Bookclub!

Okay! This week, our assignment was to watch the episode “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide” 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, 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!

Is it just me or are the episodes named after drugs the best ones? Okay, White Tulip was the best one. But, after that, aren’t the ones named after drugs awesome? It’s like the writers say “Wow. What a great episode. We can name this one after drugs.”

Well, this is the *LAST* of the Bellivia episodes. Which is too bad, really. Not because Olivia gave such a great Nimoy impersonation (though she did) but because watching Bell and Walter together was just a lot of fun. I would be willing to watch a “Grumpy Old Scientists” television show.

But I get ahead of myself.

We open in the lab and witness Bellivia and Walter bickering as they are finally getting serious about moving Bell out of Olivia’s bod into, oh look… they’ve found a corpse. Walter gets Astro’s name wrong again and Aspirin responds by calling Walter “Wally”. Walter’s expression is priceless. Half hurt and half “where in the hell did *THAT* come from?” resulting in one of those little perfect moments that rewards everybody for watching every week.

Asterisk and Wally pull the switch and the corpse does this shimmy thing (do they just call down to central casting and say “we want someone to go shirtless and shimmy for 3 seconds”?) and the power goes out and, of course… it didn’t work. There’s an interesting little argument between Peter and Bellivia where Peter says something to the effect of “didn’t you say that, after two days, you’d just shuffle away?” and Bell asks “Are you suggesting I die?”

Well… yeah.

So while we let that sink in, a lightbulb pops and Olivia is back long enough to cry for help before collapsing and we jump to a local hospital where we see Walter and Bell tell the truth to the doctors without giving them even half of the backstory they need to even find this story unbelievable and so they just sound crazy when, for example, Bell tells the doctor to not use defibulators because they will “kill me and the young woman I’m living inside of”.

You’re watching Fringe (Blue Credits).

So here’s the setup: Bell is in the driver’s seat and doesn’t know how to get out of it. Like, not even “into a cow or something” get out of it but “following the ‘die’ suggestion” get out of it… so our Fringe Team decides to go in.

And, this time, they’ve watched the show before.

Hey, everybody! Let’s drop acid and hook our brains up to each other!

What surprises me is not that Walter tells Astrid to whip up a couple of grams of LSD. It’s that she’s able to do so in such a short amount of time.

Anyway, after Peter theorizes that Broyles is bald enough to be an Observer (and Broyles looks at Astrid and asks “drugs?”), we jump into Olivia’s mind. There’s a very interesting exchange between Walter and Peter where Peter says “I thought you said none of this was real anyway” and Walter replies “I said that everything is a product of Olivia’s subconscious. My feelings are definitely real.”

Which is one of those themes that they could write a two or three-week story arc around, if you ask me.

After some cute boy scoutery with Walter and Peter in which they send a message to Olivia (a makeshift mirror sending Morse Code signals up to an office in the WTC (!)), we jump back to the lab and watch Broyles start tripping balls.

We have an Inception moment where all of Olivia’s subconsciously created people include her abusive stepfather as well as every passerby on the street and they all look at Walter and Peter at once… and then start attacking like fast zombies. So maybe it’s a 28 Days Later moment. Anyway, they end up in the lobby to the WTC (!) where they have the opportunity to kill Nina Sharpe. Which probably means something. We find William Bell’s office and… wait. That’s not Olivia! That’s William Bell!

Oh, and we’re a cartoon now.

This allows for Leonard Nimoy to do some light voice acting that can have him participate in action scenes without actually making him do stuff like climb ladders. Or go places. Or stand.

We hammer out that Olivia isn’t readily accessible because, uh-oh, she’s hiding… and the stepdad thing is instrumental to this. He’s both a defense mechanism and nightmare… which is bad news for anybody who happens to be trespassing. Well, anybody who isn’t William Bell. Of course, now that Walter and Peter have shown up, it’s time for all of Olivia’s subconscious’s avatars of everybody else to go full zombie and attack the three of them *BUT*! It’s a cartoon! If we need a blimp, we’ve got ourselves a blimp! So we’re blimping down to Jacksonville because Olivia knows that it’s the last place anyone would look for her.

Of course, there’s a stowaway who manages to wreck the engine room and then the wall of the blimp and attack Peter and Walter. Interestingly, he fires a flaregun and creates a hole in the side of the blimp and jumps out with a parachute… and Walter is sucked out through the hole after him.

For the record: If you die in someone else’s dream, you do not die in real life.

Peter and Bell land safely (?) and grab a motorcycle and motor up to Olivia’s childhood home which, it turns out, has a red door (surely *THAT* means something) and, inside, *WHAM*. We’re real actors again. Peter sees Olivia who walks up to him and Peter grimaces… she’s not the real Olivia. A little kid sitting at the table walks up and tells him “I knew you’d be able to tell it was me” (GREAT WE GET TO HAVE THIS CONVERSATION AGAIN… wait, no. It looks like we don’t have to…) and, suddenly, it’s Christmastime and there are loud, loud steps in the house. Li’l Olivia grabs Peter by the hand and they run outside where, WHAM, they’re cartoons again.

We’re running in a surprisingly intense sequence where they’re being chased by army jeeps and one is barrelling down on Olivia and Peter pushes her out of the way to get hit by the car and WHAM we’re back in the lab and Peter is saying “I lost her.” Walter points out that “it’s up to Belly now”.

And, apparently, it is. We’re back in the cartoon subconscious where Li’l Olivia and Bell are running running from a crowd of soldiers when Li’l Olivia has a moment of clarity and turns to the crowd and holds up her hand. With a simple rebuke… she transforms into grownup Olivia and the soldiers freeze. Olivia has, once again, faced down her demons. In the cartoon, there’s a bit of thunder and lightning and Bell says “That’ll be Walter. Please tell him that I knew that dog wouldn’t hunt” and *WHAM*.

Olivia wakes up in the lab. And it’s her.

Astrid explains that the computer didn’t absorb William Bell’s consciousness… and Olivia says that Bell said that he knew that the dog wouldn’t hunt. Walter, with tears in his eyes, explains that that was something that Bell always said when he knew that something wouldn’t work… and he goes off to his office to get used to being alone, without Bell, for what looks like the last time.

And Peter and Olivia are back together and, gingerly, getting used to that again. Olivia had drawn a decent little sketch of the guy who shot a hole in the side of the blimp. Peter asks about him and Olivia drops a bomb. “I think that he’s the man who’s going to kill me.”

Wham.

Wow! What a great episode!

So… what thinks did you thunk?