Picking right up where we left off, Peter takes the call from that janitor lady Olivia tasked with informing him that he's sleeping to the wrong Olivia. Accepting the news pretty immediately (we always knew he kind of knew there was something off about Fauxlivia, right?), he silently wigs out and starts going through Fauxlivia's enormous and unwieldy MacBook Pro with a Windows OS, because Fauxlivia lives dangerously. She catches him, and he tests her with the Greek phrase Olivia said to him way back when, and when Fauxlivia asks him where he heard it, he knows the truth. But she does too -- she pulls a gun on him, forces him to inject himself with paralysis juice and heads out with the laptop she thinks is hers, but since they have identical MacBook Pros with a Windows OS (WHY?), she takes the wrong one. Also, Peter's eyes are open and he's going to be paralyzed for "a few hours." He's gonna have prune eyes by then!
Fauxlivia goes up to that typewriter place in the Bronx, tells the other side her cover's been blown, and gets instructions to go down to Penn Station to prepare to crossover. Through a series of events that involve pastries and Walter cursing Olivia for tricking Peter with her feminine wiles and "vagenda" (an underused term), the Fringe team tracks Fauxlivia to first the typewriter shop, then Penn Station. The Penn Station is the Newark, NJ one, though, which is not explained, but whatever. Recreating midtown Manhattan is expensive to do in Vancouver, after all.
Back in the other world, lab geek Brandon has convinced Walternate to send Olivia back dead, but with key organs missing so he can study them. Olivia quickly figures this out and appeals to Alt-Broyles to help her, and though he refuses at first, he eventually decides to bust into the surgery room, shoot Brandon in the face, and save Olivia. When they discover the Deprivation Tank has been drained, they steal a buttload of Cortexiphan and take off for Walternate's old Harvard lab, fill the Deprivation Tank there with water and rock salt, and Olivia gets in and teleports, just as the whole damn army comes in to intercept them. Olivia wakes up in our Harvard lab, scares the shit out of Astrid, passes out and is home forever now! Yay!
When Fauxlivia gets to Penn Station (which is called "Springsteen Station" in her world -- Jersey joke! Chortle, chortle!) she is greeted by a handsome shapeshifter who injects her hands with something painful in the ladies room. When a woman comes in and interrupts them, they walk out to find the Fringe Team encroaching on them, guns drawn. Fauxlivia fires at them and retreats back to the bathroom, only to come back out with the woman who interrupted her before as a hostage. The woman's daughter runs up behind screaming "Mom! Mom!" and when Peter asks the woman three times what her daughter's name is and doesn't get an answer, he shoots her in the head because IT WAS THE SHAPESHIFTER OMG PETER IS A GENIUS. Fauxlivia looks hilariously buzzkilled at her getaway plan being foiled. This show is so awesome.
Outside, Fauxlivia is waiting in a paddy wagon, handcuffed, while Peter and Fringe team get the call that Olivia is back, and recovering at the hospital. Before they can celebrate, Fauxlivia's injected palms start glowing bright red, the paddy wagon starts a-shakin', and she teleports back to the other side, leaving in her place the mutilated (and incomplete) body of poor Alt-Broyles, who must have been killed for helping Olivia and put in The Tank. Poor guy. I know I'll certainly miss the superior Broyles on this show.
At the end, we see the typewriter shop guy sitting at a table with a creepy man in a red sweater. At the beginning of the episode we learned that the typewriter clerk has been helping Fauxlivia because The Other Side had promised him new legs (he walks with crutches), and now we see him getting them... in the form of some crazy injection. He quickly gets up and starts walking free of crutches, and the red sweater man takes in exchange a piece of The Device that Fauxlivia had stolen from Walter to bring back to Walternate. That thing's going to explode the universe this spring, y'all.
So we get a replay of the phone call that Peter gets (gotta get that extra cellphone product placement in) from the woman telling him about the disappearing Olivia from another universe. And then a sleepy Fauxlivia asks him who was on the phone, and he pretends it was a telemarketer, which seems kind of dodgy at midnight, but Fauxlivia just says he should save their number and call back when they're sleeping.And then Peter lies awake (I presume) for the couple of hours, and we watch a digital clock change instantly to 2:15, and it would be kind of cool every so often to get the old speeded-up-clock-hands effect that movies and television used to use. I know, it seems cheesy... Anyway, Peter gets up while Olivia sleeps, and skulks around, opening a dresser drawer and inspecting Olivia's stuff -- notepads, files ... he finds a strip of photos of the two of them together, the kind you get taken for a couple of bucks in a booth at the mall. He looks at it for a few moments, and then spies the two Mac laptops on the nearby table, which have identical screensavers running, and he picks hers up, and it's one of those Mac laptops that uses a Windows operating system for some reason.
He starts going through the files -- old Fringe cases -- and tries unsuccessfully to get into a locked file that accepts none of the passwords he attempts. Try "Eric Stoltz in Back to the Future"! And then suddenly Fauxlivia's there, asking him what he's doing up. "Just sending an email," he lies, and she's all, "At 2:15?" and he points out that "it's not 2:15 in Greece," and she doesn't point out that an email is not the same as a phone call, probably because she figures that Peter, not being a moron, should know that. He tells her he has a friend in Corinth. "And like he always says..." and then Peter repeats that Greek phrase that I won't even try to transcribe, the one that Olivia blurted out when she returned from her first trip to the other universe.
Of course, Fauxlivia has no idea what it means, and so then the soundtrack gives us the big bass note of betrayal, but he recovers enough to say, "It means, 'be a better man than your father.'" And then Peter makes up a story about his friend's father. Fauxlivia says she's going back to bed, and Peter says he'll be right there, he's just going to get a glass of water. After she leaves Peter gets up and opens and closes a cupboard just for the sound effect. Then he stealthily goes back into the living room, but her gun that was on the table isn't there anymore. She's got it, and she's pointing it at him.
"I failed the test, didn't I?" she asks, and wants to know what the Greek phrase meant. "It meant exactly what I said it meant. But it was Olivia who said it to me, not some friend," he says. She wants to know if it was the phone call that gave her away, and he wants to know how she replaced "our Olivia," but he's at least realized that she was with them when they came back from the other side. She says she can't give him the answers that he wants, and then he classily points out she's given him more than answers in bed. She falters slightly and then tells him that it's not realistic to think that she wouldn't do what she came here to do. She grabs a small case that was hidden in a clock on the mantle and tosses it to him.
He opens it; inside is a syringe and a little vial of something. He asks if it's going to kill him. "Not if you do it right. Five cc's should be enough," says Fauxlivia. Peter sits down in a chair and keeps grilling her with questions, like what the assignment was, and if she faked every orgasm. OK, he didn't ask that last one, but I bet he's wondering. She doesn't answer, and he says he wouldn't respond either: "'Cause if you're telling the truth and this doesn't kill me, the last thing you want me to have is information."
She asks if he's going to come after her and kill her. He says he's going to get answers. "And if I find out that you did anything to Olivia, then I'm going to kill you." Big man! He injects himself, and then his vision starts to go all fuzzy. Fauxlivia comes over to make sure the drug is working, and then she tells him that the effects of the paralysis will wear off in a few hours, and then she leaves instead of using the opportunity to use a Sharpie to draw penises all over his face. The least she could have done was put the television on a late-night Robot Chicken marathon or something.
And now over to Typeset Antiques, voted the No. 2 antique typewriter store/parallel-universe-agent communications hub in greater Boston by Globe readers in a recent poll. The owner limps up to the door and fumbles with the key to unlock it and is startled to see Fauxlivia behind him all of a sudden.
Inside, he takes the key to the extra-special back room out of the cash register and gives it to Fauxlivia. She goes in the back and types "COVER BLOWN. EXTRACTION NEEDED. LOL." And then looks directly into the camera via the mirror.
After the opening credits, which are split between the red and blue ones indicating that we're finally getting the episode that jumps back and forth that we've been waiting for all season, Peter's still sitting in the chair in Fauxlivia's living room but he's being tended to by an EMT while agents mill about. The EMT asks if he has any nausea. He does, and a bit of a headache too. "On a scale of one to ten?" asks the EMT, and Peter says, "Tequila hangover," like just give her a damn number, damn.
Broyles is pissed that Fauxlivia's been there for eight weeks and none of them suspected anything. "Did she give you any indication at all where she was headed? Anything you might have overlooked?" he asks Peter, who can't think of anything. The EMT has taken a blood sample from Peter and she tells Broyles she'll get them to the lab, and Walter wants a sample sent to his lab too, and now that he's the owner of Massive Dynamic he might want to specify which lab he's talking about.
Peter asks if they were able to trace the call that came in to his cellphone, and Broyles says all they know is that it was made from a Manhattan payphone at 12:21 a.m. Payphones still exist? Well, drug deals still have to happen, I suppose. Walter surmises that Olivia was able to cross over momentarily but unable to stay. Peter wants to get over there to get her back, but Walter says that's out of the question, without Olivia's help: "But there may be something I haven't thought of yet," he says, which is usually how episodes work.
Speaking of questions that must be asked, Broyles notes that Peter said the paralytic was administered at 2:15 a.m.: "Now what were you doing here at 2:15 a.m.?" he asks, and Walter starts rather obviously covering for Peter, at least until Peter stops him and admits that "Since we came back from over there, Olivia and I became something more than friends." Broyles seems sincerely surprised, but I can't imagine Mr. Nina-Sharp-Booty-Call is TOO astonished.
"It's perfectly understandable, son," says Walter, who then launches into a potentially very uncomfortable story about wandering into someone else's house "in the '70s" and sharing a bed with a woman who didn't look like his wife at all. Jesus! That'll do, Walter. That'll do. Fortunately, the story of Walter's drug-addled sexcapades are interrupted by Peter realizing that Fauxlivia took the wrong computer with her when she left: "I was searching her computer last night and she caught me, but I convinced her that it was mine," he says, and Broyles orders an agent named Hernandez to get them access to every file on that computer.
So now Fauxlivia is just going to hang around the typewriter place while the owner bitches: "That's what they do, isn't it? They make you wait for 'em. I've been waiting for seven years. Your kind isn't so good at keeping promises. But I guess you've got it all under control." Fauxlivia ignores him and flips open her computer, only to discover Peter's name already entered in the password box. Angrily, she slams the laptop shut. Hey, those
special Mac/Windows combo laptops aren't cheap, you know!Then an aerial shot of the Statue of Liberty flips us over into the other universe, where Col. Broyles is arriving at Liberty Island to meet with Walternate, who's got Fauxlivia's typewritten message in his hands as he talks to alt-Brandon. In addition to Walter's other evil qualities, he apparently doesn't consider the environment before printing messages received from the other universe.
Brandon notes that Fauxlivia hasn't completed her mission yet, but Walternate says they can't worry about that right now and need to provide her with an extraction point.
Brandon points out that last time they had to swap an entire steel bridge with him on it, and a grouchy Walternate tells him the principle is the same: "You simply need to narrow the harmonic field to focus on something smaller. A single person. We'll use the girl. I've gotten all we need from her and obviously they have equivalent mass," he says. Well, that may depend on whether Fauxlivia has discovered KFC's Double Down. Never mind the change in mass; she might not even want to come home.
Brandon: "Alive or dead?" Walter gets what he means right away but doesn't respond, so Brandon makes it clearer: "How do you want to send back their Olivia? Alive or dead?" Brandon says there are very valuable parts for him to study, and he would just have to replace her mass. Even Walternate seems vaguely horrified by this as he stares at Brandon.
And then we're with Col. Broyles outside Walternate's office, waiting. Dr. Giggles strolls out and weirdly smirks as he walks by: "He's ready for you," says Brandon.
Inside, Walternate tells Broyles that someone helped Olivia get past their patrols onto the island. Yeah! It was a nervous cab driver who's scared of water who'd never been to Liberty Island before. That's how easy it was. Broyles looks vaguely nervous as Walternate rambles on: "Whoever the traitor is, they don't understand our goals: to save the world from destruction. Our people. Our families." He gets to the part of his diatribe about how their world has been breaking apart for the past twenty years because of what they did (in his defence, he's not actually wrong about that). He says, though, that with what they've discovered about how Olivia crosses over, they are about to turn the tide. "Only one world can survive. And finally we have made strides so that it can be ours," he says, handing Broyles a scotch, and adds that their Olivia will be returning shortly, her mission over there a success (which isn't what Brandon just said).
Anyway, Broyles toasts her safe return, and then afterwards, he's walking down a corridor when Olivia is dragged, screaming, from her room by a couple of burly orderlies. She spies Broyles and starts screaming for help at him, and he just looks at her, horrified, as she's dragged away.
Back in our universe, in Walter's lab, Astrid and Peter watch video on Fauxlivia's laptop of Olivia being debriefed by Broyles, telling him that the Bishop boys have been very helpful. "So this is how she learned about us," says Peter (when in reality she probably rented a Dawson's Creek box set). Then he asks Astrid if there's anything in there about how Fauxlivia communicates with the other side. There's nothing, though, just Olivia's debriefs, files on all their cases.
And then Walter comes in, distraught because he hasn't figured out a way to cross over despite four hours of meditation and a two-gram dose of "Brown Betty," which if I'm not mistaken is the only one of Walter's recreational drug preferences to have an actual episode named after it. On the other hand, he is hungry, and goes right for one of those boxes of pastries that Fauxliva started bringing Walter when she realized that Olivia was actually NICE to people.
Broyles comes in to tell everyone that so far they've recovered seventeen pieces of Walternate's doomsday device, but Fauxlivia used her clearance at 5:30 this morning to access the aircraft hangar where they're being stored and stole one of them. Broyles shows them a picture of what looks kind like a metal football with a depression cleaving it in two across the seams.
"Well, that explains why she's here. Walternate couldn't find all the pieces to the machine on the other side. So he must have sent her over to retrieve it," says Peter, adding that Fauxlivia may now be going home, which is concerning for two reasons: Now Walternate may be able to complete his device, and two, if they lose Fauxlivia, they lose their chance to get Olivia back. And three, Fauxlivia's alternate-universe sexiness, but no one brings that up.
Broyles asks Walter if he's got any idea on how Fauxlivia would cross back, and Walter's blank on that too, and he's stuffing his face with one of the pastries that she brought him: "It's all because of that temptress! She tricked my son with her carnal manipulations and he fell right into her vagenda!" Yes, in case you're not sure you heard right, Walter just said "vagenda." Astrid can't believe her ears either. And I'm told Hidden Vagenda is the name of a Kimya Dawson album. I didn't think I could find her any more annoying, but I guess I was wrong. And I highly doubt Walter's a fan. Anyway, Walter blames himself, too: "She used my stomach to get through to my heart." It's Astrid who notices that the bakery address is in the Bronx, even though Fauxlivia always supposedly brought these back when she went to the Federal building. "Why would she go there?" Peter figures she knows someone there, and so the team is off.
Back at Typset Antiques, the magic typewriter is rattling off a message, which Fauxlivia picks up and reads. We don't get to see what it says, but Fauxlivia gives a half-smile, and back out in the main shop, she tells the shopkeep that if he wants his new legs, there's one more thing she needs him to do. She puts a metal box on the counter.
The team arrives at the bakery and they decide to split up to search the neighbourhood to see if anyone's seen Fauxlivia. Walter volunteers to start with the pastry shop, so that's him done for the rest of the afternoon.
It's Peter who winds up in Typset Antiques, showing a picture to the store owner who a little too casually says he's never seen Fauxlivia. Peter's suspicious, and the store owner isn't exactly convincing, so Peter starts having a look around. "Typewriters, huh? Seems like kind of a high-rent area to be selling something so retro," he says, and the owner says that people come from all over the city (yeah, the shop is absolutely teeming) because he specializes in hard-to-find stuff. Then Peter spots something on a table: "Yeah, I can see that. I can also see my computer right here," he says, holding it up.
And the thing we know, the owner is showing Peter, Broyles and Walter into the back room, explaining that they promised him new legs. The team checks out the special typewriter, and Broyles is all, "Fuckin' magic typewriter, how does it work?" and the owner says he doesn't know. Walter looks at it and says, "It's a quantum entangled telegraph!" which could communicate between universes, and I totally think Walter is talking out of his ass right here, and Peter yanks out the ribbon to see if they can read anything, and sure enough: "WELL DONE. INITIATE.PHASE TWO/NEEDED.PENN STATION.NEWARK.NJ" is what we can see.
Back over to the alternate world now, where Col. Broyles is having a beer in a bar while a television shows a huge sinkhole in the East River. The screen lets us know that this is the 20th anniversary of the East River vortex, and that Roy Orbison song "You Got It" is playing, only it's slowed down and a different person is singing, a voice that seems to evoke John Lennon -- maybe he's alive in this universe. Broyles downs his beer and gets up to pay, but the bartender tells him his money's no good here: "Times are tough. It's nice to know we have heroes," he says, and Broyles ponders this and says "Thank you." Hey, moral qualms aside, free beer, right?
p>Hopefully there isn't too much beer on his breath as he goes to visit Olivia in her cell on Liberty Island. The guard takes her tray of untouched food away as Broyles comes in, and when they're alone, he says, "Thank you for not giving me up. You easily could have." As if this room isn't bugged. She smiles and asks after his son, and he says, "He's sleeping through the night again. We owe that to you. I want you to know that I realize that. Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?" he says. Uh, other than helping her escape? Not really, chief. And she's not going to let him off the hook, either: she smirks and tells him that's not why he's here: "You're here to make yourself more comfortable." She's got a dotted line drawn under one eye and another on her forehead. Broyles, unable to look her in the eye, admits "maybe."
Olivia, with no reason to soften any blow, pulls back her bangs, revealing another dotted line on her forehead and tells Broyles that they're sending her back for Fauxlivia. "But they're gonna kill me first. They're gonna cut out my brain and study it."
Broyles doesn't really have any answer for her, and so she just starts outright begging him to help her, saying that if he gets her out there, she can get herself home. Broyles says he can't: "My world is dying because of what your side is doing to us," he tells her, and Olivia tells him that despite what he thinks, her universe is not at war with theirs. (Besides, our universe would win, because of the superiority of our Back to the Future franchise.) She says it all began because a man came over to save a boy and twenty-five years later she came back to save that same boy. "But if you let me die, then we will strike back and we will fight. But if you let me go, both universes can survive." Sounds like pretty big promises she's making! She says that there has to be another way, and she'll find it. She tells him about the lab two floors up, and says she can get home from there.
He points out that if she's lying, she'd say anything right now because her life depends on it: "Am I supposed to just hope you're telling me the truth?" She says that if he doesn't trust her, then there is no hope. And then an orderly comes in and starts getting an injection ready. Broyles tells her that he's sorry, and he gets up to go. And the orderly is getting a series of injections ready, and through the sexy open back of Olivia's crazy-person robe, we can also see that there are several more dotted lines on her back, making her look like the instructions for those small boxes of cereal that you cut open and use as a bowl.
Broyles stares at Olivia from the corridor for a moment and she stares back before he turns and walks away.
And now here's Col. Broyles strolling through an aviary in Central Park with his wife, like does this guy ever do any work, and she wants to know if he's going to tell her what's up: "Or are we gonna keep pretending that there isn't something on your mind?" Broyles tells her he's got a decision to make, and she slowly says "OK" like she's worried he's going to ask if he should divorce her or if she's cool with him bringing another woman into an open three-way marriage. But he just wants her to think back to when he joined Fringe Division, which turns out to have been two weeks before the East River Vortex opened up and swallowed 165 people, half of them children. "And it's gotten even worse since then," he says, and then says they have a chance to put the world back together, but they'll have to go to war, which would mean an "unimaginable" number of lives lost. "And I don't know if I can live with that. There may be another option, but it could put everything at risk. Either way, who am I to play god with other people's lives? Who am I to make that choice?' he says. And then his wife gives him a whole lot of blah-blah about what a good man he is, how he's the right man to protect the world. Yeah, real objective observer here. "I think this world is in as much pain as it can stand. We need to restore hope," she says. Obama just looks at Michelle. I mean, Phillip just looks at Diane.
Back over into our universe now, where Broyles and the fabulous Bishop boys are racing over to Penn station, with Broyles giving some instructions via his Bluetooth to an agent about how Fauxlivia will be armed and dangerous but needs to be taken alive.
Then he asks Walter if he has any thoughts, and Walter appears to take him literally and says, "Several. Not many of them pleasant, however," so Broyles has to specify that he's asking if Walter has any idea why she's going to Penn Station. "Do you think she's trying to cross to the other side? Is there a soft spot there?" "No. Not as far as I know," says Walter, and both the Bishop boys look absolutely despondent, and here's hoping this operation will require some industrial-grade sulking, because they'll succeed easily. Broyles tells the zombiefied Peter that they'll get Fauxlivia and bring Olivia home -- which will technically turn out to not be true, either promise -- and Peter monotones, "Glad you're feeling so confident," and Broyles says she was strong enough to get them a message, so if there were anyone he would bet on to survive over there, it would be her. Which is exactly the same thing Col. Broyles said about Fauxlivia, if I'm not mistaken.
Meanwhile, in the other universe in alt-Brandon's lab, Olivia's being prepped for surgery. The operating table has a clear mould that Olivia's encased in, with space to operate on her face and her back. Unsettlingly, she's awake. Brandon and his assistant spin her around so she's facing the floor, and the assistant wants to know if they should give her more sedative. "No, if her heart rate lowers any more, we won't be able to preserve her organs," says Brandon, telling the assistant to go prepare the coolers in the "receiving room," because why would the organ coolers be in the same room? He leaves, and Brandon fires up the ol' bone saw, and he's a fraction of a second from cutting into Olivia's alabaster back when someone enters the room and drops him with a shot from some kind of dart gun.
She's flipped back around. Of course, it's Col. Broyles. He starts to free her, but she's really groggy, so he starts rummaging through drawers and fills a syringe with a clear liquid. "You came back for me," she whispers, and he tells her not to thank him yet: "I have to give you adrenalin." She has just enough time to yell "Oh no, please don't--" before he jams it into her sternum, as everyone who has seen Pulp Fiction knows to do...
... and the thing we see is the two of them racing down the poorly lit, poorly patrolled corridor. Into an elevator they go, thanks to Olivia's photographic memory on the keypad because I guess why bother changing the codes after someone used them to escape? Broyles even thought to bring a rag so she can wipe off the marks denoting her various cuts of beef.
They're going to the lab for the deprivation tank that's in there. "That'll help you cross over?" says Broyles, and Olivia says it has something do with the lack of sensory input.
But there's a complication: Brandon's assistant returning from the cooler room to find him lying on the floor.
In the lab, Olivia strides toward the tank before noticing a box with several IV bags with her name on them, containing a reddish fluid. Broyles asks what they are. She's not sure, but she thinks it's Cortexiphan. "It's a long story, but if I'm right, this is why they stopped their experiments on me, 'cause they found what they needed and it could help your people cross over to my side." She flips on a computer and heads to the tank -- only to find out that it's empty. "They emptied the tank. I can't cross over," she says. I suppose filling the tank is out of the question? Well, now that the alarms are sounding, yeah, it's probably out of the question.
Broyles tries to get her home, but she says he's done enough. Of course, then she also says that she just needs to get to the other side
of the island so she could swim for it. After all, she's done it before. Then she'll head over to Walter's lab at Harvard for his deprivation tank. She gathers up some Cortexiphan to take with her, and Broyles tells her that the harbour patrols have changed, so he'll take her. Of course he will.Elsewhere, Walternate is striding around majestic buildings somewhere when he gets the call that Olivia Dunham is gone.
Hey, here's one reason why the alternate universe might be better than ours! Over there, Penn Station is called "Springsteen Station"! Anyway, Fauxlivia's getting some coffee and leaving the change and then she's accosted by some ne'er-do-well who tells her that "some things are gonna be hard to leave behind" (meaning the coffee). Then he tells her it's time to go home.
So they head into a restroom, which doesn't exactly seem like the most secret place to prepare Fauxlivia for trans-universe travel, and the bearded agent says that he sometimes dreams about the other side. "Sadly, for my kind, coming here is a one-way ticket," he says. Fauxlivia says she thought his kind didn't care, meaning he's a shapeshifter.
He's preparing some sort of injection gun, and asks Fauxliva to give him her hand, palm up. And then after he admires himself in the mirror and admits that he seems to be a big hit with the ladies, making this his favorite of the eight identities in the last five years, he shoots her in the palm. Fauxlivia seems to find it really painful.
Striding into non-Springsteen station, Broyles gives Peter a gun and warns him not to shoot himself. Has that happened and I've forgotten about it? Or is Broyles making fun of Peter for being all grouchy and gloomy? Walter unnecessarily tells Broyles not to give him a gun, and Broyles just gives him a sarcasm-drenched "good idea."
In the washroom, Secret Agent Ladies Man now needs Fauxlivia to lift up the back of her shirt. This is confusing for her, because she assumed that jumping universes is really easy. He tells her the transfer is scheduled for four p.m., 23 minutes from now, and then prepares to shoot the injection gun in her back, which is when some woman walks in, saying she knows they're cleaning, but she's really gotta go... she clams up when she sees that whatever they're doing, it ain't cleaning. Secret Agent Ladies Man and Fauxlivia stare at her for a while.
Then the two of them stroll out of the bathroom. Peter spots them, and yells at them, prompting Fauxlivia to fire a couple of shots overhead, sending everyone scattering while the parallel-universers duck back into the bathroom. "She's in there with another guy," says Peter, sounding kinda jealous, as Broyles comes up.
thing you know, Fauxlivia's got the woman from the bathroom hostage with a gun to her head as she walks out of the bathroom again, ordering all the FBI agents to put their guns down or she'll kill her. Broyles eventually gives the order to lower the weapons.
Behind them, some woman starts screaming when she sees that her mother is the hostage, and needs to be restrained by a couple of agents. Peter glances at the open bathroom door, and then something occurs to him. He takes a couple of steps forward. "What's your daughter's name?" he asks, and he has to ask it again, and when there's no answer forthcoming, Peter lifts his gun and shoots her right through the forehead, splattering mercury all over the doors behind her. Jesus, good thing he was right and she wasn't just paralyzed with fear!
So as Fauxlivia is handcuffed, Peter wants to know how they get Olivia back, and Fauxlivia says she doesn't know, because it wasn't part of her assignment. They stare at each other a few moments before Fauxlivia says that she wants him to know that "this started out as an assignment, but it became..." "... something more," he finishes. He moves in close and touches her cheek and just when you think he's going in for some tonsil hockey, he tells her that it would be so much easier to believe if she weren't in handcuffs. I don't know. There's potential in handcuffs.
Anyway, after she's led away, a cop brings over a bag that he says Fauxlivia left in the bathroom. "No sign of the component she stole, but we also found the second body," he says. That's gotta suck for the daughter, huh? Oh, my god, my mom's been taken hostage! OH MY GOD, THAT FBI AGENT JUST SHOT HER IN THE HEAD! "Don't worry, that wasn't really your mom. That was a shapeshifter from a parallel universe pretending to be your mom ... who actually is really dead, sorry about that."
Anyway, Peter rifles through the bag and finds the strip of photo-booth pictures of the two of them.
Over there, Olivia and alt-Broyles arrive at Harvard and get into Walter's lab. Olivia pulls the cover sheet off the sensory-deprivation tank, which appears to be empty. Fortunately that doesn't appear to be the insurmountable obstacle it was on Liberty Island. She fills it up with a hose, making sure to include bags of rock salt, while Broyles readies a Cortexiphan injection.
But just as Broyles is helping Olivia into the tank, they hear the sound of agents storming the halls of Harvard. Olivia's all "What the!" and Broyles tells her that he's got a subcutaneous tracker -- he shows her the lump on the underside of his wrist. Yeah, NICE OF YOU TO MENTION THAT BEFORE NOW. He finishes getting her into the tank, telling her that he has to "believe in hope. Please make this worth it."
So she gets in, and the doors are closed, and we hear muffled shouting and a shout and someone shouting that Broyles is under arrest, and "she's in the tank!" etc., and all I can say is NICE SENSORY DEPRIVATION TANK, but it seems to work because Olivia closes her eyes and then she kind of jerks them open.
And then we're in our universe, with Astrid puttering around in the Harvard lab. She's shocked to see Olivia climb, dripping wet, out of the sensory deprivation tank, and she drops the beaker she's holding. And then Olivia collapses, so it's not all good news.
Over at non-Springsteen Station, Broyles is ordering up a three-car half-mile buffer zone all the way to Boston, while Fauxlivia sits in the back of a prisoner transport truck.
Meanwhile, Walter examines the little rod thingies that were in the injection gun, and says they look familiar, and the huge digital clock on the wall of non-Springsteen Station behind him changes from 3:59 to 4:00.
Inside the paddywagon, Fauxlivia's hands start to glow an orangey-red. Outside, Walter's tapping the pin on a hotdog vendor's cart and holding it to his ear. "E-minor. It's pretty," he says. I second that; I don't know why, but E-minor is my favorite guitar chord. Maybe because it's easy to play yet sounds cool? Anyway, Broyles has the not-insignificant news from Astrid that Olivia crossed over into Walter's lab, but they think she had a seizure and she's on her way to Boston General. Peter's managing not to flip out too badly, but it seems like none of this has even really registered with Walter, who's still listening to the rod.
"I remember why this is familiar. They're harmonic rods. Like Belly and I used to use to help objects cross between universes. And this was found in their Olivia's bag?" says Walter, and just as it looks like Peter is starting to figure something out -- did they forget she was going to be trying to cross back? -- the ground rumbles and shakes and the paddywagon rocks from side to side.
Peter draws his gun and approaches the back (hilariously, there's a cop extra in the background chatting away with someone like nothing just happened), and opens the door. He's shocked, and then tries to stop Broyles from seeing what's there. Broyles holds up for a moment, just long enough for me to think, "What exactly does Peter think Broyles might see that he hasn't seen as part of his work -- ohhhhh."
Broyles pushes past Peter to look in the back, and the horror registers on his face just before we see it: a mannequin that kinda looks like Broyles, scorched and missing limbs and very, very dead. O
bvious phoniness of the dummy aside, quite the shocker. Nicely done. Thus endeth Col. Broyles, unfortunately.Back over to the other side where Fauxlivia's arriving for work, accosted by Lincoln Lee to show off his now-scar-free and pain-free face: "It's like nothing ever happened." "Just like nothing ever happened," agrees Fauxlivia. Dialogue that works on so many levels! Two, I suppose!
Bad-Astrid comes over, sounding very worried as she asks if either of them have seen Col. Broyles, because he's late to work this morning. "Have you tried calling him?" asks Lee, and I swear I don't know why Bad-Astrid didn't take his head off for asking such an insulting question, but she sorta-calmly says that she tried calling him at home as well, but his wife said he didn't come home last night, which is very unlike him. Concern clouds Lee's face, and Fauxlivia stares up into Col. Broyles' empty office, looking like she doesn't know what happened but thinks something -- something not very good -- did.
Over here, Broyles studies his own doppelganger's body. Maybe contemplating using it to fake his own death over here? Then he closes the body's eyes, which you'd think would have been done by now.
Elsewhere, the owner of Typeset Antiques -- was he really not arrested or anything? -- is in some dark room lined with books and filing cabinets, with a man in a sweater vest readying a massive syringe. The shopkeep nervously rambles on about how he's never been a fan of needles, or doctors, or hospitals, because when you're sick as a kid, you come to hate them all.
The librarian/doctor ignores this and injects the shopkeep, in his arm. Then he withdraws the needle, and nods: "Go ahead. Try 'em out." The shopkeep seems surprised that that was all it took, but he lurches to his feet with the help of one of his crutches, which he then casts away before taking a few halting steps. "Thank you," he says to the librarian/doctor, who is all, "Thank you," because he has the box with the doomsday-machine component that Fauxlivia handed over to him earlier.
And over in Boston General, a groggy Olivia wakes up, and is somehow not startled to see Peter all stubbly staring at her. She says his name, and he takes her hand and says he's sorry. She shakes her head and tells him not to apologize: "You were the only thing that got me through. If it wasn't for you, I would never have made it back. You saved my life." He leans in and kisses her on the forehead as she closes her eyes, and then he hovers over her face. We're going to leave them there, where I assume he delicately broaches the subject of just how advanced things got with Fauxlivia and how he doesn't think it's necessarily fair that he should have to start back at first base.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter who are tired of him describing what he thinks their alternate-universe versions are like. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel[at]gmail.com.