What happened?
The Fringe team investigate a series of strange events related to apparent time anomalies. Believing Peter to be a potential cause, distorting the space-time continuum due to his appearance, they take him along to investigate. Whilst he experiences these time jumps himself it transpires that another man is chiefly responsible.
Continuing work his wife was pursuing before she developed Alzheimer’s, the husband has been creating a time bubble to the past so his wife can finish the work and create a permanent window to the past. However, realising the dangers occurring elsewhere the wife destroys her work so it can never be repeated.
Due to Peter’s assistance he is offered Walter’s campus residence to stay in, and whilst Olivia has figured the version of her Peter knew obviously meant something to him and is warming to him Walter is proving harder to win around.
Thoughts
Tricky business, time travel. A lot of sci-fi shows like to dabble in it and it can tie a plot up in knots and nonsense in no time flat. Fringe is very often a cut-above but, for me, it fell over itself with this episode. It’s a shame because, before the introduction of the husband, before the episode actually tried to explain itself so it could resolve the situation, it looked like Fringe was really cooking up a knockout instalment.
From the scene with the mother in her kitchen that switched to a burned husk, her rushing out of the place with her girl now a baby, to the scene where the kids in the car were nearly hit by a section of train appearing out of nowhere and dashing by, it was fast-paced and inventive stuff. Furthermore, Peter’s trips through time were masterfully handled; quick edits dropping him seamlessly from one place to the next. I loved how he just rolled with it, remarking how it could get annoying but got on with it.
Once an explanation was attempted to be posited it all started to unravel. I mean, there was a kernel of a good idea (albeit one that’s feeling a bit creaky on Fringe, that of the well-meaning person meddling with science and generating tragic results) but it wasn’t really well sold. The episode with Peter Weller in (can’t recall the name of it, possibly it was White Tulip) dealt with similar ideas, I seem to remember, and managed them far more successfully. I know Fringe often skirts around the cyclical nature of behaviour and events but recycling plot ideas with new riffs here just feels lazy.
I mean, the genius wife had her timeline interrupted by her husband dredging her forwards in time (kind of) and telling her everything, and then she disappeared back to her original timeline. . . Surely that would have changed history! And how did she just disappear anyway? To where? It was all very sketchy. Bizarrely the story could have shaped out that the husband’s mucking around with time travel was what caused her mental condition – but instead that self-fulfilling, terrible (and, yes, paradoxical) time loop idea was ignored.
Also glossed over was whatever was happening with Peter – when he kept zipping back and forth in time what were other people seeing him do? Did he break a piece off the car bumper first time at the scene, or when he travelled back there? Again, it was very sketchy, and I was waiting for a scene that would offer a more objective explanation – but it never arrived.
So the initially enticing premise gave way to a bit of a mess, luckily the episode had some good business going on with the main characters to redeem it even if I have to somewhat baulk at how quickly and easily the likes of Broyles and Olivia have bought into the idea that Peter is really Walter’s dead son as deposited from an alternate historical timeline! Just because it’s true doesn’t mean our leads should be so readily swayed by it!
I did like the interplay, or lack of, between Walter and Peter. Walter’s retreat into childish ignorance won’t hold for long, though I like how he is being won around by a sense of admiration by Peter’s display of intelligence at the Faraday cage belt plan. A sense of fatherly pride? Just a touch, but it can be fostered into something more.
Peter, meanwhile, has to deal with a kind of reversal to Walter, in that he has ‘lost’ the father he knew. This Walter won’t speak to him, but he also lives in the laboratory. The moment Peter returned ‘home’, pulling the sheets off the furniture of the place that he and Walter used to live in (curious that the place was furnished with a top notch enormous widescreen LCD television, I thought!), the point was hit home: this was the world he knew but it was a world he didn’t belong to.
As Peter remarked to Broyles, he has come to realise that he is the person that needs to be reset – but that is, of course, impossible. Also impossible, I feel, is the idea that he can go back to the previous version of the universe he knew. I think Fringe this season has set up plot dynamics and characters here that are establishing themselves as permanent, to be invested in, so I don’t see the ‘undo’ button getting pushed and all of that being erased to go back to the state of things at the end of season 3. So Peter is ‘stuck’ in this world but, maybe, Olivia and even Walter, might just awaken to an awareness of that previous version of things and make this new world feel more like home.
It was interesting that Olivia didn’t answer the question about what her dreams of Peter involved, and whether they at all featured the park and picnic as he dreamt. Also interesting was Peter being unaware of appearing and speaking to Walter before he properly arrived. If Olivia was dreaming of Peter, and Walter alone was having visions of him, it’s almost like they dragged him back into existence. . .
Deep, heady territory this. I rather hope that there’s more to be pursued about this angle, this extra dimension – a shared dream of a perfect day. That maybe all of these characters and versions of the universe are all circling around an ideal place, iterations and variations that fail to meet the ideal. . . If Fringe has an endgame, maybe that’s it.
What was the best part?
I really liked the sequence when Peter was jolted through time. The edits were sharp whilst the transitions were smooth. It was unexpected and it really enlivened what looked to be one of Fringe’s usual investigation scenes. Icing on the cake was Peter’s deadpan acceptance of what was happening and just getting on with it. Peter’s really cool this season!
What do I think will happen next?
I expect that Walter and Peter will continue to grow their relationship, to the extent that Peter may eventually be faced with a decision where he no longer wishes to return to the world he came from since he has become attached to this one. Olivia will be crucial in this. (As ever, Peter’s choice regarding Olivia will determine the fate of the universe!)
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