Fringe

Fringe continues it’s run as one of the more intriguing, if maddening programs on television.  The producers have “reset” the show’s overarching conspiracy more than once since the show began.  But the last two seasons have settled on a string theory concept that seems to have carried them up until the present.   

This season began with the Observers, those hairless derby wearing “men” that ensure order in the universe, resetting the cosmic time line so that Peter, played by Joshua Jackson never existed in the original universe.  But fear not, the producers did not jettison one of their principle actors.  Instead he’s been given a new story arc to embark on.  Jackson’s Peter Bishop has been desperately trying to return to his “original time line” the whole season. After the Observers managed to erase him from the universe thus restoring order.

At the beginning of the episode we see Peter Bishop and Anna Torv’s Olivia Dunham kiss.  Apparently she “remembers” that Peter has always existed in this plain of reality.  This isn’t explained through dialog but merely through a series of scenes in which Olivia feels weird and headache-y and the world gets all swirly around her.  Meaning all the effort that the Observers had gone through to expunge Peter from existence has seemingly failed.

After this flashback intro we are presented with this weeks main plot.  A young man in a mental institution near Deerfield, Massachusetts who appears to be talking to himself, but this is intercut with a group of men breaking into a house and attacking and killing the homeowner.  Every word he says is in direct response to the actions of the men in the house.  After the attack he man in the institution collapses exhausted.

Olivia meanwhile has started to remember information about Peter.  She stops by his apartment and proceeds to detail how the apartment looked in Peter’s timeline where he lived with his father Dr. Walter Bishop, played by John Noble.

Walter postulates, as he often stands as the Greek Chorus of the show, introducing the scientific theory that each episode will be based on, that Peter is influencing Olivia somehow to remember the things she is remembering about Peter.  

The boy from the hospital meanwhile, whose name we learn is Sean it turns out, is not actually schizophrenic, as he has been diagnosed but is actually communicating telepathically with the killers, because he is related to them.

The man the men killed was a journalist who had been investigating a doctor who was renown for his in vitro fertilization techniques. 

Walter in the next expository scene posits the theory that the killers felt threatened by their possible discovery and like a colony of bees protecting their hive, lashed out. Peter and Olivia visit the fertility doctor at his retirement home and discover that he was not giving the families that came to him for assistance the variety they were looking for but was in fact using the same batch of sperm for each family, his own. The doctor then makes the interesting claim that he had tried to defy God’s law by trying to reverse engineer genetic traits that had been lost to humans through evolution back into them.  Hence the hive-mind of the antagonists. 

Walter also figures out that the Cortexifan, that he and William Bell developed to expand the mind of young children and expand their ESP powers, Olivia included, was found in Olivia’s blood recently, contributing to her migraines.

Walter forces Seth Gabel’s Lincoln Lee to take him to Massive Dynamic, the corporation that he and William Bell founded to ensure that the only remaining vials are still intact.

Back in Massachusetts, the hive-mind men find their maker and kill him in a very obvious homage to Frankenstein.  Astrid meanwhile is tasked with accompanying Sean as they try to track the other hive-mind men.  Astrid humanizes Sean by explaining that not hearing dozens voices in your head in normal.  Sean had felt lonely when all the voices stopped talking.

Peter and Olivia go looking for the scientist’s old notes only to be ambushed by the hive-men.  A shootout ensues wherein they kill a number of the hive-men.

Peter finally accepts that Olivia really remember all the stories she has been telling him instead of being influenced by Peter as Walter had thought.  The two finally kiss again.

Walter meanwhile drinks a vial of the Cortexifan only to discover that it is just Red #4 and water.  Peter had been waiting for Olivia in a car but she never comes back. Someone has kidnapped her!  Olivia wakes up and discovers that she is tied up with Nina in a dungeon.

The show uses parallelism on a number of levels to explicate the ideas being presented in the episode.  The hive-mind men, the multiple universes, the story lines are parallel to each other.  And the structure of the episode remains consistent as the same story arc in each scene follows each story arc.