Brace yourselves because I really like this one, so I watched it while taking notes in my notebook. Because I’m a millennial and serious note-taking can’t be done on a cell phone.
Things I’ll pretend never happened so I can like the show more:
Massive Dynamic keeping John there for reasons that will never be explained.
Favorite foreshadowing moment:
Walter saying he was once in Baltimore as a throwaway joke, and later we learn he owns these boxes.
Peter not remembering his toys, and a bunch of them being red!
The whole scene in the lab, with Walter explaining the “science” with the rice; Olivia coming in casually saying she was working and dropping information about the case; Peter saying he was buying rice for Walter’s toy; Olivia hearing something about “radioactive” and automatically thinking about how to use that in the investigation; saying she is going to a bar to keep investigating things; Peter following her; and Walter doing the toy demonstration again just because he likes it, asking Astrid if she wants to join, and her deadpan “nope.”
We move the plot forward, we laugh, we see how brilliant Olivia is, and we get the 4 main characters interacting. All in one scene. That’s peak Fringe for me.
I know for most people the most remarkable scene from the episode is the bar one, but I’m a sucker for the moments where the 4 main characters interact in the lab.
Did I spot the Observer on my own?
Yes. This time, either they were too lazy to try to hide him, or they thought, “Let’s show him right at the beginning, when people are not focused yet, to make them spend the rest of the episode looking for him.” Because it’s almost the first thing we see.
Polivia shipper moment from Walter:
We had a small moment of it in the second episode, but from now on is when I think Walter becomes really invested in it.
“Oh, do you two want to use the room?”
By the way, Olivia’s expression this time was not her standard mouth acting when Walter says something very Walter. It was this emoji: 😏
This use of color had to be intentional
I’ve never seen a hardware store have essentially only red, blue, and yellow in it. I can’t see a connection to the plot, but it must have been intentional because it’s not realistic.
The jerseys of the toys from the American football teams being one team red and the other blue. A hint about the universes that will compete against each other?
And again, the toys that Peter does not remember being mostly red!
If anyone understood this / has a theory, please help.
Did Nina know about the whole Olivia and John Scott in the tank thing? Because would they jump to “they must have shared consciousness” without knowing that?
Did Walter actually forget that he switched Peters, or is he telling a half-truth here while being conscious of it? Was this whole story about trying to travel back in time to find the doctor who could save him an extremely elaborate cover story, or at some point did he actually think about that?
This device has some similarities with the one he used in Raiden Lake (like the three metal rods and that blue tub thing), but it’s not exactly the same one. Is this just a plot hole and I’m overthinking it?
When Walter said he hid those boxes, he said he was convinced he was being followed and that someone was watching his every move. Is he talking about the Observer/September here, right?
Your Alt-Livia is showing.
The whole flirting with the bartender to get what she wants and “Is that a dare?”
It’s funny, because in my mind, when she is doing the card trick and talking about being a weird kid, that’s Blueverse Olivia. But the rest of the time (even the voice and the speech cadence) is the one we’ll see with Alt-Livia in season 3, and completely different from what we see in Olivia in other situations.
Maybe Alt-Livia not drinking was intentional, to make us not think that this was already a glimpse into the Redverse hehe.
I like the sci-fi bank heist in the beginning. For TV CGI from 15 years ago, it holds up pretty well.
After the episode where we see her almost going out with people we’ll never see again, we have a dialogue about her never having had a best friend, being called “Han” in boarding school, and Peter having a best friend we’ll never see. And then, in the bar scene, she knows the license plate of her best friend from high school by memory. Pick a lane, writers!
From all the John-related things, Olivia mixing her memories with his, like it happens in this episode, is the only part that I actually enjoy, because it makes sense (as an in-universe bizarre Fringe thing). If they had never brought him back to try to redeem and badly explain how he was not a bad guy after we see him trying to kill her in the pilot, and had only kept this bit of her having hallucinations and mixing her memories with his, I think I would have had no problem with the John plot. It would be kind of cool actually.
Also, Olivia dropping that she is mixing her memories with John’s, Peter and Walter getting concerned, Walter saying he needs to look into that, and Olivia going, “Yeah… yeah… I’m losing my mind, but first we need to figure out what happened here.” Olivia being Olivia.
I love David Robert Jones. He is the stereotypical Bond villain, but I’m a simple girl. He has a Hannibal Lecter vibe that makes him one of the most memorable things in an episode, even if he has very little time on screen.
The bar scene. This was the moment that even 19-year-old me, who was even worse at reading social cues, noticed that they had chemistry. And I’m pretty sure that the card trick is what made People go from finding her hot to having a serious crush.
By the way, did he bring a deck of cards with him? Or was he ripping apart the one from the bar? That’s not nice, guys.
The doctor being very ethical, following procedure, and saying no to Olivia’s request for personal information without the proper documentation was kind of nice to see. I honestly did not remember that everything would get solved by someone who loves to gossip. I know it seems very plot-convenient, but we all know someone at work who would totally do that, don’t we?
The way that Peter jogs Walter’s memories 🥰
We even have Gene in this one!
Just by the number of notes, it’s clear that this is my favorite episode from season 1 so far. It ties things we saw before and sets things up for future episodes, and has an amazing cliffhanger.
My kind of 45 minutes of television.
