Lower Decks

The following contains spoilers through the episode “The Bishop Revival,” originally broadcast 1/28/10.

Well, I gotta say, all that negative talk I had going on last week is completely irrelevant this week. This was a wickedly good episode all the way around, not only terrifically compelling but a good one for both a casual and committed fan of the show. It’s funny, because on the surface, there are a lot of common elements between “What Lies Beneath” and “The Bishop Revival.” But where the former episode teases things we know, the latter exploits them in new and interesting ways, and even tells us some new ones.

What I’ve loved about shows J.J. Abrams helped launch are their sense of history. ‘Alias,’ for instance, would have been far less of a series if so much of it weren’t hinged on the Bristow family, how Sydney related both to her father and her mother, for things that had happened and what continually unfolded. ‘Lost’ took a different tack from the start, with its flashbacks, that delved into the pasts of its characters from the start, things that were obvious and others that weren’t, until the series really started to dive into history. ‘Fringe,’ meanwhile, has been working the Bishop mythology from the start. (It’s no surprise, then, that Abrams ended up working on the Star Trek franchise, since history has always been a major element there as well, as he helped make clear yet again with last year’s reboot.)

The history of the Bishops has hung over Walter and Peter like a specter from the very start, and it’s hung thick ever since, and as a consequence, it’s been an unavoidable element to almost every episode of the series. Sometimes, the writers seem a little more inspired about how they choose to approach it. Sometimes, they’re a little obvious about it, other times, they’re cryptic. Walter usually gets obvious, Peter cryptic. “The Bishop Revival” goes one step further by revealing a third layer of the family history and it may be the most important development since we first learned Peter is technically dead. Apparently, his grandfather worked for the Nazis (three generations of geniuses, anyway!), but as a spy. In the present, his work, like his son’s, is being corrupted, which is first manifested in one of the more unique and sustained sequences to start an episode as a wedding is ruined by another classic disintegration-style death. We learn the victims are linked to the Holocaust. The culprit is revealed in the closing moments of the episode to somehow have been active (and the same physical age) during those days as now, the show’s own dirty little Richard Alpert (though he’s dead by the end, so Alpert is that much more unique!).

Anyway, much of the drama, whatever the implications of the mystery this week, is derived from the unexpected conflict between Walter and Peter, stemming from their messy history that’s rarely visited with such potent angst. Father and son were estranged long before Walter was committed for decades at St. Claire’s, but Peter had gotten to the point in that period where he willfully sold off some of Walter’s prized possessions, books, just to try and get back at him. Not only did he fail to understand their significance as heirlooms from his grandfather, he was also potentially responsible for the leak of the work that was now killing people in a terrible new ethnic cleansing. This involves another sequence that does manage to remind us that Peter’s penchant for private dealings are rarely arbitrary, that he can usually track things back down fairly easily, yet more clues for a life that still has yet to be explored to the same extent as his father’s, much less grandfather’s. It’s no mistake that another lingering element of Peter’s life, his possible future romantic attachment to Olivia Dunham, is revisited during the episode as well.

Anyway, another important element is a tangible reminder that Walter will do anything in the name of family (sometimes, he seems less like a Bristow than a Sloane, and that’s not exactly good) when he murders the sleeper Nazi, which Broyles lets him get away with. It’s rare that Walter is seen as anything but a brilliant innocent, so this is certainly a noteworthy incident, and either a sign of the past or a portent of things to come, possibly both, but certainly a reminder of just how dynamic he really is, and of the power ‘Fringe’ holds as a drama, whatever its classifications and inclinations.

“The Bishop Revival” becomes quite an unexpected essential episode indeed.