fringe: the road not taken

The Fringe world gets weirder: now Olivia’s seeing into and interacting with alternate realities.

The case is of a girl who spontaneously combusts, but a look at her house shows that she’s combusted before. It’s not spontaneous, and it’s probably not natural. Meanwhile, Liv keeps seeing more than one body, and it gets worse. She sees the city burning. She sees the office in an uproar handling the outbreak of a terrorist plague attack. And when the trail goes dry here, she can get info from the other universe, which means she finds out that the victim (and probably the others she finds along the way) has a twin. They track the twin, but get there too late. Peter, who’s been working on a mystery project, reveals that it’s a machine to read sound waves off objects, and that it can be modified from it’s original purpose of decoding Walter’s old warped records to read the sounds in the room at the time the twin was kidnapped. It works well enough, of course, to get a phone number, and Liv’s phone has an app that can dial from the tones: and gets Harris’s phone. That’s right, the guy who’s been trying to get her off the case and out of Fringe Division is in on whatever’s happening to these people.

Liv and Charlie track him and find the girl, but Harris’s tests to activate her have made her unstable—Liv stops her from blowing the two of them up, but the girl combusts Harris instead. Ha! but now their trail is literally in ashes.

Meanwhile, Nina Sharp is agitated by a phone call and eventually shows up at Broyles’s door late at night with a warning of the Observer and something big on the way.

Liv knows Walter was in on the experiments on kids: the twins were from Jacksonville, and are about the same age as her. She wants answers, but he can’t provide them; he can’t remember.

Walter goes back to his office to find the original manuscript of the ZFT book to prove that Bell had a whole removed chapter on ethics that the movement isn’t using, and therefore that Bell isn’t to blame for them, finds it, and then is visited by the Observer, who tells him ‘it’s time’ and they leave together.

What’s going on now? The season’s almost at an end! And suddenly this show is very fiercely interesting.