TBBT 6x09: The Parking Spot Escalation

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Howard has a brand new car, and as such, he needs a parking space. The university assigns him spot 204, which used to belong to one Sheldon Cooper. However, since he doesn't have a car and can't even drive, the university gave it to Howard. Regardless of his inability to use it, Sheldon wants his spot back.

The car has other ideas.

A quick call to the President of the University doesn't get him any justice, either. Apparently, going into space makes one a big deal and gets one a good parking space. But this aggression will not stand, man, so Sheldon retaliates -if you can call it retaliating when you attack someone who wasn't really at fault- by stealing Howard's limited edition Iron Man helmet.

His arc reactor is down to 73%

Meanwhile, the ladies are back from getting Amy her first bikini wax and she and Bernadette get drawn into the fight as well. At first it's just about the parking space, but women are mean and soon it's about Howard's mother and Amy's lack of a sex life.

This is not a face Amy gets to make very often.

Then everyone starts to go a little bit too far. Howard sits naked in Sheldon's spot on the couch, Sheldon and Amy paint over Howard's name on the parking spot then leave her car there, Bernadette gets Amy's car towed, and Amy takes a swing at her with her purse. Unfortunately, Bernadette ducks, and Amy hits Penny square in the nose. After that, the ladies agree to detente, but the gentlemen continue total war. To prove that he uses his spot, Sheldon sets up his whiteboard and starts working outside. He's no match for Howard's new RAV4, which Howard uses to push him out of the way, but he can still grind his butt into the driver's seat.

A sight Amy longs to see.

After that, Raj makes Howard apologize to end the madness. This makes Howard the bigger man, and that cannot stand either, man. So, Sheldon agrees to let Howard keep using the space, and everybody's happy.

Except Penny.

What I Liked
-Sheldon gets pissed off at the squirrel that lives in the tree overlooking the parking space. Yeah, screw that squirrel.
-The down home, folksy wisdom of Sheldon's father just makes Leonard feel bad for his mother. Drinking and driving isn't cool, kids. Letting your 10-year-old drive you home should be fine, though.
-The only PhD Wolowitz will ever get is the one he steals off Sheldon's wall. Nerd burn!
-The only horns Howard and Sheldon will ever lock are the kind they bought at Comic Con. Double nerd burn!
-Bernadette says she might let Howard do it to her in the parking space. It's been scientifically proven that butt sex is the most hilarious kind of sex.
-Howard puts his nude butt in Sheldon's space and rests Sheldon's laptop on his junk, inflicting double the damage in the same amount of time. That's using your noodle.

Literally.

What I Hated
-Raj never gets an answer to his question about what happens if a zombie bites a vampire and then the vampire bites a human. Dang it, I want to know the answer to this, too.

Final Thoughts
It's hard to notice, but when Sheldon started really putting his back into it, the car actually did start to move.

Lots of nudity this week. Two naked dudes and Amy showed off her freshly-waxed crotch to Sheldon. I'd actually call that a little bit of character development since it advances their relationship... sort of. Sheldon's still relatively asexual, but the writers are working on turning him into a normal human being, and I can see him finally getting down and dirty towards the end of the season. Just as long as it doesn't lead to a season finale cliffhanger where somebody's pregnant and we don't know who it is.

There was a lot to like about this episode. It hit a solid 34 on the "I'm working on it, I swear" Laugh-O-Meter, and it managed to work seven characters into a single plot. Sure, it was a little bit light on Raj, but even he got to kick in a few jokes. Yes, a lot of the humour was low-brow, but that's fine; it doesn't have to be all 'Ha ha, look at how nerdy those guys are' all the time. I applaud the writers' ability to mix it up a bit and to fit (almost) everyone into one coherent plot. Good show.

HIMYM 8x08: Twelve Horny Women

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It's the not-too-distant future, and Marshall is talking to the New York judiciary committee about his case against Gruber Pharmaceuticals and their lead counsel, Big Dick Richie. Future Ted is telling a story about Marshall telling a story. It's pretty stupid. Anyway, Marshall asks Brad why he dicked him around since they used to be brunch bros, and the answer is all too familiar: His lady broke his heart, so he said screw it, suited up and started lying.

The world is a far darker place without love.

Regardless, Brad knows he can't win the case on its merits, so he plays to the jury, which happens to be made up of the titular twelve horny women. Instead of using facts and sound reasoning, he uses the one thing Marshall doesn't have: Buns of steel.

It's not lecherous when women are doing the ogling.

Using his powers of sex appeal, Brad wins over the judge, the jury, and even the court sketch artist. It looks like he's got everything in the bag. Marshall tries to win back the ladies with a cute duckling that was sickened by the chemicals Gruber dumped into Frog Lake, and it looks like it might work until Brad shows off a video of himself flexing and cavorting topless in the lake. All seems lost until Marshall notices Brad scratching himself.

He ain't pretty no mo'

It seems that the waters of Frog Lake gave him a pretty severe case of acute dermatitis. The jury finds against Gruber Pharmaceuticals, and Marshall wins the case. Unfortunately, the judge only fines the company $25,000 because he doesn't give a crap about the birds and fish and turtles and otters. It seems like all of Marshall's work was for nothing until Brad comes to see him at MacLaren's. He's seen the error of his ways and taken a job at Honeywell & Cootes. From now on, he'll use his manipulation skills and his buns to save the world. He also tells Marshall that he ought to be the one behind the bench making decisions, and that's why Marshall's in front of the Judiciary Committee: To apply to become a judge.

Meanwhile, the rest of the gang takes the day off from work to support Marshall. They don't have much to do during recesses, so they talk about how they were super badasses back in high school. Only Lily really was, though. Apparently, in the HIMYM universe, either The Wire does not exist, or Omar was based on Lily. That's not only ridiculous, it's lazy writing that borders on plagiarism.

Plus, there's a couple minutes of Barney-Robin relationship stuff at the end of the episode.

What I Liked
-"Objection, Your Honor, on grounds that this is ridonk!" If I'm ever a lawyer, I'm going to use that line as much as possible. All of Brad's bro-lawyer speak is pretty good, actually.
-Brad's video. It had sex appeal for the ladies, and comedy for guys like me.

Where the crap did all this gold come from?

What I Hated
-They retconned Scooter's first name. Originally, it was Bill, but in this episode, it's Jeff. Why even bother having continuity if you're just going to ignore half of it?
-The cast is way too old to do flashbacks to when they were teenagers. Alyson Hannigan's in some pretty heavy make-up, but she still looks like a 38-year-old mother of two.

They're supposed to be about 16 in this picture.

-The gang is there in the courtroom for every day of the trial. Supporting your friend is great, but using up all your sick days for that seems kinda ludicrous. Basically, the writers wanted them in the room, but they just couldn't think up a plausible reason for them to be there, so they had to go with something stupid. They don't really add much to the court scenes, though, so I'm surprised they bothered with it.

Final Thoughts
It took until the end credits for me to find out that one of the justices was played by Dennis Haskins of Saved by the Bell fame. He's gotten really fat.

Seriously, did he eat Screech or something?

Again, the Barney-Robin relationship drivel was just tacked on to the end of the episode. It all seems so fake and unrealistic because it's not happening organically. Their relationship isn't being derived from their actions or the situations they're in, but instead it's like it's something external that's happening to them without their consent or input. Almost as if the writers can't figure out a reason why the two of them should be together, but still have to turn them into a couple because we know they're going to get married(or at least have a wedding). It's fine to write the ending first and work your way towards it, but if you flash forward and show that ending, then you're stuck with it. The writers on How I Met Your Mother are stuck with a bad ending that they don't know how to get to, and it's really starting to show.

This episode hit 16 on the still unmade Laugh-o-Meter, which is an improvement over last week, but nearly all the laughs came out of Brad-related stuff, and if I'm not mistaken, Brad's not a regular character on this show. The B-plot was so bad that it completely eroded any good will the A-plot garnered. The good bits of this show are still pretty good, but they're so few and far between that the bad bits overwhelm them. It seems like everyone's just killing time while they wait for the end of the series, and it's sad to see a once-great show end like this.

Hawaii Five-0 3x07: Ohuna

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For once, there hasn't been a murder. Instead, a kid is released from a juvenile detention centre into the loving arms of his celebrity parents. On the way home, their GPS takes them off course, and they're intercepted by a squad of skeleton mask-wearing goons who kidnap the kid and pistol whip Alan Ruck.

Which I think is something we've all wanted to do to one of his characters at some point.

When the team arrives, the parents tell them that their kid was arrested for hacking into the White House database and getting tickets to the correspondents' dinner, and even though they wound up in the middle of nowhere, they were just following the GPS. Kono tries to talk to the couple's other child, and he's repeatedly typing out a licence plate number on his tablet.

So she looks it up using the awesome power of Windows 8

The licence plate belongs to a stolen van that's already been recovered and has just been delivered to the impound lot. Inside, they find the body of the kid, who appears to have died of a heart attack while being tortured.

Since it's now a murder case and not a kidnapping, they can slow down a bit and make jokes. Apparently a missing child is serious business, but a dead one is hilarious. Anyway, while he was in the joint, the kid got a visit from superbad hacker dude, Kong Liang, so Danny takes Steve to meet with his hacker contact, Toast.

Martin Starr's been eating a lot of beef.

Despite his protestations, Steve and Danny wire up toast and send him into Kong's hacker den. He's not terribly happy about it, though, and yells at Steve and Danny over the wire. When the first thing he sees on the inside is Kong breaking a dude's hand with a mallet, he does the smart thing and runs the hell away. Fortunately, Kong only has two guards and his office has easily accessible windows, so they apprehend him without much difficulty. He's not the killer, though.

Kono finds out what the kid's killers were looking for: an encrypted file on his personal storage site. They can't access it though, because the password is 309 digits long and will take infinity billion years to hack. She goes to the kid's house to see if his family knows anything. His parents aren't much help, but his younger brother has memorized a series of elements that apparently correspond to the digits of the password.

I think he's supposed to be a high-functioning autistic.

Before she can relay the number back to headquarters, Kono's phone suddenly cuts out and the house is invaded by the guys in the skeleton masks. Chin sends a uniformed cop over to check things out and he's promptly shot in the leg and then executed.

They get a print off a stolen car and it leads to a private military company called WhiteFire (which is a pretty blatant parody of BlackWater) led by Carlo Rota. Inside the house, Carlo finds Kono and agrees to trade the hostages for an armoured vehicle and the password. It doesn't go well for him as Steve hides on the underside of the vehicle, Chin shoots his men, and Kono beats him up.

Being beaten up by a girl doesn't go over well in prison.

They decrypt the file and it leads them to a mobster who WhiteFire helped break out of prison. Conveniently, he's in Hawaii, so they arrest him. Case closed.

On the home front, Steve finally gets Mary to come back to Hawaii so he can tell her their mother is alive. She brings along an old man in a wheelchair named Morty whose caregiver she is. When Steve tells her, rather than go home, she goes to visit their father's grave and talk about how sad they both were when they thought her mother was dead. Eventually Morty convinces her that getting a second chance is a rare gift, and she goes home to see her mom.

Case closed.

What I Liked
-Steve needs to talk to Mary in private, so she gets Morty to take out his hearing aid. That's a pretty good gag.
-A newly caneless Max struts his way into the examination room. I like Masi Oka, and I wish they'd find a way to use him more.
-Toast reacts the way a normal person would when he's wired up. Regular people should not be totally cool with being sent into dangerous situations with no weapons and no training. Also, it's really kind of a dick move to do that to a guy. Steve and Danny are jerks.
-Shelley Berman as Morty. Even at 87 he seems to be relatively cogent in real life, but he still plays the befuddled old man really well.

What I Hated
-Toast says there's nothing free about free porn. Any real computer expert would know that's completely untrue. Hell, any moderate internet user would know that's completely untrue. In fact, the whole hacking section of the plot seems like it was written by someone whose sole knowledge of computers comes from the movies Hackers and The Net. Did he use a typewriter to write this episode or something?
-The brother recites like ten elements, when in reality he'd have to say more than 100. Also, the last one sounds like Ununtrium, which isn't listed in the book Kono uses to look up the atomic numbers. Everything about that part of the episode is stupid beyond belief.
-Carlo Rota's ludicrous accent. I've seen him play a paramilitary guy before, and he used a stupid accent that time, too. I guess they really like it when he does that.

Final Thoughts
The kids in the episode are clearly not the spawn of blue-eyed Alan Ruck and Melinda McGraw.

He has brown eyes, his parents both have blue eyes. Somebody's got some 'splainin to do.

I looked it up, and this seems like it's the writer's first writing job, so I highly doubt that he's a 90-year-old man. So, that makes me wonder why all the technical stuff is such gibberish. Computers are not magic boxes, and anyone under the age of 60 should know that. I really tried to get past it, but it's as if the episode was written by someone whose knowledge of computers has all been gleaned from comic books and bad movies. Or maybe there's an edict at CBS that says all computer-related writing needs to be goddamn stupid.

The last few episodes have been pretty dark and serious, so I was hoping for something a little bit more fun. This episode almost delivered, but it was still kinda serious and the parts that were supposed to be fun were way too stupid.

Castle 5x08: After Hours

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A priest is murdered, and it's up to Castle and Beckett to find out who did it. Which is good, because they were at a dinner with their parents, and it wasn't going well. Esposito and Ryan start by interviewing a nun, and, right away, I think she's the killer because I've seen her in something. She's not though, she just has information that might lead to a suspect: The priest was friends with notorious Irish mobster Mickey Dolan.

Meanwhile, Castle and Beckett have a lead on a witness. But, before they get a chance to interview him, some of Dolan's goons get the drop on them.

Hired goons.

They manage to escape when the witness, Leo, causes a distraction by opening his door, but they're on the run in the Bronx with no money, no phones, and no car, since it's been stolen. The payphone they find is broken, and when Castle attempts to antagonize someone into calling the cops, he just threatens to come down to the street and kick his ass.

I think Castle could've taken him.

Back at the station, Esposito and Ryan can't get in touch with Castle and Beckett. The Cap'n has Ryan track down her car while Esposito goes to the witness' apartment to look for them. Obviously they're not there, but there are signs of a struggle, so he calls in the cavalry.

Beckett busts a car window so she can steal a cell phone, but it's password protected, and the noise from the car alarm attracts the goons. They escape again and hide out in a playground for a while. Castle tries to figure out the password for the phone. He guesses that it's the name of the woman's cat because its photo is on the phone's lock screen. The phone's owner calls and Castle tries to convince her to call the cops, but they have a misunderstanding and she hangs up. Luckily, she gave him the name of the cat and he unlocks the phone, but before he can make a call, she remotely disables it.

Her nude photos and tweets are safe.

A cab drives by and they try to catch it, but the driver's off duty and doesn't believe that Beckett's a cop, so he won't help them. Worse, they get spotted by the goons again and have to flee. They hide out in a basement for a while, then Castle tries to make a run for a 24-hour Chinese restaurant.

He doesn't quite make it.

Castle tries to hide Beckett's location from Dolan and the gang, but Mickey's far too good a poker player and sees right through his bluff.

At the station, Ryan and Esposito discover that the priest was talking to the feds right after he had a fight with Dolan. The Cap'n calls in an agent he tells them that Dolan was considering becoming an informant, and the priest was helping to turn him. He slipped out of custody when he heard the Father was dead, so he couldn't be the murderer. The O'Reilly family killed him to flush Dolan out, now Mickey's looking for the real killer, OJ style.

As it happens, Beckett's already found him. When one of Dolan's goons tracks her down, Leo kicks his ass, grabs his gun and points it at her.

The face of a killer. I've seen him in stuff before, too.

Leo ties Kate up and has her use the goon's phone to call Mickey. Castle tells her that he's pretty sure Dolan just wants to talk, and she tells him something strange so he'll know that things are fishy on her end. They agree to a meeting, and Leo marches Beckett over to Dolan's van before emptying his mag into it. Of course, there's no one inside, and the remaining goons emerge from the shadows intent on whacking Leo. Castle convinces Mickey that that's not what his friend would want, and they all put their guns down just in time to see four or five cop cars roll up. One of the cops whistles for a cab, and Beckett and Castle are on their way home.

The licence plate said 'FRESH'

What I Liked
-Castle makes a 'Dude, Where's My Car?' reference. Man, I haven't thought about that movie in years.
-A call from a payphone costs a dollar, and it really ticks Castle off. It ticks me off, too. Seriously, they should just slap some ads on the outside and make local calls free.
-After the woman remotely disables her cell phone, Castle chucks it on the ground. Yeah, screw that lady.
-The second time he gets caught, Castle apologizes to the goon for kicking him in the junk the first time they met. That's a wise move.

What I Hated
-The ringtone on the phone Beckett steals is 'Call Me Maybe'. I've heard that song enough. It took me weeks to get it out of my head, and I don't want to have to do that again. It's just too catchy.
-"What are you doing Leo?" "My job." Ugh, so bad.

Final Thoughts
The entire premise of this episode is based around the idea that Castle and Beckett can't find a way to contact the station. Sure, everyone in TV New York is a jerk who won't call the cops for you, but there was nothing stopping them from breaking in somewhere or from starting a small fire in a dumpster to attract the fire department. Even in TV New York, if you want the cops there are ways to get them to show up. Plus, even if the cab driver they found didn't want to give them a ride, they could've gotten him to call emergency services. No matter how much of a dick a dude is, he'll still probably help you out if you yell 'Oh my God! Call an ambulance!" The writers wanted to do an episode where the leads were on the run with no way to call in assistance, but even after taking their phones it still didn't really work.

Overall, I didn't get much of anything out of this one. There were some good bits, and it was nice to see the Cap'n and Martha get a bit more screen time than they usually do, but it wasn't fun or exciting or suspenseful. It was just sort of there.

HIMYM 8x07: The Stamp Tramp

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Three plots this week. That's one too many. But which one? I'll let you decide. Hint: It's the one with Ted.

In the first plot, Marshall bumps into his old law school friend, Big Dick Richie in front of his office. Brad tells him that he's been down on his luck lately, and Marshall offers to get him an interview at Honeywell & Cootes. The gang thinks this is a bad idea because Marshall gives his stamp of approval to everything, and it's harming his credibility at the firm.

Giving your boss food poisoning rarely helps your reputation at work.

But, Marshall's from St. Cloud Minnesota, where they believe in people, so he continues to believe in Brad. Unfortunately, at the interview, he offers legal insights he got from his psychic, cuts a big fart, and insults Mr. Honeywell's diminutive stature. He doesn't get the job, and Marshall's credibility is severely damaged to the point where he gets taken off a big case. Lily helps him rebuild it over time with popcorn, lies, and Ted's unintentionally hilarious video diaries. It works, and Marshall's back in his boss' good graces until they get to court and find out that Brad is on the opposing legal team and was just pretending to be down on his luck so he could get in the building and conduct some espionage. Now, if Marshall doesn't win, he's fired.

Lawyered.

In the second plot, the gang tells Ted that he's never put his stamp of approval on anything without first having it mentioned to him by someone else. He sets out to prove them all wrong by digging out his old college video diaries. But, all they do is prove that he's been a douche for a long, long time.

Douchemaster General.

In the third plot, since Barney broke up with Quinn, she's gone back to stripping, so he needs to find a new strip club. He's notoriously free with his cash, so all the local clubs start trying to recruit him. To help field the offers, he hires Robin as his strip club agent. At first she does well, but she soon starts accepting bribes and tries to sign Barney to geriatric strip club Golden Oldies. He's forced to fire her and make the decision on his own.

He's taking his talents to Mouth Beach.

In order to apologize, Robin offers to buy Barney his first lap dance at the new club. They get pretty wasted and as they're walking home, he kisses her. She kisses him back, but quickly has second thoughts and shoves him away.

I've gotten the dodge, but never the push off.

What I Liked
-Seven years is like 69 in perv years. Yeah, it is.
-Barney does an impression of Ted that sounds like Keanu Reeves. I see what he did there.
-Lily, Robin, and Barney set up a spit-take so they can act surprised when Ted tells them he was Dr. X.

I still don't believe it.

-On his video diary, Ted's friends are eating a fat sandwich. That's the kind of continuity we can all enjoy.
-Ted actually recognizes that he's a douche. That's good. The first step is admitting that you have a problem. The second step is to maybe stop being such a douche.
-Brad calls Honeywell a leprechaun. I called a girl a munchkin once in high school. It was equally hilarious.

What I Hated
-They feel the need to remind us that Ted was King Douche of Douche Mountain even when he was in college. We know that. He didn't grow out of it.
-The big reveal of Ted's plot is supposedly that he was the first one to put his stamp of approval on Lily and Marshall's relationship. Except we already knew that because he was the one who had her pose in their first roommate photo. It's still really weird, but it's not new.

Final Thoughts
I've decided that every week from now on I'll come up with a new theory as to who the mother is. Mother theory #1: They'll bring back Lyndsy Fonesca, slap on some makeup, and have her play her own mother.

This episode hit 13 on the Laugh-o-Meter, which is a little better than HIMYM has been doing lately. The were a few jokes related to LeBron James' he Decision TV special, but that was a few years ago, now, so they kinda fell flat. They've got their finger on the pulse of pop culture over at HIMYM.

They're really trying to force the Barney-Robin relationship. It just doesn't make sense, though. They were a terrible couple, and the show went out of its way to show what a terrible couple they were. Their relationship nearly killed both of them. The writers are trying a slow build by jamming some stuff in the last minutes of the show, but it really just seems tacked on to me. Like they know they need to get the two of them together somehow, but can't think of any logical way to do it, so they slap something onto the end of an otherwise unrelated story.

I've been wondering what happened to Brad. The last time he was on the show was three years ago. Each member of the gang started the show with a bunch of other friends, but as time went on, they've all disappeared. Even Wendy the Waitress and Carl are gone.

Right now, it seems like they've lost their way on How I Met Your Mother, and they're just running out the clock. Ted isn't even making an active attempt to find a wife anymore, and the entire narrative structure has broken down. Future Ted is now telling his kids the story of a bunch of things his friends did. Personally, I'm fine with that because his friends are far more interesting than he is, but it seems like it would be the kind of thing that would bug his children. The show's not Lost or anything like that, but there are still questions to answer, and probably only seventeen episodes left. I don't want to get to the end and find out they've been dead all season and the kids are part of some weird afterlife they created for themselves.

TBBT 6x08: The 43 Peculiarity

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Two plots this week. In the first, Sheldon disappears for 20 minutes every day at 2:45, and Raj and Howard try to figure out why. They start by asking Alex (who I thought was just a one-time character) where he goes, but all she knows is that her pants are too loud and she has to go get some quieter ones.

Corduroy is the loudest fabric not found on Don Cherry's jackets.

They track him to an old storage room in the basement, but they can't tell hear him doing anything, so they come back in the middle of the night to break in. Inside, they find nothing but a blackboard with the number 43 on it. They spend the next day trying to figure out what that could mean, but they can't come up with anything. So, Howard steals the spare camera for the Mars Rover and hides it so they can see what Sheldon gets up to. But, he finds it and switches the feed to a video of him sticking his head into a wormhole and getting his face eaten by an alien.

Get this man a crowbar.

Then he shows up and yells at him for invading his privacy. They don't need to know, don't deserve to know, and will never know what he's doing down there. But we will.

He's actually not bad at it.

In the second plot, Leonard and Penny are having some relationship issues because she's doing a report for school with a British guy, and Leonard is jealous of his sexy accent. Because he's a creepy weirdo, Leonard follows the guy out of the building and warns him that Penny's boyfriend is a big dude in a gang called 'The Scientists'. Penny catches him, and she's not happy.

I'll bet Johnny Galecki's seen that face before.

At work the next day, he bumps into Alex and asks her for some girl advice. She sees an opening and starts hitting on him, but he's completely oblivious. When he gets home, he bumps into Penny on her way to work. She's ticked off that he embarrassed her in front of her friend, who knew who he was because his picture's on her fridge. While she's admonishing him for his behaviour, she tells him he shouldn't be jealous because he knows she loves him... which is the first time she's ever told him that.

She didn't mean to say that.

They both pretend it's not a big deal so they won't start crying. Then Leonard goes into his apartment where he gets a text from Alex telling him that she's always available if he wants to talk. Dude's knee-deep in ladies.

What I Liked
-Sheldon's "chicken pecking for corn" head motion. You can slip a lot of perverted jokes past the censors, apparently.
-Howard tests the storage room for booby traps by shoving Raj in first. That's the best way to do it.
-Raj thinks 43 is the number from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but Howard tells him it's 42. I actually had to do that once, too.

What I Hated
-Raj and Howard listen at the storage room door, but they don't hear anything. Unless the university decided they needed soundproof storage rooms, they should've heard Sheldon hacking his sack.
-Howard's belt buckle. I get that they're supposed to be super-nerds, but even the biggest Pac-fan wouldn't wear that thing.

Eugh.

Final Thoughts
I really didn't think Alex was going to show up again. Because of the way he treats her, there really isn't much comedy gold to mine out of the Sheldon-Alex relationship. It looks like they might try to get something out of her interactions with Leonard and Raj, though.

No Amy, Bernadette, or Stuart this week. It allowed the show to be a lot more focused, but they still went with two plots that were totally unrelated. It's strange, they've done episodes where all eight characters fit into a single story, but then they cut three of them out of the show entirely and they can't seem to work them into related plots.

That sort of thing doesn't really seem to matter to me, though, because this episode hit 34 on the still unbuilt Laugh-o-meter. That's fairly impressive. Although, upon further viewings, I have no idea why I thought it was so funny the first time. But, I only judge how funny something is one time because a joke is rarely as funny the second time around. I got what I wanted out of it the first time, and that's all that matters.

Fringe 5x07: Five-Twenty-Ten

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Peter stands on a busy street and observes his surroundings. He watches one of the important Observers, Mueller, walk out of a building and down to the road. When he gets there, a second Observer in a car notices him and calls him over. Mueller climbs in, and they drive away. Then Peter walks out into the road and blocks traffic. He waits there just long enough for the traffic light to change, then he moves on. We see Mueller exiting the building again; Peter wasn't watching him the first time, he was seeing a possible future. This time, the other Observer doesn't see him, and Mueller just continues on his intended path. Peter is very pleased with himself.

Very pleased.

Back at the lab, Peter crawls out of a vent toting four canisters of Helium-Neon gas to fuel the amber laser. The rest of the team thinks he's just been off bartering; Walter is upset that he took so long and only managed to get four canisters, and Olivia is concerned that Peter left without her. He tells her that he left really early and didn't want to wake her, but she knows him too well, and recognizes that he left early because he couldn't sleep... again.

Walter gets a bit short with Astrid, and she quickly retrieves the next tape. For the next part of Past Walter's plan, they need to retrieve two of the Observers' beacons from William Bell's lab. That's why Bell was in amber with them and why Walter chopped off his hand last season: To open the door to Belly's private storage room. Astrid and Peter believe William betrayed them to the Observers, so they're not sure if he ever had the beacons in the first place, but all Walter can remember about that time is actually part of the plot to the movie Marathon Man. They have no choice, though, if they want to complete the plan, they need the beacons, so they have to check out the lab.

When they get to there, most of the facility is a pile of rubble. However, Peter uses his Observer Vision to see through some of the debris and locates the door they need to go through. His new powers are taking their toll, though, and he starts bleeding out of his ear.

This is why you should never pierce your own ears.

Walter gives him a quick once over, but Peter lies and says that he's fine. While they discuss what they're going to do to get into the storage facility, Peter gets a call from Anil. He's been trying to hand off a briefcase Peter gave him to an Observer, but the future he saw didn't come to pass, and it didn't work.

While he's on the phone, the rest of the team figures that since they can't blow up the rubble or move it away with heavy equipment, they can visit Nina Sharp and see if she has some technology that will help them change the structure of the junk so they can move it easily. Peter agrees, but says Anil wants to talk to him, so they'll have to go without him. He won't explain exactly what's happening, though, and Olivia is worried about him.

This is her worried face.

Nevertheless, the ladies and Walter head to Brooklyn to meet with Nina. She's happy to see them, but saddened by the fact that she wasn't able to be there to help Olivia through her pain after Etta's death. Fortunately, she has what they need: The Observers built a device to turn solid matter directly into gas so they could clear large swathes of land very quickly, and she just happens to have one lying around.

As they wait for a scientist to deliver what they need, Nina wonders if Walter is angry at her for telling Etta and Simon how to restore his brain. He's been noticing some changes to his personality, but he believes that Peter will be able to help stop him from becoming the man he used to be.

Elsewhere, Peter learns from Anil why his plan didn't work, and retrieves the briefcase to make the hand-off himself. When he returns to his car, his Observer powers malfunction, and he's overcome with blinding pain.

The director chose to go with a fairly literal interpretation of 'blinding'.

He goes to a restaurant and leaves his briefcase with the hat check girl. A few minutes later, an Observer named Royce walks in, and leaves his identical briefcase with the girl. Peter stands up to leave, and while the girl is distracted by a phone call from her degenerate boyfriend, he gets her to give him the wrong case.

In Brooklyn, a scientist explains the device to Astrid and Olivia while Nina and Walter talk. She's worried that Peter won't be enough to stop Walter from becoming the man he was; the man who cared for no one and who desired power above all else. She tried to do exactly the same thing for William, and it didn't work because not even love can compare to the feeling you get when you walk amongst the gods. A bit of the old Walter surfaces, and he tells Nina that the reason she was unsuccessful was because Belly never really loved her.

Even decades later, it still hurts to hear something like that.

Anil watches as Mueller and Royce arrive at an office building for a meeting with a third Observer. Royce opens Peter's briefcase, and gets a dose of gas in the face.

It has some unpleasant effects on him.

The whole team meets back up at Bell's lab. They successfully turn solid concrete into gas, and gain entrance to the facility. But, Nina warned them that the atmospheric changes would be picked up by the Observers, so they have to work quickly.

Inside the building, they use William's severed hand to open the door to his storage room, which was a little bit more disgusting than I thought it would be. The storage room itself is pretty gross, too, and it has all manner of preserved things in jars of formaldehyde.

I don't know whose face is in that jar, and I don't want to know.

Peter finds a safe hidden behind a painting. Fortunately, Walter knows the combination because Belly used the same combination for everything. Which is really poor security procedure for someone who worked with such dangerous and classified stuff. Unfortunately, with his brain scrambled, Walter's unable to immediately recall the combination. Astrid and Olivia both want to leave, but Peter gets him to take a deep breath, and the numbers come back to him: 5-20-10, the title of this episode, and the date of the second season finale.

The beacons aren't in the safe. All that they find is a strange device, a file folder, and a photo of Nina, which Walter pockets. They all believe that they've confirmed that Bell betrayed them to the Observers, until Olivia hands the device to Peter, and it turns on. The beacons arrive soon thereafter, digging up through the floor.

Oh! There they are.

They grab them and head for the door. Olivia draws her weapon in preparation for the fight she thinks is waiting for them outside, but Peter just strolls out nonchalantly like there's nothing to worry about. He's right, of course, and he suggests that they split up. She knows that he's keeping something from her, and now she's moved on from worry to anger.

This is not her worried face.

Walter gets Olivia to take him to see Nina again. He gives her the photo Belly had, and tells her he was wrong: William really did love her. It wasn't enough, though, and Peter won't be enough to keep Walter from reverting back to who he used to be. So, he asks her to take the pieces of his brain out again. It may diminish his intellect a bit, but it's worth it to keep from becoming a monster again.

Meanwhile, Olivia returns to Etta's apartment, and finds Peter drawing timelines. Royce and Mueller were two of Windmark's top Lieutenants, and he manipulated their timelines so they'd be together and he could take them out. He tells her about the thing in his head and about what he's been doing with it. She wants him to stop because she thinks it's too dangerous, but he pulls the whole 'say what you're saying exactly when you say it' thing that Observers like to do, and tells her that he's going to avenge their daughter. Windmark is his next target. She slowly backs out of the apartment while he returns to his work.

She's even less enthusiastic about this than she was about the time he killed all those shapeshifters.

As the episode ends, we're treated to a montage. Walter listens to The Man Who Sold The World, Windmark rides an elevator, and Peter plots a new timeline... until a big clump of his hair falls out.

What I Liked
-The Observers at the restaurant are all eating heavily-peppered, rare roast beef with jalapenos. That's a callback to what September ordered back in 'The Arrival' in season one.
-When the scientist guy is showing her the matter sublimation device, he gets a bit snippy with Astrid, and she makes a face at him behind his back. He thinks he's so big just because he has a machine that can turn concrete into gas.
-Of all the things that William did to him, Walter is the most ticked off that he stole his copy of David Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World. They used the wrong version, though. The 1972 reissue probably looks better on TV, but the original US version had a drawing of a mental asylum on it, which would've been more fitting, considering that William stole it after Walter was institutionalized.
-Peter explains where the gas he used to melt the Observers' faces came from. I knew it had been on the show before, but I couldn't remember where. It's funny to go back and look at the pilot and pick out all the buildings they used at UofT. Fun fact: I used to have classes in the Federal Building in Boston.

What I Hated
-The Observers at the restaurant are all eating heavily-peppered, rare roast beef with jalapenos. Sure, it's nice that they made a callback, but just because one Observer ate that specific meal one time it doesn't mean that they all have to eat it all the time. That's just silly.
-When Walter can't remember the combination to the safe, Olivia thinks they should give up and get out of there, despite the fact that she has a photographic memory -especially when it comes to numbers- and Walter told her the combination back in season two. They've been making a lot of callbacks to the earlier episodes this season, but if they're only going to recognize part of the continuity and ignore the rest, then I'd rather they didn't mention the past at all. Of course, the continued use of the combination raises an interesting question: Since William Bell didn't die on May 20, 2010 in this timeline, what's the significance of the numbers?

Final Thoughts
The word of the day is TRUST. Olivia can't trust Peter anymore because he's been lying to her, and Walter can't trust himself anymore because his old personality is returning.

Blair Brown's temporary return got me thinking of all the characters this show has lost over the years: Nina, Broyles, Charlie, Lincoln, Brandon, that FBI agent from the second season premiere, John Scott, Rachel and Ella, September, and even Gene. I sometimes wonder how different the stories would've been if the show had been more popular and they'd had the budget to keep some of those characters around. The show doesn't appear to have suffered, but there's no way to know. Perhaps the producers had far grander plans in mind when they started, or maybe things have unfolded more or less the way they would've if the show had had a CSI-sized audience.

I don't think they're going to make Peter into an Observer in the traditional sense. Somehow, I think blinding pain, blood pouring out of his ears, and his hair falling out is more likely a symptom of incompatibility between his body and the Observer chip than part of some kind of transformation process. However, I've been wrong before.

For instance, I could've sworn Nina was a redhead.

I saw a bit of an interview with John Noble where he talked about how this was Joshua Jackson's first opportunity to play a different character on the show. Everyone else has been able to play at least one alternate, but because the other Peter died, he never got the chance. So, this is the year where we meet finally get to meet the other Peter. He's driven, he's focused, and he knows kung fu; very much like the alternate Olivia, only with less hair and more bleeding out of the ears.

It's not really about Peter anymore, though. We all know what Peter is trying to do, and while he's no longer driven by emotion, but by cold, unfeeling logic, vengeance is still the only thing on his mind. The question is, what is Olivia going to do? The man she loves -and she had a little girl talk with Astrid that proves she very much does want to be with him- is in dire need of help and maybe an ass-kicking. Giving up on him or letting him go certainly does not seem to be an option. So, will she kick his ass, or try to appeal to what remains of his humanity? Or both? We'll find out in three weeks when the show comes back from its break.