Episode Report Card Daniel: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Olivia. In The Lab. With the Revolver.
By Daniel | Season 2 | Episode 17 | Aired on 04.08.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.So the Clue poster outside the 1985 alterna-universe movie theatre last week wasn't just a coincidence, as this week's episode is called "Olivia. In The Lab. With The Revolver," and she actually plays the board game with Sam the Mystic Lebowski after she goes to see him at the bowling alley, feeling guilty about keeping Walter's secret about Peter the Glimmer Man. It's eating her up inside, but Sam reassures her that since she's such an awesome person, she probably has a good reason for keeping the secret. Still, she tells Walter that she's going to reveal the secret to Peter, and Walter's deathly terrified that he'll lose his son again once Peter knows the truth.
Anyway, the episode revolves around a dude who seems to be able to give people skin-blistering cancer just by touching them. As the victims pile up, Olivia's once-vaunted memory fails her for a while until she remembers the names as being on the height chart she saw in the classroom at the Jacksonville lab where the Cortexiphan trials were held: all the victims were kids in the trials, just like she was. Cancer Man turns out to be James, the brother of the first victim, and was in the hospital with cancer when she died, and it looks like he was weaponized. James doesn't actually really want to kill people, it's just kind of happening as he tries to track down people who might know something about his condition. The victim chain leads him to Olivia, who fights him off and avoids getting cancer. So that's good!
Along the way, she also confronts Nina about all the information that Nina likes to hold back (just like the old days!), and threatens that she's going to tell Peter the whole story. Nina thinks Olivia's bluffing, and it turns out she is.
Well, maybe she intended to tell Peter, but after a conversation with him, in which he awkwardly fumbles around the fact that he tried to kiss her -- which is why he thinks she's acting strangely around him -- she decides she doesn't want to rupture their family unit, either. She tells Walter that she's not going to tell Peter -- but Walter has decided that he is going to tell Peter. This can only go well.
Want more? The full recap starts right below! Tonight's episode opens in a diner in Providence, Rhode Island, where a guy shakily drinks a glass of water across a table from a concerned woman (played by Diane Kruger, recently shot to death in a basement pub in Inglourious Basterds and who is apparently Joshua Jackson's girlfriend? Good for him!) who asks if he doesn't want some soup or tea or coffee to warm him up. He says he has trouble keeping anything down, so I guess the other diners ought to be grateful that he doesn't plan to barf anything up while they're enjoying their lattes. He thanks her for coming, since her office told him how busy she is. She nods, and says she's just trying to remember him (and maybe she's distracted by the alterna-universe-or-whatever-signifying lens flares that are going on throughout this scene). "I understand. It was a long time ago. We were just kids," he says.She asks if that's when he thinks he was "exposed to something," and he tells her that he's seen half a dozen specialists who think that's the only answer that makes sense. She starts taking notes (under the name "Neil") and says she might be able to help him, and he clarifies that that isn't why he asked to see her: "I wasn't looking to make money," he says, and she nods like she's heard this before but explains that if someone's responsible for his illness, her firm can help. Hey, great! Maybe we can see her on television commercials that run during Jerry Springer!
Anyway, the guy says the last doctor suggested he get in touch with other kids he went to school with, to see if they're suffering from any of the same symptoms: "It might help him identify what it is that's making me sick." She apologizes and says it was so long ago that she doesn't really remember names, but then comes up with one anyway: "I do remember one boy. Lloyd, um, Lloyd Becker. He made me eat a bug on the playground. I remember him." They share a laugh about how the name "Lloyd Becker" sounds like a "budding sociopath," and while we're on the subject of daytime talk shows, maybe she can do one of those shows where you confront the bully who tormented you in school and show him that you are now all that, and then Neil reaches across the table and touches her wrist to tell her that she really appreciates her helping her.
Then she's in her SUV driving down the street and telling someone via a hands-free cellphone to make an appointment for Neil Wilson with an oncologist at Rhode Island General: "You know, the one who always calls me 'honey.'" Not that you'd ever use that to your advantage, sounds like.
She shuts off her cellphone and waits for the light to change, and notices a slight redness on her wrist. She glances back at the light -- still red (and you can spot The Observer crossing the street and glancing at her vehicle) -- and a few seconds later, when she looks at her wrist again, it's bubbled up with what look like blisters. This would seem to be a concern, but before she can really do anything about it, she doubles over in pain.
Then the traffic light turns green, and it's not long before the honking starts up behind her. But as the blisters on her wrist are worse and she now has what appears to be a huge growth of congealed mozzarella cheese on her neck, she's got other things on her mind. And then the dude in the car behind her decides that it would quicker and more productive to get out of his vehicle and ask what the hell is going on instead of just pulling out from behind and driving around her. His annoyance softens somewhat after he taps on the window and notices that she's not sitting at a green light because she's busy applying lipstick like the lady drivers like to do but appears to be in distress. She has her face turned away, but when he taps and asks if she's OK, she turns towards the window, her face covered in angry white lumps. "Help me," she croaks.
After the opening credits, we see Olivia, lying in bed, unable to sleep. It's 5:18 in the morning, but since she can't sleep, she gets up. And where else are you going to go at that time of morning but your neighbourhood mystical bowling alley? Sam is not only awake, but he's on his back down one of the alleys, fixing a pin-setter. Oh, and he's listening to The Velvet Underground ("Oh! Sweet Nuthin'") and drinking, so just like that I'm transported back to college. "Is that you, Dunham? I thought you'd quit bowling, took up another sport," he says, and she acknowledges that it's been a while. "I see you're still not sleeping," says Sam, like look who's talking. He asks her to pass him a nut because he has a whole plateful of nuts and bolts, and she asks what kind he wants and he says "dealer's choice" because he's the mystical bowling alley man and can't just ask for the right damn size of nut, so she passes him a nut that's fortunately the right size.
Then he finally gets around to asking her what's on her mind, and she takes forever to tell him that she's been experiencing "things" like he said she would after her car accident.
He gets up from under the pin-setter and asks if she'd like a beer. "It's 6:30 in the morning," she points out. So ... whisky? "When you've been up all night, time is just a matter of semantics," he says, by which he means, "Do you want a damn beer or not?" She declines, because she's a big baby.
"So, I suppose you're here to find out what happens next," he says, and then adds that he can't help her because she has officially gone beyond his "field of expertise," and I find it hard to believe that anything is beyond the expertise of a bowling-alley manager who drinks at 6:30 in the morning, but there you have it. He does have some idea why she's not sleeping, though, and says it doesn't have anything to do with her accident and a lot to do with her being a cop: "You must make a dozen decisions a day, many of them life and death. One of them you're not happy about. You think you did the wrong thing. I'm right, aren't I?" he says. She admits that that's the case, but it wasn't exactly the job: "I agreed to keep a secret," she says. "A secret," he repeats, and her cellphone rings.
She answers it and tells whoever it is that she'll be right there. "Good thing you didn't take the beer," says Sam, and she starts to leave, but he stops her to tell her that she's a good person, one of the few he knows (that's what happens when you DRINK AT 6:30 IN THE MORNING): "If you agreed to keep this secret, I'm sure you had a good reason," he says. Olivia says "yeah" but doesn't seem exactly convinced.
So Walter and Peter are arriving at the Providence morgue, with Walter trying to convince Peter to come on a skiing trip. You know, if there's a show that could conceivably work in an episode titled "Hot Tub Time Machine," this is the show. Peter had no idea his dad was even into skiing, and Walter brags that he was once quite the "hotdogger" and tells his poor son about a secret trail called "the backside" because it was a nude ski run: "By the time you got down to the bottom, your testicles would be in your mouth." Pretty much whatever you do nude, if your testicles wind up in your own mouth? You're probably not doing it right.
Naturally, the Bishop boys stroll up to Olivia just as Walter gets to the balls-in-mouth part of the story, and Peter says, "I'm sure Agent Dunham is very thankful for that image," and he tells Olivia that Walter is advocating a father-son trip. Walter is very awkward with Olivia (and she with him) as he says that Olivia's probably not interested in that, and then all business-like says he understands there's a body to look at.
Yay, Broyles is back this week too! I wonder if he and Peter went somewhere during their week off, like Vegas. Anyway, he explains to the Fringe crew that the dead woman is Miranda Green, 30 years old, unmarried attorney: "EMTs responded to a 911 call phoned in by a Good Samaritan. She was dead by the time they got there," he says.
They arrive in the morgue while the post-mortem is actually going on, and Broyles introduces the medical examiner t