FRINGE: Northwest Passage

At times this season, I have been feeling that maybe FRINGE was becoming a little too formulaic for my liking. Opening scene – something weird happens, ACT 1 Team Fringe arrives, ACT 2 Back to the lab, ACT 3 Dangerous pursuit/mystery solved, Closing scene – character development or shocking piece of info revealed. As much as the formula might work well and be easier for the more casual viewer to follow, it is the episodes that don’t fit the mold that keep me tuning in for more. “Northwest Passage” was a nice mixture of both. It stayed true to the formula, but shook it up a bit by changing the location and players. The case had a tidy solution or a very complicated one, depending upon your perspective. Best of all, in the last few minutes, we were treated to yet another big reveal!

Peter from Boston

Peter has fled cross-country and is on the road to nowhere, in an attempt to get away from Walter and sort through his feelings. He meets an interesting waitress at a diner and they plan to meet at his motel after her shift ends. She never shows up and Peter is set to leave town when he passes the diner and sees that it is now a crime scene. He speaks with the local sheriff, who wants to hold him as a suspect. While giving her his alibi, Peter spots Newton in the crowd and begins to get extremely suspicious when he hears over the police radio that the waitress was found with part of her skull removed. He immediately asks the sheriff to find out if her temporal lobe had been removed. Oddly enough, the sheriff does as he asks and finds that Peter is correct. They go to the police station where she learns that Peter works for the FBI. She assumes that Peter is in town to track the brain-removing killers, but he says that he thinks that the reverse is true.

Meanwhile, back in Boston, Walter adjusts (not so well) to a life without Peter. He breaks down in the supermarket over the appalling ingredients of Toaster Pastries and creates a scene, which causes Olivia and Astrid to get involved. His apartment is a total wreck and he is concerned that he will be sent back to the mental institution if Peter does not return. Astrid helps him to get things in order. He points out to her what we have all been thinking since Episode 1, “Astrid, you are a federal agent, I doubt you had dreams of babysitting a helpless old man”. Once order is restored, Walter begins to hatch a plan to locate Peter. He is going to build a device that will locate Peter by tracing his other-worldly glow (or something like that). In the end, he is too scared to use it for fear that even if he found him, Peter would not want to return.

Walter is right on, because when Peter speaks with Broyles to get him to confirm Peter’s credentials with the local authorities, he also asks Broyles to promise him that he won’t tell Walter where he is. Peter pairs up with the sheriff after her partner disappears and the two conduct their own investigation. Peter suspects that Newton is in Washington, trying to get to Peter by kidnapping people with whom Peter has had contact and harvesting their temporal lobes to extract their memories, particularly any knowledge that they have of Peter. We get to see the many sides of Peter – detective guy, science guy, and badass gun-buying action guy. There is a great running through the woods scene where Newton shoots some strange dart into a tree near Peter and then Peter shoots at Newton (and a mysterious sidekick), causing them to promptly disappear.

As the case unfolds, the sheriff repeatedly questions Peter’s sanity. Even though she is a fan of the unknown, some of what Peter is telling her seems too hard to believe. But Peter knows that he is not crazy and is determined to stick around to find out what Newton wants from him. They continue their investigation, another girl dies (not really interesting enough to mention the details on that one), and they ultimately establish a “kill zone” by using some method that Peter concocts which involves measuring adrenaline spikes. Smack in the middle of the kill zone is an abandoned dairy farm where they wrap up the case by finding the missing police officer, as well as a creepy guy who turns out to be the killer.

Wait…what? Peter is crazy after all? At this point, it kind of feels like the episode in BUFFY where you find out that maybe Buffy has been in a mental institution the whole time and that the entire Buffy-verse is just a figment of her imagination. Thankfully, that feeling of dismay doesn’t last long. Peter returns to his hotel and settles in to listen to a CD that the dead waitress had burned for him with the “Peter from Boston” play list. He pops on his headphones and stretches out on the bed. The first song is Band of Horses, “Is There a Ghost”, and in what is a VERY unsettling moment; Peter opens his eyes to find a ghost of a man standing over him – Newton!! Before Peter can reach for his gun, Newton calls in Mr. Secretary and, just as many of us had suspected, it is WALTERNATE!!!!

Walter and Olivia are on their way to find Peter (since Broyles apparently found an escape clause in his promise to Peter). What will happen when they get there and learn that Peter has teamed up with his real Daddy??!!

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

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.