Lower Decks

The following contains spoilers through the episode “Of Human Action,” originally broadcast 11/12/09.

One of those episodes that changes on a dime, “Of Human Action” spends the majority of its time acting like an amateur ‘Twilight Zone,’ featuring some stupid kind with mind control powers, redeemed only by its reminders about a few long-standing arcs. Then the final few minutes makes it pretty much completely essential, relevant, and easily the biggest surprise of the season.

I like to talk about the Bishops in my reviews, because they’re some of the best family characters I’ve seen on a J.J. Abrams show (this is saying much, because ‘Alias’ was legend for clan Bristow, and ‘Lost’ became a running study on the subject, too). What sets them apart is there’s rarely been a moment of confusion about their relationship. While Peter can sometimes come off as embarrassed about his father Walter, he’s never been anything short of the biggest support and defender possible. He’s just cynical, so sue him. Gradually, we’ve learned more about their relationship, specifically that the Peter we know is the one that was actually born to this Walter. Our Walter’s son died as a toddler, which caused him to steal a parallel reality’s version of his son. All the alienation Peter has felt and expressed over the course of the series is justified more than he knows. But it isn’t something ‘Fringe’ has made a big deal about. I’m certain there are regular viewers, even fans, who might not have even known about it, or understood quite the distress Walter was in during “Of Human Action.”

Of course, the peril Peter finds himself in also serves as a welcome show of work for Joshua Jackson, who because of the nature of his character rarely gets to do much more than the same thing he always does. If there was any reason why I was filled with trepidation when I first started watching ‘Fringe,’ it was that here was this actor I’d long associated with the worst aspects of the last big Hollywood youth movement, from ‘Dawsons’s Creek’ to ‘The Skulls,’ which Jackson took on like it wasn’t a brain-dead thriller (these views may have changed since I first formed them). The show quickly made me a fan of Jackson , which might not always be apparent, because I rarely reference acting in my TV reviews (I did in the early ‘Fringe’ reviews, though). It was possible to tolerate the kid because after he kidnapped Peter, it really didn’t matter, even when most of the scenes played out so predictably. Peter Bishop, like his father, is reason enough to love the show. Olivia Dunham might get all the material that pushes the show’s arc along, but she (and this is no knock on Anna Torv) wouldn’t be enough to sustain my interest.

So, aside from reminding us of the Bishops, “Of Human Action” also brings back the show’s best recurring character, Nina Sharp, whose Massive Dynamic ends up front and center (early on in the show, it seemed like the writers were going to use this angle as a crutch, but that never happened), whom viewers are never quite sure if they can trust. Lately, we’ve been conditioned for trust, and this stretches back to last season, when Sharp was almost killed, but keen fans will know there’s plenty of skeletons in her closet, which those who stuck around for those final minutes were rewarded for remembering. Previously we discovered that Walter’s old lab partner William Bell (Leonard Nimoy), the man driving the series arc at the moment, was the man behind Massive Dynamic, so when Nina starts typing a message for him and explaining what was really going on, it transformed everything, not just the particulars about the boy and everything he thought he knew (which admittedly wasn’t much to begin with, and made much of the episode seem like a run of the mill procedural, with the father giving a teary confession, proven to be totally bogus, that he had lied to his son all his life), but why mind control was even relevant in the first place (well, okay, so that part wasn’t really explained).

To top it off, the preview for next week looks like we’re finally going to see the big Observer episode we were promised for the fourth week of the new season, which means the season is really starting to heat up (read: start watching again, folks). I truly don’t know if Fox can afford to be patient much longer, with how abysmal the ratings have gotten on the new Thursday night timeslot, no matter what they say, but ‘Fringe’ is a show built for a slow build, which can let things develop naturally, rather than just have the characters leap from big development to big development. It’s worth rooting for, just to see how everything eventually works out.