What happened?
Peter is intent on leaving for New York but is called back when Walter discovers something unusual with the footage they had of September before he disappeared. They discovered an address had been implanted in Peter’s eye. Peter investigated and discovered a beacon emerging from under the ground. He activated the beacon and it served to bring September back who informed Peter that he was home.
Olivia investigated the case of a man that was killing couples, extracting the pheromones of the male to make the female momentarily kiss him before he then had to kill her. Olivia tracked him down and captured him and he told her that he could tell she was in love. Later Peter met back with her and they embraced and kissed.
Thoughts
Oh Fringe how you make me roll my eyes, this deep into the season, 4 seasons into the show, and still you feel the need to drop in a case of the week when there’s so much more intense and interesting serial storylines to contend with. This episode’s case of the week was perhaps about as unsubtle as they come in terms of feeding into the principle themes at play with the main characters. Here we had a burned man, a damaged man, that was taking the pheromones of those in love so he could recreate a sense of romance that he lost from his life. That, naturally, tied in with Olivia and her damaged state – longing for a love that felt all too real towards Peter.
See how I roll my eyes.
How the murderer de-saturated the male victims and eked out their pheromone juice was, however, just about one of the most disgusting things this show has ever done. They must have some fun in the writer’s room trying to out-gross one another with the latest high concept way of extinguishing a human life. The fatty deposits of concentrated pheromone excretions was truly the kind of substance I can’t say it’s ever occurred to me could exist – to extract it from a dying human and collate it all together to rub into the pulse points is absolutely revolting. Kudos to Fringe and this case of the week on that front alone – it delivered the yuck. The rest of it was totally irrelevant.
Peter’s odyssey into Observer world was a lot more interesting. At the beginning of the episode he was doing his usual thing of hightailing it away from everyone when the going gets tough. It’s what he’s done before so perfectly in keeping with his character – although considering his character is dead set on trying to return to his own universe, and so needs Walter and The Machine to assist him, it seemed a little shortsighted for him to be skipping town away from his one good shot at achieving his goal. But anyway, it didn’t matter, Walter called him back because he’d spotted that September, in the blink of an eye, had inserted something into Peter’s eye.
I suppose I now have to add faster than light movement to The Observer’s repertoire of available skills. September’s original plan had been to have the address on the ball in Peter’s eye absorb into his consciousness, but Walter finding it had the same result: Peter went and found the old flat that September used to call home. I’m not quite sure what to make of The Observer having an actual place to live in the world(s) they are purely there to observe. Still, I guess everyone needs someplace to hang their hat and The Observers probably have quite a lot of hats to hang. Before long Peter had stumbled across some weird technology that he figured out how to work and that lead him to the beacon machine that has turned up a couple of times in previous seasons.
It felt like a bit of a cop out that this beacon managed to return September back to the world. I say that because it felt like a plot contrivance to solve an inconvenience that didn’t even need to be there. September had turned up having been shot, bleeding out, and eventually ‘died’. As such Peter discovered a beacon, brought September back, and so this gunshot wound we don’t even know the circumstances for got resolved and September was brought back from a death that we weren’t even clear had properly taken place.
Unless there’s going to be some kind of backwards time travel, or a crucial flashback revealing how September came to be shot that is revelatory to future events, I just don’t see what the point of the whole thing was. It brought September into Peter’s path directly, sure, and allowed him into his head and explained what he was – but all of that could have been achieved any number of other ways that would have been just as satisfactory and left less question marks. The frustrating thing about suspenseful, mysterious television is how sometimes the show writer’s feel the need to drape everything in vague and elusive mystery when a straightforward and clear dramatic turn of events would work just as well.
September’s message to Peter, about how he didn’t need help to get him back home because he basically already was, felt a bit. . . wet. Sure, the point that Olivia here had changed to become his Olivia and so there was no other person to go back to has, over the past few episodes, become transparently so – but I’d like to expect some kind of solid explanation about that. I worry that we’re not really going to get one. That there might be a murky theory about the bond between Peter and Olivia being too strong to be held back, but I’ll be disappointed if there is something more powerful and more compelling underpinning all that has been happening since the beginning of this season, when Peter was drawn back into a universe that had erased all awareness of him. There just has to be something that sells such a thing better than true love between Peter and Olivia being the driving force!
Olivia reached a conclusion that she wasn’t going to fight this transition into the new Olivia of memories and feelings she was being imbued with. It certainly makes things easier on a plot level, though I do feel there hasn’t been quite enough conflict from the Olivia that is being supplanted against the one that is taking over. Still, it’s been sold on the notion that these new memories that original Olivia is becoming aware of feel so much better than the ones so much so she had that she is prepared to let that become her life. It was a nice scene between Olivia and Nina, with Nina facing up to saying goodbye to her ‘Olive’, because the new Olivia believed she was becoming a better version of herself.
Word also for Lincoln, quietly broken hearted on the sidelines. Seeing Olivia and Peter fall for each other when he used to be in with a shot is bad enough, but he is watching an Olivia slowly morph into someone who won’t even remember that they once had a potential relationship and intimacy burgeoning between them. I do like Lincoln’s character in this universe. I suspect the show isn’t interested in delving too much into who he is outside of the Fringe Department work but if things didn’t feel so important elsewhere, all over the place, then I wouldn’t mind a bit of a detour into seeing more about who he is and what he’s all about.
The last scene really let the schmaltz sweep up the emotions, with Peter and Olivia finally dropping all the battles to avoid each other, or resolve universes, or prevent consciousness takeovers (talk about obstacles in the way of true love and Fringe really has to lay claim to having the most outrageous ones you’ve ever heard of!) and just give in to their feelings. A hug, a kiss, and suddenly all those consternations and problems are set aside. Peter and Olivia are together at last, properly, finally! Whilst I’ve not always been on the side that says I should really invest in them as a couple I have to say that this resolution felt earned; I felt wearied enough for the pair of them being apart to feel happy that they are together again.
Now they just have to save a world or two, I suppose.
What was the best part?
Call me an old romantic fool but I have to admit that the last scene got me. As unlikely as it seemed, it worked. If you had told me before the episode that the last scene will have Olivia and Peter hugging and kissing I’d have thought, Meh. But it turned out to be a wonderful, touching reunion and had me feeling all emotional. Fair’s fair, they got me.
What do I think will happen next?
I am assuming Fringe isn’t going to undermine all this good work and, indeed, legwork this episode went through to get Peter and Olivia together. The show has managed to set up an entirely new universe where neither Peter nor old-universe Olivia had any reasonable right to exist. Now they are both there, pretty much, so I don’t see the show undoing all of that! Which means with our dynamic duo together they can set about dealing with Mr. Jones and tapping into whatever further powers Olivia is said to possess.
That all being said there’s every chance the next episode could zip across to the other universe to catch up on events there. It certainly seems to have been treated as the poor relation this season, which leads me to think that the side with Peter and Olivia on it is the side we are supposed to invest in and another war may be on the cards. . .
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