What happened?
Fringe Team investigated a case of a man on a plane who terrified passengers and crew by needing to be sedated to stop something from happening. At the airport he then transformed into a monstrous beast and killed security personnel. Olivia and Peter both remembered the case from their previous timeline, but this time it had changed and there was the suggestion that Mr. Jones was once again behind it.
Lincoln lead the investigation and broke rules by including Olivia, who had been suspended, and they managed to stop another man that was transforming. However, it transpired that there were more people using this drug to warp their genetic code suggesting an army of these new creatures was gathering.
Thoughts
Episodes like this make me wish I could remember the first season of Fringe better. This season in particular has been carrying over hallmarks and plot threads from that first run (Mr. Jones being the most prominent aspect to that) and, whilst I appreciate the sense of continuity, I feel that it’s asking a lot of the memory of the general audience. Hopefully it won’t be entirely crucial to have intimate understanding of all that went on all those years ago, though for this episode and perhaps other details I do wonder if there are certain subtleties and nuances I am missing out on.
So this episode at least used its ‘case of the week’ structure to tie it in with the larger mythology, which is rather clever. Having it be a case that Peter and Olivia had previously worked on, with slight differences, meant there was a structured plot here to drive proceedings and provide some form of resolution. In the meantime the character progression of Olivia could have a little time to percolate, with it becoming more and more established that the old Olivia is rapidly replacing the new one.
Her not being able to remember conversations with Lincoln, and seeing the pained look on his face as he acknowledged that, was good stuff. It would seem that Lincoln and Nina are really going to be the only characters to which we get any sense of how much one Olivia is going to be missed as she is replaced by ‘Alpha Olivia’. Lincoln showed himself to be nothing other than thoroughly decent about the whole matter, of course, as you would expect of him. There was a little possibility that there could be antagonism from him towards Peter but that was soon quashed. Poor Lincoln. The only real problem for his character now is a threat of redundancy in terms of having a compelling reason to remain on the scene. Hopefully he won’t just be killed off and instead better uses will be made of him.
He stuck his neck out a little bit by allowing Olivia to work on the case, though I am glad that her being kept off the Fringe team wasn’t a conceit that continued beyond this episode. It would have just been tiresome. Luckily Broyles was there to see the light and realise that even this new Olivia with faint memory of this world was of far better use working on the team than she was sitting on the outside being evaluated. So it was she could assist everyone in figuring out what on Earth was happening with the hedgehog bat monsters.
In hindsight, the ending did a lot of good stuff. It would have felt like a diversionary enjoyment to have the episode concluded with the death of the remaining creatures. The questions then would have really focused around the question of why it was events in this timeline had worked slightly differently than how they did in Olivia and Peter’s timeline. There isn’t an easy answer to that question, really, beyond the obvious point that this isn’t quite the same world populated by quite the same people so it stands to perfect reason that events would never play out exactly the same way.
It appears to be the case that this army of creatures is being bred for a larger purpose. Very often throughout season one of Fringe it seemed like many of the cases pointed towards a purpose to build an army, or super-developed person for a larger cause. I have a jumbled memory of there being a manifesto that forewarned of a coming war and, of course, Olivia and the Cortexiphan kids all fell into a uniform and manner following their experimentation that was, again, designed to create hyper-developed individuals for a grand cause.
Like I said, I wish my memory of all this stuff was crystal clear. But we’re going back a few years and, besides, I also have the nagging feeling that a lot of it won’t be as pertinent as the show might hope I’d believe it is. That all being said, the ending appeared to suggest (and Fringe does do a lot of appearing to suggest stuff) that Mr. Jones was behind this collection of people that are all set on morphing themselves into these beasts that develop wings and, with enough time and drugs, potentially develop into something else entirely. Question always comes down to wondering about the purpose of that, and that question lately generally centres on what it is that Mr. Jones is up to. On that matter I am still none-the-wiser.
The return of the bookstore guy was a nice callback of an old minor character. I suppose we, the audience, are being made to feel like Olivia is. Having spent the whole season in a new universe with ‘new’ characters we are getting blasts from the past and having our memories jogged on stuff that happened a long time back in the old universe timeline. I’m not holding out a mass of hope that there is a big endgame planned, that this harking back to the original timeline represents some kind of cyclical design of some sort, but it’d be cool if this did all feedback strongly.
I did enjoy the episode, actually. I thought it did a great job in injecting genuine menace out of its monsters, and I wasn’t 100% confident that Lincoln was going to survive (the matter of his relevancy to the show feeding in to his increased level of peril!). Layering on the interplay between the characters and deftly showing us how things are going to be as one Olivia fades away to be replaced by what is, technically, a completely new person was also nicely handled. So whilst it was ostensibly just a transitional episode on a lot of fronts it successfully managed to make it feel substantial in its own right.
What was the best part?
I have to admit that for the first time in as long as I can remember a TV show actually made me jump. Fringe managed this, with the moment that Lincoln encountered the monster in the dark house for the first time. It was a text book jump scare, with Lincoln panicking at seeing something before letting his guard down and being attacked on the blindside. But it worked. It made me jump on my sofa, no question. I was rather glad I wasn’t holding a hot drink at the time, actually, otherwise I might have ended up tipping it all over myself.
What do I think will happen next?
Fringe seems to be almost moving through the motions of getting the old Olivia into and established within this new timeline. I don’t feel like the show is quite ready to tip its hand and show us what Mr. Jones is doing, and what further capacities he expects Olivia to be capable of, so for the next episode at least I am fully expecting a more routine case of the week, maybe another one that has callbacks to events in the first season or two.
That all being said, I don’t know how many episodes there are going to be this season (and I still don’t know if there is even going to be another season) but we should be definitely heading to the home straight for a finale by this point, so maybe things will gather pace for that quicker than I anticipate.
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