Tonight’s episode of Fringe is the best in ages. After a handful of somewhat weak storylines, tonight’s Fringe kicks your ass with a super-dark, messed-up tale of the aftermath of Peter Bishop’s kidnapping. Here are some things to watch for.
Minor spoilers ahead…
I’ll be honest — I was kind of nervous about tonight’s episode of Fringe, in which we go back to the mid-1980s and discover that Peter Bishop and Olivia Dunham already met as kids. It looked like a potential shark-jumpy moment of retconning, trying to recast Peter and Olivia’s relationship as some sort of lifelong bond. Especially after some of the show’s recent moves towards soap-opera territory, like the “love triangle will decide the fate of two universes” thing, I was nervous.
But rather than playing up the soap-opera angle, tonight’s episode goes really, really dark and murky. It starts with a scene that I’m slightly surprised made it onto network television. And then turns out to be a very unflinching look at one of Walter Bishop’s darkest chapters — the early days of his experimentation on little kids.
So here are a few things you should keep your eyes open for tonight:
Young Peter Bishop’s a beautifully fairy-tale way of talking about the universe he came from.
An important moment in baseball history went a bit differently “over there.”
An unexpected shout-out to one of your favorite season two episodes. (Hint: It’s the one with Robocop in it.)
Signs that the aerospace industry “over there” was already way ahead of ours in the 1980s. And the view out Walternate’s office window is pretty spectacular.
Not to mention, it turns out Ronald Reagan’s space dreams came a lot truer in the other universe.
A Battlestar Galactica/Ghostbusters shout-out.
More Walter Bishop insanity — even though this is purely a flashback episode, we still get to see some glimpses of the silly, brilliant, fanciful Walter we’ve all grown to love. With origami!
And some absolutely heart-breaking insights into just how both Peter and Olivia came to be so messed up.
