In the third episode of season four, the Fringe team find two bodies that look to have been dead for weeks – but have only been dead for a day or two. A strange mold – and a boy’s connection to it – bring Walter to face his demons.
Sometimes, the people behind Fringe manage to bring us an episode that stays just close enough to realism to bring out the emotional high-points that we love. This season is no exception, bringing fantastic guest stars along with amazing storytelling.
Walter (John Noble) and Aaron (Evan Bird)
In this episode, the guest star role falls on the shoulders of Evan Bird, a series regular from The Killing. He plays Aaron, a haunted and lonely young kid that has – for reasons which escape me – grown friendly with a super-sentient mold of sorts. I know how strange it sounds, but this is Fringe we’re talking about, after all. The mold, which is spreading throughout town and killing people needs to be stopped, but the psychic link between the two – the boy and the mold – is too strong and is threatening to kill the boy as the Fringe team combat it. In the end, Walter (John Noble) manages to talk the boy down and release the psychic link, after which the Fringe team can kill the mold.
On the whole, it’s not too much of a story, but it’s everything that happens around it that makes things interesting – especially Walter’s relationship to young Aaron. For a couple of minutes, we’re pulled back into the anguish that he feels over having lost his own son – twice – and the turmoil that still rages within him. He’s still shaken from having seen and heard a strange apparition – but doesn’t know that it’s his own son – and is visibly unsettled over the entire affair.
You matter to me. I care, and I … And I don’t want to lose you. I can’t lose you. Not again. Aaron … I know how hard it is to make connections. I know what it is to be lonely. It takes courage to be the one to take someone else’s hand, to trust that they won’t leave you. I won’t leave you, Aaron. And I’m begging you not to leave me. Please. Let it go. Let it go. Please. Let it go, son.
- Walter to Aaron, as he convinces the young boy to release his psychic bond
The episode ends shortly after Walter Bishop has a nervous breakdown. He’s seeing things, hearing things, and is – pardon my French – scared shitless that he’ll be sent back to the asylum. If he’s hallucinating, the only logical – well, logical in his mind, at least – course of action is to perform a lobotomy on himself. Being Walter, he goes through the motions with a passive detachment and a sadness in his eyes, and is already beginning the operation when Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) walks in on him. He confesses to her what he’s been seeing and hearing and explains his dilemma to her …
… Which is when she takes out a picture she’s drawn of Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), asking if this is the man he’s been seeing. Apparently, she’s been having dreams of him of late, proving finally to Walter that he’s not insane after all.
I am really enjoying the way that John Noble and Anna Torv are portraying the ‘new’ versions of Walter Bishop and Olivia Dunham. Even Lincoln Lee (Seth Gabel) is an interesting addition to the team, even if it feels strange to have him there instead of Peter. There’s something so subtly different about the make-up of the team and their interactions with each other that constantly serves to remind us that this is a whole new universe we’re looking at; a universe that looked identical to the previous one up to the time that the alternate-universe Peter Bishop died in the frozen lake at the tender age of four.
In this universe, there was no Observer to save him.
Still; it’s obvious that Peter is coming back.
The question is just what effect this will have on the universe.
How did you like Fringe – Season 4, Episode 3?