Fringe, S5, Ep5 – An Origin Story

I sort of think this is the episode that should have had the #TurningPoint Twitter hashtag.  I mean, obviously last week was one, too, but this one?  Wow.

Seriously, the Observer even all but replicates Loki’s “An ant has no quarrel with a boot” line. Still, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and all that.

I hardly know where to begin.  I guess I’ll start out by admitting that the magic inter-dimensional cube thing didn’t really grab me at first, except in that I was convinced it was the Tesseract from The Avengers.  This show doesn’t really do hand-wavy techno-babble any better than any other sci-fi show, especially not recently.  But as soon as we found out that the Resistance had captured an Observer, I was intrigued (and worried) to see where Peter would go with the situation.

Olivia’s understated grieving was nicely done and, of course, exquisitely acted by Anna Torv.  And the scene where Walter gently explains to her why she and Peter must grieve together and remember what they had and still have?  Wonderful, tragic, and an amazing callback to S2’s “Peter” and Walter’s absolutely killing final line: “You have no idea what it’s like to lose a child.”

Awww, yeah. More of this, please!

Also, I am fully in support of Liv shooting the Observer that could have killed Peter. Still, though this arc is clearly focusing on Peter right now, I miss Olivia, well, doing stuff instead of mostly talking and hanging back in the lab.  Heck, I would have liked to see more of her reaction to seeing her daughter’s face staring back from a Resistance poster, a la Katniss.  (It better be coming, along with seeing people hearing Etta’s story, otherwise why would that poster affect anyone except the Bishops?)  Also, I think I’ll give up on hearing more on what actually happened during Etta’s growing-up years.  That way, if it ever does happen, I’ll be pleasantly surprised instead of hoping for it every week and being disappointed.

But I was definitely blown away by the way the episode ended.  I’m not sure any one Fringe line has made me gasp and shout, “Oh, no!” as much as Peter’s seemingly out-of-the-blue (and yet very much in line with how he’s handling his grief) insistence that if he had the tech the captured Observer had in his head, he’d be ten times the man the Observer is.  Yikes!  I was begging Peter not to go through with it, hoping Olivia would share her little epiphany caused by watching the old tape of Etta’s birthday in time to make him stop… but it didn’t.  I guess Peter didn’t watch Dollhouse and learn how being a TechHead destroys families.  Still, I’m looking forward to seeing what it does to him.  I’m guessing it will be cool as well as awful.