Dust in the Wind

This week's episode certainly brought literal meaning to that famous Kansas song!  As Walter said, the victims were reduced to their most elemental state.  I tend to enjoy the stand-alone/freak- of- the-week episodes more than the mythology-laden ones and I thought this one was especially good.  The special effects alone were worth the price of admission!  How (disgustingly) awesome were those scenes with the remains, still intact, that began to crumble or, in some cases, blow away (thanks to an oscillating fan)?!  I wanted to be disgusted (and I'm sure I would have been had I been the one discovering my loved one like that), but the darn special effects were so good that I found myself in awe of their awesome-ness.  But there was also an intense race against time, a puzzling mystery and lots of pressure on Walter.  And a lot of that dust.

Of course, the dust was only a small part of this intriguing tale...

The dust was merely the aftermath -- the by product -- of what was really going on in this episode.  A famed Russian cosmonaut returned from a trip to space with something more than a few incredible photos.  He brought back with him a space entity.  As Dexter would say, a "dark passenger"... literally.  Some sort of space entity latched onto his being while he was up there and it put him in a coma.  His brother, in a desperate attempt to save his life, smuggled him out of Russia and kept moving him around to different cities and hospitals.  It seems that the cosmonaut and the space entity became so entwined that they relied on each other for life.  The entity, in order to stay alive, projected himself outside the cosmonaut's body (as a shadow) and sought people with high levels of radiation in their bodies.  The entity sucked out the radiation, killing everyone it stole it from and turning their remains into dust.  But, how do you stop a space entity that projects itself as a shadow?  Kill its comatose host.  THAT was an intense scene!  I was worried about that poor little girl.  Regardless, she's going to have some nightmares after that close encounter of the dark passenger kind!

Fringe airs Thursday nights on Fox. If you missed this week's episode, you can watch it for free at Fox.com.