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This was also quite a funny episode, which is one underused aspect of Fringe that often works beautifully. Of particular note was the moment when Olivia (Anna Torv) assured a nervous Aaron that Walter (John Noble) isn't a doctor to be scared of, seconds before he marched up wearing an big apron and rubber gloves, curtly demanding the boy take off his shirt. Or when Walter insisted to Aaron he has no time to entertain him in his lab, before we cut to the sight of them both slurping homemade milkshakes while wearing tin-foil hats.
In mytharc terms, beyond the aforesaid confirmation of Peter's fate in this altered timeline, it was explained that Walter gets assessed by a Dr Sumner (William Sadler) as agreed terms of his release from a mental asylum, and Walter's scared witless by the possibility he'll be recommitted because he keeps seeing a stranger in reflective surfaces. As you'd expect, Noble was fantastic in all these scenes, but especially when he was trying to talk to Broyles (Lance Reddick) while failing to ignore the ghostly mutterings from Peter. It's a shame SF is still a genre Emmy voters look down on, because Noble's so brilliant in this role and has turned Walter into a truly complex character—pigheaded, scary, crazy, childlike, compassionate, lonely, obsessive, bitter, mean, brokenhearted... given an episode like this, he can touch on all that with enviable skill. It's a pleasure to watch him work. A shocking scene with Walt giving himself a lobotomy, to stop hallucinating, would have been memorable by itself, but together with Noble's emotional breakdown after Olivia stopped him from hammering a chisel through the corner of his eye... it became something even better.
Overall, "Alone In The World" was a really good example of what Fringe can do when its case-of-the-week stories have a strong theme (loneliness, the salve of parenthood) that echoes into the bigger picture. Throw in some memorable scenes of humour, drama, humanity and grisliness (like the attacking fungus seen through night-vision glasses) and you have an episode that can't go far wrong. I'm already excited to see what else Fury can bring to Fringe, and hoping his influence in the writers' room will have been both strong and positive.
Asides
- As many suggested last week, The Observers were being misleading when they said Peter had been "erased from existence" last season (i.e. the writers realized this idea was completely unworkable, so adjusted things for season 4 over the summer).
- I wonder if calling the fungus "Gus" was a sly reference to Breaking Bad, as that show's druglord Gus Fring has a surname only one letter away from referencing this show. Or maybe not.
- David Fury made his debut as a Fringe writer here, but so did director Miguel Sapochnik (best known for box office flop Repo Men and some House episodes).
- The big reveal here is that Olivia's been dreaming of Peter all these weeks, which proves to Walter that he's not going insane. It's only been three weeks, but it's a relief the show's moving forward with this story now. I'm still not particularly invested in the idea that the timeline changed with Peter's absence, because the character never meant much to me, and it feels like the writers are occasionally straining to make us believe Peter's loss would have impacted these characters in huge ways. I mean, everyone but Walter's only known Peter for a few years, and in the original timeline Walter spent half of Peter's lifetime in total estrangement from him anyway!
