'Fringe' Opens a Door

This show has managed to make me enjoy a mythology-laden episode as much as one of the case-of-the-week outings.  And this is going to sound even crazier, but the whole bad-guys-from-the-alternate-universe-stole-pieces-of-Walter's-brain-from-the-people-someone-implanted-them-in-and-then-reconnected-the-pieces-with-Walter made perfect sense and I LOVED every minute of it!  It had been so long since we'd seen Frozen Head Guy I had forgotten about him.  And then there was the miraculously healed mental patients (to which I thought, how bad can Frozen Head Guy be?  Huh!), Olivia's pressure-filled decision and the BIG revelation about Walter.  What a way to end things until 2010.


The leader of the bad guys from the alternate universe was looking for something and he found it.  That something was really someTHINGS and they were small fragments of Walter's brain!  Someone had harvested the fragments (parts of the memory) to safeguard a potentially deadly secret discovery that Walter had made when he lost Peter.  He found a way to unlock a door between this universe and the alternate one.  He went through it and he "stole" alternate universe Peter (or simply, Peter to us and Olivia) to replace the Peter he lost in this universe.  The bad guys needed to know how Walter unlocked that door, so they harvested the pieces (which were being safeguarded in other people's brains courtesy of a mysterious Dr. Paris), reconnected them to Walter and possibly discovered the secret (my money's on yes).  To make matters worse, the leader built in a "safety net" to ensure that he would be able escape the FBI's clutches.  He injected Walter with a neurotoxin forcing Olivia to choose between capturing him or saving Walter.  It went down to the finale seconds, but she made the right decision and saved Walter.  Broyles beautifully articulated why she made the right decision -- emotions running high or not.

The show saved the biggest shocker for the end, though.  That mysterious Dr. Paris had harvested the fragments of Walter's brain 14 years ago.  He had then systematically implanted those fragments into the brains of people for safe-keeping undergoing counseling (he made sure they were institutionalized to ensure they were kept safe).  So, who is Dr. Paris?  That answer came in the final moments in the form of an MRI/sedative-induced dream from Walter.  It was his old colleague William Bell.  Bell didn't want Walter's discovery to fall into the wrong hands, so he literally removed the memories from his mind.  Unfortunately, the seemingly perfect hiding place was discovered by those who want to use it for bad.  The reason why isn't exactly clear yet, but it appears that the alternate universe is plagued by something they call "the blight" and they need the door to escape it.  Of course as Olivia pointed out, with each new answer comes more questions (gotta love when shows take a stab at themselves), so there is a lot more to this story yet to be told.  This hiatus feels long already!

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