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| Friday, October 7, 2011 11:02 AM |
| On the Viewer - Fringe (Season 4, Episode 1 - "Neither Here Nor There") |
 by Fëanor |
(OK, so I lied about not posting this week.)
As usual, beware spoilers!
We open with Olivia and Bolivia bitching at each other.
Olivia: "Just because you walked in my shoes, don't you think for a moment that you know me."
Yuck! Hating the dialog so far.
Quick flicker of Peter in the background at the end of the first scene. I'm hoping they are eventually going to explain how him fixing everything somehow made it so he never existed. Seeing as how that's kind of a paradox.
Our favorite Observer is given the unpleasant task of making certain no one ever knows the truth about Peter, and his boss hands him a mysterious device that looks kind of like a hair clip, which I assume is somehow meant to help him in this task.
The background color of the opening credits has always been a clue as to the dominant setting of the episode - blue for our universe, red for the other - and now it's a sort of yellow, I assume to signify the new, blended universe/altered timeline.
The return of our universe's Lincoln Lee! Yay! I'm a fan of this character. He immediately gets a great speech about toast in an all-around entertaining sequence involving his partner being late and not wearing pants.
Holy crap, this version of Lincoln is a serious bad-ass!
Looks like Astrid is now a field agent. And as the Observers helpfully point out, in this timeline, Olivia and Lincoln have never met. This whole experience is quite similar to when we were tossed into the other universe and had to figure out how things were different as we went. Only now it's the universe we know and love that has itself changed.
Lincoln: "I'd like to talk to someone else."
Olivia: "There is no one else. There's just me."
Just kind of driving the sad point home there, aren't they?
At least the cow is still here.
Lincoln walks into the lab, and Walter immediately hands him a dead bird, which he then injects with something. It pops up and starts flying around.
Astrid: "Walter, you brought it back to life!"
Walter: "No, no, it's still quite dead. Isn't it wonderful?"
It's scenes like this that make me love this show.
Walter: "If you really want a story, you should look under the dome. I'm growing an ear."
God, I've missed Walter.
Looks like Astrid acts as Walter's eyes and ears at the crime scenes. He watches through a camera from the lab.
Unsurprisingly, Lincoln's persistence is rewarded and he is essentially inducted into the Fringe Division to help work on the freaky see-through killer case.
The Observer is buying a bunch of random electronics in a junk shop. The proprietor asks him what it's all for and he replies, "I need to erase someone from time." *facepalm* You don't just tell people that! He is such a crappy Observer!
This version of Walter, it comes out, is afraid to leave the lab - which explains why he's using Astrid as his eyes and ears at crime scenes. So it's a bit of a mystery when he can't be found.
Olivia: "Maybe he locked himself in the bathroom again? I'll check Gene's stall."
Turns out he's hiding in the sensory deprivation tank because he thinks he saw somebody in the mirror who disappeared. Poor Walter.
Lincoln: "Is he... all right?"
Olivia: "Well, it depends on your definition of all right. He's functional... except when he's not. But he's often quite brilliant. He's just never had anything to tether him to the world."
This is so sad. Peter's absence has left such a hole in this world.
Walter: "I don't think there's anything sadder than when two people are meant to be together and something intervenes."
And then a pointed cut to Olivia's face.
Walter: "I'm not wearing pants."
Astrid: "I'm on it."
Finally we find a link between the victims: they were all suffering from various diseases that involved metal imbalance. The killer appears to have cleaned their blood somehow. Pretty classic Fringe plot-line: a murderer is killing people to get something out of them to keep himself alive. They fall back on this whenever they need a monster-of-the-week story. I'll go with it, though; I like a good monster-of-the-week story.
Lincoln is pissed when he learns Fringe is keeping the bodies and not telling their loved ones the truth about their deaths.
Lincoln: "Those families are going to spend the rest of their lives wondering what happened to their loved ones - looking for answers. Can you imagine what that would be like, to have that - that hole in your life?"
Uh, yeah, I'm thinking maybe she can.
Walter: "People die. It happens. Sometimes they even die twice."
Astrid: "Dead people do not use their credit cards."
Walter: "Of course they do, certainly."
Olivia retells the story of the pilot episode of Fringe to Lincoln, although of course in this version Peter does not appear at all - she gets Walter out of the insane asylum by herself.
Olivia is a dumb-ass and gets close enough to the killer so that, even though she has a gun, he successfully disarms her with a briefcase. Gah!
Finally she gets it together and shoots the guy, like she should have in the first place. But surprise! There's more than one of them!
So what, there are like a dozen see-through people hanging around? How have they not been noticed more often??
The translucent dudes are some combination of mechanical and biological - similar to the shape-shifters.
Walter: "This tech is not from here."
Lincoln: "Not from here... you mean, like, China?"
Lincoln officially becomes a Fringe agent, and gets to see the bridge between universes - and the other Olivia. You could say he's a little confused.
Olivia has yet another "I know what you meant when you said that thing before" moments with Lincoln. Two of those in one episode is going a bit far, but okay.
The Observer shows up, clearly with the intention of flipping the switch that will erase Peter for good - but he can't do it. He turns off his machine and walks away. Neat moment.
In this timeline, Walter actually lives in the lab - he sleeps there and everything. And it turns out the man he's been seeing in reflections is Peter.
Well, despite a couple of wince-worthy, poorly-written dialog exchanges, and despite the unexplained paradox that sits squarely at the center of the whole story, this was actually a pretty solid episode. I like the sadness underlying everything, the heavy presence of the lack of Peter, and the conflicted Observer. And I like that Lincoln is taking a central role. Yay, Fringe is back! |
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