“If you had asked me a week ago, I would have told you I would do anything to save our world, when in fact, there are lines I simply cannot cross.” – Walternate
In the Redniverse, Broyles is still missing and if Fauxlivia knows that she’s the reason for it, she’s not letting on. Add that to the secrets she’s keeping from everyone. A totally healed and scarless Lincoln gets promoted to head of the team. They all go out to investigate a case of a guy getting eaten alive from the inside out by lots of supposedly extinct beetles. They crowdsource the tip that a certain scientist named Silva is into those particular beetles, then figure out what equipment he’d need and tace that to where he’s most likely to be, and viola! Mad scientist lair.
Silva separates Fauxlivia and Lincoln and then goes all monologue-y and tells her that he only needs one more generation of gross bugs to create the vaccine for Avian Flu he’s been working on since the beetles supposedly went extinct with their host species (sheep) ten years ago. The only thing that works as a replacement host is people. Fauxlivia gets sick to her stomach and assumes it’s because he infected her. She’s rescued and rished to the hospital–and along the way, they discover that she’s not infected: he infected himself, and she’s just run-of-the-mill pregnant.
Dun dun DUN!
Because meanwhile, she’s been reunited with Frank, who came back from trying to help people not die with a purpose. He proposes and she accepts, and now that she’s pregnant from a time obviously during the time he was missing, he’s more than a little ticked, and he leaves her. But Walternate is thrilled. This is exactly what he needs to get Peter back, the best leverage ever.
I’ve missed the Redniverse, where everyone is a little different and more comfortable in their jobs that aren’t secret. This episode was okay, but not the best one we’ve gotten from the Other side, but it wasn’t exactly bad. It just felt a little contrived. Like they started with the idea that at the end of the episode, Fauxlivia had to be pregnant, then asked how you know someone’s preggers (morning sickness), then what else could make someone sick (something non-baby incubating inside them–> gross bugs), then just figured out who would do that. The villain was kind of flat, and they missed the chance to get Frank, who is all about saving people from sickness, involved in the man himself. They should have been foils for each other, but the show stopped short of actually making that comparison. It felt like a pulled punch.
But it did a really good job of highlighting how different Fauxlivia and Walternate’s relationship is to Olivia and Walter’s. In our universe, they’re pretty close, almost a family; in the Redniverse, she works for him, and, apparently, her uterus belongs to him since the father is his son (I wonder if there’s a clause in her contract about that), but she’s never been more than a tool to him, and his interest in her baby is creepy, at best. Ooh–I hope he has to cross his no-testing-on-kids line with his own grandbaby, which will add to his monsterhood, alienate Peter once and for all, cause Fauxlivia to rebel and maybe defect, and, if we’re lucky, create a super-powered infant that they’re all responsible for. That’d be a season ender to write home about, right there!
More thoughts:
* I really hope the Bug Girl gets to show up again. Scarlie’s awesome and needs more screen time. (And I was finally starting to see Fauxlivia’s hair as red like they said it was, until she stood next to Bug Girl. Now it looks brown again.). She could be the Creepy Lab Girl like Abby on NCIS.
* We were talking about this episode, and we think a few opportunities were missed. No one on the team knows that she was replaced and then re-replaced. She doesn’t have any of Olivia’s memories, only her notes or reports. Surely something would have come up?
* If Lincoln can be healed without scars, why does Scarlie still have his?
* Walternate and Brandon discover that their synthesized Cortexiphan kills adults, but it kills younger adults less quickly after giving them strange powers. Brandon wants to start tests on kids, but Walternate won’t do it. He’s finally found a line he will not cross. If Walternate won’t test on kids, does that means that Walter is the bigger monster in this case because he did?
* Adding a baby to the cast is going to be tricky. Fauxlivia will be indisposed at some point, unable to do her job — which could open the way for a new character who will fill in for her and cause trouble (Fringe’s very own Diana Fowley to their Mulder and Scully?), or it could be a way to turn a strong female character into a Damsel in Distress, which is annoying. And what will they do with a baby? Leave it in the Redniverse? Take it home and domesticate the Blueniverse? Send it away, also a la X-Files? Kill it heartlessly? Age it in an alternate dimension like Angel did? It’s nothing but trouble, really, and it’ll be interesting to see how the writers get around that.
* Walternate has a mistress. How very upper crust of him. Is he still married to Mrs. Walternate? He seemed to be last time we saw her.
* Scarlie has spiders inside him. I remembered them being worms, but I think spiders are much, much creepier.
Some stats and info about Fringe, “Immortality”
TV SHOW – Fringe
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 3, Episode 13
AIRED ON – February 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.