Bookclub!

This week, our assignment was to watch the single episode “Grey Matters” from Season Two of Fringe. (You can read the Television Without Pity Recap here, while the AV Club has their recap of the episodes here. The post dedicated to the Season Two season premiere episode is here and the subsequent bookclub posts are here, here, here, and here.)

As always, here are the ground rules: nothing that we have seen so far is considered a spoiler, anything that we have not yet seen should be considered a spoiler. Crazy nutbar speculation is *NOT* a spoiler, but confirming or denying said confirmation would be.

Here’s my idea for spoilers: please rot13 them. That’s a simple encryption that will allow the folks who want to avoid spoilers to avoid them and allow the people who want to argue them to argue them. We good? We good! Everybody who has seen the episode, see you after the cut!

Ah, the sweetness of remembering that you shouldn’t eat during Fringe is even sweeter during opens like this one. I get ahead of myself.

We start at a Mental Health facility and see Longinus! Finally! For the first time since “Momentum Deferred”! And, of course, he’s doing brain surgery on a guy. He pulls a sliver of grey tissue from a guy’s brain… he’s very gentle, actually. He assures the guy that there will be no pain and, when it comes out that he has to go before he can close the guy up, he apologizes and said that he’s sorry that he’s leaving the guy in this state. When a nurse shows up, we see that the guy’s brain and see him turn to the nurse and he says “Help me.”

We’ve had Longinus back for two minutes and already I’m missing Mr. Jones less.

This means that our Fringe team has to show up to investigate… and, since it’s a Mental Health facility, Walter is vaguely freaked out. We meet the doctor and, as we walk down the hallway, we establish that the guy was a paranoid schizophrenic until last night when somebody cut the guy’s head open. There there’s a great moment where Walter says he wants to see the patient. When Peter points out that that’s what they’re doing, Walter says that they’re going to go see a sane man. He wants to see the guy when he was crazy.

So we watch a videotape of the guy and it’s from a session where he’s yelling about a woman across the street with flowers in her hair and when the Doctor says that this woman doesn’t exist, he *REALLY* goes nuts. Walter watches this and… you know what? I’m getting the feeling that this is going to be a fairly sad episode. We go to talk to the guy himself and he’s… he’s downright tranquil. He answers the questions the best he can, explains how awesome he feels after that many years of being crazy and that he feels, and Walter finishes his sentence: “Free”. When the guy talks about his wife visiting, he gets visibly apprehensive and says that he thinks he remembers being horrible to her… and he leaves to go speak to her. Walter says that the guy is a lucky man because he has visitors. Walter points out that he spent 17 years in the asylum and never had a visitor. Peter almost winces and gets ready to say something and Walter waves it away. He was just thinking out loud, is all. When asked about any theories he has about the guy getting cured, Walter pretty much tops the last minute and says that he’s spent a lot of time thinking about cures for insanity.

Poor Walter.

So they’re looking at the security footage and Longinus turns around and Olivia recognizes him as the frozen head guy. Well, that’s something. Right around the second you say “wait, what? How in the heck does she recognize…” they answer that question. She’s been looking at the faces associated with the names associated with the heads stolen from that facility that we’ve stopped talking about for, what?, five episodes? Anyway, she pulls up a name and I can stop calling the guy Longinus:

Newton. His name is Newton.

In a show dedicated to Fringe Science, Newton is the bad guy.

Dude. That is freakin’ awesome.

So now we have a face and a name and a nemesis… and Olivia reminds us that William Bell warned her that Newton would try to open a door between the two universes. Broyles gets to put all of this in perspective for us the way he did when he asked “Why are shapeshifting soldiers from another universe stealing frozen heads?”, specifically, he wants to know why these guys are running around curing paranoid schizophrenics as their first move. Sadly, he doesn’t come out and ask “Why are formerly disembodied heads working with shapeshifting soldiers from another universe to cure paranoid schizophrenics?” because that would be just too awesome.

So Walter and Astrid are going through files and Walter sees a doctor’s name: Simon Paris. He referred the guy to the institute and his prescription numbers match two other folks around the same time. Astrid’s on the horn before I can finish typing that sentence. We officially have a goal and a ticking clock. We’ve got to get to the other patients before Newton. And we’ll probably do as well the last time we had a clear goal.

Yep, we get to the next patient and she’s already been cured of her “arithmomania” where she was obsessed with the number 28. (Note: I googled it and arithmomania exists but it’s more of a “count everything” disorder rather than being obsessed with a particular number.) They ask to look at her head and… yep. She’s got a scar. They ask her about Doctor Paris and she shrugs. She saw him for some mild post-partum depression and, next thing she knows, she’s thinking about 28 and in an institution and never sees Doctor Paris again.

That’s messed up.

Cut to Newton who asks for a status. The specimens won’t last another five or six hours… and we have a ticking clock again. This one is more confusing, though, because we don’t know why the clock’s ticking, just that it is.

Cut to Peter and Olivia in the car talking about the third patient who, of course, is already cured. (Well, *THAT* was anti-climactic.) Peter says that the guy had the psychiatric equivalent of a cough, sees Doctor Paris, and ends up with a full-blown case of schizophrenia (he thinks he’s Sydney Greestreet from Casablanca)… and, two days ago, this last guy is cured.

So we’re back in the lab looking at the tests and Walter asks about organ transplants on the part of one of the patients because they were prescribed an anti-rejection drug… which turns a lightbulb on in Walter’s head. He gets a brain in a jar (whose… whose brain is that?) and starts talking about how you can’t keep brain tissue alive for more than a short while outside of a human body *BUT* if you put brain tissue inside of a brain (with some anti-rejection drugs), you can keep it alive indefinitely. They look at the cat scans of the brains of the patients and, yep, there’s a smudge in each one. Peter gets canny and looks something else up and asks Walter “are you sure you never had any visitors?” because it turns out that Doctor Paris visited Walter… and they look at Walter’s head and, get ready to gasp, HE HAS A SCAR TOO.

Let’s give Walter a cat scan. The really sad moment is when Walter asks “what did that man do to me?” The really funny moment is when Walter asks for 50mgs of Vallium and the doctor says “that’s a high dose” and Walter responds “I have a high tolerance.” The writers respect our intelligence by reminding us that Walter has a tracking chip in his head. Walter doesn’t stick around for the results and Peter and Olivia muse about Walter being crazy. Olivia makes the observation that going crazy seems to have helped Walter become a better person. Peter mentions that he should have visited… we still haven’t really seen why Peter hated Walter so badly, have we?

Here’s the doctor with the results. Walter didn’t have stuff added… he had parts of his brain *REMOVED*. DUN DUN DUN. What parts? Inhibitions, memory, and spacial awareness. Poor Walter.

When they overlay the cat scans of the three patients over Walter’s brain, yep… it’s a match. They stored bits of Walter’s brain in the heads of those three poor people. They start discussing why this would have been done and Peter reaches the same conclusion that all of us have: it has to do with the ability to open doorways to the other universe. Like Walter’s gateway machine that he kept in a handful of banks, he put his memories of how to do it in a handful of brains. And the bad guys broke in and stole those too. Well, they figure, how is Newton going to read the memory he stole? He’d need a brain that knew how to read the information OH CRAP WHERE’S WALTER??? and they hit the ground running.

Walter is coming down from a valium trip and he sent Astrid out to pick some stuff up that will help him do so. While Olivia and Peter are talking to Astrid on the phone, there’s a knock on the door to the lab. Walter, thinking Astrid is back, opens it… and it’s Newton. Hello, Doctor Bishop. Dude, aren’t bad guys just so much *BETTER* when they have manners?

Astrid and Peter and Olivia all get to the lab at the same time and, of course, it’s empty. Peter and the writers both remember the tracking chip! HURRAY CONTINUITY! and we’re off! To see Walter sitting in a chair talking to Newton as he gets hooked up to all kinds of electrodes connected to jars. He asks Newton a sad question: Do we know each other? “We will”, Newton says. I quiver to see us have a decent bad guy again.

Cut to Olivia and Peter tracking Walter and yelling into phones and talking to Broyles about SWAT…

And cut back to the first real monologue that we get from Newton since we saw him in Roar (though I understand he was also on 24): he talks about the brain. “It’s a fascinating organ.” As he gives the speech about connections and memory, we see a computer model of Walter’s brain. They’re putting Walter’s brain back together.

Peter and Olivia kick in a door and… go to a sink… uh-oh… and find the tracking chip. The bad guys found it and cut it out of Walter. Now, I personally would have had the tracking chip work at least *ONCE* before I got rid of it as a plot device but I’m not writing for the show.

Now we get to the saddest part of the show. Newton tells Walter that he’s going to show some pictures and map the neural pathways. Walter asks “are you trying to fix me?” and Newton apologetically says that he’s not. We see some chemistry stuff, then a picture of Peter as a boy which makes Walter smile and say “Peter”, a picture of pudding which makes Walter smile and say “Peter”, and a picture of a closed casket which makes Walter cry. Newton apologizes again and it seems sincere.

I think that the sincerity may make it worse.

Back to Olivia and Peter and Broyles brainstorming about what to do now… and Peter finally remembers that a girl named Sidney lived across the street from him at 2828 Green Street. It’s the best lead they’ve got so let’s get going there!

Walter and Newton, of course, are already there. Walter is talking about the leaves turning and Newton says something interesting… he says that the trees in this place have all died, in his universe. The Blight killed them. Walter, sincerely, says that that is horrible. Newton gives a small speech about how he really had to get kludgy with this stuff and he apologizes but… And Walter opens his eyes as if for the first time. “You.”, he says.

My God. Walter with his brain intact is the baddest man on the planet.

Holy crap, in the other universe, there’s another Walter who, presumably, has not had brain surgery.

Newton and Walter are talking and it’s like they’ve known each other a while. Walter snarls the entire conversation. Where is my wife? Where is my son? Squinty and calculating: How are things on the other side. Newton takes this in stride and says that he’s heard that things are worse… and asks about the door. “You know what you lost last time… do you want to lose it again?” and Walter deflates.

Olivia and Peter finally show up and Newton’s henchman radios that “they’re here” and Newton shrugs it off. “That’s fine. We got what we needed.” and he gives Walter a shot before he leaves him just lying there spent next to the now useless pieces of his brain in the little jars.

Peter and Olivia pull up and find Walter and the homeowners (wow, I seriously thought the homeowners would be dead) and they yell that the bad guys left out the back. Olivia goes on a chase, finds the getaway van, yells freeze (futilely), and shoots the henchman driver in the head. Mercury. She opens the door to the back and there’s Olivia pointing a gun at Newton… and now we find out whether Newton really is in the same tier as Mr. Jones.

Cut to Walter who tells Peter about how his brain, in those little jars, is dying and he’ll never get those parts and those memories back… then he looks at Peter and says “Hello, Son” and smiles… right before he faints to the floor.

Poor Walter.

Cut back to Newton. “I gave Walter a neurotoxin. He’s got about four minutes left to live.” He tells Olivia to call her friends to confirm the story… and ask them if they see a medikit that he left behind. We do, and it’s got three differently colored vials. Of course, these vials have to be injected in the right order… and Newton says that Olivia now has a choice. She can kill him or save Walter. She gives Newton her phone and starts booking back to the house. When she gets there, Newton gives her the order for the injections… and then twists the knife by pointing out that now he knows how weak she is. Click. Or whatever cellphones do now when you hang them up. Beep. A tense moment while we wait for Walter to come to… and he does. “I have an immense headache. And I want some chicken wings.”

Me too, Walter. Me too.

Some denoument with Broyles and Olivia and Olivia points out how the bad guys got what they wanted *AGAIN* and they got away *AGAIN* and she could have stopped them but she didn’t. Broyles points out that we now know what to call the bad guy and we now know what he looks like and, hey, there are millions of bad guys but there’s only one Walter… she made the right choice.

Walter goes in for another MRI (the neurotoxin, maybe?) and Peter apologizes for not visiting. Walter points out that he probably wouldn’t have remembered anyway (which is also really sad). We fade to white and have a flashback of Doctor Paris… and, of course, it’s really William Bell. Walter deliberately had these pieces of his brain removed… as protection. Protection to keep the knowledge from how to get from here to there from getting out.

And, like the device from last season, this got lifted by the bad guys too.

Devastating.

Oh my gosh, this was the best episode we’ve seen yet. We learn so much about Walter and those few seconds we had with intact Walter show us how terrifying Walter can be (and what a great actor John Noble is). If they could get a handle on the whole “monster of the week” crap, we’d have dang near the perfect show.

So… what thinks did you thunk?