REVIEW: Fringe 2.02 – “Night of Desirable Objects”
Original Air Date: September 24, 2009
Screencaps were done by me again this week.
Holy crap! I mention the Flukeman in the previous Fringe review, and he shows up (kind of) in this ep! If I’d known I had these powers earlier, there’d be a LOT more shirtless Castiel and Dean in Supernatural! So, this was a one-shot, Monster of the Week episode straight out of the first season of The X-Files. Not sure why they went that route the second episode back, but there you go.
The show starts near a corn field in Pennsylvania. Wait, I’ve seen this movie before. If there are a bunch of kids in Pilgrim outfits, get thine ass outeth there! Basically, a road crew guy comes across a hand covered in blue goo in the corn field. He goes in to investigate because he hasn’t seen this movie before, and gets pulled into the ground.
In New York, Olivia is being discharged from the hospital and not a moment too soon as far as she’s concerned. She does have to use a cane for her bum leg now (if she starts popping Vicodin, this show will copy any FOX show that’s aired), and Peter’s doing that good friend thing by driving her back to Boston. What they don’t know is that Faux Charlie is stalking Olivia now. In that creepy, shapeshifter way that is kind of hot because he looks like Charlie.
Back under the corn field, the road crew dude is still alive but in pretty bad shape. He starts crawling around, finds a dead animal next to him, and decides he should probably find a way out of there. Of course, he realizes that there’s something down there with him and is promptly eaten.
Having made it back to Boston, Peter takes time out to talk with Broyles about how rad it is being a BAMF (Peter, with his new-found powers of demanding, squared himself and Walter new digs). But it’s not all fun and games, as Peter also found a possible case to work. A handful of people have gone missing in this one area of Pennsylvania, and it sounds similar to what went down with Olivia. Broyles takes this time to ask about her, and Peter says she’ll be fine, but Broyles knows that’s probably not true. He tells Peter they can investigate these missing people, but to keep a close eye on Olivia while they’re doing that.
At the lab, Walter and Astrid are trying to recreate Olivia’s crash (with frogs). Five hours in, and Walter still can’t get the frog to disappear like Olivia did. I don’t know if it’s just me, but Walter seems extra weird around Olivia, like he’s hiding something bigger than he was doing experiments on her when she was a kid. It’s kind of like she’s his daughter or something (which would make the thing between her and Peter really awkward). Astrid tells Olivia that Walter thinks Olivia travelled to another universe. He starts to explain the Multiverse theory again, but realizes he’s already done that. Olivia tells him that she knows she went somewhere, and maybe talked with someone, but that’s about it. He admits to her that he was crushed when he thought she was dead, which seems to confuse her (she’s only got three looks, it’s hard to tell what her reaction is sometimes). Walter also mentions that traveling to alternate realities has its consequences, but Peter shows up with the new case before Walter can elaborate for Olivia.
Peter, Walter, and Olivia (I feel bad for Astrid) head out to PA. Walter is extremely cheery and introduces himself to everyone. They meet up with Sheriff Golightly, and he tells them that there have been seven missing people reports so far. In the best “Winning Friends and Influencing People” moment, Walter remarks about the sheriff: “We’re all victims of our own gene pools. Someone must have peed in yours.” Classic. Unfortunately, that puts them at about below zero on Golightly’s priority list. When he finally lets them get some evidence, Walter is supremely excited about it.
At the small town cop shop, Olivia continues in Walter’s footsteps in rubbing Golightly the wrong way. Se also zones out as she starts to hear the fly in the office buzzing and walking around. Peter saves her by talking about night fishing, which is charming enough to get the files and evidence back in Boston. Olivia gives Faux Charlie a call to get his help on the case.
Speaking of, Faux Charlie ain’t looking so hot right about now. He goes back to the typewriter shop to converse with his superiors. He’s holding onto his side like a chestburster is working its way up and out. My theory is that he’s getting permanently stuck as Charlie.
The files on the missing people turns out to be not very helpful at all (unless you want to know where to score a wicked awesome apple pie). Walter finds out the blue goo found in the corn field is a paralytic after he gets it on his hand. It also contains human DNA and it looks like they’ve found a mutant! Olivia notices that one of the guys in the case files (Hughes) was at the houses of a couple of the missing people shortly after they went missing.
Peter and Olivia head back out to PA to look for Hughes (who turns out to be Hack Scudder from Carnivale!). After Hughes finds the dead road crew guy under his corn field, he finds Olivia and Peter at his front door. He lets them in, and almost immediately Olivia starts using her super hearing. She asks Hughes if there’s anyone else in the house and he denies it, but she doesn’t believe him and starts to investigate while Peter “keeps him busy.” She finds a decent-sized chemistry set in an upstairs room that I’m thinking isn’t used to make meth. She puts the cane aside to two-hand her pistol and hobbles over to where she thinks the sounds are coming from. Turns out it’s a closet, but that doesn’t stop her from almost canoeing Peter’s head when he shows up in the doorway.
They bring Hughes down for questioning because they can do that when they don’t have evidence of anything. He used to be a doctor, lost his wife and baby son 17 years earlier, and had been visiting with the loved ones of the missing people in an attempt to commiserate with them. They want to compare his DNA with the evidence from the corn field, but he refuses. Behind the two-way glass, Broyles asks Peter about Olivia shooting her gun and Peter blows it off as a misfire. Broyles looks unconvinced and has Jessup take a team out to PA to check out the Hughes house.
Olivia goes back for a check up, but I’m not sure why since the doc clears her when she totally has problems still. Nina Robo-hand shows up and gives Olivia the name of a guy (not a head shrinker) that help “put [her] back together” in the past and she thinks he can help Olivia.
Jessup must be the World Champion on the Jump to Conclusions Mat because she finds a bible in Hughes’s house with a note in it and jumps to the conclusion that Hughes was responsible for his wife’s and child’s deaths.
Walter is thrilled with that news since this means he has bodies to examine (Astrid and Peter, not so thrilled). Astrid gets the fuzz to dig the bodies up because she’s basically the PA for the FBI and Walter at this point in her career.
The wife’s in her coffin, looking like a 17-year-old dead body. The baby’s coffin is empty. There’s a huge hole in the bottom of the coffin that the guy carrying the coffin didn’t happen to notice. Something dug its way out of the coffin because there’s also huge HOLE in the bottom of the grave that the guys digging up the coffin didn’t notice while they were down there. Olivia thinks Hughes has some explaining to do.
Too bad he hung himself while in FBI custody. And no one notices his dead body hanging from the ceiling until Olivia shows up at the Federal Building the next day. Seriously, FBI?
Walter discovers Mrs. Hughes had Lupus (there’s no way she could have had a baby because of this). Peter and Astrid are lost when Walter’s mind starts to wander at the concept of a grave for a boy that isn’t in his grave (totally thinking about Peter on that one).
Broyles and Olivia are discussing how Hughes could have killed himself (hint: someone fell asleep on the job) when her super hearing starts going off again. She finally realizes that she has super hearing at this point.
Walter discovers that Hughes had been doing genetic experiments on the fetus while it was in his wife’s womb so it would survive her Lupus. Hughes mixed scorpion and mole DNA with human DNA and ended up with a mole baby. Astrid’s grossed out by this, Walter’s impressed, and Olivia shows up to drop the super hearing bomb on everyone. They determine that Mole Baby is still in the house or under it and need to head back out there.
Golightly found him first! Why, for the love of God, would you just stand there as the ground in front of you starts to fall away like that? Honestly.
So Peter and Olivia head back out to the house without backup because they would totally never need that. The nursery door was covered with wallpaper, but all the interesting stuff is in the basement. Peter finds some dog teeth on the ground, then the dog head they came from in the wall (plus an opening to those underground caverns Mole Baby’s been living in). He goes to look for a shovel while Olivia continues to move dirt and bricks out of the way
She finds Golightly, turns around to tell Peter, and is grabbed by Mole Baby and dragged into the cavern. Peter follows, gets into it with Mole Baby, and stabs him with a bone or some kind of debris.
Mole Baby tries to dig his way out of there, but only causes the cop car to come crashing down on top of himself. Once backup arrives, they find dozens of leg traps buried all over the Hughes property. Guess Pa Hughes was trying to snag his mutant son before things got out hand the way they did.
Olivia still thinks Faux Charlie is Real Charlie, chalking up his change in personality to him “growing”; though, to be honest, he looks like he’s waiting to see her reaction to see how he should be acting. He makes her the promise to help her remember what happened to her before the crash.
The show ends with Peter getting Walter to go night fishing with him. He tells Walter the story of how he started fishing because he wanted to spend time with his father, but Walter doesn’t realize the story is about the two of them. It was cute and I always like these kinds of scenes between Peter and Walter.
Wait, the show really ends with Olivia’s super hearing going nuts and picking up every sound on the planet. She ends up going to the guy Nina told her to see, and he works out of a bowling alley. Which I thought was cool because I like bowling. I always wanted a friend who works at a bowling alley. He asks her if the headaches have started yet, and you get the feeling he’s traveled between realities once or twice before.
Okay, the show really ends with Frodo heading off into the Grey Havens with Gandalf and Elrond and Faux Charlie back at the typewriter where he gets more orders. Dude is looking severely uncomfortable and serves him right for knocking off Real Charlie.
This week’s glyphs are as follows. Remember, you can use this cypher to crack the code (oh, how I wish it would spell out “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”):
