Quick Take: Fringe, “A Better Human Being”
“There’s a new voice.” - Simon
Review: Fringe, “A Better Human Being”
(S0413) Last week’s gripping cliffhanger left many Fringe fans hopeful, anxious, and understandably frustrated for a further Fringe-fix. Luckily, it didn’t take long for Peter and Olivia to discuss the latter’s apparent lapse – or leap – of memory. When the Fringe team “over here” meets a misdiagnosed schizophrenic with a seeming-psychic connection to a homicidal home invasion, Olivia starts flashing back to St. Claire’s mental institution when she first met Walter – with Peter.
After running some tests in the lab, Walter is convinced that Olivia’s unusual emotional sensitivity – a result of her uniquely traumatic childhood during her Cortexiphan trials – is picking up on Peter’s deep-seated desire for his own Olivia. Peter seems hesitant to accept that Olivia is simply harbouring an empathic connection to his fondest memories, but he doesn’t accept that his girlfriend’s memory has somehow skipped timelines, either.
While Olivia and Peter follow up on leads that might help the boy who hears voices and prevent another attack, Walter remains at the lab to pursue apparent similarities between segments of Olivia’s and Simon’s genetic code. As it goes, all roads lead back to Massive Dynamic: Lincoln and Walter take their findings straight to Nina Sharp, demanding access to the Cortexiphan samples he believes were reverse-engineered and are presently being given to Olivia.
Olivia, however, is quick to find herself face to face with the real Nina Sharp, who has been tied up and obviously replaced with a shapeshifter. Even though the trail goes cold on the generation of genetically-manipulated hive-minds defending their secret, Olivia’s mind is elsewhere – maybe literally, definitely figuratively – when Peter admits that he’s only scared of making the same mistake of mistaking Olivias as he did last season. He finally looks past his disbelief when he learns that Olivia is remembering things that he didn’t know about her yet, though he gets little chance to reconnect before she gets kidnapped.
It’s unfortunate that such a potential-laden concept as human hive-minds was overshadowed by the more intriguing developments pertaining to Olivia, but better a case remain unresolved than forcing too much out of it. I certainly appreciated the time focused on Astrid (Jasika Nicole) as she further endeared herself to fans with her patient sympathy towards the hive-hearing Simon, as well as the subtle but significant restoration of Walter’s self-confidence and courage in protecting those he cares about.
As it stands, my theory is that Olivia’s unique exposure to Cortexiphan has given her Observer-like abilities that link her body from the Amberverse’s timeline with her memories from the timeline from which Peter was torn. As the fabric of the universe falls apart, maybe memories of Peter’s timeline will continue to bleed through until the Amberverse is indistinguishable from the world Peter left.
