Fringe "Notivation" Episode Guide

”Some things are not ours to tamper with.”

We’ve had to wait an extra week due to that pesky World Series, but Fringe returned for real this Friday. And with it came the return of Peter Bishop, or at least, Peter Bishop as we, the audience, know him. He’s still a mystery man to the rest of the team, and their attempt to figure out his history coincides with the return of yet another familiar foe.

Read on to see what exactly Peter’s return had in store for Fringe this week.

• Walter’s been self-medicating to help himself sleep. You would too, if the man from your nightmares and daydreams suddenly popped into a physical existence and claimed to be your son. Their meeting is tense – Walter’s technically seeing his dead son grown up, while Peter struggles to convince him of the events in the original timeline. In this Peter-less timeline, the Observer failed to pull Peter from the lake the night he almost drowned. His existence was a paradox that was never supposed to happen.

• The Fringe division’s got other things to deal with at the moment, as they get called into a crime scene that links back to the transparent shapeshifters we saw back in the first episode.

• Olivia and Lee visit Nina Sharp to get intel on Dr. Malcolm Truss, a former Massive Dynamic employee whose wife fell victim to the shifter. He was working on cellular replication, but good old William Bell shut the project down due to ethical issues. The shifter, however, finds Truss and convinces him at gunpoint to fix a malfunction that’s been occurring with the shifter’s skin grafts.

• Truss voluntarily helps the shifter, taking pride in his work even though Bell thought it was too meddlesome. When his back is turned, however, the shifter unintentionally takes the form of his now-dead wife, and he freaks out.

• Because Peter’s a bit of a braniac, there’s a cool moment where he hacks into an intercom to chime in on the team’s debate about the shifters. He gives them the details on the memory disks, including the fact that he’s now a pro at decrypting them. After spending a couple of hours with a laptop, Peter bears the bad news that this new generation of shifters is so advanced that they are molecularly identical to those whose identities’ they steal. Short of an impromptu surgery to retrieve the memory disks, it’s nearly impossible to tell that they’re not human.

• Peter also figures out that the shifter is embedded with a tracking device, meaning two things: the first is that someone else is keeping tabs on the shifters, and the second is that they now know the location of Truss and his work.

• Nina Sharp pays Walter a visit in the lab to help him deal with the appearance of his son. She attempts to convince Walter that he’s not to blame for rifts in the world or the loss of his son, but he is too wrapped up in the past to allow himself to be happy at Peter’s return. He visits Peter again, and even though he accepts that Peter is really and truly his son, he still cannot forgive himself enough to help him be fully remembered.

• Truss tries to sabotage the serum he’s making for the shifter, but Fringe arrives and scares her off. In a clever switch worthy of Hannibal Lector’s praise, the shifter pretends to be a wounded agent to hitch an ambulance ride away from the scene. Fringe confirms what Truss already knows: his wife is dead. He laments that maybe William Bell was right – there are some things that are just not meant to be tampered with.

• The episode closes with the shifter, fully healed, operating the typewriter to the other side. She types out that the serum is successful, and the music swells as the ghost keys eerily type back: “We’re sending the others.”

Don’t forget to watch Fringe Friday at 9 PM on FOX to catch next week’s episode “And Those We’ve Left Behind.”