Lower Decks

The following contains spoilers through the episode “The Man From the Other Side,” originally broadcast 4/22/10.

As important episodes go, this one was pretty inevitable, and is probably best considered for how it works with the rest of the season, the series, and the run of episodes since “Peter” at the beginning of the month. I wouldn’t say it’s as essential as that one, or even last week’s “White Tulip,” so much as something that needed to happen. Simply put, Peter finally finds out the truth.

Just as recent episodes have been driven more by the serialized side of ‘Fringe’ and bringing arc elements to the core of the stories, “The Man From the Other Side” brings back Thomas Jerome Newton, last seen in “Jacksonville,” the episode that aired before the two-month break “Peter” ended, and featured Olivia’s first inclination of the truth behind Peter Bishop’s origins, which Walter had already revealed to Astrid, and had been hinted at and played with since last season. Newton is the season’s main villain, the thrust of the conflict between our and the alternate reality Olivia stepped into and conversed with William Bell in, and where Walter snatched Peter from after his own son died. The episode also brings back the shape-shifting foot soldiers originally introduced in the first episode of the season, “A New Day in the Old Town,” which Olivia helps remind the viewer this week happen to be the reason ol’ Charlie Francis is no longer around.

And aside from the fact that Peter finally finds out and reacts badly to the revelation that all this time, he’s been bonding with what he now considers a monster, this really is sort of a letdown compared to the material that we’ve been getting in the latter half of the season, and really it’s because this is not the interesting part, it’s really just the thing that had to happen. For that reason, I don’t have a lot to say, because it’s an episode that needs to have happened, but perhaps on its own isn’t by that token all that important (strangely), almost as if this week, our regular characters are the poor victims of random fringe science of the week.

Next week is a musical episode that will delve directly into the mind of Walter Bishop, something that perhaps some of us have been waiting for since the first episode of the series, because there is hardly anything quite as fascinating as the inner workings of this mind. We’ll get his version of reality, and certainly his reaction to this momentous development, and then there will be three episodes left.

I guess I’ll also add that this week we take a trip to Massive Dynamic for another of the consulting figures the show likes to visit now and again, and that’s another interesting aspect of the series for me, that even with such a strong figure as Walter, who has routinely solved on his own many a mystery, there are still ways and reasons to take on the perspectives of others, from Olivia to Peter to Broyles, and even Astrid, as well as Nina Sharp, Sam Wise, William Bell…‘Fringe’ is, in some ways, the show ‘Lost’ might have been if it’d taken its approach strictly from the Dharma Initiative, and I suspect that is hardly a suspicious without basis in reality.

…No matter how strong it can sometimes be…