“I can’t read your mind, but I read his.” – Simon
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 the previous one 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.
More thoughts on Fringe, “Concentrate and Ask Again”:
* I’m still hoping Peter manages to save both Universes somehow. Barring that, I hope he merges them– then Olivia can he whole, with both halves of this same personality in one head, and all the characters from both worlds together.
* Is Sam a wayward Observer gone native? That’d be fun. Is he something else entirely? Probably.
* Watching a dude’s bones melt is about the grossest thing I’ve seen all week. Bones are creepy.
* I really don’t know what was up with last week. This show is usually so well-planned, and the ones before and after were tight, so… they just dropped the ball there? They made some last-minute decisions that forced them to speed up the storyline and caused that hinge-ep to be all dumb?
* This show really loves a cypher.
* Olivia looks great in a dress and makeup, but she should have maybe chosen something easier to run up stairs in. Just a thought. Also, she was shooting without any secondary verification, and she could have been killing people in cold blood for all she knew; I hope someone mentions that she was rattled by that fact, even just a little.
* If they’re bringing in the idea of Cortexiphan kids who aren’t on the roster, I hope they do more with them than the last batch. It was annoying to have them all filed away and brought back, only to have them all killed in one episode. Are you listening, JJ?
Some stats and info about Fringe, “Concentrate and Ask Again”
TV SHOW – Fringe
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 3, Episode 12
AIRED ON – February 4th, 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.