“Real is just a matter of perception.”
On the Other Side (from our point of view), Olivia is living Faulivia’s life and truly believes that’s who she is. She’s been cleared to return to work, and the boys are glad to have her back. They’re called out on a case involving weird strings of seeming coincidences that wind up with someone getting hit by a bus and killed, once a day, every day, for three days. The victims don’t seem to be connected, but Altrid, who happens to be some sort of savant, says it isn’t random and the chance of it being unconnected is too small for it not to be something they need to look at.
So they do, and even though the victims seem to be unrelated, their investigation, with the boring parts happily off screen, leads them to a hospital where the doctors are running a drug test to get people with abnormally low IQs up to functional levels so they can live normal lives. Only this one guy, Milo, responded abnormally well to the tests and when he learned that the final stage was to take them back down to where they started from, he decided that he’d stop them from doing that. The victims were all involved in getting him to be dumb again, and he killed them all with a disturbingly clear grasp on every probability involved… except the probability that Fauxlivia wasn’t who she appeared to be.
See, they thought the memory graft took, and she thought she was who she was pretending to be. Walternate wanted to use Faulivia’s loyalties with Olivia’s ability to cross over without machines and without coming to harm to defend themselves against our Universe. Except, Olivia is a fighter, and the graft didn’t take as well as they thought: while out investigating crime scenes, she thought she saw Peter, then at the hospital, she saw Walter. And when it came down to catching Milo, she didn’t know the protocol about the pockets of missing oxygen (and what’s that about?), so she didn’t stop like he expected her to, and she caught him.
This was a good episode: a lot of information was conveyed without slowing down the action, and the mystery was fairly straight forward, even if the method wasn’t. And best of all, it wasn’t related to the Core Mythology, which makes it sort of a throwback to when the show was more monster-of-the-week — only with the twist of it being monster-of-another-universe’s-week.
We managed to learn about Olivia and Fauxlivia at the same time, which is brilliant. The original personality is still there, and it’s concocted a hallucination of Peter to remind her of who and what she is because apparently every guy Olivia falls for eventually becomes a hallucination she’s carrying around in her head. If this happens a third time before the end of the series, they’ll have to say it’s a side effect of her being tested on as a child or something — she doesn’t just have a photographic memory; she has a memory that creates exact duplicates of people’s personalities. Or, at least, the way Olivia sees them. Hallucination-Peter was more romantic than usual Peter, which both says that she’s secretly more romantic or thinks he is, since he’s from her subconscious, and that she really does care about him.
And we learned that Fauxlivia never deviates from protocol even when that means she would have been crushed by a ton of bricks, but she’s also a daredevil that will likely get herself killed, which has implications about how she’ll handle herself on our side of the Divide as things get more tense, and maybe how she’ll blow her cover. Which might be coming soon, if anything at all can be trusted from Fox’s notoriously misleading previews.
It’s exciting to see all these new pieces of information start falling into place, and to let our minds spin off them and see how we can fit them all together. That’s the best part about this show: all the possibilities.
Further thoughts on Fringe, “The Plateau”:
* Lincoln Lee, who as yet doesn’t exist on our side, is probably in love with Fauxlivia, and kissed her once.
* Frank, the boyfriend she lives with, is a virologist specializing in small pox, which is a problem in Texas. He apparently also has connections, since he managed to get her some avocadoes that are either extremely rare or totally black market over there.
* None of the young people know what pens are, which both adds to the idea that the Other Side is more advanced than we are, and that things are often rare or controlled there, and usually the unexpected things.
* The other US had a war with Aruba and doesn’t take care of it’s Vets.
* Scarlie is more fun to be around that Charlie, but close enough that it’s good to see so much of him now that he’s back on the show.
* The whole thing where the actors insist that they weren’t going to be a couple seems to have been protesting too much: our Olivia and Peter technically aren’t together, but she’s holding on to who she is only because she wants to get back to him, and he thinks he’s involved with her back home. Can we say “Have your cake and eat it too”? They’re both together an not together in a way that, really, only a scifi show could pull off.
* Scarlie feels like something isn’t right with Olivia, and he knows that the other one / our Olivia is impossible to tell apart. Lincoln thinks he knows that this is the right one. Let’s watch and see how that blows up on him!
Some stats and info about Fringe, “The Plateau”
TV SHOW – Fringe
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 3, Episode 3
AIRED ON – October 7th, 2010
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.