Bookclub!

Before we get to the boilerplate, I just wanted to say that this… THIS!… was the episode that made me want to start this danged Bookclub in the first place. This is the episode that told me that the series was made for me. I suspect, if you’re here, that you got here in such a way that tells me that it’s probably also an episode that would tell you that the series is for you as well. (But I assume a lot about the folks who end up here.) This is the episode you should watch, even if you don’t usually watch.

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

So we begin at the train station looking at a particularly unsympathetic panhandler holding a sign that says “God could be watching” which is, as signs go, not one that I categorize as particularly likely to result in a handout. I understand that “hey, let’s be honest… I just want to get drunk” was found by local college students to be the most effective sign to be holding at a particular highway exit. I understand that that may not work for Fringe, though. “Need acid and Dead tickets” would probably detract from the theme of this particular show even as it ran with the theme of the series in general so I guess “God could be watching” it is. By the time we stop thinking about the best panhandling signs, we see the panhandler bump into a guy and lift his wallet.

Now I *REALLY* don’t like him.

The train that’s pulling into the station has all of its lights start flickering and the lights go out and HOLY CRAP IT’S PETER WELLER. He looks around and notices that everyone around him is dead and looks irritated. Well, that’s Peter Weller for you. He gets off of the train and the panhandler says “spare change?” and Weller looks at him like he doesn’t even see him and the panhandler gets on the train and FREAKS OUT exactly the way that Peter Weller didn’t.

This is Fringe.

So Walter is finally writing Peter a letter. It’s the one that tells Peter everything. Man, I’ve had to write letters that I didn’t want to write before (“Its late september and I really should be back at school, I know I keep you amused but I feel Im being used”) but how do you write a letter that says “I love you so much that I stole your double from another universe and that’s you”? That’s one of those things that might not go too badly, of course… anyway, the phone rings and Walter, who still uses an answering machine (of course he does), listens to Peter explain how to use the phone (“push the talk button”) and then tells him to get his stuff because there has been a thing on a train… and Walter likes trains. (Which, now that I think about it, is really sweet.) Walter, of course, is past trains as he experiences this very moment and finishes writing his letter and puts it in an envelope marked “Peter”.

Or, wait. He’s not past trains. Our team is there at the station and Peter is talking to Olivia about how Walter has not been himself and Olivia apparently thinks that the best way to deflect this conversation is to not be herself. So let’s get on the train and start checking the poor bodies… and Walter suggests sympathetic heart attacks. Man, if you didn’t feel sorry for him before, you *MUST* feel sorry for him now. Olivia is the first to notice all of the lights are off and, hey, shouldn’t there be a battery backup? Peter starts checking the personal electronics of the passengers as Broyles tells Olivia about the panhandler/witness. Apparently, the witness noticed that all Peter Weller did was get off the train and look at him like he wasn’t anything.

As this goes on, one of the agents finds Walter’s letter to Peter leaving Walter to gently panic and grab the letter back while Peter has figured out that all of the personal electronics on the train are dead too… leading Walter to the point where he’s willing to abandon sympathetic heart failure as a theory. Might as well get these people back to the lab.

The autopsies are interesting insofar as they aren’t interesting at all. Most people fight to stay alive… but these people were just “turned off”. As Walter has grown more distant, Peter has grown more supportive (ain’t that always the way) and Peter gives some fairly straightforward encouragement… and then comes out and says it. “Do you want to talk about something?” Walter’s eyes widen and he changes the subject back to the bodies… and, huh… the cells just up’n stopped working. They should still make ATP for a few hours after the body dies, after all.

There’s a cute moment where Walter is saying what we need to do next and Astrid is talking at the same time, anticipating his every request.

What’s the takeaway? Every cell has been drained of energy, in the same way that the electronics were drained of energy and that is how these people died. What could cause that? Walter makes one of his Walter facial expressions, looks down, and says “I have no idea.”

We go over to the Federal building and we see that Peter Weller got off the train, stopped by a cafe and got a meal, and paid with a credit card. (At this moment in the episode, I remembered thinking that that was pretty audacious of him, and silly, because he should have known his credit card would be tracked. I was so young!) They go to the diner, pump the waitress for info, and hammer out that he’s in there all the time and he does math on the napkins… and, in this episode, Peter Weller’s name is Alistair Peck.

So let’s get SWAT and kick down his door! WOOO!!! He’s got math stuff all over everywhere. Walter’s the only person who has a shot at seeing what’s going on and he says that this math is exquisite and these models are great and Peck is turning Einstein’s theories on their ear and Olivia almost finds a photo album… just in time for Peck to show up and ask what in the sam hill is going on here. Of course, nobody answers and they just point their guns at him. “What did you do to those 12 innocent people?”, Olivia asks. “They’re not permanently dead, miss.” Peck answers. (At this point, I was wondering if the autopsies did damage to the bodies that would probably rev back to live any minute now… like all of the batteries would get recharged.) Walter pipes up that Peck has a faraday mesh… which causes Peck to press the panic button and get all wavy and shimmery (is he from the other universe?) but… wait. He’s on the train again. He’s getting off the train again. He’s passing the panhandler again… but this time he’s apologizing that the panhandler has to go through this again. The panhandler gets on the train and, yes, freaks out again.

Which brings us back to Walter composing his letter and Peter calling about how they need to go to the train and sympathetic heart attacks… but wait, there are little differences. The panhandler, for example, has a story to tell this time. This has all kinds of little butterfly effect effects on everything (and this is really awesome to watch). Peter steps on the envelope before Walter claims it, for example. The kid remembers that Peck touched the handrail and they’re dusting for prints, for another. The cool part is Walter noticing that the panhandler was told “sorry you have to go through this again”.

Well, the prints give us a name and the name gives us an address. This time the raid enters an apartment that has been cleaned up BUT US AT HOME ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO KNOW THAT. Though Olivia does have some deja vu in there which leads to a discussion of how deja vu is the universe telling you that you’re exactly where you need to be. (To be honest, I’ve never heard that.) Peter then says “I never get deja vu” and we pan over to Walter who looks depressed.

We find a photo album again but, this time, we aren’t interrupted by Peck showing up. We get it and we open it and we see a picture of Peck and a lovely woman… and on the back is written “me and Alistair”… and we set up the stakeout. We sit and wait for Peck to come home and we might as well go through his stuff while we’re there.

Walter tells Olivia that he wants to ride home with her because he can’t handle riding home with him. She tells him that he (Walter) needs to tell him (Peter) because he (Peter) knows something is up with him (Walter). Walter confesses that he’s written the letter but (and I perked up when I heard this part) he’s imagined Peter’s reaction “over and over again” and every time the reaction is terrible. So he’s ready but… he’s waiting for something. Peter chooses *THIS* moment to interrupt with the news that he’s found something. Little machine discs. “Prototypes”.

So we cut to Peck grinding one of these discs and then opening his shirt to show us, at home, that he’s got all kinds of discs embedded in, and it looks like under, his skin. He’s a walking faraday cage/time travel device.

Cut to Peck’s old bosses MIT and they confirm what’s going on for us: Peck was a time travel guy. Since this proved embarassing to everybody there, he quit. They show the picture of Alistair and me and, the MIT guy points out two things: that’s the fiancee and, otherwise, Alistair didn’t get out much. Oh, and he happens to have all of Peck’s journals (“Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach.”) and he says that they’re dense to the point of being gobbletygook. Olivia smiles and says that she has someone who is fluent in gobbletygook.

Cut to Walter who has finished reading the journals and gives a brief demonstration of what time travel would kinda work like, kinda. The important part of the demonstration is how much energy it would require… and it appears that Peck is grabbing the energy from the environment. That’s how those people died. He sucked the energy out of them. Astrid doesn’t need the speech so she interrupts with how she’s found the fiancee, pulled up a driver’s license, Arlette Turling… and journal three, the unfinished one, has a chapter about “The Arlette Principle”… and we find out that Arlette died in a car accident a few months back.

He’s going back in time to save her… and Walter says that grief can drive a person to extraordinary lengths. Whoa.

Some back of the envelope calculations on Walter’s part figures out that the jump at the train was merely a 12-hour jump. A jump of one year? Golly. That could potentially kill a lot of folks. A lot a lot. This means that we have to catch Peck before he kills even more people (but, he won’t have killed these people, I guess). They figure out that Arlette has a cell phone that is still active, it’s still active and around a cell tower near MIT, and… hey, maybe Peck still has a lab there (I mean, nobody touched Walter’s lab for 20 years, right?).

Get SWAT, get going. At the MIT building, Walter goes up to Olivia and tells her “hey, he’s going through all this because of a dead loved one he’s trying to save… I can talk to him.” So we put Walter inside. Peck is working on stuff and inserting it into his chest and Walter comes in and turns off the stereo and Peck spins around and Walter puts his hands up. “I know you can jump if you want to. Let’s talk.” Peck says “I know who you are. Walter Bishop.” They sit down to talk.

Walter says that he knows that Peck is going to jump to May 18th and Peck confirms. Walter points out that many people will die and Peck explains that, no, they won’t. He gives the explanation that he was in a field on the day that Arlette died. An empty field (well, there was an empty hot air balloon) that drew him to the field in the first place. If he jumped there, he’d drain the field of its energy but not kill anyone and never have killed the people on the train.

Walter then yanks his microphone (causing Broyles and the SWAT team to go batscrazy) and then tells Peck that he knows that Peck hasn’t yet been able to jump earlier than the train. Peck needs to use 9th order polynomials, you see. Not merely 7th order. (Or something. I was a philosophy major.) Now, of course, as SWAT is storming upstairs, Walter has to give a short monologue about why Peck should *NOT* make the jump. We get a short version of the story about Peter and the universes and how, every day since then, Walter has felt like he has betrayed God and how he cannot reconcile to Peter because he has asked for a sign that he has been forgiven (a “white tulip”) because if God can forgive him… maybe Peter can.

And Peck gives the most wonderful little speech (jump to here and watch the whole thing if you want but if you don’t want, just jump ahead to 1:48)

God is science. God is polio and flu vaccines and MRI machines and artificial hearts. If you are a man of science, then that’s the only faith we need!

It gets better. Walter explains how it is not their job to adjust universes. There *WILL* be repercussions and he will feel that every time he looks at her the same way that Walter feels when he looks at Peter. There’s this wonderful moment where Peck… Alistair… looks at Walter and says “you’re asking me to just leave her there” and Walter says “Yes.”

Whoa.

All of the monologues having been given, it is now time for SWAT to arrive and kick in the door. Walter is screaming “no, no, don’t do it” and Peck presses the time travel button again.

We jump to a policeman getting out of his car and there are a bunch of bodies around and… well… it looks like we only jumped a few hours back. Between the train and the monologues. Peck is doing some work and the Fringe team is coming up on him and Peck is moving slowly, deliberately, like he’s packing to go on a long journey. SWAT is setting up around him and he’s writing a letter to his boss at MIT and sees the red dot on his head, he jumps to the floor, finishes up and time travels one last time.

He’s in a field surrounded by dead grass and there’s a hot air balloon above him. He starts running. No sound, just music. He finds his fiancee and gets in the car with her. He mouths that he’s sorry and that he loves her… kisses her hand… and the truck barrels through the car killing both of them.

Whoa.

Fast forward to March 18th, 2010 and go to MIT where the former boss has an envelope with a note marked “deliver to Walter Bishop, March 18th, 2010.” There’s some dialog about how long she’s been holding onto this envelope… but then we jump to where Walter was at the beginning of the episode. He’s writing a letter to Peter. There’s no phone call to interrupt him (why would there be?) and he finishes it and takes out a recent shot of him and Peter… walks over to the fireplace and throws the letter into the fire.

Peter walks past and says “hey, I know you’ve been down the past few weeks, I’ve fixed the turntable… you know… if you want to talk…” and Walter thanks him but waves him off as the mail is delivered. Walter walks to get it and there’s the letter to be sent to W. Bishop on March 18th… he opens it.

And it’s a sketch of a White Tulip.

Wow.

So… what thinks did you thunk?