RECAP: Fringe - "Olivia" and "The Box"

I'm behind in my recaps, so I'm just going to do a quick recap of the first two episodes of Fringe before getting back to the one-a-week thing.

When we last left our favourite members of Fringe Division, they had managed to rescue Peter from the alternate universe, but in the process Olivia was replaced with Alterlivia, and Olivia was being held captive by Walternate.

The season premiere, "Olivia", takes place almost entirely in the alternate universe, where we find Olivia in therapy. Walternate has assigned AlterBrandon to head up an experimental treatment that, if successful, will cause Olivia to think she is actually Alterlivia, and therefore bring her over to their side. Olivia rejects their notions that she is actually their Olivia, and she escapes from the facility on Liberty Island (Alterliberty Island? Liberty Islalternate?). She hijacks a cab and orders the driver, Henry, to take her back to the opera house. She manages to convince Henry to do what she says by memorizing the information on his ShowMe card (including his address, social security number, etc.) and telling him that she'll bring trouble to his family if he doesn't help her.

Upon arriving at the opera house, Olivia discovers that she is too late, as the area has just been quarantined by encapsulating the opera house in amber (the same process we saw used on the bus in season 1). Olivia then demands that Henry take her to Massive Dynamic.

On the way, the members of the Alternate Fringe Division (including a severely burned Lincoln Lee and AlterCharlie) corner Olivia at a gas station, but Olivia manages to make a seemingly impossibly shot to blow up a large gas tank, creating a diversion so they could escape. It wasn't really clear why she couldn't have just shot the tank itself instead of the valve on top, but it made for an important plot point: Walternate noted that only Alterlivia could have made a shot like that, since she is an Olympic gold-medalist in sharpshooting, and therefore Olivia's shooting ability is an indication that the transfer of memories is starting to work.

Upon arriving at Massive Dynamic and discovering that it doesn't exist, Olivia suddenly remembers a safehouse, and asks Henry to take her there. They arrive, and she finally lets Henry go. Upon entering the house, however, she realizes that it's not a safehouse at all, instead it's the home of Alterlivia's mother, Marilyn. Marilyn questions how Olivia could have found the house at all if she wasn't Alterlivia, and when AlterCharlie arrives it seems that Olivia has accepted that she is, in fact, Alterlivia. She leaves with Charlie, thanking him for being a good friend. Elsewhere, AlterBrandon explains to Walternate that it must have been Olivia's adrenaline (fueled by her harrowing escape) that activated the transfer of memories.

In episode 2, in the main universe, three men have broken into a house to steal a box buried in the basement. They open the box, and all but one (the one previously labelled as "stupid") are killed by ultrasonic sound waves. Fringe Division investigates the case, and eventually the third criminal returns the box to Alterlivia, who realizes that he survived because he was deaf. She kills him, then takes the box to Thomas Newton (who had hired the three criminals in the first place).

Newton takes the box to a crowded subway station, where it kills several people when a midget opens it and takes it into a tunnel for some unexplained reason. Peter decides that he should be the one to go and disarm the device (Why? Fuck you, viewer; don't ask questions, that's why!), so Walter gets Alterlivia to discharge her gun right next to Peter's ears to disrupt his hearing. Alterlivia, by the way, is still under cover, despite the fact that she acts nothing like Olivia--a fact that Peter has already noticed when she started dancing with him in a bar earlier in the episode.

Peter manages to disarm the device, but apparently the disruption in hearing also disrupted his ability to feel vibrations from a goddamn train coming down the tracks, so he is almost killed. Fortunately Alterlivia is able to save him at the last moment.

In a side-plot, Walter and Nina Sharp are summoned to the reading of the last will and testament of William Bell. Bell leaves a note and a key for Walter; the note reads "Don't be afraid to cross the line", and the key is to a safety deposit box. Upon opening the box, Walter finds 100% of the shares of Massive Dynamic, meaning that he effectively now owns Bell's company.

The episode ends with Peter trying to figure out how the box worked, as he had recognized it as part of Walternate's device from the drawing of fire-eyed Peter hooked up to some huge apparatus. Alterlivia uses the magic typewriter to send a message back to the alternate universe indicating that Peter has the box and is fully engaged. The magic typewriter tells her to start working on Walter.

Overall the episodes were decent. It seems that this season is going to flip back and forth between the events in the two universes, which is a good premise, but I'm hoping they don't drag it out for the entire season. There are a number of stupid elements to the show (like how Alterlivia is making virtually no effort to hide the fact that she is a different person), as well as a few little details that bugged me (like the fact that in the season finale last year AlterCharlie had a buzzcut, and now, apparently less than a week later, he's back to the regular Charlie hair), but they're few enough that I can ignore them to still enjoy the show. I love the disparity between the two Walters; as we've seen in the past, had Walter not had part of his brain removed, he might very well have ended up like Walternate, and that's a really interesting premise to consider. I'm curious to see how Walter will handle suddenly becoming one of the richest, most powerful men on the planet in gaining control of Massive Dynamic.

Until next time, Fringe fans.