Bookclub!

This week, our assignment was to watch the episode “The Abducted” 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, 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!

Remember the television show Millennium? Boy, I sure do. Where the X-Files would have a freak of the weak and part of the horror would be the special and uncanny abilities of the freak (remember the guy made of cancer cells? the guy who could start fires with his brain?), Millennium would have a freak of the weak and the main horror would be that he was JUST LIKE YOU AND ME. And then, they’d let him give a monologue. Which, of course, was crazy. Like, *WAAAAAY* crazy. Like, crazy to the point where it was easy to imagine the cops who were in charge of listening to his monologues go crazy and start compromising their principles in the name of stopping crap like this.

Well, this episode isn’t *EXACTLY* like that, because the main bad guy also has powers. With that said, there is a *LOT* of crazy in this episode. The creepy kinda crazy. And, to put a finer point on it, the monster in the bedroom closet kinda creepy.

The “Candyman”, as he’s known in the Red Universe, secretes sucrose. His fingerprints, therefore, are sugar fingerprints. That’s one of those things that you could go for the rest of your life without knowing. Anyway, ever since Peter was kidnapped across dimensions waaaay back in 1991 (hey, I graduated that year! “You’re Unbelievable! OH!”), every kidnapping is treated as if it were a possible Fringe Event due to the Peter Bishop Act of 1991. Well… things work out the way they work out and we find out that this is not only The Candyman but we learn that The Candyman does the following:

1. He kidnaps children
2. He kidnaps the children of protagonists
3. Like the children of Broyles (or Alternate Broyles)
4. do I need to keep counting? This is officially really creepy and *REALLY* personal
5.  He sucks the stuff out of the pituitary gland to keep alive (in our universe, it’d be the result of one of Walter’s experiments)

Anyway, the tensions in this episode involve:

Olivia and Hector insofar as Olivia wants Hector to drive (or sail, whatever the term is for motorboats) her to Liberty Island

Olivia and Broyles insofar as Olivia wants to interview Broyles’ kid who was, as I said, also kidnapped by the Candyman.

Olivia and Walter insofar as Walter doesn’t need Olivia anymore.

Olivia and Broyles insofar as she demonstrates that she (and, by extension, everyone from our universe isn’t *THAT* bad).

Peter and Fauxlivia insofar as he’s sleeping with her even though he totally should have known that Fauxlivia wasn’t even close to Ourlivia.

And, believe it or not, Christopher and Olivia and Broyles Himself insofar as she’s asking Christopher questions that Christopher knows will stress out his dad… So part of the reason for Christopher’s hesitance is due to what he sees as his familial responsibility which, lemme tell ya, is one hell of a burden for a little kid who has had all of his pituitary junk stold.

Anyway, the best part of the show comes from when Olivia follows a handful of leads to the bad guy, finds the bad guy, shoots the ever-living crap out of the bad guy, saves the kid and tells the kid “I’m with the FBI”, figures out that the bad guy was merely a janitor and needed to be taught how to steal pituitary junk from children after kidnapping them, saving Christopher and Broyles’ wife (well, Broyles did that, but Olivia was there), and telling the kidnapped kid that she was FBI… JUST TO HAVE BROYLES SAY “you know, the FBI was shut down over here a decade ago… AT LEAST IN OUR UNIVERSE!!!” to Olivia before telling her “you know what, I’m just going to go home” in response to a fully caught Olivia’s “so what now?” question.

So Olivia jumps to Liberty Island and across… but just long enough to tell a cleaning lady to call Peter and say “AUGH I’M IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE AUGH” before she gets pulled back into the arms of Walternate.

AND THEN WE SEE PETER GET THE CALL IN QUESTION.

Which is really, really cool because I was sure that the first season was “Who Walter Really Is”, and the second season was “Who Peter Really Is”, and thus the third season would be “Who Olivia Really Is” but they accelerated the heck out of that by the end of Episode 7… so now I’m stuck wondering “What is this Season About?”

All in all, a good, but not great episode (but better than last week’s) that, once again, builds slowly until I’m at the end of the episode saying “AUGH I NEED TO WATCH THE NEXT EPISODE AUGH”.

So… what thinks did you thunk?