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| Friday, April 22, 2011 10:25 AM |
| On the Viewer - Fringe (Season 3, Episode 19 - "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide") |
 by Fëanor |
Lots of spoilers follow, so if you are capable of being spoiled and would rather not be, avoid!
Looks like they finally found a body that meets all Bell's requirements, and they're going to try to jump him into it!
Heh. Astrid just called Walter Wally.
Peter is a bit worried about the safety of the procedure as far as Olivia's concerned. Walter reassures him in his own inimitable fashion: "Olivia's mind is still peacefully at rest. She won't be aware of any of this. Though we should all take a few steps back."
Ha!
Walter: "Ready, Belly?"
Bell-livia: "Aye, aye, Captain."
Hee hee. I'm just imagining Leonard Nimoy saying that, with some pointed ears on...
The procedure doesn't work, but afterwards Olivia suddenly comes to the surface again and has a seizure. Oddly, they immediately call 911. Wouldn't they normally just take care of something like this themselves? Surely Walter is uniquely suited to care for a woman with an old man inside of her, seizing due to a crazy body-jumping experiment. And indeed, when they get to the hospital, Walter keeps trying to interfere with what the doctors are doing, and ultimately Bell himself has to come back to the surface to stop them: "Doctor, I've been jolted once today. If you do it again, you will kill me, and the young woman I'm living inside of."
Bell reveals that his calculations were off and he now believes that Olivia's consciousness is likely to be lost forever in as little as a day if they don't find some way to get him safely out of her body.
So now their plan is to go into Olivia's mind, using a technique they introduced in an earlier episode, find her consciousness, and guide it back out. While this is going on, they somehow plan to put Bell's mind into a computer. Okay then.
Bell-livia: "Walter, where do you keep the electro-magnetic sensors?"
Walter: "Back shelf, by the fish food."
Now we know the point of the episode title. Looks like all our main characters are gonna be tripping on LSD! Apparently it will help the mad science work somehow. Yeah, sure.
The LSD starts hitting Peter as Broyles comes in, and he tries to touch the guy's head. "You're bald! [whispering to Astrid] I think he's an Observer!"
Peter and Walter enter Olivia's dreamscape together - which looks like a city street at the moment. Peter observes that everyone there is dressed like they raided Olivia's closet (black, black, and more black).
Someone (apparently Olivia) signals them using Morse code from the top of an office building. Walter signals back using the top of a pudding container.
Peter: "You can't seriously be thinking about eating."
Walter: "Of course not! I just had lunch."
D'oh! Broyles mistakenly absorbed some LSD, too, and is staring with great fascination at a piece of licorice.
Walter suddenly recognizes Olivia's stepfather in the crowd. Everyone stops and looks at them. Very creepy and Inception-y! Time to run! Walter heads for a cab.
Peter: "Wait, wait, wait, wait! You're driving?"
Walter: "Okay."
Heh.
Everyone is trying to kill them for some reason, but they still manage to make it to Bell's office. It turns out Olivia is not there after all, just Bell - and he's a cartoon! When they enter the room, they become cartoons, too. Walter is pleased by this development; we can tell because a thought bubble appears over his head reading, "How wonderful!"
Olivia's mind is in fear mode, with all of the bad things from her past climbing out to attack. She's hiding from it all somewhere in this huge mental landscape, which is now entirely turned against them, and somehow they have to find her.
Broyles on acid is pretty amusing.
Peter says he thinks he can find where Olivia would hide - Jacksonville. Then they escape from a pack of zombies via zeppelin! This is pretty wild stuff.
Although the cartoon effect is creative and clever, I'm a little disappointed that we have to look at these clunky, computer representations of the actors instead of the actors themselves. I feel like John Noble would be wrecking this quiet scene with Bell right now. Ah, well.
Walter is worried he can't handle the things to come (Peter and the machine, in particular) without Bell's help, but Bell says Walter has achieved the wisdom of humility and his decisions will be just.
A mysterious stranger is in the engine room of the zeppelin. He dumps the fuel and jumps out with a parachute. Walter falls out with him. When Walter hits the ground, he wakes up back in the lab - he's out of the dream and Peter and Bell will have to go on without him.
But who is the stranger? Bell suspects it's someone Olivia had a bad experience with in her past. Hmm...
Broyles whistles at a tiny cartoon bird that lands on Walter's shoulder. Hoo boy.
Walter breaks some very important part of the computer by mistake and has to tear apart his beloved record player to replace it.
Turns out Peter really does know Olivia pretty well. Using details she's told him about her past, he's able to narrow down where she's likely to be hiding - in a house with a red door on the military base where she grew up, with her real father, who was apparently an important man. I'd be curious to know more about him and how he died.
As Peter steps into the house, everything becomes real again. There's a last test - he has to recognize that the grown-up Olivia at the door isn't really her; it's the child Olivia in the back. I feel like he's sort of making up for mistaking Bolivia for Olivia here.
Suddenly Olivia's stepfather shows up again, and some military vehicles come after them. Foolishly, Peter and Bell run away on foot instead of jumping back on the motorcycle. Sigh. Why do people always do this in movies and TV shows?
Peter gets hit by a truck and pops out of the dream, which means it's up to Bell to save Olivia. Which is not good. I don't trust that guy, especially when it comes to this.
Olivia finally just turns around and tells all these subconscious fears of hers to stop. And they do! So what was that all about? Bell says she should have been safe inside her own mind from the start, but Olivia has never felt safe, so she let herself be overwhelmed by her fears. She's her own worst enemy. But she's finally realized now how strong she really is. Now it's time for her to head out - and for Bell to go away.
Bell: "Tell Walter I knew the dog wouldn't hunt."
Bell knew moving his consciousness into the computer wouldn't work - he knew that for Olivia to survive, his consciousness would have to vanish. He gave Walter the computer thing to work on so he wouldn't be upset. He knew Walter would be okay without him.
And I have to say, even though I'll miss Bell, I kind of like that the computer thing didn't work, because that would have been hard to swallow even for Fringe.
Seeing Olivia and Peter be all happy together is creepy and weird.
Olivia has drawn a sketch of the mysterious stranger in the zeppelin. Peter asks who it is, and Olivia answers quite calmly, "Yeah, I don't know, I haven't seen him before. But I think that he's the man who's going to kill me."
Woah! That's a way to end an episode.
Well, we got rid of Bell again! Too bad. Some fun dialog moments in this one, and some cool, surreal stuff in the dream world. Definitely better than last episode. Plus, for a while there I was afraid Peter was heading to the field of tulips to find Olivia, and I'm glad that didn't happen, because it would have made no sense at all. |
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