FRINGE: Olivia. In The Lab. With a Revolver.

This episode had me at the title. Who doesn’t love CLUE??!!! OK, maybe not everyone is a board game geek like me, but someone on the FRINGE writing staff must surely be – MONOPOLY references in “Jacksonville” and a Sam Weiss/Olivia Dunham CLUE match tonight – makes me want to revisit all things Parker Brothers! Excitement aside, I thought the title was rather misleading. Coupled with the FOX teaser of “Next on FRINGE, the end brings a new beginning”, I thought for sure that the final scene was going to involve a big showdown in Walter’s lab, involving a gun-wielding Olivia. Not so much. Oops – getting a bit ahead of myself by skipping straight to the end. Better start with all of the other good stuff that happened before that!!

Olivia. In her Living Room. With the Candlestick.

Tonight’s case was a combination of sad, disturbing, and gruesome all at once. One of Olivia’s former Jacksonville daycare classmates, “Neil”, became deathly ill with cancer. While hospitalized, a man had come to visit Neil and told him about the experiments with Cortexiphan. The man led Neil to believe that what had happened to Neil as a child, would help him to fight his cancer. However, after the man left, the cancer became worse until one day, Neil inadvertently transferred it to his own sister who happened to be another one of Walter’s test subjects. Neil transferred his cancer to her by touching her. In exchange, he received positive health benefits from her, which temporarily sustained him.

Neil began seeking out other Cortexiphan kids to see if anyone could lead him back to the mystery man from the hospital. But each time he arranged such a meeting, the other person wound up dead in the same manner as his sister. Eventually his search leads him to Olivia. Only moments before, she had figured out who he was and was able to prevent him from touching her (by beating him with a candlestick!!). At the end of the episode, Neil is in a drug-induced coma, under close supervision of Nina and Broyles. They discuss the urgent need of finding the man who tried to “activate” Neil. They fear that man will cause other kinds of damage by activating more of the remaining Cortexiphan trials subjects.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

• Diane Kruger!!!!!! Enough said.

• Spontaneous fatal tumor growth is definitely not the way anyone would want to go. Not a pretty death, that is for sure.

• Poor Olivia, struggling with Peter’s secret. The girl can’t win. How many of us have been in similar situations? The phrases “the truth hurts” and “ignorance is bliss” come to mind. I no longer want Peter to know the truth – somebody save him!

• Peter, commenting on the weirdness between him and Olivia and how he doesn’t want to jeopardize the “odd little family unit” that they’ve got going. I’m with Peter – they’ve always been more brother/sisterly than anything else in my eyes.

• Olivia, calling out Nina, “I’ve always been a little foggy as to your motives.” Ditto!!!

• Olivia, holding the proverbial gun to Walter’s head, helping him to realize that he must be the one to tell Peter the truth. Olivia. In the Lab. With the Revolver.

Share your thoughts below. And, hey, John Fellows – you never commented back with the song from last week. Do tell!

P.S. For all you code crackers – tonight’s word was ENERGY.

Gretchen is a stay-at-home mom of two awesome little girls who has the good fortune of being married to a husband who is completely cool with her slightly out of control television addiction. During her precious few sleeping hours, Gretchen frequently finds herself ridding the world of pesky vampires and demons, as well as taking down fake secret branches of the CIA.