Over There
Season 2, Episode 23
In the conclusion of the second-season finale, Olivia and Walter's mission to the other side continues, with the fate of both universes and some key individuals very much up in the air.
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Over There
Season 2, Episode 22
In Part 1 of the two-part second-season finale, Olivia journeys to the alternate universe with Walter, who is preparing for a showdown with William Bell (Leonard Nimoy). Elizabeth Bishop: Orla Brady.
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A murder investigation that may be linked to Thomas Jerome Newton pairs Peter with a local sheriff (Martha Plimpton); Walter dreads a return to St. Claire's; a visitor arrives from the alternate universe.
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A bout with anxiety causes a self-medicating Walter to spin a musical fairy tale for Olivia's niece, and his fertile imagination becomes the setting for a subconscious song-and-dance exercise by the rest of the Division.
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The mysterious fate of two teens at a vacant warehouse suggests that Thomas Jerome Newton and the shape-shifters have returned, sending Walter to the lab to analyze new evidence and Olivia and Peter to Massive Dynamic for more clues.
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When Olivia and Co. investigate the deaths of passengers on a commuter train, they wonder if a mysterious energy drain onboard has something to do with the powerful and enigmatic Alistair Peck (Peter Weller).
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The Division is baffled by the death of a woman from a disease she apparently never had. Meanwhile, Olivia does her best to keep the secret about Peter to herself.
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Peter
Season 2, Episode 16
Walter recalls his experiments in the 1980s as he tries to map out Peter's improbable biography for Olivia. Orla Brady guest stars as Peter's mother.
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"Jacksonville" opens with an event we've been waiting for; a building from the other dimension crosses over into ours, killing and deforming everyone inside. As Walter explains, in order for the universe to right itself, a building from our dimension will be sent to theirs — and the only person who might be able to tell what building it will be is Olivia.
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The team investigates a wedding where the groom and all of his blood relatives have suffocated to death. They soon realize that not only does the killer have ties to the Nazis, but he also has a connection to Walter's father.
At the end of last week's recap I said that I was worried about this episode of Fringe after having seen the preview. To use Nazis as a villain these days tends to indicate a lack of originality — they've been used for 60 years now as the boilerplate villain in a lot of popular culture. Luckily, "The Bishop Revival" was not the episode I worried it would be, though that doesn't necessarily mean it was all that great either.
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Network TV dramas have a long history of the "quarantine" episode. It's usually in medical dramas like House or ER, but many long-running dramas seem to eventually work it into their episode roster. "What Lies Below" represented Fringe's stab at the "quarantine" episode and considering how often it's been done, it remained a pretty effective hour of television. When the team investigates a death at Vitas Petrol they soon learn it was a contagious pathogen responsible — but not before Olivia and Peter are trapped inside by the quarantine.
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Fringe has always worn its B-movie roots on its sleeve. It owes as much to monster and sci-fi movies of the 1950's as it does to The X-Files (which itself owes a great deal to those movies). But one of the reasons the show doesn't feel like a mere rehashing of these movies and shows is the thoroughly modern conceit of the human body being weaponized. It's a potent and rewarding concept, and one that the latest episode almost completely abandoned. The team investigates a group of deformed people after they kill a few state police, and while the episode contained a "scientific" explanation, it largely felt like a by-the-numbers B-movie affair.
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Unearthed
Season 2, Episode 11
The Division is perplexed by a case involving a teen girl who, after being taken off life support and prepped for organ donation, miraculously awakens, with a newfound ability to speak Russian and knowledge of classified military information.
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Walter Bishop has always been one of the central characters to Fringe. This is hardly a revelatory statement. But as the series has progressed it becomes more and more apparent that he may be the central figure of the series — the one on which the mythology of the series hinges. This episode, in which the team investigates three mental patients' sudden rehabilitation, only underlines that fact as it shows how important Walter is to the enemy as well as the good guys...
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"Did you eat?"
"Yeah"
"Well, that's unfortunate."
Fringe has never shied away from the viscera and gore that the sci-fi genre so often demands, but "Snakehead" was an especially stomach-churning addition to the series. The team investigates a case involving large parasitic worms that are growing inside groups of Chinese nationals, and while this was a great freak-of-the-week, it was Walter's search for independence that gave the episode its beating heart.
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After a few weeks of less-than-stellar self-contained episodes, Fringe turned its attention to one of the most interesting aspects of its mythology: The Observer. Or as it turns out, the Observers. When a rogue Observer kidnaps a young woman, the Fringe team and the other Observers try to figure out why and Walter worries that they've come to collect a debt.
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The latest episode of Fringe opened on a pair of men being chased to a rooftop. They appear to have kidnapped a teen boy in their backseat. Once cornered, one of the men seems to the force one police officer to leap to his death and another to kill her partners and then herself using mind control. This being Fringe, of course, none of this is exactly what it seems. And though this particular freak-of-the-week had a cool power and there were a couple of interesting twists, this episode was largely paint-by-numbers.
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Welcome back Fringe-philes (that nickname still needs work). After a baseball enforced hiatus, we finally got back to wonderfully weird world of Fringe. This episode's freak-of-the-week had one of the cooler nefarious powers we've seen on the show, the ability to turn people into dust, while Broyles desire to solve the case reveals a little bit more about him — and gets him into some hot water.
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The Fringe division tries to decode dreams after going to Seattle to investigate a man's frightening visions that caused him to attack his boss; Broyles has a meeting with Nina Sharp.
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After the lackluster previous episode, "Momentum Deferred" got Fringe right back on track with an exciting plot-packed episode. Shape-shifters are stealing heads from cryonics labs across the East Coast as Olivia's memory begins to return, and because this is Fringe we're talking about, the two events seem to be related. Plus: Walter seeks the aid of a former test subject and Evil Charlie's plans come to a head.
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Fracture
Season 2, Episode 3
The Fringe crew is flummoxed by the strange circumstances surrounding a bomb blast at a Philadelphia train station, but Walter's discovery in the lab and the prospect of more explosions send Olivia and Peter to Iraq for answers.
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The team travels to rural Pennsylvania, when they find that a construction worker's disappearance into a subterranean passage may have larger implications. Meanwhile, Walter uses frogs as guinea pigs for reality-shifting experiments.
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The Fringe division comes under congressional scrutiny in the second-season premiere, which also follows Olivia's incredible return to her familiar environs and the pursuit of a mysterious entity that will stop at nothing to find her.
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