Fringe: Head Games

I have wholeheartedly enjoyed Fringe from day 1, even if it hasn’t occupied the top of my Must Watch list. But between last week’s compelling gross-fest, this week’s simply outstanding hour of hardcore plot propulsion, and the news that Mrs. Bishop has been cast for a forthcoming arc, I cannot wait to see what happens whenever the Fox-Lords pull the show out of hibernation.

A few weeks back, some thugs from the Other Side located the disembodied head of their fearless leader (alias Newton) and reattached it to the rest of him. Now that he’s back in one piece, Newton’s making the rounds at a handful of Boston area mental institutions to perform uninvited brain surgery on three select patients. But instead of the harm you’d expect such a course of action to wreak, it cures them completely! Olivia and the Bishops interview the formerly deranged and find out they all fell ill 14 years earlier under the care of the same doctor and that the key to their speedy recovery was the removal of some foreign brain tissue that decidedly did not need to be there in the first place.

Things get flat out mind freaky when Peter realizes that each patient’s debilitating quirk was somehow related to a memory from the Bishop family’s past and sure enough, an MRI comparison reveals that each piece of absentee grey matter fits like a jigsaw piece into previously unknown gaps inside Walter’s cranium. Could this have anything to do with the fact that Walter can’t remember how he ever crossed over to kidnap Peter? Survey says definitely. Newton & his goons kidnap Walter and force him to remotely interface with the missing parts of himself and it seems to work like a charm. Which really can’t be good in the long term, since the Other Siders want to more or less tear open the wall between worlds and pillage ours to restore what some nameless apocalypse took from theirs.

Liv finds Walter, no thanks to the quickly discovered and removed GPS chip he was kind enough to put in himself last week, and gives chase to their Unmarked Black Van of Evil. The pursuit ends with a fantastic act of crack shot badassery that takes out everyone but Newton (just how many times can Roger Cross get shot in the head on Fox?) but the newly crowned Big Bad makes his escape by ransoming his freedom for Walter’s life (the antidote for a speedy neurotoxin is involved). We’re left to hang on a flashback of what may be (but hopefully won’t be) Leonard Nimoy’s final appearance as William Bell, performing the voluntary surgery that drove Walter to utter madness for the sake of protecting our world.

I never needed an excuse for Walter’s awesome quirks and obsessions, but the revelation that they are all, in some way, an attempt to recapture lost memories gave the character yet another layer of sweetness and pathos and it’s nothing short of heartbreaking to see Walter realize he’ll never quite be whole again. But you know he’ll never stop trying and god, is it fun to watch.

Season 2, Episode 10: Grey Matters (originally aired December 10, 2009)

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Thursdays at 9/8C, Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro