Fringe - "Alone in the World"

Season 4, Episode 3

An episode that reminds you of the importance of cleaning your bathroom regularly

“He’s real. We have to find him.”

-Walter

“Neither Here Nor There” - Ba-dum.

“One Night in October” - Ba-dum-ba-dum.

“Alone in the World” - Ba-dum-ba-dum. Ba-dum-ba-dum.

With each episode, Fringe seems to be edging closer and closer to resolving the absence of Peter, without ever actually doing anything to advance us to that point. Now, it’s obvious that the show is trying to build a story over the episodes that will come before Peter’s return, however many that may be, and there is something theoretically solid with this plan. Many shows have ruined potentially good twists by reversing them too soon, and thus signifying to the audience that the twist itself was nothing more than a device to drum up interest, and has no real narrative value.

And yet even though Fringe has placed some episodes between Peter’s disappearance and his return, I’m still not sure that there is any meaning to that original twist, that like much lesser shows, this twist was only implemented as a place holder until the show runners could get a new narrative started for season four. The logic behind that assertion is fairly simple: the show has written itself into a corner. While these episodes should in theory be about exploring Peter’s disappearance, both the how and the why, it’s not something that the show can really do until Peter gets back, and Peter won’t get back until….something happens. I’ll admit that the show seems to be building towards Peter coming back (and more on that in a minute), but unless his coming back also signals some other sort of reveal, then all the episodes before the return are going to feel like wasted time. And how can you give a proper reveal if you’re not doing anything to set it up?

I know, I know, you don’t need to tell me. I’m airing the same grievances here that I’ve expressed in the previous two reviews. I wish I had something newer to say this week, but the truth is that as long as the show keep giving us the same beats on the Peter arc and Freaks of the Week that are varying levels of entertaining, there’s only so much that I can talk about. (And this is why most critics don’t like reviewing procedural; they’re not really the best for analysis.)

And about that Freak of the Week? Well, there’s really not much to say. For a majority of the standalone episodes, Fringe usually manages to come up with an interesting idea, and then bungle the execution, and that’s exactly what occurred tonight. If you didn’t manage to figure out that Aaron was somehow responsible for the damage that the giant fungus/brain Gus was causing, then this was probably the first episode of the show you’ve ever watched. (And to that I might say: Welcome, but you should know you’ve picked a piss-poor entry point.) And if anything after that first reveal came as a shock – especially the idea that Aaron was holding on to Gus just as much as it was holding on to him – well then, perhaps tonight’s outing was just far more exciting for you than it was for me – and also I suspect you just don’t watch all that much television.

Not that the episode was a total loss. The obvious theme here of course is isolation, and much like in last’s week’s episode, the case the Fringe Division is investigating is meant to draw a parallel to Peter’s absence. The problem is, it doesn’t work as well as “One Night in October”, thought it does manage to work better than it should. One of the most annoying things about this early season is that the show has been dropping overly-obvious, ham-fisted lines about Peter’s absence, and it only makes me want to get to his return all the more. I know that part of what the show is trying to do in this  early section is to use Peter’s absence to tell us more about Peter and everyone else in Fringe Division based on how they have changed without him in their lives. And while it’s a noble goal to want to explore your characters, the show has been doing it in the most overt manner possible, and the fact that the show feels like it should hold our hand doesn’t signify that we’ll have anything more engaging in the future.

But this, this was Walter’s episode, and it became all the stronger for it. I know that most people – myself included – love Walter in large part because of John Noble’s performance of the role, but I think at this point some credit needs to be given to the writers for creating such an emotionally open character in him. For the most part, the characters on Fringe tend to hold their emotions in check, and that can make it hard for the show to give us the powerful emotions that make for its best episodes. But not Walter. As a man with a good deal of brain damage, Walter is the character who is allowed to feel his feelings and have it make sense in a world full of stoic FBI agents and crippling daddy issues.

And that difference is what helps to make the emotional core of “Alone in the World” work. Where coming from Olivia or Astrid, clunky lines about feeling a connection that isn’t real might have come off as forced, coming from Walter – a man who always expresses his emotions in the most blatant of terms – it feels far more natural, and far more powerful. What’s more, because this episode is the result of two weeks of buildup, seeing (hearing?) that Peter’s voice is now haunting Walter in the daytime, when other people are around, means that we are seeing some actual progress, however slight, in Peter’s return to reality. Couple that with the fact that Walter might get sent back to prison because he’s hearing his dead son’s voice, and it’s starting to feel as if Peter’s return will have some consequences.

Except for Walter isn’t the only one who’s being seeing Peter; Olivia has as well. And while I’m sure that made all those ‘shippers out there extremely happy (True love wins over all! Even erased timelines! Yay!), my general pleasure with this development is a bit more specific. First, I’m glad the show made the logical leap that if Walter’s seeing Peter, then Olivia must too. I know that Walter has father’s love on his side, and I would have been okay if this had been the explanation for why Walter was the only one seeing him. But the show spent so much time proving the love between Peter and Olivia (it was that love, remember that helped Olivia overcomes the memory-replicating drugs that Walternate gave her) that it would probably make less sense if they didn’t.

Secondly, much like Walter’s increasingly strong connection to non-existent Peter, the fact that Olivia and Walter now both know about Peter, it would seem to indicate that the show will be giving us much larger movement in the overall plot going forward. And at this point, that’s pretty much all that going to save the show from itself.

Next Week: The tag line is “Has Peter Bishop returned?” I pray to the television god that the answer is yes.

Other Thoughts:

In most of the posts, I usually take the time at the end to list the differences that exist in Earth-2 and, more recently, EWOP, mostly just because I find it interesting to keep track of them. However, the fact that we learned that in EWOP that Peter-1 dies just like he always had, and Peter-2 died in the frozen lake like he should have, it does bring up the question of what will happen when Peter returns. Assuming that the show follows the generally accepted principles of time (and I hope that they do, because things are already complicated enough) then that means that Peter re-entering the timeline will somehow erase the Observer’s writing him out in the first place, which will make all of these episodes irrelevant in the long run. (So, thanks for that.) Alternatively, if the show somehow has Peter re-enter this time stream without disrupting it (i.e. he’ll be there, but Peters 1 & 2 will still have died), then that means that good portions of the previous three seasons will be rendered moot, and that’s an even more frustrating option. (Plus, it will be a paradox, and don’t you just hate those?)

Other notable characteristics: Olivia still manages to make time down at the home office, and Nina Sharp/Massive Dynamic are still willing to help Fringe Division.

So all that awkward flirting between Lee and Olivia, that’s going to turn into something more, isn’t it? Yeah, I figured as much. And something more is going to complicate things when Peter comes back, right? I thought so….

Tonight’s episode was written by Buffy/Angel alum David Fury, his first writing credit for the show, which is surprising given his status as a sci-fi procedural veteran. I can only assume that his involvement here is somehow he is related to the fact that he is writer/producer for Terra Nova.

Walter’s first theories: Vampires and succubae. Good to know that some things haven’t change in EWOP.

Hat tip to Ryan McGee for noticing the relationship between “Gus” and “Fringe”. I’m not sure if that’s what the show was going for, but it was pretty cool all the same.