Lisa freaks out and has a seizure. Walter figures out that when Rusk died, his energy helped bring brain-dead Lisa back to life, and transferred his memories into Lisa's head. The priest and the mother are not impressed, and Walter gets all snippy, which is awesome. Finally, desperate mom agrees to send her daughter to Walter for an exorcism. Walter puts a lot of electrodes on her head, then teenage girl starts talking like Rusk and telling them how he died. And now Charlie is back, real Charlie, which is like seeing a zombie, too, and he's identified the murderer. They go to a gym, chase down Rusk's killer. Run, Charlie, run! And tackle.
Back at the lab, Lisa is awake as herself, but is still being controlled by Rusk or something needlessly confusing. And she runs off. During the interview with the killer, they find out that he was a bastard to his wife and the wife had him killed. Guess where Rusk-powered Lisa is? Yup, trying to kill the wife by setting her on fire with gasoline. Peter gets there and tries to rationalize with Lisa, but that doesn't go well, and Charlie tranqs her. And somehow this makes teen girl free from her inner angry wife-beating demon. Then there's some guy in a car accident in Times Square who is dead, then alive and speaking Russian, so we're to guess that Rusk isn't really all dead or whatever, but since this episode has never played a part in this season, does it matter? -- Angel Cohn
Shout-out to M. Giant for doing a M. Arvellous job of covering for me while I moved to the East Coast.
I guess there's not much point in showing "Previously on Fringe" scenes this time out, given that this is an orphan episode from last season. Some explanation, however, might have been appreciated, for anyone who might understandably be wondering why Charlie appears to be alive. Why bother showing this at all? Isn't this the kind of thing that gets dumped on a DVD? These are not the actions of a network that gives a crap about a show.
Anyway, we start in a hospital, where a tearful woman prays, rosary in hand, while a priest administers the last rites to a young woman, eyes closed, hooked up to various apparati. A doctor leans in and asks the crying woman if she's ready. The woman nods, and the doctor nods at an orderly, who turns off the life-support system. The young woman flat-lines in just a few seconds, and the doctor calls the time of death at 5:21 a.m., which at least means everybody should be able to get home in time to catch Good Morning America.
Scratch that! There's no time to waste, because they have a team assembled and waiting, says the doctor: "Ms. Donovan, I'm afraid we need to begin the procedures right away," and is it too much to hope that the procedure involves some sort of bionic something? No, probably just an organ donation. Ms. Donovan leans in, kisses the girl and says, "I love you."
Ewww! Gratuitous surgery shots! The surgeon tells the team that he's going to "begin with the kidneys" and jams his hand into the incision in the girl's torso -- at which points she sits up a little and grabs the doctor by the throat. "Oh my god, she's alive!" yells one of the nurses, who fortunately minored in Explaining Things You Observe at her nursing school. The girl starts yelling "Six-eight-three-three-nine-alpha-echo-three-five-eight!" At that very moment, an obese dude in California is using those numbers to win the lottery.
After the credits, we learn we're at Boston General Hospital, and Broyles is filling in the Fringe team on the weird case of Lisa Donovan, a high school junior who collapsed during gym class last week and slipped into a coma with a cerebral aneurysm. On the plus side, if your classmate collapses in gym class and goes into a coma, you automatically get straight A's, so that's something.
Broyles says Lisa's mother made the decision to take her off life support. "And then she woke up from the dead screaming random numbers," finishes Olivia, like let Broyles finish briefing you before you jump to conclusions already, and Broyles says the numbers weren't random (he introduces a Navy officer standing in the hallway in uniform as Lt.-Cmdr. Turlough) but were an alphanumeric code. The lead surgeon recognized the pattern as identification for sailors in the U.S. because he did two tours on an aircraft carrier. Well, of course he did. "That's when I got the call," says Turlough, all eager to jump in. He explains that the first half of the sequence is ID information for a petty officer named Andrew Rusk -- Turlough has a file and everything -- and the second half are launch codes for ICBM missiles on a nuclear submarine Rusk was stationed on, the U.S.S. Gloucester. Olivia asks how classified launch codes got into the hands of a 17-year-old girl, and Peter at least wants to dismiss the obvious right off by asking if there's some sort of relationship between Rusk and Lisa. "As far as we can tell, there's never been any contact between Lisa Donovan and Andrew Rusk," says Turlough. "I suppose that's where we come in," says Walter.
So the team goes in to interview this poor girl who is doing remarkably well for a recently comatose teen who probably still has the surgeon's fingerprints on her left kidney. She looks at a picture of Rusk and says she's never seen him before, and she doesn't know where the numbers came from (she doesn't even remember saying them).
And then Peter is practically flirting with Lisa, saying at least they got her some nice balloons, like, she's SEVENTEEN, Peter, for god's sake, and she jokes that they couldn't find ones that said, "Welcome back from the dead," and then Peter jokes about those being a special order, and thank God Olivia interrupts, because I think this inane chatter could have gone on forever, and asks if the name "Andrew Rusk" rings a bell. "Maya zvezdochka. Shto samnoy," says Lisa, freaking out her mother. "She's speaking Russian," says Peter. "But she doesn't speak Russian," says Lisa's worried mother. Then Lisa snaps out of it, and asks her mom what's happening to her, and Ms. Donovan boots the Fringe crew out of the hospital room so Lisa can rest.
In the hallway, Turlough explains that Rusk is fluent in Russian: "He would have learned it during his training." Peter asks him if "little star" means anything, because that's what "maya zvezdochka" means, and in response to a question no one asked, Peter explains that he dated a Russian girl for a while, and if I were Peter I don't know that I'd be explaining that I know the Russian word for "little" because I dated a Russian girl for a while, and then Olivia wonders where Walter has wandered off to. "Where's Walter?" she asks, which turns out to be one of the least fun children's books ever. Oh, there he is, watching an old woman sleeping in the extended-care ward.
Peter finds him, and starts to chew him out, and his dad shushes him because he's trying to listen to the sleeping woman. "These people are in comas. They can't hear you," snaps Peter.
Walter apologizes to Coma Lady on behalf of his son, and Peter asks if Walter honestly thinks he's communicating with her. "No one truly understands the nature of human consciousness, Peter," says Walter. "I've read documented cases of coma patients waking up and claiming that they had moved, spirit-like, to remote locations and witnessed events they couldn't possible have knowledge of." Which is already Walter's working theory of what happened to Lisa Donovan, naturally. Peter mocks it rather rudely, and I hope that Peter's going to shed some of his skepticism before too long, because that got old in The X-Files, where it's like Season 6 and with all Scully had seen by that point she was still constantly going, "That's ridiculous!" to Mulder's theories. Of course, I have to remember that this episode was supposed to have aired a long time ago already.
Meanwhile, Olivia is hanging out at the nurse's station when Lisa's mom wanders over, and says Lisa's running a fever and the doctors want to run some more tests. She's carrying a little bit of guilt, too, having fought with Lisa the day she collapsed, over Lisa not being allowed to take the family car to school. And then she collapsed and by the time Ms. Donovan got to the hospital, Lisa was in a coma. Well, look at the bright side: if it had happened while she was driving, you might have lost your daughter and your car.
Gripping the crucifix around her neck, she says, "You know, I never thought that I would get a chance to tell her how much I loved her again. God gave her back to me." There really is no such thing as a casual mention of faith on television shows, is there? By this point it's clear that faith vs. science is going to be a subplot on this episode, which has been done to frigging death, hasn't it (albeit not on this show)? Or maybe it's just because only a few days ago I happened to watch The X-Files: I Want to Believe, which, apart from being a complete snoozefest, featured exactly this kind of conflict.
Anyway, Olivia asks Ms. Donovan if Walter Bishop can examine Lisa. "What for?" asks Ms. Donovan. What for? Your comatose and then clinically dead daughter woke up on the operating table and now knows launch codes for nuclear submarines and speaks Russian. What for? "There's nothing more that she can tell you," says Ms. Donovan.
And then there's Lisa, hobbling into a unisex bathroom, and here's a thought: maybe DON'T let the girl who knows the nuclear launch codes out of your sight, NAVY, and when she washes her face she looks in the mirr
or and sees Andrew Rusk over her shoulder, staring creepily and whispering "maya zvezdochka." She screams.And somehow Lisa's mom is the first one in a hospital to get to the SCREAMING PATIENT, like what kind of joke clown hospital did they put this poor girl in, and Lisa is clutching one of the handicapped rails, repeating over and over that Andrew Rusk, the man in the picture was here.
And speaking of hallucinations, there's Charlie walking through the situation room at the Boston Federal Building with Olivia, who's explaining that they've searched the hospitals for Rusk and haven't turned anything up. "And Maureen Donovan won't let us near her daughter. She said that our disruptive presence is what caused Lisa to hallucinate, seeing Rusk's image in the mirror." Ghost Charlie points out that that doesn't exactly explain Lisa speaking Russian or knowing ICBM launch codes, but they're interrupted by a woman identifying herself as Teresa Rusk, played by Annie Parisse, also known as ADA Alexandra Borgia of Law & Order a few years back.
In an interview room, Teresa looks at a picture of Lisa and says she doesn't know who she is. "You think she had something to do with my husband's disappearance?" Olivia says they're not sure, but Lisa had information that only her husband would know (except for a bunch of other people on the Gloucester, I would like to point out). She asks if the words "maya zvezda" mean anything to her. "'My star.' It's a pet name Andy calls me," says Teresa.
Later, at Walter's freaky Harvard Lab of Knowledge That Should Not Exist, Walter is telling the gang that Lisa's aneurysm occurred in her left frontal lobe, specifically her Broca's area, which teacher's pet Astrid points out is the part of the brain that processes language (Astrid being the linguistics expert, through book-learnin', as opposed to Peter shagging his way through the United Nations). "Precisely. But it also has the capacity for something far more intriguing," says Walter, and he's awesomely set up the reel-to-reel projector to show an old film in which a much younger Dr. Bishop introduces us to an oddly flat-headed young man named test subject No. 6. Peter asks what happened to subjects one through five. Walter amusingly says he thinks the university settled with them out of court: "They probably never had to work again. Not that they could." And here's hoping that Peter's done with the Mystery Science Theatre shorts commentary.
While the film runs, present-day Walter explains that he was asked to design an experiment to test whether cranial manipulation could increase a person's psychic possibility, and his tests proved that manipulation of Broca's area had the most dramatic effect on a person's ability to create psychic bonds. "So you think Lisa Donovan's aneurysm made her psychic," says Peter, who also wants to know why, even if that's true, Lisa would be channelling Rusk: "What's so special about him?" Walter has no idea. Olivia wonders if Walter would be able to prove if Lisa's psychic. He says he'd have to examine her, but he's not allowed to. Astrid makes an excellent point: "After watching Walter's scariest home videos, who can blame her?"
We move on to St. Brigid's Church, where the sign board announcing mass times also displays Psalm 34:4 "I sought the Lord, and he answered me." Olivia stares at it for a moment until the bell rings and the churchgoers start streaming down the steps to the street. Olivia strolls over to Ms. Donovan, helping her daughter walk gingerly down the steps. Olivia asks Lisa how she's doing, and Lisa says "really tired, but good" and Ms. Donovan is much less friendly as she asks Olivia what she's doing here.
Olivia starts to tell them about the possibility of Andrew Rusk trying to communicate through Lisa: "We're not sure how or why, but it seems that there's a connection that's been developed between him and your daughter." Ms. Donovan isn't having any of it, and asks Lisa to give her and Olivia a moment alone and Lisa is spirited away by a priest who wants to introduce her to somebody.
Right off, Ms. Donovan says, "Are you a religious woman, Agent Dunham?" Olivia says she isn't. "Then I imagine you sit in judgment of those of us who rely on our faith to guide our decisions about what's best for our loved ones." Whoa! A little defensive, are we? Instead of saying, "No, I know how religious people hate to judge others," Olivia says she knows what faith can mean to a person, but she also believes what happened to Lisa is real, and she's worried about Rusk being a national security risk, but Ms. Donovan won't let her finish, and takes a step forward, all up in Olivia's business. "Whatever happened, Agent Dunham, it's over now. And I believe what's best for Lisa is that she put all of this behind her." Olivia smiles tightly, gives Ms. Donovan her card and asks her to call if anything else comes up, WHICH IT WON'T.
Walking away with her mother, Lisa smiles over her shoulder at Olivia, and she gets a sympathetic look from the priest as well, but he's more or less required to be friendly to everybody.
Back at Harvard, Olivia and Peter are drinking beer and looking through books and shooting the shit about religion and spirituality with Peter flipping through The Tibetan Book of the Dead, reading about how the "near-death experiencer can often converse with those who have already died," and he declares the book a "hell of a coaster" and plunks his beer down on it. He tells Olivia that he doesn't think Lisa's alive simply because God changed his mind, and Olivia looks up, waiting for lightning to strike Peter, but it doesn't, because I believe that's an upcoming storyline.
However, he's reserving judgment because he's not one to say. "However, until I see it with my own eyes, I'm gonna put my money on healthy scepticism," he says. Olivia says nothing, which Peter takes to mean that she's a believer. Olivia tells him that her mother believed in God, but all the praying in the world didn't stop her stepfather from terrorizing her. "And her faith just seemed to put her in harm's way. I'm worried that Lisa's mother is going to do the same thing," she says.
Olivia's phone rings, and she appears to have to push a dozen buttons just to answer the thing. It's an agitated Lisa Donovan crying that she's seeing Andrew Rusk. Olivia, all Andy Samberg as Mark Wahlberg is all, "Where's your mother?" as Lisa says her mom's at home, but she herself isn't: "I had to come here. I keep seeing this place."
"This place" turns out to be a junkyard, and Peter and Olivia sweep their flashlights around the stacks of cars, calling Lisa's name. Eventually, they find her, cowering and shuddering. "He was here," she says, talking about Andrew Rusk, and she says there was another man with a gun. She collapses to the ground and starts crying that this other guy shot and killed Andrew Rusk. Olivia asks if she knows the other guy or saw his face. She didn't but she's sure they were here.
Peter has already found a nine-millimetre shell casing in the dirt.
A short while later, the junkyard's awash in red and blue police lights, and Peter's wrapping a blanket around Lisa, telling her it's not the most stylish but it will keep her warm, and hopefully relatively hepatitis-free.
Olivia says she just talked to Lisa's mom, who's on her way. "Is she mad?" asks Lisa, and Olivia says no, that she's just glad Lisa is all right, and I think Olivia's assuming Lisa didn't mean, "Is she crazy?"
And then there's Charlie skulking around the cars, and he says, "Hey, Liv?" and he wants her to come see something, and Lisa wants to come too but Peter intuitively thinks that would be a bad idea and suggests she get in the car.
Charlie leads Olivia over to a car with a couple of forensic techs, who pop the trunk to reveal a dead body inside. Which means that they found the body, started checking it out, but then decided to close the trunk so they could dramatically pop it back open for Olivia. I love when TV shows do that. Anyway, it's Andrew Rusk, very dead.
p>And right then Peter yells for Olivia as Lisa starts screaming. Olivia runs back to find Lisa in the throes of a seizure. Peter claims not to know what happened, but I think she's having some kind of reaction to his stank-ass blanket.
After the commercial break, Olivia tells Peter and Walter that the medical examiner confirmed Rusk was killed by a bullet wound to the head, and it wasn't a suicide. "So everything Lisa told us pans out," says Peter. Except for one thing, says Olivia: judging from the rigor mortis, Rusk has been dead for three days. "Well, then, how would he have been communicating with Lisa Donovan?" asks Peter. Yeah, that's right, because then THAT would be weird. Walter asks if the medical examiner was specific about the time of death, and Olivia says it was between five and seven a.m., which Walter calls "interesting."
Meanwhile, the doctor is telling Ms. Donovan, who's there with the priest from St. Brigid's that Lisa suffered a "fairly substantial" seizure but is responsive and stable now, and she's lucky that there's not likely to be any permanent damage. Ms. Donovan asks if it was because of the aneurysm, but the doctor says there's no connection between the two.
"I don't understand. You said she was fine, but she keeps getting sicker," she tells the doctor. Would you feel better if the doctor started talking about faith instead of facts, Ms. Donovan? The doctor says they're going to run some tests, but the cause of seizures is often unknowable. "You mean, this could happen again?" asks Ms. Donovan, but the doctor doesn't know.
Walter interrupts to ask Ms. Donovan what time her "resurrection" took place, and the priest is all "her... resurrection?" like maybe he thinks of himself as Jesus's copyright lawyer or something, and Ms. Donovan tells Walter that it was just after five in the morning, which turns out to be exactly as Walter suspected. He outlines his theory to Olivia -- who looks kind of uncomfortable to be talking about it in front of Ms. Donovan and the priest. Anyway, Walter thinks Rusk's murder and Lisa's rebirth happened simultaneously, and that it was Rusk's energy that "jumpstarted" Lisa's body and brought her back to life.
"That's absurd," says the priest, who, Sunday, will perform a ritual in which he believes he will transform wafers and wine into the body and blood -- not symbolically, mind you, but literally -- of a man who died two-thousand years ago who he further believes was the human form of the son of an all-powerful being who made the earth in six days.
Walter doesn't say any of that, but acknowledges it does sound kind of out there and asks for a moment to indulge his fantasies, because "they often lead to a truth." He thinks Rusk's energy brought some of his memories with it, and those memories are fighting to get out.
"Are you suggesting that Lisa is possessed?" says an incredulous priest. Walter wasn't, but he is now, and he's getting a little more testy with the priest: "Now that you mention it, I wouldn't be surprised if numerous possessions were in fact misdiagnosed cases of a phenomenon we are just now discovering."
The priest is dismissive so Walter starts ranting about how he would be, since the church doesn't approve of exorcism anymore. The priest calls them superstition but Walter points out there are examples of casting out spirits right through the bible. And up to recent vice-presidential candidates!
Ms. Donovan interrupts to ask Walter if he can help her daughter, and I have to say that she came down from her "faith is the way" position really quickly. Walter says he needs to have Lisa transferred to his lab, and she gives the OK.
As the Fringe team leaves the hospital, Peter asks Walter if he thinks an exorcism is going to work, and he admits that he's not sure, because his explanation doesn't explain why she's sick. Really? The energy and memories from someone else invades a girl's body but the confusing part is why it would make her sick? Anyway, Walter admits that he's really just busting Lisa out because the priest made him angry, which is a good reason to remove the girl from medical care in a hospital not staffed by people recently released from mental institutions who have experimented with psychotropic drugs their entire lives.
Walter stomps off, and Peter tells Olivia that they need to go back to Ms. Donovan and come clean, but Olivia's thinking. She wonders if Lisa's sick because Rusk was sick and transferred his illness into her. Peter says she's the one who read Rusk's file, and asks if it said anything in there about illness. Olivia says no, but it was the Navy's official medical records, and Peter laughs: "Well, you know me. If you tell me the U.S. government is covering something up, I'll tell you it must be Tuesday."
Back at the federal building, Cmdr. Turlough has shown up, as per Olivia's request, and she gets right to the point and asks him why he didn't tell her Rusk was sick. Turlough plays dumb, and Olivia cocks her head and says nothing, and Turlough completely gives it away: "Who told you that?" and Olivia's all, "You did!" Sucker! You've just been Dunhamed! He hesitates about saying anything, and Olivia prompts him by reminding him that a young girl's life is at stake, so he tells her about the Gloucester shadowing a Russian naval exercise in North Korea when there was a reactor leak, and Rusk was locked in the engineering section for sixteen hours before they were able to vent the contamination. Olivia wants to know how Rusk could possibly have survived that, and I'd like to know how it is that he was exposed to that much radiation and didn't develop superpowers? Turlough babbles some sort of nonsense about a highly experimental radiation inhibitor. "I'm gonna need his medical records. The real ones," says Olivia, and Turlough looks at her all, "Well, since you're looking at me so sternly and everything, I guess I'll hand over the classified military documents."
At Walter's lab, the nervous scientist is considering faking a stomach illness to get out of trying to help Lisa, and Peter hands over the real medical file for Rusk, and Walter reads up on the radiation poisoning. "The radiation and the synthetic treatments they gave him. I'd wager that's what kept his energy from dispersing." Uh-huh. So Walter suggests they give Lisa MORE drugs, because of course he does. More drugs is always Walter's answer for everything! Ms. Donovan gets nervous when she hears Walter excitedly talking about "more drugs" and he explains that it's just to calm Lisa's conscious mind so that Rusk's energy can slowly and painlessly leave her mind. He tells Ms. Donovan he's going to give her benzodiazepine, which is actually quite pleasant: "Besides, your daughter is seventeen. I'm sure she's sampled far worse by now." Walter, you had her... and then you lost her. Astrid looks mildly scandalized.
But Ms. Donovan needn't worry, because Walter's got his best dropout con artist son preparing the syringe to stick in her daughter, who says it's nice to have someone not afraid of her. Peter asks what she means. "Well, my friends at church. When I walked past them, I could feel them all talking about me behind my back. Kids at school are even worse. Ever since what's happened, they think I'm like a freak or something." Wait, how much time has passed? Peter tells her that they're kind of partial to freaks in this lab.
Olivia strides into the lab and bellows out something about wanting to know how it's going, and I think she can be forgiven for thinking they're goofing around because Walter is MILKING GENE, for god's sake. And Lisa, who seems a little smitten with Peter, asks if Olivia is Peter's girlfriend, and Peter explains that she's like a "friend who's a girl. And who carries a gun." Which is kind of hot, actually.
And Olivia confers with Walter over the possibility of extracting Rusk's thoughts from Lisa's brain, and wonders if she'd be able to get Rusk to describe his last moments, because she wants to find out who killed him. He sucks back the fresh
milk and decides to give it a whirl.Peter straps down Lisa, which Walter assures Ms. Donovan is just a precaution, and Peter all sensitively tells her to tell him if the straps are too tight. Then there is sciencey talk of "six hertz" and "increase the drip two mikes" and Lisa's uncomfortable to the point that Ms. Donovan wants to stop, but Peter and Walter calm the two of them down, and Lisa closes her eyes. Then Olivia steps in to softly talk to her about Andrew Rusk, and then some needles on a graph somewhere start skittering wildly, and Lisa starts seizing and Ms. Donovan wants to stop and Walter says, "We have to let it run its course," which doesn't sound right, and then Lisa speaks in a possessed voice: "There is no Dana. Only Zuul." Ms. Donovan wants to know why Lisa's speaking like that, and Walter says, "Because the recapper has seen Ghostbusters like eight million times."
So after the commercial break, Walter adjusts his hypothesis: it's not that Lisa's mind was harbouring Rusk's memories, it's that Rusk's entire consciousness was transferred to Lisa. "Perhaps his soul." He says Lisa is suppressed in her own mind. Ms. Donovan wants to stop the experiment, and Walter points out that they gave her drugs, which have taken effect, so they can't exactly just stop the experiment. Astrid suggests she and Ms. Donovan go out and get some air, and I can't IMAGINE leaving my daughter without a parent in a situation like this -- "my child is possessed by the spirit of a dead man? Yeah, think I'm going to go stretch my legs" -- and I don't buy Ms. Donovan doing it, but Walter scolds her, telling her to let him do his work. "I can't lose her again," says Ms. Donovan. Walter, a lot more nicely, tells Ms. Donovan that she's going to be fine, and she leaves the lab with Astrid.
So Olivia tries talking to Rusk, who wants to be let go. Olivia asks Rusk who killed him, and after a long while, Rusk explains he told his wife he was going for a beer, and there was someone in his back seat who told him to pull over and walk. So we have Lisa speaking in the voice of Rusk who is now relating someone else's dialogue. Whoa!
Lisa struggles against the straps, and Rusk says he doesn't know his name: "Just his blood. His left arm." Then she seizes up again, and loses consciousness. Peter turns off the drip while Olivia says she's going to call the local hospitals and see if anybody's gone in with an injured left arm. Here's hoping only one person in the greater Boston area hurt their left arm in the last few days, hey?
Sometime later, a sleepy Lisa calls for Peter, who announces to everyone that she's coming out of it. "Did it work? Is he gone?" she asks. Peter starts unstrapping her, while Olivia gets a phone call from Ghost Charlie, who tells her that hey! One person in the past few days hurt his left arm! Jake Selleg, 36, walked into a Roxbury ER three nights ago. "Jake Selleg was Navy too, OK? Now, he trained with SEAL Team Six. That's counter-terrorism." Well, that's quite the coincidence! Olivia says, "That can't be a coincidence." Oh. Charlie tells her Selleg works at a boxing gym in Dorchester.
And speaking of coincidences, Selleg is played by Scott William Winters, who served time at Oz maximum security prison with Ghost Charlie. But Selleg doesn't look too interested in any kind of reunion special, because when he sees the law-enforcement types asking questions at the gym, he takes off out the side door, Charlie and Olivia in pursuit down the sidewalk. The chase lasts only long enough for Charlie to tackle him across the hood of a car and punch him a couple of times, and Olivia pulls her gun on him.
Back at the lab, Lisa is standing looking at the dead body of Andrew Rusk zipped up in its body bag, and Peter comes in and tries to shoo her away from it, but she's strangely fascinated. Well, not so strangely, I suppose, since the guy's consciousness was inside her but is now completely gone, right? He starts walking her to the door, saying her mom's on her way back with Astrid, and hopefully she'll be able to put this all behind her soon. On the steps out of the lab, she asks Peter for something to drink. Gene moos in alarm, but Peter figures she wants something other than fresh milk so he wanders off to find something, leaving Lisa alone to look back at Rusk's corpse.
In one of the side offices, Walter is looking perplexed while studying some printouts. Peter checks the fridge and asks if Walter drank all the cream sodas again, but doesn't get a response to that. Instead Walter says he's looking at Lisa's brain scan, and he thinks she's still sleeping. Peter's all, "take a look out in the lab" but Walter says her brain waves show that Lisa's signal is still being masked by Rusk's pattern. "Rusk is still in control," says Peter, and he hustles back to the lab. Lisa, of course, is gone, and that's just when Astrid and Ms. Donovan come back. "Where's my daughter?" asks Ms. Donovan. Peter doesn't answer her. Hope you had a nice walk, Maureen.
Meanwhile, over at Boston Federal Building, Charlie and Olivia are interviewing Selleg, who sits there stone-faced as the agents tell him the slug pulled from Rusk's head matched the nine-millimetre they found in his apartment. They want to know who ordered him to kill Rusk. Olivia figures it was the Navy, and asks if Rusk was threatening to go public over the meltdown on the Gloucester, but Selleg doesn't have any idea what they're talking about: "I spent seven years in the Navy and I never killed a man. But Andrew Rusk deserved it." Olivia's all, "deserved"? "For what that bastard did to his wife," says Selleg.
Selleg explains that he met Teresa at a bar he tends at, and she told him that Andrew beat her. Once, she came in with a broken arm and she couldn't deal with it anymore. "Teresa Rusk hired you to kill her husband?"
Meanwhile, we watch as Lisa enters a home that, judging from the wedding photo of Andrew and Teresa, is the Rusk household. She finds a lockbox and opens it, taking the gun inside. And Selleg explains that in the scrapyard, Rusk asked, "why me?" and Selleg made sure to tell him it was Teresa who was sending him to hell. "You said that to Rusk? Before you killed him, you told him his wife hired you?" "Yes, ma'am," says Selleg. Such manners! That's what you get in the armed forces.
Outside the interview room, Charlie and Olivia are baffled as to why Rusk didn't tell them that, since he told them everything else. Neither of them is stupid, but they still need the phone call from Peter to prod them to figure it out: "Olivia, Rusk is still controlling Lisa, and she's gone." Olivia pieces it together instantly: he's going for revenge against his wife.
Teresa is at that moment arriving home, surprised to find Lisa standing in the hallway. "What the hell are you doing in my house?" she asks. "Maya zvezdochka," says Lisa, freaking Teresa out. "How did you know to call me that?" Teresa wants her to get out of here, that she has a gun. "Upstairs? In a safe? This gun?" says Lisa/Rusk, pointing it at Teresa. Yeah, that's the one! Oh, wait. Shit.
"I don't understand," says Teresa. "Neither do I. But I've been given a second chance, and I'm sure as hell not going to waste it," says Rusk, ordering Teresa to get on her knees.
Aaand while the Fringe team whips through the streets, there's Rusk spilling gasoline all over everything, including Teresa, who pleads with him not to do this, Rusk tells Teresa that he wants to hear her admit that she had Rusk put down like a dog. Like in Marley & Me. I hope not. I bawled. The agents pull up at the house, with Rusk taunting Teresa, crouching over her with a book of matches: "Don't you want to die with a clean conscience?" says Rusk, as Peter strolls into the living room. "Stop!" yells Peter, stepping into the room. "I'll give you one chance to back out of here, or we're all going out together," says Rusk, pointing the gun at him. Peter says he can't do that, not while that girl who has a crush on him is still inside somewhere. He doesn't say that last part, th
ough. That was more me.After the commercial break, Peter is still telling Lisa she doesn't have to do this. Well, I shouldn't say "still." 24 has ruined me for other shows; I assume the clock is running during commercials. "I already told you to leave once. I am not gonna tell you again," says Lisa/Rusk. Tsk. You've already lost that battle, Rusk. You have to be willing to back up your threats, or Peter will walk all over you!
And Peter starts in with the sob story about how he knows what it feels like to be different. "I was always sick. I didn't have any real friends. I lost my virginity to my English teacher, Ms. Jacobs, and everyone found out, and she had to leave town..." Rusk is annoyed and confused and I think even Teresa on the ground is all "shoot me now!" but Peter's talking to Lisa: "You've been given a second chance here, but you have to fight for it."
Rusk is understandably about to blow Peter's head off, which is when Charlie, from behind, shoots Lisa with a syringe, which fortunately for Peter contains what appears to be some sort of instantaneous paralysis-inducing sedative, as Lisa collapses immediately.
Outside, a groggy Lisa is being wheeled into an ambulance and she asks Peter what happened. He says he'll tell her later, and Olivia tells her that the ambulance guys are going to take her to the hospital and check her out and make sure everything's OK, like she's SEVENTEEN, Olivia, she knows what the deal is with the ambulances. She tells Lisa that after that the ambulance guys will bring her back to the lab INSTEAD OF HOME, I GUESS.
After Lisa is loaded up, Olivia asks Peter how he knew he'd be able to reach her, and he quotes from the Tibetan Book of the Dead: "Innermost subtle consciousness is ever present. It never leaves the body even in death." And Olivia needles him over getting a lot of "mileage" out of a "coaster" and then Peter says he threw up a Hail Mary.
Back at the lab, Walter has finished checking out Lisa's brainwaves, which look perfectly normal to him, which means Rusk's gone. Walter figures Rusk just stuck around "to deal with unfinished business" and once he did, Lisa was able to purge him. Which is a great theory except it should be pointed out to Walter that Rusk never did kill Teresa, so his business, as it were, is still unfinished. And then Walter quotes, in Latin, from the Bible, and Ms. Donovan doesn't speak Latin but when Walter says it's Isaiah 7:9, she nails it: "Unless you believe, you will not understand." And she practically tears up and Walter talks about sometimes needing to rely on faith even as a scientist, and Ms. Donovan is all, "God keep you and yours safe, Mr. Bishop," and I could be crazy but I think Ms. Donovan is digging Walter's action.
He disconnects Lisa's electrodes, and she gets up to go, but not without wrapping herself around Peter in a big hug. And as they walk out the door, Olivia comes in. Ms. Donovan thanks her, and Lisa hugs her too, but that may have been just so she can get in close enough to say: "I'll be eighteen in a year. Don't wait too long to make your move." Wow. Ms. Donovan, I'm not sure all the churchy stuff is rubbing off on your daughter!
The Donovans leave, and Olivia tells the Bishops that the Navy denied their request to launch an investigation into the Gloucester. Were they the right people to ask? That doesn't sound right. Walter says if Olivia's thinking of Rusk's shipmates, he wouldn't worry: "I suggest that Mister Rusk's postmortem adventures will prove to be the exception rather than the rule." Peter, though, can't wait to get the body out of there.
And we go then to Times Square, to the scene of a car accident. Some poor schmuck just jumped the curb. The EMTs are working on the bloody, unmoving driver, but they're not getting a pulse. And suddenly he springs to life. "Maya zvezdochka," he says. So... he's still alive? But this episode was supposed to have aired midway through last season, so ... this makes him the Russian mobster from "Pine Barrens," doesn't it?
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland, which is at least a half-hour ahead of the rest of North America, with a wife and a daughter and a dog and a cat, and the last few exorcisms he's been to have been total bullshit. Follow him on Twitter or email him at danieljdaniel[at]gmail.com.