Science and Religion Today » Fringe

Episode 18: Toll of Belief in the Soul

Heather Wax — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:00:00 +0000

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: We open on a sketchy-looking, smooth-talking British guy getting ready to go out for the night. A TV news report in the background alerts us to a murder that seemed to have been committed with a knife. Just then, we see the Brit pick up a folding knife and put it in his pocket. So he’s the killer! He goes to a nightclub and calls his girlfriend, who’s traveling, before going in. He lies about spending a quiet night alone, then steals into the club and unsuccessfully puts the moves on one woman before hitting it big with another. They go back to his apartment … where she kisses him and then breaks his neck in one quick movement. Later we see him with his spinal column sliced open. So she’s the killer—nice fake-out, Fringe.
Charlie, Olivia, and the Bishops arrive on the scene the next morning. The murder method matches the one on the news the night before, but the stymied Boston police are handing it over to the FBI. Walter says the wound was made by human teeth and later deduces that the killer nabbed the victim’s spinal fluid. To rachet up the ick factor, lab tests from the wound show that the killer had traces of an extinct kind of syphilis in his or her saliva. The Centers for Disease Control are the only ones who have samples of the virus, and the CDC points Olivia in the direction of Luboff Pharmaceuticals: Luboff has received several samples that could be used in bioweapons. Olivia and a strike team storm the lab and find a wheelchair-bound man poking around a dead animal’s spinal column. They bring the man, Nicholas Boone, in for questioning and ask how long he’s been a follower of ZFT. Boone looks surprised for a minute, but then says he will help them if they will find his wife. He worked for the people they’re looking for, he continues, but when he realized what “they”—presumably those perpetrating the “pattern”—were up to, he tried to pull out. That’s when they kidnapped his wife, Valerie. Boone also lets Olivia and company know that he created the skin-growth virus that killed an FBI agent a few episodes back.
Boone sends Olivia and a team on a raid of another secret lab, where they don’t find his wife, but do locate some vials of a substance called XT43. “The person who’s killing has been dosed with this,” he says, adding that he needs it to make an antidote. Then he comes clean: “They didn’t kidnap my wife. They infected her.” Elsewhere, we see his wife making eyes at the bouncer at a club. They go back to his car, where he touches her face and notices that she’s burning up. She mutters, “I’m sorry,” before rearing back, baring rows of razor-like teeth and then launching herself at his neck.
Boone’s wife is now feeding off spinal fluid; it’s why she kills, and his attempts to keep her satiated by drinking his left him paralyzed. He asks for a lab to synthesize the antidote and winds up at Walter’s. Boone eventually realizes that even more of his spinal fluid is necessary to make the cure, so he lies to Walter about having enough to spare. Meanwhile, ultraviolet stamps on several victims’ hands lead Olivia and Peter to the club where Valerie’s been hunting her prey. They tranquilize her and transport her back to the lab, where Boone is not doing well. They inject Valerie with the antidote just as her husband dies on the stretcher next to her.
Later, Walter hands Olivia a videotape Boone left for her. Making good on his promise, he leaves a message that says he doesn’t know much about ZFT except this: The man bankrolling the movement is Massive Dynamics chief—and Walter’s former lab partner—William Bell.
THE BOTTOM LINE: During a quiet moment in the lab, Walter and Nicholas Boone have this telling exchange, with echoes of one of science-and-religion’s central conflicts:

WALTER: A little memory loss is often kind to the soul.

NICHOLAS: A figure of speech, or do you believe there is such a thing? The soul?

WALTER: There are days when I wish I did. There are days when I wish I didn’t.

NICHOLAS: I often wake up at night, frightened, with the understanding that there are things man shouldn’t know. That the scientific trespasses I’ve committed —

WALTER: — will one day be judged. Bellie and I would often debate this kind of thing. William Bell. You’ve heard of him?

Episode 17: Notion of Shared Emotion

Heather Wax — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:43:00 +0000

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: A mother pushes her daughter’s stroller in a deserted subway station and just misses the train as it pulls away from the platform. The little girl’s balloon comes loose from her stroller and flies up toward the ceiling. The mom reaches for it as the next subway rolls in … and then all of a sudden, Olivia’s behind her, pushing her into the path of the train! In Boston, Olivia wakes up from the nightmare and can’t get back to sleep. Imagine her surprise when she sees a news report of the young mom’s suicide on the morning news.
After asking permission to travel to New York, Olivia and the Bishops examine the crime scene and talk to the victim’s husband. She had no reason to kill herself, he asserts. But security camera videotape shows only the mom and her baby on the platform before she takes a header into the tracks. Still, when Peter, Walter and Olivia return to Cambridge, she’s still convinced that she responsible for the death. Walter posits that Olivia’s able to influence people with her mind, and when Peter objects, his dad says they’ll know for sure if it happens again.
Which, of course, it does. Olivia pops some caffeine pills and sits down at a restaurant, watching a loving couple a few tables away. All of a sudden, the woman accuses the man of flirting with the waitress and picks up a knife from the table. As he begs her to calm down, Olivia walks over. We think she’s going to intervene, but she grabs the woman’s wrist and helps her plunge the knife into the man’s stomach. Olivia wakes up with a shock on her couch in Boston and calls Charlie: There’s been another murder.
Olivia and Peter go back to New York, where they find out that the man didn’t die, though he’s not in good shape. His flummoxed wife tells them she has no idea why she sliced her husband up. The restaurant owner has never seen Olivia before, but he can describe the man who was sitting in “her” seat the night prior, and Olivia realizes that the man, who has a scar on his temple, was also in the subway security footage. Walter thinks maybe Olivia has some connection with the man, who Charlie identifies as former mental patient Nick Lane, that allows her to see things through his eyes.
The asylum director says that a solicitor showed up months before to tell Nick he’d inherited a windfall, prompting the voluntarily committed Nick to check himself out. Why was Nick there in the first place? He had a crazy story about being recruited as a child by a secret group and “being prepared to serve as a soldier in the coming war against a parallel universe,” the doctor relates, inadvertently quoting the ZFT Manifesto. Olivia realizes that Nick’s backstory is sickeningly close to hers, right down to his age and hometown of Jacksonville, Florida.
Olivia demands that Walter tell her what he knows about cortexiphan, the drug that Olivia learned she’d been dosed with as a kid. Walter confesses that his lab partner, William Bell, thought it might “enhance certain abilities in predisposed children.” It’s possible, he continues, that Olivia and Nick were paired during the experiments, giving them an intense bond that would allow her to read his emotions. It’s also possible that Nick is unable to control his emotions from affecting other people like a virus, leading the mom to jump and the wife to stab.
At Nick’s apartment, Charlie, Olivia and the Bishops find his giant shrine to “pattern”-esque happenings; if you look closely, you can see an article mentioning a government shut-down of last episode’s Kelvin Genetics. A security guard calls the police to tell them that Nick and a band of people are poised to jump off the top of a downtown building. Olivia goes up, and Nick is happy to see her. He calls her Olive. “You heard me. You came,” he says, adding that the “man with the glasses” came to see him and told him “What was written will come to pass.” Though Olivia has no idea what he’s talking about, she snaps to it when he hands her a gun and begs her to kill him so he’ll stop hurting people. She hesitates, and a man falls from the roof to his death. She shoots Nick twice in the leg, making him—and everyone else—collapse on the roof. “You’ll wish you’d killed me,” he tells her sadly.
Later, in Cambridge, Walter finds an old videotape and watches it with a sinking feeling. We see a little girl crouched in a corner while William Bell’s voice asks if “the incident” has been contained. A younger-sounding Walter assures him it has, and, as the camera gets closer to the girl, he assures her that everything is fine. “It’s all right, Olive,” he says softly. “Everything is going to be OK.”
THE BOTTOM LINE: Before Walter cobbles together the made-for-TV reason that Olivia and Nick are bonded, he says astral projection may be responsible for Olivia’s nocturnal journeys. Though there’s little scientific backup for the idea, astral projection was popular with the ancient Egyptians, who saw it as the soul hovering outside the physical body.

Episode 16: Mixing Genes & the Unseen

Heather Wax — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 02:26:00 +0000

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: A group of college students trash Swift Research, an animal testing facility, and then all but one makes a run for it. A girl implores the straggler, Jonathan, to hurry up, but he heads for a big metal vault with a red light flashing over it. Opening the door triggers a silent alarm that registers on the Blackberry of a man sleeping in his home; he panics and jumps in his car, speeding to the research facility. Shortly after reaching Swift, the man—and Jonathan—are killed in hideous fashion by something large, powerful, and unseen in the vault. The other protesters get out as quickly as they can, but their car comes under attack by what seems to be the same thing that killed Jonathan and the man. We don’t see it, but from the look of horror on the girl’s face the moment before she dies, it seems pretty horrible.
Phillip Broyles, Peter and Walter Bishop, Charlie, and Olivia survey the crash scene the next morning. Charlie notices that there’s fast food in the car: four drinks, but only three clawed-up bodies—someone’s missing. Peter IDs the food as coming from a dive near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Because none of the victims are carrying identification, Olivia says she’ll start with the MIT student database. While she learns that one of the victims was part of an animal rights group called Animals First, Astrid and the Bishops examine one of the bodies at the lab and find that, in addition to giant claws, the deadly creature had massive fangs. Walter looks troubled.
After another big animal attack in Newton, Charlie arrives on the scene first and finds two animal control officers dead with the same kind of wounds as the protesters … then a giant tentacle-looking tail drops down behind him from the tree above. Olivia and the Bishops arrive just in time to hear gunshots from the woods. When they find Charlie, he’s hurt, but alive. He gets patched up by EMTs and released. A troubled Walter theorizes that the animal is made up of the genes of multiple species—“the best of the best, as it were,” he says. “Accelerated Darwinism.” Just then, Astrid calls: Her research shows that the Swift lab was the closest to the original crime scene.
At the facility, Dr. Swift stonewalls Olivia’s questions, so she returns to Walter’s lab. Walter is agitated and finally admits that he thinks that he created the giant hybrid creature 20 years before. But he’s confused: His experiments, done in concert with Kelvin Genetics, didn’t work. Astrid then notices one of the victims is moving in its body bag. Thinking the victim is still alive, they rush to unzip the bag … and find larvae crawling around on the dead guy’s chest. Then, just when you thought it couldn’t get more gross, the man’s chest cavity bursts open and hundreds of larvae spill out. Walter deduces that the creature’s eggs are in its stinger. Olivia looks slightly ill. “Charlie,” she whispers.
At home, Charlie and his wife watch news reports of more animal attacks while they get ready for bed. (Geek note: If you look really closely, you can see The Observer in the background of the news report. Apparently, he’s in every episode!) Olivia shows up to tell him he’s not OK and accompany him to Walter’s lab, where an ultrasound shows that he has larvae swimming around inside him. Walter is going to try a poison to kill the larvae. He hopes it won’t kill Charlie. When it almost does, he says he needs some of the mother’s blood; he’ll inject it into Charlie’s blood in an attempt to fool the wee beasties into thinking he’s one of their own and not a source of food.
Olivia gets word that one of the MIT students’ last name was Swift. She confronts Dr. Swift about his missing son, Jonathan, and he breaks down while admitting everything. The creature came from his lab, a collaboration between him and a geneticist named Cameron Dagelman—the man killed alongside Jonathan. Dagelman was a pioneer in hybridization who inspired Walter’s work, but the beast had nothing to do with Walter’s former experiments. Oh, and by the way, the beast is part gila monster, part parasitic wasp, and part bat. Pretty.
After realizing that the creature is using the sewers to get around, Olivia and the Bishops go down to lure it out and procure its blood. Walter, still racked with guilt over being an “evil” scientist all those years ago, takes it upon himself to be live bait. It works; though the creature gets a good swipe at him, he shoots it dead. Back at the lab, the team gives Charlie the antidote and restores him to health in time to return him safely home without his wife any wiser. As Walter admits to Peter that he rarely considers consequences, Olivia goes home and sleeps with the lights on to keep the monsters away.
THE BOTTOM LINE: For the first time, Walter seems to realize that his playing God back in the day has really hurt people—so it’s ironic that this time, the mistake wasn’t his. In his lab notes, though, he seems, at turns, to hold himself responsible, writing:

I knew what I wanted. To turn Greek myth into modern reality. To create life like no one had seen before. To play at God.
As though that were a crime. God created more than a few monsters himself. Without men playing at God, we would still be huddled in caves with only skins to cover us. We have always bred beasts to make them useful to us—wild dogs into loyal pets, nomadic ungulates into dairy cows. Modern transgenics differs only in degree, not in kind, and
And in purpose? I didn’t seek medical cures or better food or safer energy. I sought only to prove that I could, to find the limits of the possible—
To gain knowledge. The pursuit of truth, as noble a goal as any.

Episode 15: Empathy & Neurology

Heather Wax — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 02:43:00 +0000

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: Two construction workers are leaving a building about to be demolished and talking about lunch plans when one suddenly stops and looks back at the structure. Telling his pal he has a “weird feeling,” he insists that they sweep the place one more time. Inside, he accidentally puts his foot through a hollow floor and finds a huge series of tunnels that weren’t on the building’s blueprints. As the team searches the tunnels by flashlight, they find a bald, naked young boy crouching in the corner and panting like a feral cat. I’m guessing that wasn’t on the blueprints, either.
At the Boston FBI headquarters, Charlie receives a fax featuring a disturbing photo of dismembered doll parts. “You are invited to the showing of a brand new work. Time: Today. Place: Boston,” it reads. He calls Olivia, who’s hanging out with her sister and niece at home. “The Artist is back,” he informs her. She starts to tell Rachel and Ella that she has to go into work, but then the phone rings again and it’s Phillip Broyles, who tells her to collect the Bishops and meet him at Children’s Hospital—The Artist can wait.
At the hospital, Broyles informs the group about the tunnels and the boy. The tunnels had been sealed for 70 years, Broyles says, and no one has any idea how the boy got down there. Dr. Winick, the boy’s pediatrician, says the super-pale kid hasn’t eaten or spoken since he arrived, but they’re fairly sure he can hear because he responds to sound.
The boy seems to like Olivia, though he doesn’t smile or react like a normal kid would. She pulls out a pad to write down some info when Charlie calls again, and the kid grabs her pen and writes “Sam Gilmore” upside down.
Olivia meets Charlie at a crime scene, where The Artist has killed a girl, dressed her in a gown, bleached off her tattoos, dyed her hair, and arranged her like a mannequin. Her name is Samantha Gilmore, Charlie says, which startles Olivia. At the FBI, Broyles tells Olivia that none of Samantha’s family or friends know who the boy is, so what’s the connection?
Back at the hospital, Olivia introduces the boy to M&Ms but is interrupted when a social services rep who identifies himself as Eliot Michaels enters the room. He tells Olivia that he’s planning to have the boy moved the next day. Then Michaels steps into the hallway and makes a call. “I’m at the hospital. I think we may have found another one,” he says ominously. Back in the room, the boy writes “547 Marlborough” upside down on Olivia’s pad.
Turns out that The Artist is holding his latest victim in a van very near that address, but Olivia and Charlie don’t find him when they poke around the neighborhood. Later, they find the woman dead and trussed up outside a church, and Charlie says her dog was tied up outside 547 Marlborough. Upset that The Artist slipped through their hands, Olivia visits the Bishops at their hotel. Walter posits that years in isolation have made the boy hypersensitive to people’s emotions the same way that he’s hypersensitive to light and sound. The good news? Walter thinks he knows how to hear the kid’s thoughts.
The next morning, Olivia enters the boy’s room to see that he’s arranged the yellow M&Ms in a tree formation. Strange. She signs his discharge papers and brings him to the lab, where Walter plans to use his neural stimulator on the boy. They put the wired-up helmet on his head—but then Michaels (who, it turns out, is from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology) enters the lab, Broyles in tow, demanding that they hand the boy over to him. When Astrid says Charlie called and there’s been another invite from The Artist, Olivia gets Michaels to agree to one more day before she has to turn the boy over to him.
The boy helps Olivia one more time by writing “York/Glenway” on her pad. She and Charlie set up a checkpoint at that intersection, and when The Artist happens by, Olivia’s tipped off by the yellow pine tree air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror—it’s what the boy made out of M&Ms at the hospital. The killer knows the gig is up, so he guns it out of the checkpoint and then takes off on foot after crashing his van. As Charlie finds the latest victim alive in the back, Olivia gets into a fight with The Artist in a graveyard and eventually winds up stabbing him with his own knife.
But she just doesn’t feel right about leaving the boy with Michaels, so she enlists Broyles’ and Winick’s help to place him with a foster family. As Broyles tells a disbelieving Michaels that the boy just went missing, we see a much healthier-looking boy happily riding in the backseat of a car on his way to his new home. But all of a sudden his face falls as he sees The Observer, bald and menacing, watching him from the sidewalk. The Observer continues to watch as the car speeds by.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Nothing here about Walter’s seeming link to the manuscript uncovered in the previous episode, nor is it discussed how the boy understands language if he’s been sequestered for his entire life. “Perhaps,” writes Walter in his lab notes, “his empathetic ability enabled him to be exposed to language at a distance: learning via clairaudience.” It might’ve been nice for the show to allude to Heidegger’s idea of language as central to an understanding of being.

Meet Astrid From the Lab

Heather Wax — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:20:00 +0000

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: For months, the TV show Fringe (now on hiatus) has been touching on subjects and ideas related to science and religion. While Olivia and Peter are off taking down “bad guys” and Walter is trying to remember what he did 20 years ago, one woman keeps the Harvard University lab running: Astrid. Though the junior FBI agent remains a mystery to fans of the sci-fi drama, her portrayer, Jasika Nicole, was happy to chat with Science & Religion Today about belief, bovines, and brain goo (hint: It is just as icky as it seems!).

SRT: When you first heard about the concept for Fringe, what were your initial thoughts? Were you on board? Wary?
JN: Well, let’s see. The first time that I heard about the show, we were not allowed to have a script. So all I knew was that J.J. Abrams’ name was attached to it. They kept saying it’s a new sci-fi show by J.J. Abrams, and that’s it. So all I had really to base everything on was his past work. So I’d seen Lost, and of course I loved it like everybody else, and I really loved Cloverfield, so I was thinking something about monsters. I was like, okay. I’m auditioning for a show about monsters that will probably have its own fan base already because it’s J.J. Abrams.
So it took a really long time to get a script. Before I did, I was totally on board because I love science fiction and I love horror films. I was hoping that there would be some kind of cross-way between those two different genres. And that’s actually what happened in the end, that it is kind of about monsters and it is really grotesque like horror films, but it’s also really rooted in science, which I think is kind of different that a lot of sci-fi shows. A lot of sci-fi shows are about aliens or something like that, and this one really bases itself in science. So I was 100 percent gung-ho before I knew what it was about. [laughs]

SRT: Let’s talk a bit about Astrid. She seems a little less messed-up than the people she works with, but that may just be because we don’t know a lot about her yet.
JN: You don’t know enough about her, I know! [laughs] People keep saying, ‘It’s so nice to have Astrid in the show because she’s kind of like the grounding between Peter and Dr. Bishop since she’s in the lab all the time.’ And that’s what people say now, but you know, I’m still finding things out about her. Every single episode when we get a script, I go, ‘Oh. So Astrid minored in computer science.’ Or ‘Astrid speaks Latin fluently. That is an excellent thing for her to do.’ Because they are really, really slow to give up information about these people. And I can’t tell if it’s because they don’t want stuff to get out or because they’re kind of building it up as they go along themselves. So it’s been a really interesting process to play a character you basically don’t know anything about.

SRT: Astrid has schooling in a lot of areas, it seems.
JN: She was a linguistics major. Well, apparently, she double-majored and minored in pretty much everything in the world. [laughs] We have this joke on set: If there’s ever a question and none of the three main characters have any idea, they look at Astrid. Like, ‘Astrid, do you know anything about this?’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, you know, back in ’87, I was touring Europe and I did this and this and this. Perhaps that will help us solve this crime,’ you know? [laughs] Which is really cool because she’s a Renaissance woman. I think that’s why the team was brought together. I think that’s why they trust Astrid with all of this information. She has different things to bring to the table than everybody else does. And I like that she’s not as silent as she was in the beginning, because she’s vocalizing — each episode that happens, she’s vocalizing. She gets a little bit more involved in it.
It’s also a really nice play about where she is in relation to everybody else. She’s a junior agent, she just started doing this, she’s probably scared out of her mind. And on top of that, you have her dealing with really obscure, weird things that she never probably learned about when she was down in Quantico. So that probably has taken her a while to get used to it.

SRT: Has religion come up in any conversations with J.J. or anyone, especially regarding Astrid’s background?
JN: No, there hasn’t. And that was brought up just in my own dealings with the character and the script. I’m trying to remember exactly which episode… I think it’s the one where Olivia goes back in the tank or something like that, and Walter asks to have a Bible. So Astrid goes and she gets him this Bible, and he starts quoting all these things from the Bible. And I thought that was a really nice part of the show that had never been dealt with before. Because they don’t really talk about religion. And you have to wonder where Dr. Bishop is in that whole world.
He’s kind of become a god-like figure, just on the basis that he’s able to create these things and he has a lot of power with the knowledge that he has. But then you have to wonder, well, where did he get his power? Where did he get his knowledge? So you don’t get a clear answer from him whether or not he has any religious-based faith. So when I’m reading, we have a scene where he’s calling out, I think I start a quote and he finishes it because he knows the Bible like the back of his hand. And so I was kind of grappling with whether or not Astrid thinks that that’s weird or if she’s kind of on board with him or where she’s coming from with that, you know? Because I think that if this were a real-case scenario, if you were to be working in this kind field, something would have to give. You would have to make a compromise somewhere.
I don’t think I have enough information about Astrid actually to fully answer your question, but hopefully maybe one day I will. I don’t know yet. She’s kind of towing the line. But like everything else, I don’t know much about her!

SRT: Okay, be honest. Who’s more of a diva: John Noble [who plays Walter] or the cow?
JN: Um, the cow. [laughs] Hands down, the cow.

SRT: I did see somewhere that she refuses to go up steps.
JN: Yeah, she’s crazy. And she also uses the bathroom wherever she wants to.

SRT: Oh, gross. Speaking of… there are some truly disgusting effects that are used on your show. Are they as bad up close? I’m thinking, in particular, about the melting-brain goo.
JN: [chuckles knowingly] Yeah. That was so disgusting. You know what? They actually are really gross in person, and I was not prepared for that. Because, like I said, I grew up watching horror movies. I love them and I get that there’s a way to make it look real on film. So I was kind of ready to see the behind-the-scenes action and everything. There have been so many occasions when I’ve walked on set and I’ve have my breath taken away from me because I just didn’t think it was going to look that good. And we’re not even filming and this looks horrible! Of course, they add in a lot of stuff after, in post-production, but the people we have who are working on the effects and stuff are just incredible. I just read the script for episode 16 last night. Of course I can’t give too much away; there is some really awesome and gross stuff happening, and I can’t wait to see how they pull it off. It’s supposed to be happening in real time. Usually we have a man under the table with an air pump or something that’s making these things happen above that gets caught on camera, which is awesome. [laughs] But even when you know there’s a guy underneath there, it’s still frightening. It really is.

SRT: You’ll begin shooting season two later in the year. In the back nine of season one and beyond, what would you like to see happen to Astrid?
JN: I just want to see her out of the lab. That’s my biggest want, because she’s always in the lab. There have been, I think, two times when she was out. She was at the hospital once when some guy was getting a CAT scan and then I also think she was in the FBI office once and once she was letting the pigeons fly out in the air. Which is cool, and I get that she’s really important and that’s kind of her environment. She’s the one person out of the trio who can stay stationary and other stuff can still be happening and she can kind of call in from where she is and make sure that everything’s okay. But I think that because she’s an FBI agent, that information gets lost a little bit just because she’s always in the lab. So I think eventually, after she’s kind of paid her dues as a junior FBI agent, they can put her out in the field and she’ll be able to get some hands-on work. Maybe she’ll carry a gun? I don’t know. But that’s what I would really like to see happen.

SRT: Well you know, I don’t know if you watched Alias, but J.J. Abrams had a very unassuming, African-American female character who, in season one, was just support. In season two, she turned into a kickass assassin.
JN: An assassin! Astrid should totally be the Fringe assassin! I didn’t even know that they needed one, but I think they might just now that you’ve told me that!

Episode 14: Immerse in the Multiverse

Heather Wax — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 03:56:00 +0000

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: Remember when inmate Robert Jones killed his lawyer in a German prison, then stood in the corner and a bright light transported him to Massachusetts? Just in case you don’t, this episode begins with that. Two weeks later, Olivia is discussing the matter with the Bishops at Walter’s lab, and Walter reiterates that the machine he invented—the one that Mitchell Loeb was using to break into a bank in an earlier episode—can transport people through space and time. But he warns that the “disray,” as he calls it, requires time in a compression chamber afterward and leaves the teleportee with some serious, unpleasant side effects. “So you’re saying that Jones, in theory, could’ve zapped himself out of prison?” Olivia asks. Walter says yes.
In a warehouse somewhere, a man helps Jones out of a compression chamber and he asks for a cup of tea. While he sips it with shaking hands, he is assured that the lab has been outfitted to his specifications and that the list he asked for is complete. Elsewhere, the owner of a magazine shop banters with a customer as another customer—wearing latex gloves, it should be noted—picks up a newspaper and leaves a two dollars, walking away quickly. The shop owner, Tom, picks up the money and barely has time to remark on the rare bill before he starts screaming: His eyes seal themselves shut, followed soon after by his mouth. The skin just grows up over everything, creating a rather horrifying mask. General panic ensues.
Charlie and Phillip Broyles learn that Jones had a slush fund. But for what? That’s what Olivia wants to know when Loeb is shipped in on an Army jeep to meet her at a nondescript parking lot. He’s wearing an orange jumpsuit, handcuffs, and leg chains, and he looks less than pleased to see her. She says she knows he helped Jones escape and that they kidnapped her that same night, then threatens him with a transfer order to a state prison if he doesn’t cooperate. Jones, he says, is inconsequential, just “part of the army.” Then he warns her that “what is written will come to pass.” Hmm. Olivia’s cell phone rings and Broyles orders her to meet him and the Bishops at Boston General Hospital.
The magazine shop owner is laid out in an exam room, and Walter theorizes that an altered lipid caused a sealing of all orifices. Olivia jumps to the conclusion that Jones is behind the incident, based on what Loeb implied. Broyles isn’t convinced. She takes Peter aside and tells him that ZFT, one of the sects that’s previously been established as making malarkey for the rest of the world, stands for Zerstorung durch Fortschritte der Technologie, or “Destruction by Advancement of Technology.” And it takes its name from an unpublished, anonymous manuscript that was destroyed 10 years before. She asks Peter to work his backroom connections to find a copy.
Meanwhile, at the FBI, Charlie tells Broyles that they’ve traced Jones to a warehouse in Allston, Massachusetts. But it doesn’t matter because the man himself walks into the building’s lobby and turns himself in, saying he’ll only talk to Olivia … who, at the moment, is helping to raid the warehouse. Everyone’s gone, but she notes the compression chamber and Jones’ sketch of her. As they’re about to leave, another agent finds a two dollar bill in a drawer and soon winds up totally sealed up. Olivia performs an emergency tracheotomy, which helps for a moment. But then the skin just crawls up and over the trach, and the agent suffocates to death.
Now that they know he’s not messing around, the FBI grants Jones’ request to speak to Olivia. She also brings a bunch of things he’s asked for: a wristwatch, a ball point pen, a walkie-talkie, etc. He takes them apart to build another contraption, one to disable the recording equipment that’s capturing the interrogation. Now with a bit of privacy, he gets to the point: A key found on him when he was arrested leads to a lock box at a Salem, Massachusetts, amusement park. He needs her to go there and find what he’s left for her. “I need you to pass a test,” he says, while coughing and twitching a bit. If she doesn’t go, he continues, there’s a bomb that will kill everyone in its vicinity.
Olivia drives to Salem and recovers the box. Back at the lab, Walter reads from the manifesto that Peter recovered: “We think we understand reality, but our universe is one of many.” Olivia returns to the lab and reveals that the box holds a series of tests. Jones’ instructions are for her to take the first test and report back to him. Walter notes that the instructions for the tests and the manifesto use similar language. Olivia can’t pass the first test—shutting off all of the bulbs on a light board with her mind—and goes to see Jones, calling him on his mind games. He hits her with a big one when he says she was kidnapped to confirm that she had once been treated with cortexiphan, hence the spinal tap. As they’re arguing, he collapses and is soon wheeled into Walter’s lab. Olivia, on the other hand, goes to Massive Dynamic headquarters when she finds out the company makes cortexiphan, and Nina Sharp tells her about William Bell’s trials of the drug, which was tested on young children to limit the shrinking of their minds. The trials were unsuccessful, and they were disbanded in 1983.
Peter rigs the board to make it look like Olivia can shut off the lights, and she does so while Jones watches. He sends her to the address where the bomb is, but when she, Peter, Charlie, and a team of agents arrive, it’s clear that Jones knew she was faking: The bomb is hooked up to a larger light board, and the only way to disarm it is to shut off all the bulbs with her mind. She concentrates very hard and slowly, the lights blink off one by one, with the last shutting down two seconds before detonation. Peter is amazed, and Olivia doesn’t know how she did it.
She goes to see Jones at the hospital some time later, and he’s literally burst through the wall and escaped to the street outside. “You passed” is written on a nearby wall. Later, Sharp calls Olivia and gives her some news: There was a second cortexiphan trial in Jacksonville, Florida, at a military base. Olivia inwardly freaks: She grew up on a navy base in that same city.
At the lab, Walter again reads the manifesto, which makes even more references to the multiverse. He notices that all of the “y”s in the typewritten manuscript are elevated off the main line. He gets a horrible look on his face and unearths a typewriter from somewhere in the lab. He types the word “ability,” and sure enough: The “y” is up higher than the other characters. Walter wrote the manuscript?!?
THE BOTTOM LINE: Discussions of the multiverse, though fleeting, are all over this episode. ZFT seems to think that the pattern of weird occurrences is leading up to an us-versus-them fight, though who will be on each side is unclear. Also of note: When Olivia tells Robert Jones she can’t disarm the bomb, he tells her she can because he has something she doesn’t yet have: faith.
[Editor's note: Fringe is taking a short break and will return in April.]

Episode 13: A Viral Way to Alter DNA

Heather Wax — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:12:00 +0000

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: We open on a plane, where a passenger writes in a journal. We see the phrases “advanced technology,” “avoids capture,” and “seems dangerous” before his nose begins to bleed onto the page. He hightails it to the lavatory, where he swabs his mouth and drops the sample into a vial of clear liquid that instantly turns red. This, apparently, is a bad sign, because he accosts a flight attendant and demands that she restrain him right away. Sedatives, tasers—he wants them all at the ready: Something really horrible is about to go down. The flight crew treats him like he’s insane as he informs them he’s going to lock himself in the bathroom, and they shouldn’t open the door for any reason. Once inside, his teeth fall out and his back breaks into a mat of big purplish spikes. He’s screaming and causing a ruckus as the alarmed passengers wonder what’s going on. It grows quiet, and as the stewards are wondering what to do, a giant spiny creature bursts from the bathroom, creating general terror. The porcupine-plagued plane crashes and burns. Man, what does “the pattern” have against air travel?
At Olivia’s apartment, Ella plays with her aunt’s makeup and jewelry, including the engagement ring found in John’s effects after his death. Rachel pries about “partner John”— apparently Olivia kept her relationship secret even from family — and Olivia testily responds that “Everything between us was a lie.” Soon after, she meets Phillip Broyles and the Bishops at the crash scene. Their task force is taking command because of the presence of the giant porcupine’s charred corpse. Charlie brings over the passenger manifest and as Olivia flips through, she recognizes one of the men on board. She has a flash of memory, but it actually belongs to Jack, courtesy of their mind-meld. The guy’s name is Marshall Bowman, she tells Charlie, who looks perplexed.
At the lab, Walter, Peter, and Astrid slice and dice the airplane monster. Walter notices something hard inside the man’s palm; when it’s cut out, it’s a small plastic disc like the one taken out of dead DEA agent Evalina Mendoza’s hand. Meanwhile, Charlie and Olivia find out more about Marshall. He took care of high-end clients for a credit company, and perusal of his client list prompts Olivia’s Jack-memories again: She recognizes client Daniel Hicks as a man involved in Bowman’s shady business.
Back at the lab, Peter lets her know that the giant prickly beast was, indeed, Marshall Bowman, infected with a designer virus and carrying the disc under his skin. Hicks is brought in for questioning and is pretty standoffish until Olivia shows him pictures of Marshall’s remains. Just then, Hicks’ nose starts to bleed. “We must have been dosed,” he gasps, falling to the ground, but Olivia won’t allow him to be sedated until he coughs up the name of who dosed him. “Conrad!” he cries.
Walter works on an antidote while Hicks is strapped to a table in the lab, dozing in a drug coma. Olivia asks Broyles to dig up John to see if there was a disc in his hand, too, but he admits that John’s body didn’t go to the NSA. “Where did it go?” Olivia demands. Cut to Massive Dynamic. Nina Sharp escorts the pair into the lab where John’s body has been hooked up to electrodes since the pilot episode. She assures Olivia, who looks completely gobsmacked, that John is dead. He’s been kept alive in part because the palm discs go bad after their host bodies die; the little bits of info Massive Dynamic has been able to glean points to John being part of a bioterror cell. Based on information from an FBI snitch, Conrad has set up a meeting to sell his virus. Needing answers, Olivia drives back to the lab and calls Peter to have him prep the tank: She’s going back in.
In her mind, Olivia goes to the motel where she and John had their trysts, just in time to see her and him come through the door and fall on the bed, kissing. When Memory Olivia gets up to use the bathroom, it’s clear that Memory John sees the real Olivia. She grabs his gun and tells him she knows about his bioterror plot, throwing in that Bowman is dead and Hicks is sick. She even shoots him, but then they fade to another memory …
They’re in an alley and he points to a car that drives by. “That’s Conrad,” he says, then points to a nearby rooftop, where yet another Memory John is decked out in sniper gear. “It was my most important mission, and I failed. I let that monster get away. I didn’t know it was him,” he says sadly, adding that no one knows what Conrad looks like, making him that much harder to catch. Bowman and Hicks, he adds, are NSA agents on a black ops mission to stop Conrad—as was he. She doesn’t believe him, but it doesn’t matter: Her vital signs start going crazy, so Walter and Peter pull her from the tank.
The NSA, of course, has no record of anything John said. After the FBI nabs Conrad’s scheduled buyer, Olivia and Peter go to the meeting in his place. Hicks listens in, but the virus takes hold just as Conrad arrives at the meeting and orders Olivia and Peter killed. Thank goodness Charlie busts in with his entire team to capture Conrad and save the day. Back at headquarters, Broyles tells Olivia that the FBI still considers John a traitor. She looks content, though, now that she knows the truth. Walter administers Conrad’s antidote to Hicks and then acquiesces to Olivia’s request to go in the tank again.
He warns her that it may be the last time she “sees” John; her brain waves show she’s nearly purged herself of his memories. They meet up by a lake. She tells him she trusts him. He puts the ring on her finger. They kiss, then he disappears.
BOTTOM LINE: The show alludes, again, to the idea—and dangers—of “playing God,” this time by introducing a man-made “designer virus” that changes its victims’ DNA and turns them into monsters.

Episode 12: Seen, Ghost in the Machine

Heather Wax — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:40:00 +0000

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: In the suburb of Springfield, Massachusetts, a teenager is on the phone while sitting in front of his computer. A pop-up window appears on screen with the headline, “What was that noise?” and prompts him to click on a button. He does, and as he ends his phone conversation, a series of blurry videos begin streaming on his screen. They look like the lost reel of The Blair Witch Project, and they sound like it, too—lots of screaming and spooky noises. His mom ducks her head in to tell him she and his father are going out, and because she’s used to the uncommunicative nature of teen boys, she doesn’t think it’s weird when he doesn’t respond. His back is to her, so she can’t see that he’s transfixed by the video, tears streaming down his face, mouth agape. She leaves. A hand morphs out from the screen reaches toward the boy and eventually grabs on to his skull. That’ll teach him to install Pop-Up Blocker.
At Walter’s Harvard lab, we hear him loudly denounce Darwin’s theory of evolution while Peter opens an envelope addressed to his dad. Astrid notices him read it and toss it in the garbage as Olivia calls to say the computer boy—Greg—is dead and his body will arrive at the lab shortly. While the Bishops go out to meet it, Astrid sneakily retrieves the balled-up letter from the trash. After Greg is laid out for an autopsy, Walter announces that the teen’s brain has completely liquefied … and Peter barely hides his disgust as he drains the gray matter into a beaker. Astrid, who we learn has a background in computer science, examines the hard drive that Greg’s parents gave Olivia and deems it fried. While she gives it another look, Olivia travels to an auto repair shop to talk to Luke, who was chatting with Greg the night before. Luke is surprised by the news of Greg’s death and tells Olivia that they’d been friends since their dads worked together years before. Just then, Peter calls. There’s been another victim.
The second guy died at the car dealership where he worked and exhibits the same symptoms as Greg: brains leaking from the ears, nose, and mouth. Ew. The dead man, Anton, died in front of his computer, too. Astrid looks at Anton’s hard drive, which is corrupted in the same way that Greg’s is, and realizes that both downloaded a gigantic file before the drives crashed. Peter takes both pieces of hardware to one of his unsavory contacts, leaving Astrid to share the trashed note with Olivia, who looks shocked.
Peter’s contact, Hakim, isn’t happy to see him. But when Peter produces a gold coin that seems to have meaning to both of them, Hakim warms up. He locks on to the file that both victims downloaded and is amazed at the complicated way it’s been bounced around the world. He can’t tell where it originates, but he can tell that it’s being downloaded right now … in Olivia’s apartment! Cut to Olivia’s place, where her niece, Ella, is playing on a laptop. Peter calls Olivia and both race to her apartment, where Ella clicks on the pop-up and the bizarre video begins to play. Her mom, Rachel, is cooking and isn’t aware that Olivia’s frantically calling or that a digitized hand is reaching out of the laptop screen toward her daughter’s head. Olivia busts in, guns blazing, and the video abruptly shuts down. Peter’s close behind. Ella is catatonic for a moment, then comes around and asks when Olivia got home. Later, Peter plays with Ella and flirts with Rachel. Suddenly, Ella remembers the hand, prompting Olivia to take a closer look at the laptop. She notices the built-in camera is activated … and we cut to a dank basement where a man stares at a computer screen that’s receiving the signal from Olivia’s laptop. He mocks her inability to comprehend what’s going on—but then quickly shuts down the screen when someone approaches his workshop. Turns out, it’s his son … who’s also Greg’s friend, Luke. It becomes clear that Luke has no idea what his dad is up to, but he’s wary about why anyone not in The Matrix would need that many computers in one place. All he’ll say is that he’s working on a new program.
In Evanston, Illinois, a woman comes home to find her day trader husband dead at his computer, soupy brains all over the place. At Harvard, Walter’s figured out what’s going on but Astrid puts it in plain language: “It’s like a computer virus that infects people.” Outside, Peter has a tense conversation with an older woman who wants to see Walter. He won’t allow it. Olivia later confronts him about the letter, which was from the woman, and exposits that she’s the mother of the lab assistant that died in a fire at Walter’s lab 20 years before. (Her death, by the way, was the crime for which Walter was found guilty and imprisoned.) Peter doesn’t think Walter can handle talking with the grieving mom; Olivia does. Astrid interrupts to say that the newest victim married Miriam Dempsey, Luke’s mom, a year ago. Olivia and the gang eventually figure out that Luke’s dad, Brian, worked as an advanced computer programmer for Greg’s dad until he was fired. They bring Luke in for questioning, but after Sanford Harris forces Olivia to come down hard on the teen, the boy demands a lawyer and clams up. When he’s released, however, he runs right to his dad’s workshop, where Olivia finds Brian watching his own program and slowly losing what’s left of his mind. He holds a gun under his chin and, after a few moments, kills himself.
At the FBI, Phillip Broyles sticks up for Olivia and tells Harris that if he wants to take her down, he’s going to have to go through him. At Harvard, Peter brings the lab assistant’s mom to see Walter, who handles the situation with compassion and empathy. And later that night at Olivia’s apartment, the doorbell rings: It’s a slightly tipsy Peter, who apologizes to Olivia and says she was right about Walter after all.
THE BOTTOM LINE: The “ghost in the machine” concept—illustrated here by the computer virus that’s too effective for mankind’s own good—originated with Gilbert Ryle’s take on Descartes mind-body concept and gained even wider notoriety with Arthur Koestler’s book of the same title. Koestler argued that humans have a propensity for self-destruction. The virus in this episode, had it gotten out of control (like most viruses do), might’ve given humanity a little push in Koestler’s direction.

Episode 11: Behold, the Common Cold

Heather Wax — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:37:00 +0000

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: When we last left Olivia, she’d been hauled away by Robert Jones and his band of thugs—including turncoat FBI agent Mitchell Loeb. She’s still MIA at the beginning of this episode. Astrid brings news of the disappearance to Peter and Walter at the lab, while Phillip Broyles and Charlie have their entire division, as well as any other law enforcement teams they can commandeer, try to find her. Sanford Harris, the pal of Broyles’ that Olivia put away for sexual assault years before, calls his friend out of the blue to tell him he’ll be conducting a review of Broyles’ division. That can’t be good …
Cut to a nondescript, sterile facility where Olivia’s strapped to a gurney, flipped over, and given an involuntary spinal tap by men wearing rubber masks. While facing the floor, she notices one of the men is wearing tasseled loafers. When he leaves the room, we see that man is actually Loeb, which also can’t be good. When a junior staffer is the only one left watching Olivia, she meekly asks for water and to be unstrapped so she can drink it. He takes pity on her and gets the glass smashed into his face in return. She jumps off the table, fights him a bit, and runs off, grabbing some keys, a random cell phone, and a metal cylinder from the laboratory on her way out. Away from the building, she calls Broyles and asks for a team to meet her to storm the lab. While she’s waiting, she stops at a vacant lot and buries the cylinder for safekeeping. Good thinking, too—when the FBI agents find her, they shoot her with a tranquilizer dart, which knocks her out.
She wakes handcuffed to a bed in Boston Hospital, where Harris informs her that his sexual assault charges were overturned and he’s now a consultant who’s been tasked with looking into her division—“Which gives me the prerogative to question your sanity, your loyalty, your willingness to serve,” he tells her. “It seems to me the people you surround yourself with have failed those tests at every turn.” Though Harris seems like a big jerk, he does a nice thing for the audience by reviewing the basic setup of the show: what happened to John Scott, who the Bishops are, how they all came to work together, etc. He uncuffs her and leaves, and she scurries to the FBI, where Charlie tells her that the building she was held in is completely empty. No clues, no fingerprints, no nothing—same holds true for the phone and car she stole. She barely has time to absorb this not-so-great news when he adds that a woman named Rachel is waiting for her in the lobby. Olivia looks uneasy. “She’s my sister,” she says. But she pastes on a smile and meets Rachel and her daughter, Ella, who gives her aunt a Magic 8 ball. Everything’s all smiles and hugs and cheery fun times, and they make a plan to meet at Olivia’s apartment— where they’re staying—later. Olivia takes the Bishops to the site where she buried the cylinder, and Walter tests the test tubes inside right there on the spot. Yes, he tells Olivia, he knows what her captors were up to.
Meanwhile, a Boston College professor lectures his students on viruses. He takes a sip of water, looks a little green, and then starts choking. He collapses, his teaching assistant tries CPR, and there’s general bedlam as he dies. An all-out panic erupts when a giant slug pokes its head out of his mouth, slithers out of his body, and starts careening around the room. There’s much screaming and oozing.
The Bishops trap the giant slug at BC and take it to Harvard for examination as Olivia meets with the TA. They stroll on what is supposed to be the BC campus but what real Bostonians will recognize as Boston University. The TA confesses that she was having an affair with Prof. Kinberg and that he had just accepted an immunology post with the Centers For Disease Control. Prof. Simon, from another school, was hired too, Olivia learns. She posits that the people behind Kinberg’s death were responsible for taking her and that they’re probably gunning for Simon. Broyles gives her the unofficial OK to take Simon into protective custody. As she and Charlie leave to get Simon, Loeb tells her he’s taking charge of the investigation about her disappearance. Grrrrreat.
Simon’s in custody and being questioned when Peter calls: Walter deduced that one of the test tubes contained slug eggs, which need both stomach acid and water to be activated. Loeb picks that moment to deliver a glass of water to Simon, who takes a sip and begins having a slug attack moments later. He dies violently as Charlie re-enters the room; another giant slug pops out of his mouth, and a freaked-out Charlie shoots it. At Harvard, Walter finally identifies the slithering beasts: a virus called nasal pharyngitis. Peter seems grudgingly impressed. “They super-sized the common cold,” he says, noting the irony of using the virus to murder epidemiologists. But why did they want Olivia?
Olivia has a quick dinner with her family, during which we learn that Rachel and her husband, Greg, are having problems and that she’s staying with Olivia until she figures things out. The next day at work, Loeb tosses Ella’s Magic 8 ball, and it falls on the ground … where Olivia reaches down to get it and notices his tasseled loafers. Gotcha! For help, she goes to Charlie, who then turns to Peter for a little illegal wiretapping that Harris won’t notice. Peter happily helps, and they listen in on Loeb’s phone while Olivia goes to his house. She’s about to break in when his wife, Samantha, catches her. Suspicious, Samantha invites her in for tea, and when Olivia asks to use the bathroom, Samantha calls Loeb and tells him the jig is up. He has only one suggestion, which Peter and Charlie overhear: “You need to kill her. Right now.”
Olivia sneaks around Loeb’s study and finds pictures of the giant slug while Samantha retrieves a gun and goes on the hunt. But Olivia gets the jump on her. A girlfight ensues, ending when both women take a shot at each other; Samantha misses, Olivia hits her target right between the eyes.
In the meantime, Loeb has left the FBI with all of his things, and there’s no way to track him. The team texts him from Samantha’s phone and tells him to meet “her” at a phone booth. Unaware that she’s dead, he does, and is captured. But he refuses to say who he’s working for … until Olivia shows him pictures of Samantha’s corpse and says she’s responsible for the woman’s death. “Did you kill them?” she asks, and he’s so angry that he admits to killing the professors. “Did you not understand the rules, who we’re up against? Who the two sides are? Tell me you at least know that!” he rages. “We didn’t kidnap you, idiot! We saved you.”
THE BOTTOM LINE: As Walter reminds us in his lab notes (regarding what he calls the “mammoth virus grown in the belly”): “How difficult it proves to separate myth from fact, and fact from myth!”

Episode 10: Vice & a Transport Device

Heather Wax — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:03:00 +0000

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: We begin this week in Philadelphia, where Mitchell Loeb and his crew break into a bank. They set up a larger-scale version of his apple experiment from a couple episodes back and then walk through a solid wall to gain access to the vault. The effects look pretty cool. They cut a safe-deposit box out of the wall and haul it through the wall, but there’s a mishap and one member of the team is left in the vault. As the window of time draws to a close, the man gets unstuck and starts to exit … just as the wall solidifies around his torso. Uncaring, Loeb shoots the trapped man in the forehead and orders the crew to take off.
A chatty Peter and Olivia arrive at the crime scene with Walter in tow. Before they get down to business, we learn that Olivia has a sister and went to boarding school. Enough with the pleasantries, kids: There’s work to be done. Phillip Broyles alerts them to three similar heists in the recent past, and Olivia recognizes the man in the wall as Raul Lugo, someone from her Marine unit. Far away in Germany, Robert Jones—who gave Olivia the code “Little Hill” a few episodes back—is meeting with his lawyer in prison. The lawyer tells Jones the Philly job was successful. That pleases Jones, who orders his lawyer to wire 100,000 dollars to Loeb and to bring him some seemingly random items, including sunblock, when he returns the next day.
Olivia arrives at Lugo’s home in Edison, New Jersey, a place she knows well from when she hung out with Lugo and his wife during her Marine years. Except—oops! — when Lugo’s estranged wife doesn’t recognize Olivia but confirms some memories she has, Olivia realizes John’s memories and her own have become so enmeshed, she can’t tell them apart anymore. Meanwhile, at Massive Dynamic, a scientist informs Nina Sharp that they’ve hit a wall retrieving John’s memories. Sharp’s not happy. Later, the scientist figures out that some of John’s memories may be in Olivia’s mind. Sharp gets a look on her face like she’s plotting something really evil.
At Harvard, Walter examines Lugo’s hand and theorizes that the bank crew used high-powered vibration to make the wall’s molecular structure permeable. The unfortunate side effect? Radiation poisoning. Peter and Olivia go to a bar to talk to Lugo’s friend; when that lead turns up dry, they drink and talk about Olivia’s uncanny ability to remember any number she sees. She rattles off the numbers of the missing safe-deposit boxes and Peter realizes they’re part of the Fibonacci sequence: Each is the sum of the previous two. When they tell Walter, he realizes that the boxes are his, taken out under pseudonyms, but he can’t remember why.
After the FBI crew misses another of Loeb’s jobs—this one in Providence, Rhode Island—they do manage to catch one of the team members. He’s a former Marine, one of Lugo’s pals from the VA Hospital, and Peter correctly diagnoses him with radiation sickness. The man claims not to know Loeb or what he’s doing, saying he was only hired as a freelance goon, but does remember something about meeting up at a field in Westford, Massachusetts. Olivia goes to a map and finds Little Hill Field there, and connects the dots. In Germany, Jones again meets with his lawyer and asks him to procure one more thing: Olivia. Eew.
At the lab, Walter remembers that Peter was deathly ill as a child. In an effort to find the one man who could help him, even though he’d been dead for years, Walter invented a machine that “in theory, could retrieve anyone from anywhere,” he recalls. But when Peter recovered on his own, the machine wasn’t necessary. The pieces, he posits, may be in the boxes Loeb’s men stole.
Indeed, at Little Hill Field, Loeb’s men have the device all set up. In Germany, Jones meets with his lawyer one more time, snaps his neck, and dons the dead man’s suit. He steps into the corner, rubs some sunblock on his face, pops a pill, and waits … as a light starts to shine around him. Back in America, Olivia’s on her way to the field when a car runs her off the road. Men jump out and tranquilize her, then carry her away. All of a sudden, Jones appears in Little Hill Field. Loeb meets him and gives him the news he wants to hear. “Well then,” Jones says, all smarmy and creepy. “Let’s not keep her waiting.”
Broyles calls Sharp to tell her Olivia’s missing. When he implies that Sharp’s got her stashed somewhere, she falls all over herself denying it. Might the lady protest too much?
THE BOTTOM LINE: By manipulating molecules to gain a specific result, Robert Jones, Mitchell Loeb, and their ilk are playing God—yet there’s very little question of whether they’re the good guys or the bad guys. Walter’s recollection about why the transporting device was first built (to save Peter’s life) puts him in the same category. Whether the machine is built to save a little boy’s life or to amass personal wealth and stature seems to be moot when such deity-like powers are up for grabs.
[Editor’s note: This will be the last Fringe recap for 2008. New episodes begin in January.]