WRITER: Matthew Pitts[SPOILERS] I can't help it. My heart sinks whenever one of Fringe's teasers suggests the ensuing story involves a freaky contagion. There have been too many plots in that ballpark, particularly clogging up this year's saggy middle, and they're the least interesting area of fringe-science to me.
DIRECTOR: Brad Anderson
GUEST CAST: Diane Kruger, Kevin Corrigan, Omar Metwally, Jamie Switch, Curtis Caravaggio, Lossen Chambers, Peter Ciuffa, John Shaw & Michael Scholar
Fortunately, "Olivia. In The Lab. With The Revolver" was a better episode than I was expecting, but only because there was a membrane connecting it to the mytharc. It began with a lawyer called Miranda Green (Diane Kruger*) meeting a sickly man at a diner, moments before she died in her car after cancerous tumours rapidly grew all over her body. Fringe Division were called in to investigate Miranda's death, and later deduced that they're after a man with the ability to transfer his terminal cancer to other people, earning himself a temporary reprieve to health, and the plot thickened when it became clear those he's targeting were once child subjects of Walter's "cortexiphan" experiments in the '70s. It appears that someone's activated James Heath (Omar Metwally) to carry out this culling, similarly to Nick Lane in "Bad Dreams". Of course, Nina (Blair Brown) was revealed to be behind Nick's test-run, so I assume James was activated by an opposing force.
There was also a return trip to see bowling mystic Sam Weiss (Kevin Corrigan), which I wasn't very excited by, although some of Sam's comments piqued my interest ("I'm older than I look. I'm also taller than I appear") because it suggested he's not even human, or has access to technology that can extend his lifespan and alter his features. Other than that, the whole idea of Olivia seeking guidance and counsel from a bearded bowling alley manager at 6am just strikes me as a quirky idea that feels tedious and silly in practice.
Overall, coming after the season high of "Peter" certainly didn't help, but while the occasional character moment was nicely played, I ultimately didn't feel invested in the freak-of-the-week's story or how any of it played out.
Asides
- * If you follow my Twitter feed, you may have read my confusion that an actress who looked exactly like Diane Kruger appeared in the teaser... as I didn't realize that was Diane Kruger! She's dating Joshua Jackson, who obviously asked her to cameo as a favour. It would be fun if Fringe cast other famous faces to die horrifically in teasers. George Clooney's head explodes at a McDonald's drive-thru? Gwyneth Paltrow's leg melts at an awards ceremony?
- Considering what happened, shouldn't the title have been "Olivia. In Her House. With The Candlestick"?
- How many people did Walter and Bell experiment on with cortexiphan?
- Did anyone else think the tumour makeup in the teaser wasn't up to the usual standards of this show? Swathing Diane Kruger in bubblewrap and painting it pink would have been nearly as effective.
