Okay! This week, our assignment was to watch the episode “Subject 13” 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, 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!
Now, this is one of those episodes that answered a lot of questions I didn’t know I had (like, why *DOES* Peter hate Walter so much? I mean, sure, he was a little bit out there but he seems like he’d be a father that generates irritation in massive quantities (remember “I thought you’d be fatter”? Good times) but not the serious bone-deep resentment that we saw in the first few episodes of Season One and “Walter tested Cortexiphan on Olivia? Seriously? And she didn’t remember Walter when she saw him? Seriously?” as well as the corker “How did Walternate find out about *OUR* universe?”) and, irritatingly, gave me a handful of new questions (“Peter and Olivia were friends as kids? And neither remembers this? Seriously?”) but, all in all, it left me feeling this vague combination of sated (this would have been a good episode to have as your last episode before a hiatus) and screaming for more (I NEED TO WATCH THE NEXT EPISODE).
The beginning was great. Seeing our young Peter try to kill himself, wait, no… try to go back to *HIS* universe had me alternating between horror and pity. Dude. That poor kid. Walter just finished saving the kid’s life. Now he’s throwing cinderblocks tied to himself through the layer of ice covering a lake in order to go back to what he recognizes as normal.
You find yourself saying “you know what? This whole situation *IS* pretty messed up, now that I think about it.”
You’re watching Fringe. Retro credits.
So in this episode we see that saving your alternate child’s life has costs that we never considered once we get past the “happily ever after” portion of the medicine working… especially when the child comes from a universe that made several different decisions.
The Dodgers are still in Brooklyn over there, Green Lantern is Red Lantern, and, as we’ve seen a handful of times, they use zeppelins rather than planes so, I guess, the Hindenburg didn’t happen. Which means that WWII might have had different dynamics… which might have kept the Dodgers in Brooklyn and the height of the cold war wouldn’t have “red” be a term of derision when Julie Schwartz rebooted some Golden Age Heroes.
So we see Peter freak out and, yeah, we at home all know that he’s not nuts. His parents, of course, are lying to him about him being from this universe and not that one (hell, another universe? crazy talk!) and we’re stuck wondering “why don’t they just take him back?” when, of course, the show explains that Walter knows that jumping universes created damage and, as such, he can’t just up and do what he did all over again… but he *IS* training the kids to imagine crossing over and he thinks that, maybe, he’s making progress. Enough to hope that the kids can cross over and take Peter with them.
Well, we see that the kids *CAN* cross over when we see Olivia run from her screaming father and end up in a field with a zeppelin flying overhead and then jump back for her father to give her a black eye… and we see Walter ask her questions about her black eye as well as about the zeppelins she has started drawing. We see Peter and Elizabeth drive past a field of white tulips (!!!!!) and we see Elizabeth start drinking from lying to “her” son.
And we see Walter figure out that Olivia crossed over when she feared getting that black eye… and start building tests around emotional extremes… and we also see the answer to our question about how creepy Walter was capable of being back when Pee Wee’s Big Adventure was in theaters. We see him running experiments on a child… culminating in making her think one of her friends is dead which results in a fireball… that reminds me of the videotape of Walter talking to Olive when she was sitting in a corner of a room that had been scorched.
Hoo boy.
So we establish that a mixture of love and terror can result in Olivia activating her gift… which, of course, means that we can’t find her because we activated her gift. Peter’s there too, due to mom freaking out about nearby sirens, and (of course) he finds Olive’s sketchbook with white tulips and zeppelins and puts 2+2 together… and he bolts out as well.
In the other universe, we find that Walternate is seriously pissed (both in the angry sense and in the drunken sense) over Peter being kidnapped and he’s ruining his marriage over it. Well… yeah, that happens. He ends up going to “Bishop Dynamic” down in Florida and, in an absolutely brilliant turn of events, we see Olive and Peter find each other (in our universe) and come back to the day care center where we see Olive run off into Walter’s office and tell the story of how she crossed over into the other universe and saw zeppelins and please keep my dad from hitting me and we hear “Olive?” from behind her and OH MY GOSH SHE JUST TOLD ALL THAT STUFF TO WALTERNATE.
Wrap everything up in the show by having Walter tell Olivia’s dad that he has the power to make people in the government make things uncomfortable for him if he doesn’t stop hurting Olive, we see Peter and Elizabeth reconcile themselves to the fact that he’s not going anywhere and they both have to lie about that (and she goes straight to the booze), and we see Walternate, triumphantly, tell his Elizabeth that he knows what happened to Peter.
Wow. What a great episode.
So… what thinks did you thunk?
This post reminded me of how much I loved this episode. So thank you for that.
Hrm, I found I wished I did not watch this episode. It is one of those things where I would rather have my imaginations on it than to have the writer’s. This just gave me too many paradoxes like why no one remembers each other.
The two big things this did show me was the Walters were very similar back then and the losing peices of his brain was a good thing. Second, the excuse Walterused to keep Peter with him. You noticed he stopped the abuse at Olive’s home which would have help the crossing over. You could say this is because of his caring for Olive, but I think he saw the hug his wife gave Peter when he came back and realised, again, he would not lose Peter again. It was just an added bonus that he could help Olive.
This episode seemed to create more questions than it answered – and in a bad way of “wait, that doesn’t make sense” rather than a good way of “hey, new mysteries!”.
Why didn’t Peter and Olivia remember each other? Why didn’t Peter show any signs of remembering the ‘other universe’ once Fringe Division learned it existed? Why didn’t Peter remember where he was from regardless?
In contrast, the questions the episode answered didn’t really need to be answered. There were any number of ways Walternate could have learned about the existence of ‘our’ universe – the simplest being a ‘soft spot’ opening up that allowed passage between the two. Young!Walter’s characterization was more consistent when he was doing all of his experimentation primarily because he believed in stretching the limits of science, rather than it all being about the aim of getting Peter back home. Peter’s anger at Walter at the beginning of the show is pretty well explained by Walter always being at his experiments rather than at home when he was growing up, and Walter not being there for his mother when she needed him.
The episode just seems to draw too many unnecessary connections – even down to the white tulips, where the whole point was that white tulips don’t exist (cream-coloured tulips do exist, so that’s kind of a matter of details). Having Peter and Olivia meet each other as kids is cute, but it raises way too many inconsistencies with the rest of the show. There are some very good scenes, but the backstory the episode creates doesn’t hold together as well as what we had before.
I completely agree. I guess we need an episode where Wlter wipes everyone’s memories. That would at least explain some of this.
Really!
I walked away from this episode saying “whoa, that was awesome.”
Though, granted, I do wonder why Olivia wouldn’t remember Walter, like, *AT ALL*.
We’re not in “she blocked her childhood out for the most part and never had reason to think about that day care center ever again” territory. We’re in “I spent every day playing hippie-dippy meditation games with you until you scared the ever-living-itshay out of me and I set the room on fire” territory.
Which, you’d think, you’d have at your fingertips.
I’m willing to overlook that, though, for the sake of the scene in Walternate’s office there at the end. That gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach and had me saying “oh, crap.”
Yes, the end was good with her crossing over and talking to Walternate, but it messes up so many other things..