Quick Take, Fringe, "Firefly"
"There are things I cannot know." - The Observer
Review, Fringe, "Firefly"
(S0310) Fringe is never easy to explain, so we'll go with the quickest route. Walter is trying to make some concoction that will restore his lost brain-parts and or the intellect lost with them, and has started experimenting on themselves. We're in the blueniverse once and for all and Olivia is still upset about Fauxlivia living her life and no one noticing, but she puts on a brave face because Weird Things are happening. The main Observer who we all know is relatively young and quirky contacts them (indirectly at first) to help him fix a mistake. By letting Walter and Peter live when they fell into the lake all those years ago, he let a string of events come into play that has to finish up now. Walter is sure it means Peter needs to die, and he spends a portion of the episode being almost killed, but not as almost-killed as the girl who sets the whole fixing in motion.
So Walter follows the clues and meets the keyboardist for his old favorite band, Violet Sedan Chair (check out this clue about them from, like, two years ago), and finds out that the band broke up because of the mistake-chain. Because whenever Walter gets to save something he loves, he loses something else. But the upshot is that Peter wasn't killed and there's an opening for Christopher Lloyd to come back for other guest spots!
I was concerned when Fringe was moved to the Friday Death Slot, but it looks like the move hasn't damaged the show at all. This is as complex and clean an episode as Fringe ever made. Even though this could have been a simple throw-away episode, a space-filler to bring the show back without changing the status quo too much, but they went ahead and produced this beautiful clockwork of an episode instead. Every little thing that happens in the whole thing fits into everything else that happens, and it all dovetails nicely with what we already know of Peter and Walter's shared history. It's brilliant.
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More Chris Lloyd, always a good thing !
I kind of think the "rules" are changing significantly in many ways. There are more great shows on in the summer than ever before, and same goes for Fridays. This week for example I watched Spartacus: Gods of the Arena and Kitchen Nightmares. Hopefully Fringe will thrive in the Friday slot.