Exactly how does a woman who isn’t pregnant not only become pregnant but also give birth in the span of half an hour? That’s one of the questions perplexing the team on this week’s episode of Fringe. The other question is how does a baby who is only four hours old die as an 80 year old man? And you thought you had a tough job.
This week’s fringe science mystery is insanity to us but for Dr. Walter Bishop, it takes him only a quick trip down memory lane to help solve this one. Seems way back when he worked for the government, he was charged with figuring out how to grow soldiers. No need to reread that last sentence: he was charged with growing soldiers. I guess the government was running low during Vietnam and thought that if we could speed up the aging process then within three years of an infant’s birth, they would be a strapping 21 year old guy ready to do the government’s bidding. The only problem Walter had with this experiment was stopping the aging process when they hit 21.
All of this coincidentally intertwines with an unsolved string of murders Olivia had been working on. There were women popping up dead with an MO that involves removing the woman’s pituitary gland. For my fellow non-scientists, that’s the gland that controls all of our growth development. Thank goodness, or should I say the writers, for adding some one who doesn’t know what the Bishop boys are saying so Peter has to explain in layman’s terms, otherwise we’d all be screwed. So this guy’s been inactive for quite a few years but then at the hotel the non-pregnant dead woman was last seen in, Peter and Olivia find an orange substance exactly like the muscle paralyze the killer used in the unsolved cases. Not only that but the sheets were a particular thread count, which the killer also had a taste for. So now we know the killer was definitely with the woman who bore the old man. Fishy, right?
Of course it is because everything is connected. Searching back through the original experiments, the team discovers the scientist who was working with William. Olivia and the increasingly involved Peter track him down and ask him about his knowledge of the subject. He, of course, says he was sickened by the work and quit after only one year of working for the government. The guy seems honest enough but both Peter and Olivia think he’s hiding something. In the meantime, another woman has turned up dead and missing her pituitary gland. Luckily, Walter has an idea that just might let them see the last images the new woman saw before she died. This, of course, involves some crazy gadget that only the possibly evil Massive Dynamic has.
So Olivia gets the device from Massive Dynamic while the Bishops are trying to figure out why the pituitary gland. Not too surprisingly, the Bishops succeed. Walter explains that the guy is one of the test tube babies he made that needs to inject himself with other people’s hormones to keep him young. Then they’re able to hook up the imaging machine to the dead woman’s visual something so Olivia can see what the dead woman saw before dying. Basically, since the woman was injected with a muscle paralyze, the eye nerves that transmit images were also paralyzed thus saving the image in the nerves. Using this fancy Massive Dynamic gadget, Walter is able to transmit the images from the woman’s brain to a computer screen. No, I’m serious.
But it works and they see a bridge that narrows down the area where the woman was killed to the Warehouse District. Using some FBI technology, Olivia and team are able to track the districts via satellite and they see a car parked in front of a warehouse during the time of the woman’s death. So now they have a location and Olivia and Peter take off to try and catch the killer once and for all. In the warehouse at that time, the scientist who worked with Walter is helping the killer who, shockingly, calls the doctor “Father.” Apparently one scientist couldn’t leave his weird God-like work at work. Just as they’re about to kill another girl, Olivia and Peter bust in and break up the party. Olivia takes off after the ‘son’ and Peter is charged with making sure the scientist doesn’t get away. Of course, he pumps the girl with anesthesia thus killing her and during the commotion, he runs out of the warehouse.
So now Olivia is chasing a rapidly aging man and Peter is staring at a woman who just died. Good thing he’s a genius and able to rig together a defibrillator out of some random items. And Olivia finally gets her guy because he gets so old he dies of natural causes. Easiest ending to a chase ever. Not so easy is when Olivia returns the crazy science gadget to Massive Dynamic and the woman offers her a job. She turns it down nicely but there were some very strange moments there. Why does Massive Dynamic know so much about the pattern? Obviously they’re into it somehow after you found out they were going to interrogate Agent Scott after his death. And they have all this weird equipment. Hmm…
Of course, Olivia, Peter and Walter are all sticking around each other. The Bishops’ relationship is even healing a little. Which is good because we also found out tonight that there was something very odd about Peter. Walter mentioned something about not being able to separate work and life just as his former partner couldn’t and then he said the quickest snippet about Peter’s medical past. But Olivia hadn’t read any of this in Walter’s file as he thought she had and he abruptly dropped the subject. What the huh??? And what’s with the three guys lying on the table in the very last split-second long shot of the episode??? Agh. I need to know now. I guess this show is pretty addictive.
