'Fringe' recap: Rhubarb, Sweet Rhubarb

Suddenly, scary diner man with the eerie eyeballs was swinging a knife at Walter’s face. Peter – who had found a bloodied guy in the back room – rushed to help. Olivia saved the day with a gunshot that put the rabid dude down. Our heroes tried to get the bloodied backroom guy to a hospital, but they quickly discovered they couldn’t get out of town; every time they passed the Now Leaving Westfield sign, they soon found themselves approaching the Now Entering Westfield sign. It was like they were stuck in a loop – Bill Murray in Groundhog Day meets subway station Neo in The Matrix Revolutions. Or, per Walter’s frame of cultural references: Like Brigadoon. Westfield, Vermont, had been turned into an Escherized anomaly. Walter, Olivia and Peter – stranded within a bubble world of unreal real estate, marooned on a spit of wonky space-time. Aren’t you proud of me for not making a Lost allusion? Wait. D’oh! (That was me doing a Mindy Grayson/”Secret Word” impression. Pretty bad, huh?)

Our heroes clicked through a series of locales (a police station; a high school; a bicycle shop) and a couple different hypotheses (some strange zombie-plague contagion, maybe?) before lighting upon a working theory that could properly explain a town caught in the grip of a schizoid-inducing, teeth-duplicating continuity snarl: Bad guy David Robert Jones – making catastrophic use of his purloined stockpile of Amfilocite (see: "Enemy of my Enemy") – had caused a rupture between the “over here” and “over there” worlds, causing the parallel Westfields to overlap and collide and select people to merge and mash with their alt-reality Other, the mind first, then – grotesquely – the body. There was nothing that could be done to stop this reality storm, which was also ripping up he environs of Westfield itself. All our heroes could do was get Westfield’s surviving citizens into a safe zone – the proverbial eye of the hurricane – and ride out the weird weather. (This most excellent episode might have been marginally better though certainly doubly more complicated if we saw the “over there” Fringe Division agents simultaneously investigating the Westfield weirdness on their side of the quantum divide.) In the end, everyone was left to pick up the pieces, shake an angry fist at David Robert Jones and ponder his awful motivations, and ruminate on the paradoxes. Olivia tried to offer solace to troubled Cliff, grieving the loss of his home and the near-miss of losing his family. He moved into some wisdom: "We have each other. Whatever happens, we'll face it together."

Throughout the episode, Agent Dunham worried that she, too, was coming undone. There was the sex dream – or was that another Olivia’s memory, bubbling up from some dark recess?  (Or: a peek into the future?) At another point in the story, Olivia was reminded of a case from her past ("Johari Window"; season 2, episode 12) – except it was case from Original Recipe Olivia’s past, not Rebootlandia’s past. Trudging through the stormy streets of Westfield, she began to feel not right in her body as well as in her head. When she began speaking seizure–victim gibberish, Olivia surrendered her gun, afraid that was eating away the brains of Westfield was also eating away at her . She was relieved when Walter determined that she wasn’t at risk – what was afflicting the locals wasn’t exactly afflicting Olivia – but the phenomenon that was messing with her (reformatting her?) wasn’t done with her yet. In the episode’s final scene, Peter dropped by her apartment for a friendly, platonic hang  – and instead got a glass of wine and a smack on the lips from a driven, stubborn, sees-the-best-in-all-people lover that was expecting their usual Friday night in-house date of Domiono's and cheesy horror movies. Surprise. Recognition. “Olivia?” Rhubarbrhubarbrhubarb.

My diagnosis? The Westfield reality warp agitated and accelerated an ongoing condition, one that has been bugging Olivia for quite some time, at least since the experience of temporal distortions in “Subject 9,” perhaps since the start of the season, when the deeply empathic ex-cortexiphan kid -- possibly a living antennae for all kinds of quantum world signal and noise -- began dreaming dreams of Peter. I wondered: Have they all been so sexy? (As for Nina Sharp’s secret drugging of her foster daughter: The Massive Dynamic honcho has either been trying to cultivate Olivia's condition or manage/slow/quell it.)  Some theories: 1. Rebootlandia isn’t what we think it is. I could elaborate, but I don’t know if I know how to explain this idea yet, not without being really confusing. For now, let’s just leave it like this: Rebootlandia isn’t what we think it is. 2. Tweaking Olivia is proof that Rebootlandia is being reset by an event that’s still to come. I’ll give this one a crack: Basically, at some point in the near future, Peter is going to activate the magical electromagnetic waffle iron. But instead of transporting him back to his home timeline, the machine is going to alter and amend aspects of Rebootlandia, perhaps incorporating elements of various alternate histories, creating what philosophers call The Best Of All Possible Worlds. Said Ultimate Fringe will include Original Recipe Olivia, who will displace and replace Rebootlandia Olivia (the process, retroactive, has begun). In the end, only Peter will retain any awareness or memories of previous renderings of history.

Make sense?

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Time for you to rhubarb. See you here next week.

Twitter: @EWDocJensen

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