Now that the Fringe universes are working together to bring down the nefarious David Robert Jones, let’s … bring things to a screeching halt with a Monster of the Week episode! I mean, it's not bad, as they go, but I was kind of expecting a kick-ass team-up, and not MOTW, especially not one that seemed to pointlessly hearken back to a Season 1 episode.
Instead, we get a tiny teenage girl who has random visions of people's deaths. Her father, played by Hey! It's That Guy! Currie Graham, who I know mainly from a stint on NYPD Blue but has popped up on countless shows in the past decade, sees black-suit government agents around every corner and wants to protect his daughter from becoming the object of scorn and curiosity that someone with her ability inevitably becomes.
It's no surprise that Olivia takes particular interest, both because the girl was the focus of an unsuccessful attempt for study by Massive Dynamic, and because she wonders if the girl might be able to shed some light on the dire warning given her by the Observer. No luck there, but she learns a little more about the Observers from Peter, who of course is familiar with them in a way that the people in this timeline of our universe aren't yet. Of course, she's not reassured by his saying that the Observers know what they're talking about, future-wise (although he says this not knowing that September told Olivia she had to die).
Anyway, the girl goes against her dad's wishes and decides to help the FBI prevent the deaths of many people in a courthouse bombing by someone with some sort of custody-case judge grudge. But somehow the girl's ability also kills her, due to some vague explanation about the extra electrical activity in her brain causing a stroke. But at least it brings Olivia closer to Nina Sharp, who is helpfully going to give Olivia some new Massive Dynamic medicine to help turn her into a shapeshifter, I mean "deal with the headaches she's been having."
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. Emotional father-daughter scenes usually leave him a mess of tears, but this one had no effect, which concerns him. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.
Olivia's looking at an array of FBI surveillance photos of Observers in various locations. It's like one of those scenes in The Bachelor when the current bachelordouche and Chris Harrison survey the pictures of the women he will deign to give a rose to, only if all the women were hairless men in '50s suits. It's the baldest Bachelor finale ever! Olivia picks one out, and says it's him. Broyles asks if she's sure, because they all look like the same man. Tsk! Racist. Olivia is sure. Broyles tells her that they've been looking at "these people" (there he goes again!) for three years (so this is much like when, in the first season, Broyles similarly let her in on the Observers -- although I guess in this time stream they're not using that name), and he's wondering why they made contact now. Olivia has no idea, but she tells Broyles about the blood sample she had Astrid run: "There was no match on the DNA, but she did find antibodies for the Spanish flu," she tells Broyles, the last recorded epidemic of which was in 1919. He's an old dude, is what she's saying. Any boogie-woogie flu? Rockin' pneumonia? Broyles wants to assign her a security detail, but she thinks the guy was warning her, not threatening her. Either way, Broyles expects her to notify him if she sees him again.
Downtown Boston. A teenage girl is sitting in a garden patch on the corner of a building, painting the flower shop across the street, when she seems to be pained by some sort of humming. She winces, then flips to a new page in her book, grabs a pencil, and starts sketching frantically, some of which she's doing without even looking at the page. We only get to see snatches of what she's drawing, not the whole picture. Glancing around, the girl fixates on a couple crossing the intersection. She finishes the drawing, tears it from her pad and chases after the couple, and without saying anything more than "Excuse me," she hands him the drawing, and runs away, looking all sad. The woman asks the man if he knows her, and he says no, and then they look at the drawing. She's a little more horrified than he is -- we still don't get to see it -- and he says, "She's talented. Twisted, but talented." The woman wants to know why anyone would draw something like that, and the man chalks it up to her being a teenager and how all teenagers play depressing music and think about how everything sucks and then tries to make everyone else creepy. He's not grumpy about it, but he still seems a little young for the half-baked "get off my lawn" attitude.
Then they walk through what seems to be an active construction site. I mean, I realize they're still on the sidewalk, but can someone confirm that in Boston construction crews are allowed to DANGLE HUGE STEEL GIRDERS OVER TOP OF BUSY SIDEWALKS? Because that's what's happening here. And when the crane drops the I-beam, it plummets right toward poor Mr. Englehart here, impaling him against a trash bin and splattering his companion in blood. She starts screaming. And doesn't stop. And she unfolds the drawing and screams some more, because it is of course a picture of him impaled by an I-beam. It's kind of like a magic trick, only one that wouldn't be so popular at parties.
After the opening credits, we're in the Harvard lab, where Peter and Walter are talking about "biomechanical interfacing" and writing down formulae on clear panels in black that are hard to read unless there's something solid behind it for contrast.
Olivia comes in, and Walter excitedly tells her that they're discussing "cis-acting meiotic double-strand break hot spots" which has something to do with trying to get Peter back home, and Walter assures Olivia that it won't interfere with his usual work. "If you need me, I will give you my full attention," he says, and Peter says that's probably not right now, as Walter's pretty wired, having electrocuted himself three times already today. Olivia's just happy that they're working together. Probably a little less so when Walter overshares that he can't feel his "urine response" yet and should probably go empty his bladder again.
Agent Lincoln Lee calls from the scene of the I-beam impalement, and tells her about how the I-beam was "tragically introduced to a Robert Englehart," which is a nice way to put it. What makes it weird, he tells Olivia, is that just a few moments before he was killed, someone handed him a sketch that predicted his death.
Olivia's too surprised to respond for a moment, and then she asks if the person who handed over the sketch was a bald guy. A little surprised himself by that question, Lee tells her it was a teenage girl. Anyway, the coworker with Englehart thinks she could ID the girl if she saw her again, and he's already collecting all the surveillance from the area.
Elsewhere, the teenage girl is arriving home, where her mom give her mild grief over not calling when she was out as long as she was. The girl plops down to her younger brother, who says, "I met that kid in 3C today," and it's a line that as far as I know doesn't lead to anything in the episode and yet it's still in here so I'm including it just in case it's a reference to something that I don't have the inclination to Google. Dad arrives home, and he's played by Hey! It's That Guy! Currie Graham, who you've probably seen in something if you've watched TV over the past decade. His wife asks how it went, and he says the interview was great and he starts tomorrow. Their daughter stares at them the entire time.
Later, in her room, she's sketching again, a bucolic lakeside scene, when the hum starts up, throbbing. Instead of drawing anything, though, she just stares straight ahead, until her dad comes in and puts his hands over her eyes to surprise her. He says her drawing looks like the view from their lake house, and he asks if she misses it. She responds by asking if he isn't tired of moving them all around so much because of her, and he says it doesn't matter where they are. "All that matters is we're together," he says.
She asks why God made her this way. You mean with the annoying squeaky voice? Or the visions of impending death thing? Her father takes a moment before saying that God has a purpose for all of them, even if they can't understand it, and he knows his purpose is to take care of them. He brightly says that at least it hasn't happened in a while, and she doesn't correct him. Still, he reminds her to keep the curtains closed at night, and they exchange "I love you's" and he leaves, leaving her alone to brood off into the middle distance.
Over at the federal building, Olivia is staring at the picture of I-beam death and rubbing her temple so intently that she doesn't hear Broyles come up and ask if she's having any luck. He has to say her name and then she finally looks up, and tells him they haven't been able to ID the girl who drew the picture yet. Lincoln Lee's with the witness, though, and they're looking at footage from traffic and surveillance cameras. Then Broyles stares at her a moment, before finally pulling up a chair and sitting across from her. He asks her about getting a call from Health Services because she's been three times in the last month.
She, not all that happy, asks if he's checking up on her. "I'm your commanding officer. They tell me these things," he says. Yeah, I'm not sure that's how it's supposed to work, but all right. Olivia smiles and takes a while before telling him she's having migraines, and she needed a prescription, which is why she went to Health Services. Given that she's been three times, I'm not sure Broyles is buying it's as simple as that. If Health Services is going to call, why not just tell him what she's there about? What was that conversation like? "Just thought you'd want to know, Broyles that one of your agents has been here three times in the last month. Just FYI."
He doesn't say anything, so I don't think he does fully believe her, but then Olivia changes the subject and asks if he believes in fate. He says he doesn't, and she says she didn't either, but how is it that the day after a complete stranger tells her she's going to die, she ends up investigating a case where the victim's death was predicted? Probably because most of the cases you investigate have some sort of parallel with your own life? Consider that? No, she thinks that the man from the opera house knows something. Broyles thinks about it and says he wants to keep her out of harm's way, just for the few days. Olivia puts her head down and doesn't say anything, and eventually Broyles stands up and walks away.
Later, Olivia's over at the water cooler, getting something to wash down her migraine pills with, when Lincoln Lee comes up with some good news: Englehart's coworker ID'd the girl from surveillance tapes, and judging from the way she bypassed the 8th Street bus stop and the subway entrance, she probably either lives somewhere in the area or goes to school there.
And we're back with Emily, who's now on a bus. There's just the briefest of hums and she winces slightly. I realize she's not exactly a veteran actress, but whoever this is barely changes her expression throughout the entire episode -- and then starts to draw. Then she looks around the bus and spots the inspiration for this particular instance: a scruffy guy with long hair off a receding hairline, sitting towards the back of the bus. She starts sketching in his face, but we don't get to see his tableau of death. She tears the paper off and looks around again, but he's already off the bus and walking down the street. She yells for the bus driver to stop, which he seems to do without any complaint that we hear. She gets off and races down the sidewalk, but he's nowhere to be found, at least not in the cursory glance she gives down the street. She looks up into the sky. "I tried," she says.
All the rest of her family are at home, with the brother not understanding fractions because it's better when Emily explains them that his mom, he says. There's a knock on the door, and Mom and Dad go to answer it to find two chipper FBI agents, Olivia and Lincoln Lee, standing there with a picture of their daughter. The agents explain they're looking for this girl, and a neighbor said she might live in the building. Mom and Dad look at the picture, pretending like they're trying to recall, before saying they don't know her. Olivia asks who else live with them, Mr. ...? And the father introduces himself as Jim Mallum, with his wife Diane and the elegantly named Danny. Danny comes over to look at the picture too, and the kid doesn't even hesitate when his dad suddenly pretends to remember seeing her at Tanner Park, about four blocks over. Olivia thanks him for his help, and then the Mallum family closes the door, but Olivia points out that there was a red backpack, same as the one the girl has in the picture, on the cabinet. "So why did he lie to us?" Yeah, why WOULD someone whose daughter has freaky powers lie to FBI agents looking for her? I would! I've seen E.T.!
The agents are out on the street talking about getting a warrant instead of JUST WAITING FOR EMILY (or following the rest of the family when they leave), and then what luck! There's Emily now! What a surprise to see her on the sidewalk outside the building where the agents now know she lives?
The agents introduce themselves to Emily, who seems wary, but again: her expression has been the same throughout, so it's hard to tell. Olivia explains she's not in trouble and they just want to talk, and she brings out the picture. Emily asks if the dude is dead, and Olivia figures Emily already knows he is. She asks how Emily was able to draw the picture before it happened. Emily says she doesn't know; she just senses it. Death.
Lee notices she's got another drawing and asks if she's seen something else. "Maybe we can stop it," he says, but just then Jim comes out, angrily saying they can't question her without parental consent. Lee goes for "You lied to us" while Olivia takes on "We don't need your consent," but then Jim just asks Emily if she wants to continue to answer the agents' questions. Emily looks scared, or pensive, or constipated, or relieved, or SOMETHING, and says no.
Emily starts to head inside, but her dad wants to give the agents a piece of his mind, and asks them if they think they're the first to come after Emily. This is the way it starts, he says, the authorities show up, and then the people who want to study her, like those people at Massive Dynamic. That piques the agents' interest, but Mallum isn't done: he lays out a scenario of people watching Emily from cars, waiting for the right moment to snatch her off the street. By this point, Lincoln Lee's rolling his eyes, but Olivia understandably, is taking it very seriously. "They poke and prod her like she's some kind of animal. You have any idea what that does to a young girl?" says Mallum, his eyes boring right into Olivia's soul. Even Lee seems to sense that there's something else in play here. Jim asks the agents to let his daughter have the chance at what's left of a normal childhood, and all Olivia can do is offer her card if he changes his mind. And if the Mallum family is being harassed, she thinks she can help. Olivia's struggling to keep her emotions in check.
After Emily and her father go inside, Olivia tells Lincoln that she wants him to run a background check on the Mallums. What's the point of that? Obviously Mallum is a fake name, so -- what's that? The father, despite being paranoid about shadowy government figures harassing his family, lied about knowing Emily, but gave his real name to the FBI agents? Yeah, that makes no sense. Anyway, Olivia says she's got a visit of her own to make, and we can probably guess where that is.
Inside, Jim tells his daughter that she did the right thing out there, because if it's happening again, no one can know, or they're all at risk. Emily tells her dad that she saw something awful, on the bus. More awful than what one can regularly see on the bus? Oh, about death and whatnot. Jim seems to get that it's bothering her daughter, but he says she knows how it works, that even if she told them, it wouldn't make a difference. "Remember what they did to you when we tried to help before?" he says, adding that it's better this way.
Olivia's gone to visit Nina Sharp at work. Nina's delighted to see her, at least until Olivia gets right to it and says Emily Mallum's father said Massive Dynamic has been harassing them. "Are you asking me a question, or are you accusing me of something?" asks Nina, a little surprised. Can't it be both? Olivia says she thought Massive Dynamic was done using children as test subjects. Nina says they are, and tries to outline the difference between "testing" and simply "studying" since Emily's precog abilities would have let them make drastic advances in their study of the human brain, but Emily's father wasn't interested, even when Massive Dynamic offered to pay for her schooling.
The distinction doesn't impress Olivia; she's horrified that Nina could have raised her and seen the damage that was done to her but still see nothing wrong with what she just said. "I don't see the difference. It's still abuse," says Olivia. Nina doesn't get a chance to respond because Olivia's cellphone rings like HOW RUDE and Olivia answers it. It's Emily, sitting on the bench by the lake, and she reminds Olivia that she said she could help, and asks her to meet her. Olivia excuses herself from Nina's office so we can zoom in on Nina's stunned-but-guilty face. I think Olivia may get a triple shot of knockout gas and shapeshifter medication or whatever Nina's got going on with her.
When Olivia strolls up to the bench, she talks about what a nice place it is to meet, and Emily says it reminds her of a place they used to live. A better time. Maybe a time where she cracked a SMILE every now again. She says she sometimes sneaks out here to think and to clear her head.
Olivia asks if her father knows she called her, and Emily shakes her head and looks down, and Olivia gently presses on, asking why she called. Emily takes out her drawing, which depicts the guy from the bus among several people strewn about some sort of disaster site. "I think a lot of people are going to die," she says.
After a commercial break, Emily's now in Walter's lab, which should be enough to scare any precognitive abilities out of anyone, and while Walter examines her eyes, she explains that the first time it happened, she was 11, and in a pet store with her mother. She heard a hum, and thought something was wrong with her ears, but when they were leaving, the man behind the counter had a heart attack, and she saw it in her mind before it happened. Then I felt kind of guilty for being relieved that nothing happened to the puppies.
It didn't happen again for a few months, when she had a vision of her teacher lying on the street covered in broken glass, and then she got hit by a car three days later. Her parents took her to a doctor, and then people started to do tests on her, and then her friends heard about it. That's when people got scared, and when they moved the first time. But it kept happening, she says.
Walter by this point is looking at a printout of her brainwaves or some science-y thing, like it matters, and he babbles on about the remarkably active Theta-1 waves in her occipital lobe, and how her brain is drawing elevated levels of oxygen and blood. Like every other case on this show, he and Belly had a pertaining theory: that some traumatic events "echo backward in time," sending ripples, not that we're consciously aware of them. Nobody laughs at this nonsense, and Walter suggests that her brain is uniquely sensitive to these vibrations that he and Belly made up. He asks if she's ever been able to control the ability, and she says that's not how it works. They're like dreams, she explains: vivid at first, but then they fade, which is why she draws them.
Emily gets sniffly as she says it doesn't matter, because whatever she sees, it always happens, and there's nothing she can do to stop it. Peter asks why she warns them if the victims can't do anything about it. Maybe because she's not an unfeeling lump of stubble? For god's sake, Peter! She says she thinks that if people knew they were going to die, then maybe they could say, "I love you" to someone, or just do one good thing. Well, you little dingbat, if that's the case, maybe you could EXPLAIN THAT to them instead of just silently handing them a gruesome drawing and running away? I mean, if someone handed me a picture of myself being impaled by a girder and then ran away, I sure wouldn't be thinking, "Welp, I guess this is how I'm going to die, and soon, so I'd better get my affairs in order."
Anyway, Peter and Astrid get to work on trying to identify the man, running the face through the MBTA database in the hopes that the transit user has a bus pass, and because a pencil sketch wouldn't result in either hundreds of hits or zero hits.
Meanwhile, Olivia thanks Emily for calling her, and says it must have been hard. She's got another reason for talking to Emily, though: finding out if Emily's sensing anything right now. Olivia looks at her, and she does start to hear a faint hum. She barely reacts -- Olivia is studying her face -- and doesn't get a chance to speak before her dad comes rushing in, but it's OK, because the FBI called him. "We didn't want your parents to worry when you didn't come home," Olivia explains. Not that Jim isn't worried; he asks Emily if they hurt her, and Olivia says he doesn't have to worry about them. Because nothing ever bad happens when Fringe agents are around. Emily tells her dad that even if they've never been able to prevent the deaths, they should at least let the FBI try.
Speaking of that! Peter and Astrid already matched Emily's sketch with a face: an Albert Duncan, with an apartment in Jamaica Plain. Olivia's all "let's go!" and then Peter says, "And then what? Even if you can save Mr. Duncan, what about the rest of the people in that drawing?" Like, WHAT DID YOU FIND IT FOR THEN PETER, and Lincoln Lee points out that they're not helping anything just stand there, and so he and Olivia take off rather than continuing to listen to Peter shoot down what anyone else is doing.
Except he's got another idea of his own; while Jim wants to know if they can leave now, since there's nothing more Emily can do, Peter's wants to have Walter hypnotize Emily to recover her vision. Walter's surprised at Peter's suggestion, and asks what makes him think he can even do that. "Because where I'm from, I've seen you do it before," says Peter. I'm sure this is all very reassuring for Jim Mallum, standing right there.
Olivia and Peter are let into Duncan's apartment by the superintendent, who asks if Albert is in any trouble, and Lincoln says they don't know. "Sure, I understand. I wouldn't tell me either," and I don't really think anyone's interested in your nobody-tells-the-super-anything pity party, buddy. Olivia calls the lab to let Astrid know that Duncan isn't back yet. He works construction, but his boss said Duncan's been away all week.
In the lab, Walter's come around to the hypnosis idea really quickly, and has Emily set up underneath a complicated array of blinking red and green lights. Also, Jim seems to be remarkably OK with this.
So for someone who's not even sure he can hypnotize someone, Walter gets the hang of it really quickly, and puts Emily into a trance where she's back on the bus, looking around for Duncan. She can't see him, she reports, but she is hearing the Impending Death Hum. Walter encourages her to look some more, and her vision swims through the extreme close-ups and blurriness until she finally sees him, getting off the bus. Walter encourages her to get off and follow him.
She does that, and then we get a nifty set piece in which Emily wanders among people frozen three-dimensionally. They're in the middle of some sort of catastrophe -- rubble is strewn around and there's smoke and stones and toppled columns. "Oh, god. They're dead. They're all dead," she says. Jim's concerned that his daughter seems to be in some sort of distress, but Walter -- who has tons of experience hypnotizing teenage girls with precognitive abilities, after all -- says nothing can hurt her. Yeah, nothing to worry about when you're messing with someone's mind.
To be fair to Walter though, he looks like he's not entirely sure that nothing can hurt her (although that would make his participation in this experiment a little more iffy). Anyway, they need to try to figure out where she is.
Peter suggests to Jim that it might help Emily to hear his voice, so Jim crouches by his daughter and asks her to tell him what she sees. You know, this character surprised me. Rare is the thriller/crime show in which a character's early reference to God doesn't foreshadow the character being an ultra-religious nut. You know, like when you're watching Law & Order and the detectives are canvassing witnesses to a murder and one person has a crucifix by the door and you can say, "Oh, yeah, that guy did it because God told him too"? I sort of assumed that's where they were going with him, so I'm happy to be wrong.
Speaking of God, though, Emily looks around and sees, in the rubble, the remnants of a sign that says "dei judicium, fiat justita," and she can't read Latin because America's school system is awful I'm sure but fortunately Peter can and he translates it to "by the judgment of god, let justice be done," and he calls Olivia to tell her that it's going to happen in a courthouse.
Olivia and Lincoln are going through papers in Duncan's apartment. I'd really like to see the warrant for this one: "Probable cause: Teenage girl has visions of people's deaths. Drew picture that we ran against bus pass database. Victim identified." Anyway, Olivia's discovered that Albert Duncan just got divorced; the settlement was last week, and he lost custody of his kids, and maybe he's not so happy about it.
Walter's in the process of waking Emily up, but then she says she sees Duncan, and we go back into her vision, where Duncan is in fact lying in the rubble. "He's holding something. Some sort of weird-looking radio," says Emily. Peter rejoins the group to tell them he thinks it's a detonator: "Duncan's not the victim. He must be setting up some sort of bomb."
Jump to Duncan making his way through security at the courthouse, Latin sign still intact and hanging from the ceiling. He looks around shiftily and, really, airports and other high-security locations need to do a better job of identifying the "stubbly, receded-hairline guy looking from side to side" kind of threat. Those guys are always bad news.
After the commercial break, Fringe and the tactical teams are at the courthouse, and Broyles tells everyone that courthouse security has surveillance video of Duncan's vehicle entering the south entrance of the parking garage twenty minutes ago, and they assume he's still in the building. Since Emily's vision depicts a scene of complete rupture, there's no way Duncan has that much explosive strapped to his body, so they figure the explosive is in the parking garage underneath the building, which is where the bomb squad (plus bomb-finding expert Peter) is going to go look. Lincoln Lee wants in on that party too. Broyles and Olivia will lead the team that's evacuating the building.
Meanwhile, Jim and Emily Mallum are walking home, with Emily apologizing for not telling her father she was calling the FBI. Touchingly, he's proud of her, but warns that she's in the system now, so it's only a matter of time before people start showing up. Emily disagrees, saying that Agent Dunham promised it wasn't like that this time, that no one will harass them. But Jim's not listening, because he spots a black van parked against the street, and he hustles Emily inside and up to the apartment, where he orders her to pack her bags, and then yells for his wife.
All he has to say is, "Black van across the street, just like the one in Baltimore," and she's nodding, and telling Emily to do what her father says. Emily rolls her eyes and flounces off to her bedroom to start packing while her family does the same. She's flinging stuff into a suitcase when the hum starts up again, so she quietly closes her bedroom door, pulls out her sketchpad and begins adding to her sketch of the lake view, the place where she met Olivia. She's drawing a man sitting on the bench.
Meanwhile, Duncan gets off an elevator and asks a court clerk walking by where he can find Judge O'Malley, and the woman says he's in chambers, and asks if he has an appointment. Is she some kind of mobile receptionist or something? Before he can respond, there's a voice over the loudspeaker telling everyone to get out of the building, due to a "reported emergency." There's no particular urgency in the announcement -- it almost sounds like background noise -- but everyone's paying attention and starts moving towards the exits.
In the parking garage, the bomb team and sniffing dogs can't compete with the sharp eyes of Lincoln Lee, who notices a truck with a tarp covering some bulky load in the back. The bomb squad pulls it back to find several large tubs connected by wires and plugs. I think this might be it!
Olivia and Broyles are scanning the crowd leaving the building when Peter checks in with Broyles to let him know they found the bomb, which is rigged up to a remote detonation trigger. Bomb squad doesn't yet know how long it will take to disarm. Broyles fills in Olivia, and suggests she help the police set up a 200-meter blast radius (going with the metric!). Olivia right away sees through his attempt to get her out of danger, and refuses to go. "Olivia, what that man said to you, that you're gonna die, maybe this is what he was talking about," he says, and Olivia says she can't live her life or do her job like that. Yeah, she's got a point; it'll be pretty difficult to avoid any Fringe work that puts her in harm's way. She looks resolute, if maybe a little scared.
Down in the basement, the technician is telling Peter and Lincoln that there's no reason for them to be there, since the thing's wired with multiple redundancies that could take hours to disarm, and it could be triggered at any time. But since everyone working for Fringe apparently prefers to risk needless, instantaneous death, Peter ignores that and asks if he can tell what frequency the bomb is rigged to receive. And it looks like he could, because Broyles gets a call from Peter telling him to get everyone to tune their radios to 432.5. That's because Skeeter and the Hound Dog are giving away tickets to this weekend's Skynyrd show to the fifteenth caller.
Meanwhile, Duncan, who is loitering and not evacuating, spots Judge O'Malley and confronts him. It doesn't improve Duncan's mood that O'Malley doesn't even know who he is. "You took my family from me. And I'm gonna take you away from yours," he says. The judge looks mildly confused, and then Duncan pulls out his transmitter and pushes the button, but... nothing.
And that's when Fringe and the SWAT team rolls in, with Broyles telling Duncan that they blocked his signal. As agents surround Duncan and the judge, guns drawn, Olivia says nobody wants to hurt him, so if he puts his hands up, everyone can just walk out of there.
Except that even though Duncan's homicidal and possibly suicidal, he still knows the value of a good backup plan, and opens his jacket to reveal explosives trapped to his torso. "Nobody's going anywhere," he says.
Olivia talks him down for what feels like half an hour or so, and she gets more and more urgent in her assurances that "nothing is written in stone" and "you and I -- we don't have to die here today." I mean, even Broyles is giving her the side-eye like, "This ain't even ABOUT Duncan anymore, is it?" Duncan still gripping his torso bomb detonator, looking unsure but still nuts, and Olivia pleads with him to think about all the people here, and how they have children too. After a few tense moments -- I mean, not really, it's not like this show's going to blow up its entire cast halfway through the season -- Duncan puts the detonator down and starts sobbing like a little baby while agents cuff him.
Olivia calls the Mallums to let them know the good news, that the bomb has been defused, but Jim Mallum is packing, and listening to her message on the answering machine, which is totally still a thing that people still have and use. He goes to Emily's room to tell her, but she's not there, and when Jim, concerned, looks out the window, he sees the black van that he had been worried about before is gone too. Diane comes in, concerned, and Jim has already jumped to the conclusion that his daughter has been taken. Just like in the movie Taken! The movie that makes me feel like an utter waste as a father!
After the commercial break, the police have found the van, tracing the license plate number provided by Mallum. Turns out it was just a dry-cleaning van. You know, one of those dry-cleaning vans that don't advertise the dry-cleaners and the side and that park in residential neighborhoods.
Lincoln Lee and Olivia, still at the courthouse, get the news from Broyles and decide that Jim Mallum is wrong and paranoid. But where the hell is she? asks Lincoln, and Olivia says, "Maybe we should try the ONE OTHER PLACE that we've been to with her, maybe that's where she went."
Sure enough, Emily's sitting on the park bench by the lake, and when the agents arrive, she's porcelain-pale and there's blood filling her right eye. She's also freezing cold, Olivia finds out when she goes to her. Lee goes to call an ambulance, while Emily stammers that it doesn't matter; it's just her time. to Emily is her sketch of the lake view. In the foreground is Olivia looking at the park bench, where Emily is sitting, to a man. Olivia tries to tell her that what's in her drawings isn't inevitable, and that they saved people's lives because of her. That makes Emily smile.
Then her dad arrives, shocked to see how pale his daughter looks, then he sees the sketch, picks up the pad and takes the spot on the bench to her. Presumably, Olivia goes to hit her mark behind the bench, looking on. Emily tells her dad that she's known for a while, and he asks why she didn't tell him. This earns a slightly wry smile as she points out that she knew he'd be here. We hear the sound of sirens getting closer as Jim pleads with Emily to hold on until they get here, and instead, she weakly talks about how he was right: "Everyone has a purpose. They saved those people today. Maybe that was mine." Jim sobs and holds his daughter and kisses her, and -- look, you put an emotional father-daughter relationship in a 30-second car commercial and I'll be blubbering about fifteen seconds in, but this moved me not at all. Sorry.
Some time later, we're back at the Harvard lab, where Olivia seems to be going over case files when Peter walks in. They're familiar enough with each other now to greet each other with "hey" and Peter says he heard Emily had some kind of a stroke. "Yeah, the overload electrical activity in her brain was just too much," says Olivia, so it turns out that the thing that gave her her ability also killed her. Kinda like John Holmes! Olivia says Walter told her that even if they'd known, they could have done anything to prevent it. "He says, 'A candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long,'" says Olivia, and I can see how that applied to Emily, Human Ball of Energy. Either way, Olivia doesn't find a whole lot of comfort in that, and Peter starts pawing at the case files like MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE, interloper, and he notes a picture of the Observer and is all, "Hey, an Observer!" and Olivia's surprised and asks if that's what he calls them, and Peter says it is and asks what they call them. "Well, up until now we haven't called them anything," says Olivia, making Peter marvel at how different things are here. Peter's like the new guy in your office who can't stop telling you how they did things differently where he used to work.
Peter explains the Observers as best he can, that they show up at significant events throughout history, but they're not so much time travels as beings that exist in all times simultaneously. What Olivia really wants to know, though, is if one of them said something about the future, could they be wrong? Peter says he doesn't see how they could. "They don't predict the future, Olivia. They've already experienced it." Peter finally clues in that maybe Olivia's not asking for the fun of it, and asks if one of them made contact with her. Olivia says no, but Peter knows even this Olivia well enough to be unconvinced.
Olivia's at home, answering a knock at the door, which turns out to be Nina, hoping it's not too late. Olivia invites her in, and Nina says Broyles told her about Emily, and Nina wanted to see if Olivia is all right. The two of them sit down on the couch and then fight about who needs to apologize more for their discussion this afternoon. Nina says what happened to Olivia as a child was unconscionable, and she's come so far that she sometimes forgets how much Olivia has been expected to forgive. As for Olivia, the fact that she thought she was going to die today made her think that Nina wouldn't know how she felt: "You're the closest thing I have to a mother. And I love you," she says. Awww, the "closest thing" to a mother, it kind of gets you right here. Is this because of Nina's arm?
Anyway, Nina smiles and calls her "Olive" and gets all verklempt and then Olivia closes her eyes for a moment, blaming it on migraines. Nina does her very best to look surprised and concerned, and gets up to make her soup. "I'm the closest thing you have to a mother, remember?" Oh, and there's this "remarkable" new drug that Massive Dynamic has been working on that Nina will send over tomorrow. Yes, Olivia won't mind being a guinea pig for an expensive new drug, right?
We end with a shot of an Observer watching Olivia's place from across the street. I know I don't normally bother noting these, but it seems particularly relevant that the commercial-break glyphs spell out "MARCH" this week.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. The end of Monsters, Inc.? Gets him every time. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel[at]gmail.com.
Think you've got game? Prove it! Check out Games Without Pity, our new area featuring trivia, puzzle, card, strategy, action and word games -- all free to play and guaranteed to help pass the time until your show starts.
What are people saying about your favorite shows and stars right now? Find out with Join the conversation now!