Quick Take: Fringe, "Concentrate and Ask Again"
"I can't read your mind -- but I read his." - Simon
Review: Fringe, "Concentrate and Ask Again"
(S0312) Someone is revenge-killing with a weird powder that dissolves all of a person's bones, and the team is called in to investigate. But that only matters at the beginning. They figure out pretty quickly that it's an ex-Marine who's taking out everyone related to some testing that he was immune to and vaccinated against, but which affects the development of his (and his cohorts') offspring, and he winds up getting hit by a car and winds up comatose. To interrogate him, they track down another of the Cortexiphan kids, this one a telepath who can't control his abilities and was bumped from the program and erased from the record so he wouldn't expose Walter's secret.
The rest of the episode involves him reading people's minds to track the other bone-melting terrorists, and not reading Olivia's mind because she's immune to his abilities. This is interspersed with Olivia and Peter continuing to make up and hitting roadblocks that prove he still thinks about Fauxlivia.
Meanwhile, Nina continues to investigate the First People, finds a cipher, and learns that Sam -- the guy who helped her after her robot-arm mishap and helped Olivia after the smashed through time and space -- wrote the books. Instant mystery! He's like 30-something, and the books were all written ages ago, at different times, in different languages. He tells her that the machine they've been thinking of as a weapon can also be a creator, and it all comes down to Peter's particular frequency when he gets into it-- and the frequency is determined by who he chooses, Olivia or Fauxlivia. All of this is in the last three minutes or less of the episode or so.
This is a much better episode than last week in just about every way. It was tighter, on-character, quiet despite the action, made sense, and told us something significant about the core storyline. Really, last week could be entirely removed from the plot without ruining this week at all, except maybe that one scene where Brandon told Nina about Bell collecting the books. Maybe.
The Peter-and-Olivia thing is starting to wear a little thin, and it's nice that Peter made that why-are-we-still-thinking-about-this face when she brought it up again, because it's going to matter a lot in the rest of the season the way Sam tells it, and we need something new in there. Poor Peter. In love with two of the same woman, and two whole universes in the balance, and all this while he's slowly becoming a psychopath (which wasn't even really hinted at here).
It was great to have more Nina, and her honesty about her relationship with William Bell, which made her sort of the Ghost of Relationships Future for Olivia (and the genre as a whole, really.). And it was great to get more of Cryptic Sam and his half-told stories, because he just ramped up the mystery ten times faster than the main cast can.
All in all, a good episode, restoring faith in the show.
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Video: Fringe, "Concentrate and Ask Again"
The description for this video says, "The team faces a perilous threat." That's, um, every episode. Here's the episode in full from Hulu, while available.
