“Fine, if you end up breaking the universe, this time it’s on your head.” – Walter
In the Blueniverse: there have been mysterious “numbers stations” for almost as long as there have been radio receivers to pick them up, and maybe they were even there before radio. It’s become something of a hobby for people to listen in on them and try to crack the code, whatever it is, and in the cold open, a group of several of these hobbyists listen to one particular broadcast that blanks their memories. Of course Fringe goes to investigate. Lots of investigation ensues, and it turns out that the broadcasts are deeply coded reports of where parts of the Peter-machine are located, and they’re all over the world. They dig up one of them and decide that they need to get the rest and start putting it all together to see what it does.
Meanwhile, Fauxlivia is aware of who is responsible for the cubes they keep finding that are piggybacking the memory-wipe on the numbers station, and kills him, then fakes trauma and says she had no choice, it was self-defense. Her and Peter’s relationship has taken a sweet turn that makes it all the creepier and sad-making that she’s not who she says she is. He made her breakfast in bed! He bought her concert tickets to see U2! Do you know how expensive those are? He let his guard down! Oh the horror! The waiting for that particular plotline to take a nosedive might kill me. The ad for next week makes it look like maybe the showdown is coming, but it showed so little of anything actually happening that I’m inclined to believe it less than I already do.
Astrid got some awesomeness this week, since her mentioned-long-ago skills at cryptography finally came in handy and she got to crack the code that people have been looking at for a century without cracking. Does the fact that the locations are all over the world mean that Fringe is going international? Because it could be really fun to see them interacting with their foreign counterparts, a new one every week or so, while they build this machine– or, at least, half the machine, since there’s so much already built in the other Universe, and it’s unclear as of yet whether it’s a duplicate machine they’re looking for now, or the rest of the one that Walternate was trying to build. If that’s what it is, he was much less complete than he said he was. Not that we could ever trust anything he had to say.
This was a pretty strong episode, but it’s still feeling like it’s set-up, and the waiting for the inevitable needs to end soon, or it will just have gone on way too long. It feels like the plot is the point more than the characters and their reactions to it are. The strength of the show has always been in how these moderately-normal people manage to make sense of everything, how they live in the insular world of only having a handful of people who know what they’re doing.
More thoughts on Fringe, “6955 kHz”:
* The titles made up of numbers seems to be the thing with this section of the season.
* The discussion between Peter and Fauxlivia when they were digging up the grossly-slimy machine (code in SF shows for ‘biological components’) was a little crystal-clear piece of brilliance: She asks him if he wouldn’t do anything to save his universe, which sounds like she’s trying to tell him before everything falls apart that this is why she’s doing what she’s doing. And that sounds like she’s feeling bad about what she’s doing. He answers that he thinks there’s another way, and sets up that he’d do whatever it takes to save as many people as possible — and that makes me happy, since my personal hobbyhorse for this plot arc is for the universes to merge, not annihilate.
* Astrid’s scenes were all lovely. She knows Walter so well, and she’s the one who seems to have the most time to work with him and take care of him. And even though she was the one who solved the problem, she took him along with her.
* Walter and Nina renewing their friendship over a nice spliff was sweet. Nina is so interesting and so vital to Massive Dynamic, that it’s nice when she has something to do in the plot. Maybe we’ll get more of her, even if Walter does stay in the Harvard lab– which it’s nice to see he did this week, at least. I missed the cow last week!
* All this First People stuff: new revelation of the backstory, or red herring? If there was a previous race of humans, maybe that’s what the Observers are, who we haven’t seen directly in quite a while now? It would definitely explain where the machine is coming from, and maybe survivors breeding with the populace is why some people are special. But the straightforwardness of the connection seems to be too convenient. And do we really need another conspiracy when we still have ZFT floating around, and a whole other universe of ulterior motives?
* Peter: “I had to go back, I forgot to say skim.” Fauxlivia: “You walked there twice? You didn’t have to do that.” Peter: “I had a motive. It’s the little things that make me irresistible. — See? This is what’s tearing up the ‘shipping centers of my brain.”
Some stats and info about Fringe, “6955 kHz”
TV SHOW – Fringe
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 5, Episode 1
AIRED ON – September 23rd, 2011
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX
GENRE – Science Fiction, Drama
CREATED BY – J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci
CAST – Anna Torv, Joshua Jackson, Jasika Nicole, John Noble, Lance Reddick, Blair Brown
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.