Latest Episode of Fringe Is a Piece of Shift

Okay, they can’t all be winners. Fringe gets its first clunker of the season, in a tale of robots who love and the people who love them.

It’s not that it was a bad episode per say. It was still well filmed and pretty well acted – but the writing was uniformly obvious, stilted and kind of terrible. Whether it was a shapeshifter telling his son how monsters aren’t all bad, in fact some of them are totally great or Olivinot’s closing line (“I lied to you... I don’t want to talk.”), there were more head-slappingly stupid moments than I could count.

But. But! It’s still Fringe, so, you know, not all bad. The plot, in fact, was a fine idea:

Turns out there are shapeshifters from Dimension X infiltrating every level of our government, from cops to Senators. One of those Senator-bots ends up in a car accident, which leads to Newton blasting his way into a hospital, before Broyles breaks it up – forcing Newton to give the Senator a shot in the eye, effectively shutting him down for good.

Except that doesn’t shut him down for good, for you see, over the two years the shifter has been impersonating the Senator, he has fallen in love with the Senator’s wife. And every time he sees or hears about her, he starts to wake up a bit. And Walter hooks into this, using the wife (and his new resources as head of Massive Dynamic) to find out where the shifter’s data center (or brain) is – turns out? It’s in his ass. I’ll give the writers a little credit that the shifter’s brains weren’t in their hearts, because if that was the case, I probably would have died from a saccharine overdose.

Meanwhile, Olivinot is struggling with identities issues of her own. Specifically, Peter basically peer pressuring her into having sex with him. This is tough for Olivinot, of course, because she doesn’t love Peter, and also, she has a boyfriend back home on Earth-2. Spoiler: she has sex with him at the end of the episode, mainly so he doesn’t realize she’s not actually Olivia. Second spoiler: funny story, but that’s how I met my wife! Weird.

Anyway, we get it: everybody leads double lives and struggles with their identities, from Olivia to the shifters to even Walter, who is adjusting to his new role as the head of a major company. Even Astrid gets a little bit of an identity shift, as Walter calls her by her given name for the first time.

Like I said, the problem wasn’t the plot – it was the lines, and the pace of the writing. Fringe usually has a good bit of subtext going on, but here, for the first time this season, the subtext was text. It’s a bit of a bummer, given how good every other episode has been. It’s an even bigger bummer, because we’re now going to have this episode to take us through until the next new episode is on, on November fourth.

Hopefully, when the show comes back, it’ll have fixed those dialogue problems.

Random Notes:

• “I want information on James Van Horn.” Broyles kicks butt.
• “We’ve got an... Astro Farnsworth?” “Yup, that’s me.”
• Peter is a fast reader! He can figure out someone has files on every case the Fringe Division has ever done merely by looking at them.
• “I’m eating for comfort!”
• "He left his pudding, something must be wrong."
• How do I get a quote in the Fringe promo? How about, “Fringe is better than you think it is!” or “UGO says, If you don’t watch Fringe, we’ll shoot you in the eyeball and shut you down, you dumb robots.” I think I have this locked down.