Episode Report Card Daniel: A+ | 2 USERS: C- YOU GRADE IT Half the Man He Used to Be
By Daniel | Season 3 | Episode 8 | Aired on 12.02.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Picking right up where we left off, Peter takes the call from that janitor lady Olivia tasked with informing him that he's sleeping next 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.
Want more? The full recap starts right below! 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 next 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