Fringe: The Human Kind Is An Emotional Wreckage, But There Is Hope!

Hello Fringedom!

We have returned from the hiatus to a fantastic Fringe episode with lots of confrontation, between POlivia, most importantly. The episode deals with the things that make us what we are, like faith.

Either having faith in an unseen God or in us and our own potential, it is one very important thing that moves people, which motivates people to doing whatever is needed to be done. We cannot think of faith without thinking of hope and it all leads us to how we face things in life, how emotionally we react to things because that is all we do, it is all we are.

All our thanks to the great folks at FOX Broadcasting and Joel H. Wyman’s team for all you have done for Fringe. Thanks also to Give Me My Remote for the nice video with Mr. Wyman (above).

The promotional sneak peeks for next episode “Black Blotter” look great! Walter is about to take the team off to another LSD adventure again, this time in 2036!

The Human Kind:

The episode deals with how the Human Kind deals with difficult situations. Some of us lose faith quickly and get to live negatively; others are able to see the light in the darkest places. Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) and Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) have lost their daughter twice, they have dealt with it their own way but it is in this episode that they are brought together.

Peter had a piece of tech that makes The Observers what they are in his head and Olivia builds walls around her heart, both of them unintentionally getting themselves apart little by little despite Walter Bishop (John Noble) and Astrid Farnsworth’s (Jasika Nicole) help.

What is more effective? Keep going with the plan that nobody understands and has been futile ever since or fighting equal by equal with the Observers by implanting their tech? After everything Peter has been through, at first I would pick the second too, however what change would killing Windmark (Michael Kopsa) bring to the whole picture?

On the other hand, with the plan, we have a chance of getting rid of all of them. The problem is that in the midst of the sorrow and grief for Etta Bishop’s (Georgina Haig) death, Peter got himself blinded. I gotta point out here that Josh as an Observer is simply flawless!

In the first scenes, we see Olivia in her car looking at a man cleaning the walls off her daughter’s RESIST posters. That’s when Anil (Shaun Smyth) arrived to deliver to her the same piece of technology Peter had implanted in his head.

She knows what Peter did and is on her way to stop him, but what I really hoped for was that she would implant herself too and be one hell of a couple fighting like bosses against the baldies. They would have had no chance if that had happened. LOL

By the time Olivia arrives in the lab, Walter has already recovered one more tape from Amber. Walter’s discovery ultimately leads the team to learn they must travel to Fitchburg where they have to acquire an industrial-sized magnet and she tells them about the piece of Observer-tech she got from Anil.

 

Walter can learn how to get Peter back by running tests on the porcupine brain to learn how it works. It was one of the funniest little moments in the episode when Astrid asks him whose brain he intends on using to test that tech! In the mean time, Olivia left to Fitchburg to retrieve the magnet.

When Olivia arrives in Fitchburg, she sees a little girl and it made me instantly think of ZFT and its chapter about ethics which stated that kids were to be protected as Walter reads in season one’s The Road Not Taken: “Our children are our greatest resource. We must nurture them and protect them. We must prepare them, so they can one day protect us.”

Which is what Etta did for her parents, she fought for them when they were gone, she made POlivia very proud of her and she gave up her life fighting to save them, to save the world. I think that Darby did not mean anything in that sense at that moment, however it is a nice touch to have Olivia interact with Darby (Eliza Faria), is not it?

 There in Fitchburg, Olivia meets Simone, played by Jill Scott. Ms. Scott is beyond a doubt the Jazz Diva as Lori referred to her in her latest review about the previous episode. I knew who Jill Scott was when I read she was cast for this episode, but as a musician only. I was impressed by her acting given the shortness of her part…

She rendered an outstanding performance that made me cry, made me believe they actually have a chance against the Observers. Really, it is more than how I am describing here, far more. I saw such a huge big hope in her eyes it was brilliantly done.

 

The moment Carlos (Claude Duhamel) tells Simone that a woman is looking for a magnet, the surprised look on Simone’s face was amazing, even better as they talked about how everyone else had lost faith when she was still holding on to the hope someone would come to the magnet that would help the grayish man save the world.

Simone started guessing things about Olivia’s life and it was done with so much brilliancy, so naturally. It was funny because Olivia has moved things with her mind, she has lit things on fire and she found it hard to believe the woman was able to foresee things.

 

Back in the lab, Walter and Astrid were running test in the porcupine brain with the Observers’ tech and learned that the device increases the neural activities to achieve the full potential of the brain with super high level thinking.

As the tests continued, Astrid realizes it would create new ridges in the brain overriding the areas responsible for emotions. The scene was cut back to the Fitchburg field and one little talking between Simone and Carlos got me intrigued because she did not have a good expression on her face, maybe she was just worried about the fuel or she had something to do with the ambush on Olivia.

 Right after that, she offers Olivia a glass of water a few moments before Darby mentions that everybody is talking about the fact that Olivia is on reward wire and the bounty on her.

Of course it gets Olivia scared and on the defensive against Simone. She asks her what is in the water, like sedative. Hurt, Simone drinks the water and comes to the conclusion Olivia has no faith and says she lost someone. Olivia disbelieving her is knocked down, so to speak, as the woman starts giving details no one would know about who she had lost. “But you lost your daughter… Twice”

Peter is thinking he has conned Windmark. But he was caught up by Windmark as he is far more experienced with the reading of futures. He made adjustments of his own to whatever Peter was planning so this way he found Peter.

The scene when they fight was excellent; Peter killed one observer (Charles Zuckermann) and kicked Windmark’s buttocks despite the dirty way he played Peter forcing his daughter last thoughts in his head as a way to ensure his weakness. At the end, I bet Windmark thought like “well, he is not that weak”.

 

 

Olivia said that people assign meaning to things without meaning to Simone and it is exactly what that other observer told Peter some episodes ago.

Remember An Origin Story? He said that Peter took the decisions he took based on the observation of a fly and Olivia has this same feeling now. It is not just numbers, Olivia…

I really wish I could hug the Fringe writers right now as well as Anna and Jill for their scenes, they were done so perfectly!!!

 Peter says there is no reason to be afraid of what he has been through, suppressing the emotional memory is no big deal, right? It means he would forget how it is to be married to Olivia Dunham, how on earth can he say such thing?

It is a big deal, it is Olivia Dunham we are talking about, and forgetting what it feels like to wake up next to her every morning is just… unbearable!!! And this change would be permanent… I wonder if avenging Etta would be that important if it means losing everyone else.

 

More unfortunate surprises crosses Olivia’s way, she cannot get a break, can she? On her way to Anil’s place to hide the huge magnet, Olivia found what looked like a car accident. If it was me, I would have accelerated and run over that scene.

I found it suspicious the moment I saw that! But Olivia has a golden heart and she stopped to check it out. It was a trap and she fell into it. Two guys ambushed her in order to assault her, she tried defending herself, but she was punched in the face, it was so horrible, I cannot even… The men were planning to deliver her to Windmark.

 

If anyone thinks they would let Olivia go easily, were wrong, so wrong… She did something with some material in the room she was locked I still do not fully understand.

She managed to shoot Briggs (Kett Turton) in the head and well as Stratton (Nathan Dashwood), I think that after dying twice, she has learned her lesson to be more prepared, such a MacGyver like spirit!

It is time for a talk face to face between POlivia. Olivia tried to put some sense into Peter’s Observer-head, which was difficult, but not impossible. It was very similar to a season four episode, I do not remember the name, I think it was a Short Story About Love when Olivia remembered Peter and everything they lived together in the previous timeline.

Now it is Peter who needs remembering and as they talked, he started recalling the memories and the love they share. It was enough for him to decide for her, for the love of his life. He chose Olivia instead of avenging Etta’s death through that wrong way which I so much loved.

 

Peter could as Olivia herself said, think ahead of everybody but the fact that she paid him this visit, had nothing to do with that except the love she had for him, and he needed to face the facts, looking at her. If he had not removed that thing from this head, it would mean good bye to anything he had ever felt for her or anybody.

Peter would become like Windmark, he would see things, memories like those from Etta Bishop’s (Georgina Haig) and it would mean nothing, he would not be able to understand it. It does not matter how good it feels to be able to manage numbers well and manipulate time, if you do not have the most important thing in life, the memories of how you feel about your daughter.

Watching this week’s episode, recalled me another episode from season three. On the 14TH episode from season three, called 6B, we were presented with the Merchant’s love story.

Alice (Phyllis Somerville) and Derek Merchant (Ken Pogue) had been married for 40 years. After his death, Alice was heartbroken, so heartbroken she could not get up from bed and that’s when she started seeing her dead husband’s ghost. At the same time really strange events started happening in the building leading everyone else to believe it was haunted.

 

They have no Physics’ knowledge so they assigned meaning to what they could not explain. Hello Simone, should have rang bells right here!!! The thing, she was not seeing a ghost. It was in fact her husband’s doppelganger from over there and the explanation is that they were emotionally quantum entangled and if she had not let go of him.

Besides unintentionally having caused the death of 6 people who had fallen through the balcony, a vortex would have been opened which would have swallowed up half of Brooklyn.

I found it would be worth mentioning, because of what Peter told Alice to help her understand she had to let Derek go which did not help at all. Peter told her to look around and see that she had memories all around her and she should do anything to keep that, the memories given the fact that it was not his husband she was talking to.

Even though she she refused to listen. She only let him go when a huge difference between them came to light, this Derek she was talking about had had daughters, but Alice never gave birth. To sum up, Alice ended up talking to Olivia; she said that if the impossible is possible, who is to say they will not see each other again?

Here is my point bring up the story from 6B, Peter had a major role in helping Olivia get her stuff together and breaking free from the damage the Altlivia’s (Anna Torv) vagenda had caused her life and mostly to her relationship with Peter. She had told him that she was terrified that she would not be able to fix this thing and she was stopping them from being together, which was true and he helped her through it, despite being the problem on the question in her mind. Is not it what she did for him in this episode?

At the end, she was there and got him out of that dark place. It was really awesome to see that now Peter is in Alice’s place, refusing to let go… I love, I freaking love this show and its full circle story arcs!

My thanks to Kenn for video embedding and Lori for final proof of my review. As always, we appreciate you visiting the WormholeRiders News Agency!

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Thanks for reading!

Raphael