Fringe - "Nothing as It Seems"

Season 4, Episode 16

“You remember you said all of this would stop being strange?”

Apparently this is just a week for purposeful repetition in television, with both Community and 30 Rock doing episodes that used callbacks to previous episodes in order to tell their stories, and now Fringe doing the same. There's a reason that I cited two comedies for this example, as it's the form which most often uses this trope, and does so the most effectively. (One of my favorites was a fifth season Scrubs episode, which essentially just re-filmed all of the show's best bits from the previous four seasons and made it into an episode.) With dramas, such a move is a bit trickier, as it usually requires to take on some sort of thematic relevance, or barring that, at least have a specific purpose as it relates to the overall narrative. 

Given the way that tonight's episode purposefully aped the season one episode “The Transformation”, a lot of your mileage on this episode will most likely depend on how much you remember about that episode, and whether the parallels drawn made you smile or in any way appreciative of what the episode was trying to do. If you were familiar with “Transformation”, then the twist on the original story probably excited and amazed you. If, like me, it's been a while since you've seen the first season, then perhaps it all sort of fell flat, since the differences didn't really seem to be large enough to make the narrative impact necessary for it to feel like a worthwhile experiment.

This is not to say that I didn't understand what the show was trying to do. the show using the transformation of these men to help underscore the transformation of Olivia into a new and better kind of human being? Yeah, I got that, but only a while after the episode had aired, and I was trying to collect my thoughts about everything. I'm a TV watcher who appreciates it when show go for subtlety, and by that logic, I should have loved that the show made these not-too-explicit connections here. However, Fringe isn't a show that usually does subtlety, and in fact has gotten some great emotional and thematic mileage while remaining fairly explicit, so I guess I the show finally throwing in some subtlety just for the hell of it threw me off. Or maybe it was because the hour was set up so much as a standalone that I wasn't expecting there to be any sort of emotional/thematic connection at all. Either way, I think this is one of those rare cases where a show wold have been made better by going more explicit, as oppose to less.

The same criticism can be applied, more or less, to the hour's connections to the overall plot should have probably been expanded further than they were. So David Robert Jones is building up an army of human-creature hybrids in order to achieve some sort of nefarious purpose? Great, I'll be sure to keep an eye out for that. But that's also the sort of development that feels small in comparison to the setup of the episode, especially when you consider how far they could have taken it. If I had my druthers, the episode would have answered the far more looming question of why Peter's disappearance was causing things to happen in a different order and manner than he originally experienced them, or at least paid more than lip service to the question. I'm still not entirely sure that the show knows what to do with this “malleable timeline” logic it has in place, and now that we know for certain that this is the Prime timeline, I would like the show to explore what that means further, if only because it's been a question they've enticed us with for so many episodes.

Of course, I don't want to give the impression that the hour was an entire bust. Unlike last week's misstep of an episode, the standalone case here both made sense on it's own, and was able to maintain an understandable connection to the larger narrative. Granted the case was fairly simplistic, and I've already stated my issues with the thematic connection, but at least it wasn't deeply flawed.

Second, and more importantly, even if the episode as a whole didn't work, there were some fantastic individual scenes, all revolving around Lincoln Lee. The show has always been fantastic at depicting heartache, and now that Peter and Olivia seem to be together for good, that ache's got to be transferred over to somebody else, and Lincoln seems to be the perfect vehicle for that. Given how large a crush he had on Olivia before Peter came back, and how much Peter originally pushed him to be with her, he's got to be in pain, even as he recognizes that she is not the same Olivia that he fell in love with. (Well, okay, so she;s still 60% intact, but that other changed 40% REALLY loves Peter.)

Even better, Lincoln's pain seems to point towards what I hope will be a unifying them for this back slate of episodes. Throughout the episode, we saw that he was largely in pain because Peter was causing Olivia to change personalities, and to a lesser extent was bringing Walter out of his shell, all of which leaves Lincoln behind, staying the same. And that made me wonder: If Peter has managed to restore the “original” Olivia, does that mean he'll do the same for Walter? For Astrid, Broyles, and eventually even Lincoln? Will the entire world soon begin to revolve around Peter, and how things use to be with him around?

These are the things I think about because honestly, these are the types of questions that Fringe likes to bring up, and is usually capable of answering . The reason that this season has so let e down, then, is that the show seems afraid of trying to answer big questions, and it's led to a lot of tempered and disappointing episodes. Let's just hope that as Peter's changing everybody else to their original state, the show itself will follow suit.

Other Thoughts:

Given that he tells Peter not to open a 10-15 year old beer, I have to assume that Walter doesn't know about beer fermentation. Either that or he does, and he bought a low quality beer that would have been skunky anyways.

When Walter looks for examples of palindromes, he uses “madam” and “boob”, the latter of which seems to bring him particular joy.

Seeing Lincoln get infected with the venom (or whatever) or the Freak of the Week only helped to solidify my theory that Lincoln is the new Charlie. Just don't die/get replaced by a doppelganger/go off work with Maria Bello, Lincoln! We like you so much more than Charlie.