This week, our assignment was to watch the episode “6955 kHz” from Season Three 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 Three season premiere episode is here and the posts dedicated to the following episodes 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!
We’re in a lighthouse. That can’t be good.
And, of course, it’s not. It has nothing to do with it being a lighthouse, though. (If you were wondering, “Number Stations” are, really, a thing. And they’re even creepier than the show seems to indicate… the theory that made the most sense to me is that they’re part of a fail-deadly “dead hand” trigger for second-strike nuclear retaliation in the event of a decapitated military.)
The opening once again holds the entire show right before the credits. “Who are you? Who am I?”
We hammer those questions home again and again, Peter brings Fauxlivia breakfast in bed “just for you being you”. Walter tells Astrid to think like someone from another culture would allowing her to channel Bad Astrid. Fauxlivia screwing up her conversation with Walter and Peter. And, of course, Ourlivia hears that Walternate doesn’t need her anymore… which means that everybody is either sub-vocally asking the questions “Who am I? Who are you?” or we’re screaming at the television that, seriously, you need to ask at least one of those questions (Peter).
At the same time, we find out that Peter has been continuing his dabbling into the “Doomsday Device” against Walter’s wishes (and, indeed, Walter is doing what he can to hinder Peter’s progress in passive-aggressive ways… taking apart stuff Peter’s using because he needs the soundboard or similar) and, presumably, is making progress.
And at the same time as *THAT*, we find out that the numbers stations might be vaguely related to not only what the people from the other universe are doing (That Guy From Central Casting is a shapeshifter who needs to be killed by Fauxlivia for being sloppy) but that they might also be signals to where more and more of the pieces of the Doomsday Device are buried… and that they might have been buried by The First People (we *NEED* Ancient Astronauts on this show, people)… and the Doomsday Device may, in fact, be a Creation Device. Maybe.
The big question comes between Fauxlivia (who, seriously, is giving off a MILLION “I’m not Ourlivia!” signals) and the shapeshifter she killed where they have a “they’d do the same thing to us!” discussion… and then Fauxlivia and Peter having a “I’d find a third way. There has to be a third way” conversation.
And then we find out that Fauxlivia sends the evil reflected typewriter a message that says, effectively, “THEY FINALLY STARTED LOOKING FOR THE DANG PIECES”… and Ourlivia gets told that she doesn’t need to come in for testing anymore and Scorpius tells Ourlivia that that means that Walternate has what he wants.
Which means that the clock is ticking.
As slow as this episode started, it sped up until we got to the end and I said “HOLY CRAP I NEED TO WATCH THE NEXT ONE!”
So… what thinks did you thunk?
I don’t like this episode quite as much as the previ0us few, but it’s still very good. I think it’s quite creative how they keep managing to find cases that tie into the theme of identity; they could have had the soundwave just kill people or put them in comas, but they chose memory loss because it allows them to create parallels (and they also drew in a comparison with Walter’s loss of parts of his brain).
It’s becoming too non-credible that people aren’t figuring out this isn’t Olivia.
The “first people” thing is ridiculous. Before dinosaurs?! Before dinosaurs, there weren’t even any mammals larger than a squirrel. The idea of an intelligent species evolving on earth before us and all traces of their presence being wiped out is already stretching credulity (you’d expect archaeologists to have found something). The idea that such a species would be mammalian and humanoid takes it into the realm of “completely laughable”. It’s a movement from “Fringe science” to “crazy guy ranting on the street”, and thus not a plot development I’m fond of.
I like Fauxlivia’s conversation with Peter at the end, though. She’s trying so hard to justify what she’s doing to herself, trying to convince her that “they’d do the same if they were in our shoes”, and now having to deal with the realization that no, maybe they wouldn’t and she’s been completely wrong about the nature of this ‘war’.
The “first people” thing is ridiculous. Before dinosaurs?! Before dinosaurs, there weren’t even any mammals larger than a squirrel.
Maybe not Earth Native, anyway…
Yeah, this was one of those episodes that I thought was weaker in relation to the freakin’ awesome episodes we began the season with… but it ended very strongly.
You won’t *BELIEVE* what starts to happen in the coming weeks.
Yes, this one was not up to par and I agree that people should be figuring out the Olivia is not Olivia. I also have to wonder why nobody feels like they are being lead around by their noses to find these pieces.
For the former, I think Peter, at least, believes what he wants to believe. She looks just like the real Olivia, after all. Only smoochier.
As for the latter, if you have to work for something, it feels more like you earned it.
Well, to be fair, it was fairly clever of the Other Side to make it look like the people were having their memories wiped to cover up what they’d supposedly discovered. Of course that would get the Fringe team interested in figuring out what had been covered up.
And Jaybird’s hit the nail on the head regarding Fauxlivia.