“I like porcupines. It shows that god has a sense of humor.” – Walter
Something seems off. Did we just experience a Fringe event? Because it feels like we just time-travelled back to Season One. It’s one of my favorite episodes, “The Transformation,” where a nerdy guy on a plane gets a nosebleed, hassles the flight crew, goes into the bathroom and… doesn’t turn into a murderous spiny behemoth? And now he’s getting arrested, questioned, and – oh, that’s more like it.
Well, something is definitely off, and not just the extended director’s cut of the porcupine case. Olivia is deemed temporarily unfit for duty after effectively sacrificing half of her memory to be with Peter, and Lincoln isn’t happy about it. He does the “good guy” thing and concedes so that they can go on with the case, but he immediately gets the “good guy” treatment by being attacked by the spiked mutant.
Despite the differences between the otherwise similar cases, everyone else is falling into old habits. Peter and Olivia get their groove back and revisit Ed’s bookshop for the first time; Walter enjoys having a semblance of a family as much as he enjoys his peanut butter and bacon sandwiches; and a very ZFT-like group whose villainous goals entail technologically guided evolution — or in this case, mutation.
The injury Lincoln sustains also carries the virus which allows human beings to transform into these creatures. Although Walter is able to derive a cure, the Fringe Division is far from discovering its source. We already know that David Robert Jones is amassing an army of biological shapeshifters – likely inciting the uprising of the “End of Day-ers” laying waste to the universe, and ultimately killing Olivia during Peter’s time-jump in the Season Three Finale – but his plans involve so much more.
As though it wasn’t frightening enough to watch the creature armed with spikes laced in a self-replicating virus sprout wings and fly, an unsettling – possibly, literally universe-shattering – revelation is held until the final scene. After watching Battlestar Galactica’s Felix Gaeta (Allesandro Juliani) choose to join DRJ’s army of flying hedgehog monsters, the real threat is revealed.
Somewhere amidst the expanse of the two universes’ international waters is a ship. Or rather, an ark – filled with the full scope of sleep-depriving nightmare fuel that Fringe has dealt with in seasons past. Mutant scorpion-lizard-bats, oh my!
Some stats and info about Fringe, “Nothing As It Seems”
TV SHOW – Fringe
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 4, Episode 16
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.