What did we learn from this week’s boring and uninformative building block episode of Fringe? Apparently where there’s a bald guy with no eyebrows, there’s a pattern incident.
Stop me if you know this one: A bald guy is sitting in a diner. He orders a sandwich with 11 jalapenos and then pours an entire bottle of Tabasco and pepper and chows down. Maybe he’s an alien? Or a robot? Or some loon who escaped from the asylum where Walter was? No answers yet. We do know that he was watching a construction site with gadgety binoculars and writing something in a notebook in a language I’ve never seen before. Suddenly, but not altogether surprisingly, there’s an explosion at the site and the guy makes a call to say it’s arrived.
Sounds pretty normal, right? So why would Olivia be called in for an explosion? Because it was caused by a silver spherical thing called the cylinder. This particular cylinder is not like your normal kitchen appliances. It seems to be completely hollow but it emits a vibration that suggests otherwise. Walter’s been working on it and he seems to know what to do with it. So he sends Peter to get tin foil and once he’s gone, poor Astrid gets a needle full of sedatives so Walter can escape with the cylinder. Next thing we know he’s sitting with the bald guy in another diner. We also know that Olivia is now on the trail of the bald guy. I guess for a whatever-he-is, he isn’t very covert. He’s been in the photos of every pattern incident.
When Walter’s brought in, Olivia asks him where the cylinder is but he won’t say. He says there’s some one looking for it and he has to keep it safe. And he’s right. There’s a guy shooting his way through everyone who might know where the cylinder is. The ones who he has a particular interest in, though, he’ll rig up to a telepathic machine so when they think something, he hears it. Crazy and painful looking. And the next target is Peter, who has recently returned to the lab with the tin foil. You may think that it’s okay because Peter doesn’t know where Walter hid the cylinder but when Walter hears that Peter’s been abducted, he fears the guy will find the cylinder. And he’s right once again.
Turns out Peter knows all of Walter’s hiding spots and leads the guy directly to it. Luckily, Olivia gets there just in time to shoot the guy, but the cylinder has already been activated and it explodes down through the ground (that’s apparently it’s power, it shoots to the exact opposite spot on the globe). While she’s checking that bad guy, the bald guy shows up right in front of a beaten up Peter. And the oddest thing happens. Anything Peter says, the bald guys says, too. I guess he can read minds without a machine.
And finally we get to the only information that’s really worth anything in this episode. Walter explains that when he and Peter were in their car accident years and years ago, they were sinking into freezing water because Walter couldn’t move. He and Peter, who was badly contorted due to the accident, died and were only saved because a bald guy with no eyebrows pulled them from the water. He told Walter that was needed in the future. Um, okay.
Yeah, that’s it. Apparently the writers thought they overloaded us already because this bald guy thing could’ve been explained in one scene instead of an entire episode. Hopefully next week with be interesting and informative.
