FRINGE Recap: ‘Wallflower’

“I’ve been investigating Fringe events for three years. I never thought I’d become one.”

Oh, Peter. You are a Fringe event, but unfortunately for you, you aren’t what the team is investigating this week.

Part of the fun of FRINGE for me is their opening credits. I don’t know how closely you pay attention to the words in the various versions (and yes, they are different in each color), but the word that always prompts a chill to run down my spine in this new universe is the inclusion of “existence.” While Peter is the obvious tie-in, tonight’s hour brought a whole new layer of heartbreak to the mix.

Meet Eugene. (Or perhaps it’s “U Gene.” But that feels kind of heartless to call him.) Hospital records showed that he died as a newborn due to complications from his genetic abnormality, but a nurse who was there swears she heard him cry after he was declared dead. She tells Olivia and Lincoln — who are investigating the man in connection to a bunch of murders that have been happening around town — that a group called Cyprox Inc. was set to take care of the autopsy. Olivia privately informs Lincoln that Cyprox is a subsidiary of Kelvin Genetics, AKA Massive Dynamic.

The duo pay a visit to Nina, who admits the boy lived and they did testing on him. However, she insists neither she nor William Bell knew about what was going on because the testing was done by a satellite group. Given the amount of details Nina has, Lincoln is curious about how she knows so much about Eugene. She tells him there was a fire in the lab 10 years earlier and she and William learned about his existence then — they thought he was dead.

But Eugene isn’t quite dead. Instead, he’s invisible, killing others to get brief moments of pigmentation in his skin so he can be seen by others.

However, he won’t be alive for long, Walter warns. He realizes that with Eugene trying to “repigmentize” himself, it’s killing him slowly. Walter demonstrates on his rats, John and Yoko, and shows that the team will be able to find Eugene via ultra violet light.

Olivia and the team track him down at one of his crime scenes, but unfortunately for her she falls and is hanging on for her life when she finally encounters Eugene.

“You understand right now, how important it is to be seen,” he tells her. “Your life depends on it, me seeing you right now.”

He helps her up, but takes her gun in the process. Olivia tries to warn him that what he’s doing is killing himself, but he refuses to be a lab rat anymore.

“All my life, I’ve been watching them live theirs. Watching them fall in love. To be looked upon by the right person. To connect and to see in their eyes kindness. Happiness. Recognition. That’s when you exist.”

He runs away when Lincoln and the rest of the FBI come up and they’re unable to catch him. Despite Olivia’s warnings that making himself seen even one more time could kill him, Eugene makes himself visible one last time. He finally gets up the nerve to talk to Julie, a woman he clearly has feelings for and visited in the elevator every day. The brief conversation clearly meant everything to him and he dies in the elevator.

The conversation Olivia had with Eugene — and the fact that she doesn’t really open up to anyone — leads to her to visit Nina. Olivia wonders if the testing that was done on her as a child perhaps stunted her emotions. Nina is quick to reassure her that isn’t the case.

For all of Nina’s faults, she does make a great mother to Olivia. “Before you and your sister came to live with me, my life was work,” she tells Olivia. “I didn’t think that I could find the time or the room for you girls in my life. Now I can’t imagine what my life would have been like if I hadn’t taken that risk.”

We know. We know what her life would have been like, and while our Nina was awesome, this new connection is lovely and unexpected.

But alas, warm and fuzzy feelings rarely last on this show. As Olivia gets ready for a “date” with Lincoln (more on that in a minute), her apartment gets gassed and two men enter her home. One injects Olivia with something and another fiddles with a security camera inside her apartment. Apparently she won’t remember the last two hours and she’ll have “one hell of a headache.” (Okay, yes, this reveal is more interesting than my theory those migraines were caused by memories from the other time line coming through.) However, the men weren’t alone — Nina was there to supervise.

…yeah. As if that wait between now and January wasn’t long enough.

While Peter was barely in the episode — and had no input in the case — he did have his own mission: reassemble the machine to get back home.

“The machine was powerful enough to snap me out of my time line,” he explains. “It stands to reason it’s powerful enough to snap me back in.”

Um, Peter, last time you used the machine you traveled into the future, saw how bleak your world was, had to live through the death of your wife, then went back to “normal” time and disappeared from existence. Maybe you should put down the shiny toy and use that as a last case scenario?

But he’s determined to get home and because of that, he seems bizarrely detached from his surroundings, going as far as almost encouraging Lincoln to pursue Olivia. At first Lincoln seemed embarrassed when he realized his fascination with Olivia was apparent to Peter, but Peter quickly assured Lincoln, “The Olivia you’re talking about? That’s not my Olivia.” Heck, Peter went as far as to give Lincoln new glasses (with the $200 allowance he gets?!) to help him out.

In this time line, it seems like the show might be delving into a Olivia and Lincoln relationship and that feels…weird. I get this version of Olivia is not “our” Olivia, but she doesn’t feel as foreign as Fauxlivia did. She’s just Olivia as Olivia would have been had Peter never survived as a child.

And yet, at the same time, as I was watching this episode, I kept having this nagging sensation that this is not my show.

Of course it is FRINGE in the literal sense. We have the same writers, we have the same actors, but while the pieces are all there, they’re being rearranged in a fashion that is unfamiliar. (Kind of like our favorite band split up, but decided to put together an album of their combined solo music.) Walter may have his quippy one-liners and work with the team, but he’s not leaving the lab. In this episode, Lincoln had virtually taken the spot Peter would have occupied had this case come last season. (Though I do continue to enjoy the bizarre friendship between Peter and Lincoln.) Peter may be back, but is he really? He had no scenes with Walter and a brief passing moment with Olivia. After he heavily featured in last week’s “And Those We’ve Left Behind,” this week, he had virtually nothing to do with what went down — aside to give Lincoln his permission (of sorts) for him to go after this version of Olivia.

I’ve heard and seen a lot of complaints that this season is moving too slowly for some viewers and for the first time I think I understand what they mean. It’s not that “Wallflower” wasn’t a great episode, but the pacing as of now has been fairly consistent. Last season, by the time we had our “fall finale” (less of an ordeal, given it aired in December and it was the ninth episode of the season as opposed to tonight’s seventh hour),  Olivia had returned home, and she had started to make sense of the damage Fauxlivia had wrecked on her life. The “controversial” arc was wrapped and while Olivia was in a pretty awful place with Peter, fans had the hope that the team we once knew would find their footing soon enough.

With this season? I don’t see how FRINGE can “wrap up” this storyline in two more hours. I don’t think there’s any fair way they could. Even if Peter were to magically use the machine to pop back into his time line (or go back to the night Walter brought him over from the other universe and made sure he didn’t drown), there is too much unresolved here to be totally satisfied with things returning to normal. And if things are as simple as Peter needing to go back to another world where Walter and Olivia remember and love him, what kind of agony are they going through as he’s missing? Or has no time passed for them at all? Will this end with Peter back in that machine, yet again the only one aware of yet another possibility of what could happen?

To be a FRINGE fan requires a great deal of trust. We had to trust when the alt-world was revealed and the show as we knew it fundamentally shifted. We had to trust when the doubles of the characters we loved were revealed. We had to trust when the show decided at the beginning of last year to spend half of the episodes in the alt-universe, away from the characters we “knew,” minus poor Olivia who was brainwashed into believing she was someone else. We had to trust when Peter literally disappeared in front of our eyes at the end of last season. And we have to trust now that these writers have a way to make the seemingly impossible work.

We’ll just have to wait until 2012 to see what they have in store for us.

But on a slightly less serious note, there were a few lines in “Wallflower” that made me laugh…

• Peter: “Every 32-year-old man needs a ‘friend’ to chaperone him as he’s underwear shopping.”
• Walter: “Tell Agent Broyles science has no price tag.”
• Walter: “It’s possible, of course. Leprechauns are possible.”

What did you think of “Wallflower”? Can you believe we don’t have any new FRINGE until 2012? And for the love of all that is holy and unholy, what the heck is Nina Sharp up to?!

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