“You’re changing, Peter. It’s changing you.” – Walter
This week, the team gets to see the machine in almost all its universe-crushing glory because when the government gets its hands on deadly machines, it’s obvious that they’ll build them. When Peter gets within 50 feet of it, it activates and then they get called away on a case: someone found a dead body in a pond that turns out to be a dead shapeshifter. They cracked the encoding on Fauxlivia’s laptop, and the shapeshifter’s name was on a list of various government employees, so they start checking all the people they can get their hands on to see who the other shifters are and to find a mole they think exists.
Then it gets sort of dumb, and then it turns out that Peter is the one who has been killing shifters, and that there were only five anyway. He was apparently altered when he came in contact with the machine, despite the fact that he didn’t really come in contact with it so much as come within range of it, and it has “weaponized” him. Which turns him into a murdering jerk out of nowhere. A murdering jerk who doesn’t share his sudden need for action with his team, even though that team involves a woman who punched a hole in reality and has special powers that might come in handy, a cryptography expert who can do what a whole department can’t, and a mad scientist who happens to own the biggest and most advanced industrialized science in the world.
Meanwhile, Peter and Olivia start to make up after she reads Fauxlivia’s journals and sees that she was much more like her doppelganger than she thought, and therefore she can understand everything she did better.
Okay…
Last episode was really good, delicate, complex, and useful. This week was heavy-handed and clumsy, and it was that much more annoying following the elegance of the previous episode. This is a core episode, which the show usually does its best with, but it just… wasn’t that good. It’s like they were trying to cram too much stuff into too little space, and as though a lot had to be sacrificed to make it fit in one hour. The case frequently didn’t make sense, the logic of the show was basically abandoned, and there was almost no lead-up. Peter’s raised heart rate was supposed to be a tip-off that he had become a murdering loon? I didn’t get that.
But there was some good in the mix. Olivia is starting to unwind, and it’s always so nice when they’re on the same page… until he decided not to tell her that he was the one effing up her case. There was a nice chunk of things going on with Nina Sharp, who is the neatest underused character on the show. And Walter’s still trying to make himself smarter by randomly dosing himself with unmarked chemicals.
Hopefully this was a necessary episode and not a trend-setting one. If everything after is in a new groove and back to being quiet and delicate and smart, that’s fine. This was just like a rough draft to expedite the story because they don’t have year-round filming like a soap opera (although such a thing would benefit this show, I think). It will be overlook-able if things turn out well.
More thoughts on Fringe, “Reciprocity”:
* I know I didn’t come up with the name, but I’m totally going to take credit for the fact that the show now uses the name Fauxlivia. Even if they had to explain it all clunkily, despite the fact that it should be obvious.
* They brought up the books again, and then didn’t do much with them, so this is definitely ham-fisted setting-up: there were three different versions of the same book about the first people, published at different times and in different languages, but they’re virtually word-for-word. Will there be a code in the few parts that aren’t identical? And William Bell started looking for all known copies years ago.
* Jerk-Peter doesn’t jive with how nice and calm he was being the rest of the episode. He should have been twitchy and mean and snappish and strange throughout so that someone could call him on it. But we’re assuming that he’s going to flip out and try to use the machine because he’s compelled, and Olivia’s going to have to remind him that he’s a good person. i liked it better when it looked like he’d have free will to figure out a different option.
* Walter is better when he’s doing mad science than when he’s sobbing over his own company experimenting on Peter when it was Peter’s idea.
* We got to see Peter’s way-too-neat room.
Some stats and info about Fringe, “Reciprocity”
TV SHOW – Fringe
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 3, Episode 11
AIRED ON – January 28th, 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.