Lower Decks

The following contains spoilers through the episode “Northwest Passage,” originally broadcast 5/6/10.

“Find the crack.” Maybe that phrase is another of those perfect metaphors ‘Fringe’ seems to find so easily, or maybe it’s just a private joke between some guest characters. Could be just a nice thing to find written on a pen. Anyway, this is another episode that could be mistaken, like last week’s, to be somewhat unessential, while at the same time be completely essential. If you really care for these characters, you’ve got to think the latter.

Like a lot of shows that are basically procedural in nature, ‘Fringe’ can often be easily understood week to week by the, ah, pattern it typically follows, whether it’s in the cases or how the characters relate to one another. Much of the work the series has done solidified the character relationships a long time ago, and those have remained mostly unchanged since the start. Of course, the big change recently was when Peter Bishop found out he came from the alternate reality, which caused him to bolt town first chance he got, which would have been perfectly typical behavior for him at any point prior to the first episode of the series. Last week, he was mostly absent, except for his representation in his father Walter’s story, but here he’s squarely in the spotlight…where he just so happens to find himself exactly in the kind of circumstances he might have thought to have left behind.

Because of the often-procedural nature of the show, and how it relates specifically to our characters, we might be forgiven to take a number of things for granted. This season we’ve been given a number of opportunities to remember not everyone just accepts Walter’s eccentricities, but it’s not often the nature of the fringe investigations need to be explained. Peter finds that he has to do exactly that, which is a fine way to make a guy nostalgic about something he’s trying to escape. But the real fun of it is how quickly he gets sucked into the mystery, which happens to revolve around the brain games of “Grey Matters” from earlier in the season. Newton makes a cameo, as if he thinks he’s the Observer or something, nothing too flashy for him this time.

The more important guest turns out to be the local cop Mathis, who manages to spin herself into a veritable regular presence in fairly short order (a remarkable achievement for any one-off character), walking us through Peter’s experiences as he suddenly realizes what a small world he’s left behind, an exclusive, privileged company. Anyone, and I dare say most people, who has ever wondered why it’s so hard for others to understand them when under other circumstances they have plenty of sympathetic souls to lean on, can gleam from this episode an entirely different lesson, and they don’t need to have watched any previous episode. But they will probably want to see more.

Walter, meanwhile, is quite beside himself, like Mr. Burns wondering about the difference between ketchup and catsup, unable to cope with the sudden responsibility of looking after himself, an unexpected side-effect of Peter’s desertion. It brings to very stark reality what real danger he’s in of sinking back into the far worse psychoses that left him in a mental institution for two decades, and is a clever addition to the episode, which leads to a possible way to track Peter, which he tries to sabotage for fear of actually confronting Peter, only for Olivia, via a conversation with Broyles, who has been contacted by Peter, to make it easy and say they can just go to Washington already…The whole episode is heavy with pathos, the kind Walter is often prone to anyway, but all the more elevated because of the strain on these relationships everything depends on.

And then, of course, Walternate shows up to claim Peter again. It’s an episode that, once again, really just needs to be seen. I don’t think that’s a cheap way out of putting up my own review, but rather an indication that ‘Fringe’ very generally is doing things right. Early in the series, it was okay to let the procedural elements takes the characters on the ride, but as the series has progressed, the reverse has increasingly become the case, and that’s exactly what should happen in a series like this. What kind of series is this? Well, the episode does seem to point out how different ‘Fringe’ has turned out from, say, ‘The X-Files.’ You decide.