Fringe 5x05: An Origin Story

Etta is dead. With her gone, there's no reason for her family to stay in her apartment, so they pack up everything they can use (including some guns and explosives she had stashed behind a painting) and prepare to move to the lab.

At the same time, on a Manhattan street, things get weird. Bolts of static electricity shoot around. A convoy rolls up and a couple Observers break out their actual observing gear, then one of them activates a cube-shaped device and a portal to the future opens. They're there to accept delivery of components for the air-degradation system they're building in central park.

Thanks to time travel, you can get same-day delivery on almost everything.

As they're about to leave the apartment for the last time, the Bishops get a call from Astrid. She's hit a bit of a snag since the next tape with a chunk of Walter's plan is right next to a small propane tank and a big jug of ethanol. It's going to take her a few days to get it out. Before they have a chance to resign themselves to a few days of downtime, they get another call, this time from Anil. He's gotten his hands on an Observer and his notebook, and the resistance is hoping the old Fringe team might be able to decipher it so they can destroy the next shipment from the future when it comes through.

But, Peter's thinking bigger than that. He doesn't just want to destroy the shipment, he wants to blow up the wormhole they're using to send things into the past. Anil has a piece of technology that he thinks is the key to opening the wormhole, but it's disassembled and they don't know how it works. He and Walter try to dissuade Peter from his plan, but the man's daughter just died and he's in no mood to argue.

No mood.

Each of Etta's family members deals with her death in their own way. Walter tries his best to remember her, Olivia begins to rebuild her emotional walls, and Peter takes after his father: When the universe took his child away, Walter got pissed off and tore the universe a new butthole. And that's exactly what Peter's going to do.

That is, of course, if he can figure out how to turn on the damn cube. Walter tells him that if they can lob some antimatter down the open wormhole, it'll collapse and create a black hole on the other side. But to do so, they first need to figure out how to assemble the cube, and if Peter puts it together wrong, he'll blow himself up. Olivia and Walter both see what's happening to him, and they try to stop him, but he's adamant, and he goes to torture the information he needs out of the captured Observer.

He doesn't seem terribly concerned.

The Observer kinda acts like a dick, however Peter gets what he needs by focusing a camera on his eye and watching for minute variations in his pupil dilation. Observers don't feel fear, or anything else for that matter, but on some unconscious level, Peter reckons they still have a biological desire to stay alive as long as possible, so the Observer doesn't want to get blown up, even if he says he doesn't care.

Back at the lab, Walter has something for Olivia. He's seen that she's worried about Peter; not just that he's going to be killed or hurt, but that his grief and rage will consume him, and she'll lose him again. Twenty years earlier when Etta disappeared, the two of them split up because they couldn't deal with the pain of having lost a child, and they were only just beginning to rediscover the love they had for each other. With Etta gone again, Walter fears that the two of them will lose one another once more, so he gives Olivia a tape of one of Etta's birthdays so she and Peter can watch it and remember what they had. She can't watch it, though. The pain is still too great.

She's barely keeping herself together.

Astrid manages to decode the notebook, and Peter fully assembles the device, so they head to New York to stop the latest shipment. They get the portal open, but an Observer spots them and a slow-paced fight scene ensues. Olivia kills him before he can stomp a hole in Peter's face, and then Peter uses a grenade launcher to pop an antimatter device into the wormhole. It works, and the portal collapses into a black hole, sucking in everything nearby. However, as they flee in a van, Anil notices another portal opening. They succeeded, but it didn't matter.

They call Walter to see if he knows what could've gone wrong, but he doesn't have any answers, so Peter goes to talk to someone who does. Olivia chases after him, but he's gone. Instead she finds posters with Etta's face on them and the word 'Resist'. In death, her daughter has become the face of the resistance.

Henrietta Bishop has a posse.

Peter dismisses the guard and wraps some plastic around the Observers head so he can suffocate him a little bit before he starts questioning him. He learns that the Observer's pupils weren't responding to what he was doing with the device, but rather to a fly on the window. He assembled the cube properly because he's a highly-skilled engineer; he just lacked the confidence to do it on his own, so he saw what he needed to see. The Observer reads Peter and tells him that Etta's death is irrelevant: She was here, and now she's simply not. Peter is understandably upset, so he pistol whips him and knocks him unconscious. When he wakes up, he learns all about a father's love for his daughter as Peter carves the chip that lets him phase through space and catch bullets out of the back of his head. The pain he feels as he dies is the same pain a father feels when he loses a child.

It's not a good pain.

In Boston, Olivia gets up the courage to watch Walter's tape. It breaks down the little bit of her emotional walls that she'd managed to reconstruct, and she calls Peter, begging him to come home. She believes that Etta would want the two of them to get through this and to be together, and for the first time in a very long time, she tells him that she loves him.

Anna Torv does sadness really well. Even in interviews she sometimes looks like she could use a hug.

He responds in kind, but he's a little preoccupied, since he's sliced a hole in the back of his neck and inserted the Observer's chip into his own brain.

What I Liked
-One of the shops on the Manhattan street is called the 'Brown Shirt Cafe'. Even if the world becomes a fascist police state, people still need coffee.
-The Observers actually do some Observer stuff. They've been more like Overseers this season, so it was nice to see them break out the fancy binoculars and the notebooks.
-When Peter collapses the wormhole, there's a shot of two Loyalists watching everything get sucked into it. One just stares at it with his mouth open, while the other turns around and runs the hell away.

Pictured: One smart man, and one idiot.

What I Hated
-Olivia tells Peter that the wormhole's going to open near the corner of 86th Street and Lexington Avenue in New York about half an hour. When she tells him that, she's at the lab on the Harvard campus, which Google tells me is around 200 miles away. Nevertheless, she makes it there on time. Even with all the time travel and wormholes, the most unbelievable thing on this show is still how they manage to get back and forth from Boston to New York so fast.
-After they open the portal, Olivia and Peter stand up in front of wide open windows and are clearly visible from the street. They're fighting a group of guys called "Observers" so you'd think they'd try to be a little more discreet.

Final Thoughts
The word of the day was 'FIGHT' which I originally screwed up and wrote down as 'FIHT'.

I'm still trying to figure out whether Peter and Olivia are supposed to be married. They've certainly never stated it explicitly, and these days there's no need for a couple to be married in order to have a child. However, the first two episodes had flashbacks where Peter is quite clearly wearing a ring on the appropriate finger, and Olivia appears to be as well, although they flipped some of the shots in post-production, so it's hard to tell which hand it's supposed to be on. They're obviously not wearing them in the present (which is technically the future), but for the past two episodes, Peter has been quite clearly wearing a string around his neck with a ring on it.

He hangs it up so it won't get blood on it while he's carving into himself.

So, they might be married, or perhaps while they were together they just discovered a mutual love of hand jewelry.

On another note, they certainly went a different way with Peter's reaction to Etta's death than I had expected. I thought he would give in to despair and just shut down and go live with Markham. Instead, at long last he became his father's son. They don't play it up on the show that much, but Peter's supposed to be nearly as smart as Walter; he just didn't have the benefit of Walter's training. So, it would stand to reason that he'd be nearly as obsessed and vicious as well. I say vicious because Peter's father isn't Walter, it's Walternate, and they spent an entire season showing off just how big a bastard Bishop men can become when they lose a child. Of course, Walternate was going to destroy an entire universe, so I suppose creating a black hole and murdering a man so you can steal his powers are actually fairly measured responses.

But, that leads me to wonder just what exactly the Observer's chip is going to do for/to Peter. If all you have to do to get their super speed and strength is rip the thing out of their head and stick it in your own, there should be dozens of resistance super soldiers running around. It's not like they have any trouble capturing/killing them. In just the short time they've been back, Olivia and Peter have each killed several. There are sure to be some terrible side effects, but when you're fighting for the survival of the human race, I figure there would be a few people out there willing to make the sacrifice.

I also wonder why the Observers are taking the time to degrade the air and conquer the planet if they don't care whether they live or die. Or why they even bother living at all if they can't derive pleasure from anything. Pure scientific inquiry is noble, I guess, but we haven't seen any Observer ladies, so what's the point of having a big science brain if you can't use it to score some bald-headed babes?

Anyway, I enjoyed this episode. It finally gave the season a clear direction. It's not about trying to save the world; that's far too grand. It's about putting things back together: Walter's plan, Olivia and Peter's relationship, and maybe even William Bell's arm.