“Clearly I’m in the wrong place, and all the people that I know and love are somewhere else.” – Peter
Olivia experienced what I can only call a “glitch” in the previous episode: a brief moment, like a skip on a record, when she lived a trivial exchange with another agent twice. I thought it would have had to do with her Cortexiphan trials as a child – which it may yet prove to be. She’s glimpsed “over there” more than once – but continuing to defy expectations, Fringe “glitches out,” tackling another tour through time.
Peter’s return seems to have set off a chain of “anomalies” having to do with time: an entire apartment building jumps backwards to just after a fire, a car almost gets hit by a train that is and isn’t there – even Peter himself is partaking in these jumps. He also has a dream about being married to Olivia, though it soon becomes clear that not everything is necessarily related.
Being more willing to learn from and about Peter than Walter is, Olivia learns that Peter isn’t aware that he was bleeding through the universes. The disembodied voices and the voiceless reflections weren’t… consciously projected. Of course, not existing tends to entail not being conscious. When a convenient skip brings Peter back to one of the anomalous sites, he discovers evidence of a man-made machine that might be responsible for the time-rips.
Raymond and Kate (the spectacular guest-stars Stephen Root and Romy Rosemont) were a prestigious couple; an electrical engineer and a theoretical physicist, respectively respected. When Alzheimer’s cruelly stole Kate’s mind away, Raymond labored to create a machine that would restore her mind by trapping them in 2007, oblivious to the outside world. In order to hold the time-bubble around their house, keeping Kate in increasingly longer pre-Alzheimer states, Raymond’s machine has to move time from other spaces. Kate’s work in time-displacement didn’t inform her husband of the repercussions of his love’s labor, however, and the Fringe Division is soon at their door.
As mind-blowing as the time-displacements are, they’re wonderfully coherent, and they culminate in the spectacular disintegration of an agent who doesn’t notice the bubble. Walter’s unwillingness to work with Peter doesn’t impede his ability to react with his scientific mind, however, and he devises the “Walter Bishop-Faraday Harness” for Peter to wear to safely pass through the point of broken space-time. (For those in need of a refresher, a “Faraday Cage” is that screen in your microwave-oven that stops your brain from melting out through your ears due to electromagnetic radiation).
Aside from the bizarrely impossible cases that are under investigation week-in and week-out, what sets Fringe apart from other crime dramas is the mild lack of actual crimes. Tonight’s episode is markedly similar to season two’s “White Tulip,” in which a man struggles to send himself back in time to be with his wife before she dies in a car crash. The similarities are tied to a recurring theme in Fringe; love can challenge science, nature, even fate, but it has a spread of consequences. Like love for Helen launching a thousand ships combined with Frankenstein’s disregard for the impact of his extreme actions.
Peter has been moved to Walter’s campus-housing while the mad-doctor himself takes refuge in his lab, though he’s still under constant surveillance, having not quite won over the trust of the Fringe agents yet. Olivia, however, seems to trust Peter the most, offering her optimism in returning him to his proper timeline. That is, of course, assuming that Peter’s instinct about resetting his own timeline isn’t ultimately correct.
Some stats and info about Fringe, “And Those We’ve Left Behind”
TV SHOW – Fringe
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 4, Episode 6
AIRED ON – November 11th, 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.