Fringe 5x10: Anomaly XB-6783746

With the Observer child, Michael, reclaimed, the Fringe team sets about questioning him to see what he knows about Walter's plan and if he knows who Donald is. Unfortunately, he's not very forthcoming. Walter wants to put him in a coma so they can enter his mind like they did with September, or jack him up with LSD and stick a probe into his brain like they presumably did with Olivia and John Scott (but not when William Bell's soul was trapped in Olivia's body because that was in a different timeline). However, he's just a child, and the rest of the team is against experimenting on him.

Old Walter is re-emerging... and is ticked off.

With their questions getting them nowhere, Olivia calls Nina to see if she has some way to help. It's not safe for her to talk, though, so they agree to meet up later. It's a good thing, too, since Windmark and his two newest lieutenants barge into Nina's office 20 minutes after she leaves. The Observers have discovered that the team used a sublimation device to access Bell's storage facility, and they believe someone in Nina's department provided it to them. Their suspicions are confirmed when they use some fancy future technology to read Nina's conversation off the glass in her door.

An LQ7 unit is much better than that exploding record thing Peter had in 'The Road Not Taken' back in season one.

Nina has an old Massive Dynamic lab that might have technology that can help them communicate with Michael. After the invasion, the resistance used it to experiment on captured Observers to figure out how they read minds and to see if the process could be reversed. It didn't quite work, but Nina believes they might be successful with Michael. Meanwhile, Walter slowly continues to regress, referring to the boy as if he's merely an experiment and not a human being.

Well... he's mostly human.

Back at the Ministry of Science, Windmark is slowly interrogating all the people who work in the storage facility where the team got the sublimation device while his goons try to track Nina through her comm device.

Complicating matters, Michael's brain doesn't behave in the same manner as the other Observers, so Nina's machine can't read his thoughts. However, with an adapter for a second person, they might be able to get him to read someone else's thoughts so he'll understand what they want from him. Unfortunately, the gear they need is in the exact warehouse that's currently under investigation.

Their man on the inside, Dr. Hastings, gets busted just as they arrive, so Astrid has to remotely hack the door to get them in. Luckily, the Observers are well-organized, so they find what they need fairly quickly. They also find that Hastings is getting his brain melted by Windmark.

He doesn't look good, but at least no blood vessels have burst in his eyes.

Nina foolishly calls Olivia, and the Loyalists instantly have her location. Olivia tells her she's compromised, so she smashes her phone, but it's too late. A guard tells Windmark her location, and he teleports there immediately.

The Bishop family rushes back as fast as they can, but they hit a checkpoint and have to ditch their vehicle. Peter has a doctorate in hotwiring, so they have a new car relatively quickly, but it's not enough; Windmark gets to Nina long before they do.

The Loyalists search the lab for Michael, but Nina has hidden him too well. Thus, Windmark is forced to uncover his location the old fashioned way: By using advanced technology to psychically interrogate a woman with a robot arm. She won't give him anything, though. Instead, she asks him why Michael worries him so much. He tells her that Michael was a genetic anomaly (specifically, XB-6783746) who was scheduled to be destroyed, but he went missing and the Observers had no idea what happened to him until now.

Windmark continues his interrogation, but rather than giving him useful information, Nina talks smack about how the Observers' mental evolution accidentally made them more animal-like, and thus inferior to regular humans. This makes Windmark as close to angry as an Observer can get, so he has one of his Loyalist guards handcuff her to her chair so he can conduct a more thorough scan. Loyalist guards are idiots, though, and Nina gets his gun. It won't work on the Observers, but that's not what she had in mind.

You can't read a mind that's been torn to shreds by a bullet.

The team arrives shortly thereafter and discovers her body. Walter is distraught at the loss of his old colleague, and when they watch the security footage to see what happened, Olivia cannot bear to watch her surrogate mother die. As grisly as it is, they do learn one important thing from watching it: The Observers left without Michael. After a few moments of searching, Olivia spies some condensation on the inside of a stasis pod, and she finds Michael inside, hidden under the old corpse of an Observer. He, too, weeps at the loss of their ally.

Back at Harvard, they hook Walter and Michael up to the mind-reading machine. It works, and they're able to communicate. When he knows what Walter wants, Michael stands up and goes for a direct connection.

My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts.

Walter sees flashes of his life, mainly involving his family, and especially regarding how he went to the other universe to get Peter and how he managed to save him in the other timeline. It's mostly short flashes and blurs, but one thing is made perfectly clear: Donald is September.

Except with hair.

What I Liked
-Windmark smiles an evil smile when Nina points a gun at him. Seriously, look at how evil it is.

EEEEEVIL!

Most of the emotions he's displayed this season have been incredibly subtle, but he just couldn't contain his amusement this time. Michael Kopsa has really been a fantastic addition to the show.
-When they strap the mind-reading machine to Walter and Michael, it starts to arc with electricity, and it looks really goofy. A reaction like that usually means a device is malfunctioning, although I can see the Massive Dynamic scientists leaving it that way because they thought it was funny.

What I Hated
-Not that it was really a surprise to begin with, but Michael Cerveris' name in the opening credits kinda spoiled the fact that September/Donald would be in this episode. I'm not sure of the union rules or whatever, but they've done it a couple times now, most notably at the end of season four with Leonard Nimoy.

Final Thoughts
The word of the day is SENSE. I think it refers to both Michael's ability as an empath to sense emotions, as well as Nina's discussion with Windmark about how the Observers' lizard-like brains cause them to involuntarily cock their heads to the side so they can better sense peoples' thoughts.

I'm not sure if it's what the producers intended, and I haven't really been paying attention, so they may have done it before, but they left a big, fat Observer language Rosetta stone in the episode. Someone with more time and energy than me can go through and decode it now.

It's not supposed to be one-to-one, but if you look closely, it is. Click to enlarge.

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but back in my review of episode six, I successfully predicted Donald's identity. It's not like it was particularly hard to guess, though. Making him a brand new character would've been a bit silly, and there aren't exactly a lot of other recurring characters to choose from. Of course, Walter knows -or at least, knew- something about what happened to September, so it's a little strange that the characters didn't guess that he and Donald were the same person.

Walter's regression to Old Walter is continuing, but I remain unconvinced that it's as bad as he fears. With Peter around, he's not going to become the bitter megalomaniac who had a plan to destroy two universes. Sure, he's a little less empathetic and he a little grumpier, but he still cared when Nina died, even though in this timeline he didn't particularly like her.

This episode made heavy use of the guest actors, and it might have suffered were they not so good in their respective roles. Blair Brown knows her character well after five seasons, and as I mentioned above, Michael Kopsa has made a truly excellent antagonist this season.

That being said, I'm not getting the same rush out of Fringe that I used to. It's still enjoyable, but maybe the fact that it's ending has me a little bummed.

Fringe is off until January, but when it returns for it's final three episodes, we'll finally find out how and why Peter is important.