Quick Take: Fringe, "Os"
"I just wanted to fix you." - Doctor Crick
Review: Fringe, "Os"
(S0316) Some guys get caught stealing rare minerals, and when one gets shot he floats away, which of course tickles Walter pink. The investigation leads to an aerospace engineer who discovered that, somehow, combining two of the heaviest elements on earth creates a serum that can make a person lighter than air-- and he did it because he was trying to come up with a way to help his parapalegic son walk again. Except that it was poisonous and against physics, and the test subjects kept dying, which meant he had to keep chopping them up to get his test results, which meant there was a gross scene of dismembered bodies.
Meanwhile, Peter and Olivia are cute and in love, and they're divulging all their secrets to avoid a replay of the issues they'd had before. This results in Peter going "Hey, maybe I should tell Olivia I've become a crazy mass-murderer because of the Machine!". So he does. But as he's in the middle of explaining that the data's still there on the shapeshifter drives, but he doesn't know how to get at it, plowing over the fact that he was working in direct opposition to Olivia in that case where she was trying to get at these same disks, Walter enacts another plan. See, he realized that the serum could only exist if physics were breaking down, and that's cause by the cracking universe, and that's caused by him, so he has to fix it. He doesn't think he can do it like he used to be able to before, so he figures out a way to get William Bell back-- because Belly always has a contingency plan, and the bell he gave Nina is the signal for this one to trigger. Before Olivia can react to Peter's news, she gets inhabited by Bell.
The A-Plot of this one was dull and pretty straight forward. Who really cares about how wrong Cameron came out after Ferris Beuller went away (which is how it sort of feels, since he's not given much character-building)? He's a lovely actor, and he really sold the part, but he wasn't given much to work with: the whole thing came across as another daddy-issue, and this show is already riddled with them. It was too easily called when we were watching through, and it took away from the B-Plot, which is where the real interesting things were happening.
Walter and Nina in a scene together is always fun, and the scene where Walter rang the bell and nothing happened to Nina was great. Equally as great, but in a totally different way, was Peter showing Olivia his secret lab (is he becoming a villain? Ooh, that'd be awesome and horrible at once). The mix of showing it off like a little kid, telling it all in forced clinicality so she doesn't have a chance to go "Oh Em Gee, you're a murderer and also the jerk I was trying to catch that other episode", and his dawning realization of what's happening when Belly comes back is just brilliant. Few people can pull off a slow dawn like Josh Jackson.
The episode as a whole felt short. We got to the end, and we we sure the DVR had just stopped recording, but it was a full hour... It just wasn't all that well-paced, really, and we didn't realize the end was already there. The case was uninteresting, as I said, and the really fun stuff of the Bell-return was just starting.
But it did make an effective lead-in to the next episode.
More thoughts on "Os":
Video: Fringe, "Os"
Watch the full episode on Hulu while available.
