Fringe

I'm really enjoying the way Fringe is subtly tying all of its episodes together.  Last week's installment introduced us to a man who had visions of the airplane incident from the pilot episode, and the shady character at the heart of tonight's investigation appeared somewhere in the background during each previous installment.  I'm starting to get a sense that the writers know exactly what they're doing, which makes me believe that everything about The Pattern may actually add up to make a hell of a lot of sense.  These bits of connective tissue will certainly make the show fun to rewatch on DVD.

On tonight's episode of Fringe, the gang springs into action after a mysterious explosion rocks New York City.

It's a nice, normal day in a Brooklyn diner, even with a really creepy bald man ordering food and jotting down cryptic symbols on a notepad.  He's looking at a construction project outside, and the fact that he eats a lot of Tabasco on his sandwich makes it possible he's one of those aliens from Roswell.  An explosion rips through the construction site a minute later, sending a crane careening into a building and allowing Baldy to call someone and tell them, "It has arrived."

Much to Peter's dismay, Walter (John Noble) likes to ramble off the formula for root beer at three in the morning.  This puts the kid in a crankier than usual mood when he visits Olivia later that day.  He tells her that he feels like a glorified babysitter and that he's not needed to investigate The Pattern.  That may be true, but Dr. Bishop has already informed Olivia that he'll stop cooperating if his son leaves.  It looks like Peter better renew his membership in the babysitter's club, because he isn't going anywhere.

Broyles (Lance Reddick) gathers the gang together to investigate the explosion, which seems to have been caused by a cylinder smashing into a gas main.  The large bullet-shaped container is one of the only things recovered from the site of the accident, and this isn't the first time such an object has been found.  Walter demands to have it shipped to his lab, no matter how difficult it is to transport.

Olivia (Anna Torv) visits an old friend to get some information about the container that was found in 1987.  The cylinder would vibrate when exposed to a certain frequencies, and the government figured that it was transmitting something to someone.  Before they could investigate further, the cylinder caused a huge downward explosion and was never found again.  Remind me not to buy one of these things to decorate my apartment.

While Walter studies the container in his lab, a very pissed off man with a deadly pulse gun hunts for it in a nearby warehouse.  He's not pleased to find it's been moved, and he plans to take his creepiness and his large gun all the way to Boston to find it.

Is there anything spookier than getting a static-filled phone call from a dead guy in the middle of the night?  They've based at least eight million Asian horror movies on that idea alone, and now Olivia can relate to those films.  She gets a call from John, but when she has it traced she's told there have been no calls from that number in hours.

Dr. Bishop used to work on Project Thor, which involved a weapon that could shoot right through the earth's core and hit a target on the other side.  Yikes.  Olivia sees a picture of Baldy at the site of the 1987 explosion and recognizes him from previous Fringe episodes.  She asks Broyles about the mystery man, and he reveals that the FBI has seen him at over three dozen Pattern-related disasters.  They call him The Observer, because all he seems to do is watch things happen.

Olivia warns Peter (Joshua Jackson) about the deaths in the warehouse, and Dr. Bishop's first response is to demand aluminum foil.  Of course, that makes perfect sense.  He claims it'll help block the transmission from the cylinder, but the instant Peter leaves to find some, Bishop stabs Astrid (Jasika Nicole) in the neck with a needle and knocks her out.  Peter finds her when he returns, but he doesn't find his father or the container.

While the cylinder-obsessed Pulse Gun Guy tortures and kills Olivia's friend for information, Walter meets up with Baldy to have a root beer float.  The man thanks him for hiding "the beacon" and says that he'll soon have answers to all of his questions.  Walter gets picked up on the side of the freeway later, and promptly explains to Olivia and Peter that he can't reveal where the cylinder is.  He has to hide it for four more hours to keep it out of the wrong hands.

After a tense confrontation with his father, Peter decides he's ready to move on to a new job.  He calls a friend for help finding a less insane gig, but he's not aware that he's being watched by Pulse Gun Guy.  The man abducts him, ties him down and shoves two very long wires right up his nose.  Pulse Gun Guy then sends shocks to his brain and questions him about the location of the beacon.  For all the trouble this creep is going to, that thing better be filled with delicious Hershey's miniatures.

Olivia talks to Walter for help finding Peter, and he warns her that Pulse Gun Guy will be able to extract the location of the cylinder from his son even without him knowing where it is.  How is that possible, you ask?  Apparently, Pulse Gun Guy can pull it off by shocking Peter until all of his father's favorite hiding places come spilling out of his brain.  The man takes Peter out to a graveyard to dig the cylinder up, and nearly escapes with it until Olivia chases him down and shoots him in the back.  As she examines his body, the cylinder burrows into the earth with a puff of smoke and disappears.

Once these baffling shenanigans come to an end, Baldy, who has been watching from the shadows, calls someone and informs them that the departure is right on schedule.  Peter soon tackles him and demands to know about the cylinder, but Baldy surprises him by mimicking everything he says while he says it.  He even knows what Peter's going to say before it comes out of his mouth.  Maybe Peter and Baldy are clones of one another!  Though Peter has hair, so apparently he got the better end of the test tube.

Walter's first order of business after being let out of custody is to apologize to Astrid.  Poor Astrid.  Not only does she not care to accept his apology, but she really has no personality traits whatsoever after four episodes.  At the hospital, Broyles reveals that they couldn't locate the cylinder.  I guess we'll have to worry about that mystery another day.

Peter's run in with Baldy has turned him from a Scully into a Mulder.  The fact that Baldy seemed to be inside his head and knew everything he was going to say is too weird for Peter to explain.  He thinks Walter may be on to something, and he's not leaving the job until The Pattern is figured out.  Olivia hands him his official credentials and welcomes him aboard.

Peter wants to know how Pulse Gun Guy could have extracted the location of the cylinder out of his brain.  Walter tells him that information can be absorbed by osmosis and proximity, not just through normal communication.  He also reveals that Baldy saved both of them from dying in a car accident over an icy lake when Peter was a boy.  As the man pulled Walter from his frozen doom, he felt that Baldy was inside of his head and reading all his thoughts.  Baldy informed him that he would need him one day, but Walter didn't realize what that meant until he saw the cylinder.  The instant he laid eyes on it, it was as if an instruction manual opened in his brain and he knew exactly what he was doing.  For the first time ever, Peter actually thinks his father is telling the truth.

As the episode comes to an end, Olivia pours herself a glass of scotch and a bowl of dry cereal, aka the worst late night snack ever.  Luckily, she doesn't get a chance to eat it, because the supposedly dead John (Mark Valley) shows up in her doorway to say hi.  Don't you hate it when your duplicitous ex-boyfriend returns from the grave to chat with you and interrupt your late night scotch-n-cereal bender?  That's a problem you'll only find on Fringe.


- Don Williams, BuddyTV Staff Writer
(Image courtesy of FOX)