Episode 204 review

Recuperating from the traumatic and alarming meeting with Massive Dynamic founder William Bell (guest star Leonard Nimoy), Agent Dunham consumes a powerful black worm concoction that Dr. Bishop prescribes to stimulate her memory. Meanwhile, the Fringe Division investigates a series of robbery cases that are tied to shape-shifting. As clues are tracked and memories are jogged, another woman experimented on by Dr. Bishop is introduced and a flashback reveals more about Olivia's visit to the alternate reality. --FOX

This is where the path to war began.

A night robbery, but not like anyone, one of cryogenically frozen heads. Of course this is fringe so the robbers are no ordinary men, they sustain gun shot (except for ones in the head) and they bleed with silvery substance! We learn later that it was their 3rd successful attempts on the east coast this week (Medford, Chicago, New York). Walter and Peter are collecting evidence and the young one came back to a tottering Olivia that the silver in the robber's blood is mercury. During this time, a "no more sweating but pale" Fake Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) is watching Walter collecting more evidence, like a working shape-shifter device. Walter suggests to Fake Charlie a little cannabis before going to bed.

Next, Fake Charlie and the surviving robber (Roger R. Cross) are arguing about method to find the head that they are searching because it wasn't in the stolen truck. Fake Charlie thinks that Olivia (who still thinks that he is Charlie) knows where the special head is because William Bell must have extracted her to tell her. So, he must find a way to know what Olivia must remember.

While conducting the autopsy, Walter deducted that the shape-shifter is a mechano-organic-hybrid that use mercury to obtain the desired form. Additionally, He realise that the body of the old shape-shifter from the season opener didn't have the same characteristics. So the enemy is among us! He also thinks that the hippie girl, Rebecca Kibner, we saw in the old video in that same episode can detect them and suggest they meet with her.

Olivia goes see Nina Sharp at Massive Dynamic to ask her if they can repair the broken shape-shifter device. The MD researchers think they can extract information's from the device and learn who the mole is. The MD technician told them it could be done in about 3 hours. He could also create a computer link between MD and Olivia's phone so she can see the reconstructed face.

Walter and Peter go meet Rebecca Kibner (Theresa Russell) to convince her to help them identify the shifters. She explain to them that she sees some kind of glow on people that "don't belong here" as an after-effect of the experiment made on her but the effect have diminished over the years. Then Walter suggests that they repeat the experiment so they could reactivate her gift and she accepts to do the trip again.

Everyone is at the lab for the experiment and Olivia asks Astrid link her computer to the rendering program at Massive Dynamic then to her cell phone so she can see the face of the spy. They began the "homemade psycho-tropic drugs" induce experiment with Miss Kibner and ring a big bell then Olivia "leave Kansas to see the Wizard". I will get in more detail of the meeting later.

After the return of the FBI woman from the twin towers, she asks to meet with Nina Sharp immediately. Olivia show a symbol to Miss Sharp given by William Bell that mark the leader of the shape-shifter group called "The first wave" and incidentally the head that the robbers are looking for. Their meeting is cut off by the clear noncooperation of the head of Massive Dynamic and a message sent to Olivia saying that Nina is the shape-shifter and she must leave at once.

It was a diversion by Fake Charlie to lure Olivia out so he can extract what she remembered from her voyage to the other side. Olivia received the rendering image of the mole just after she told Charlie where the precious head is. A fight ensues and Olivia kill for good Charlie but not fast enough because he had time to transmit the location to his partner. The partner was fast enough to retrieve the head. We are left with a final image of a body reconnecting with the marked head, the new villain is born.

It is my favourite episode of the season; we finally get to know what happened in that room in the alternate universe. It was a good balance between, character development, mythology and monster of the week, awesome!

My favourite scene was without a doubt the anticipated meeting between Olivia Dunham and William Bell. I loved the way Bell treats Olivia in this scene. He tries to be warm and welcoming ("Call me Willem" he said) and acts as if this is some great reunion. But Olivia isn't having any of it, and she shouldn't! This man inexorably changed the life of Olivia and she's more than a little pissed about it. Remember that she had just learned that Walter and William experimented on her as a child at that time.

Anna Torv and the writers really deserve kudos for making Olivia forceful and strong without making her come off as someone who curses her lot in life. After all, we wouldn't have a show if mister Bell hadn't done what he did. Bell explained to her that a war is coming and the shape-shifters, also known as "The First Wave," are looking for someone who could open a door between their two universes (someone who has a particular symbol on him). He has confidence Olivia can be the one to stop the nefarious plot because she was always the strongest and she's "just coming into her abilities."

My observations of this episode led me to some cultural references that are stated as follow:

• Elias, the name of the robbed company, sound a lot like ‘Alias', a J.J. Abrams show.
• The actor, Roger R. Cross, who plays a member of the shape-shifter group call "The first wave", played a major role in a television series of the same name.
• The twitching of Fake Charlie in this episode made me think of Edgar in the movie "Men in black".
• The symbol drawn by William Bell looks like the Greek letter omega. It is the last letter in this alphabet and it symbolizes the end, the destruction.
• This mark should be on the one who will destroy our world. A strong reference to "the mark of the beast" in the Bible.
• In this segment of the Bell-Dunham meeting the lightning had a lot of secondary colors (orange, green, violet) marking that we are in the 2nd dimension.
• Peter and Olivia discussed about a 1978 movie called "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". Leonard Nimoy, who plays William Bell, is playing Dr. David Kibner in that movie. It is also the name of the hippie girl, Jessica Kibner.
• The glyphs (Butterfly, Leaf, Apple, Daisie, Frog and Seahorse) were seen on the wall when Olivia and Fake Charlie were fighting. (see image before)
• Previous episodes were marked with "Wizard of Oz" reference. In episode 202 it was the Scarecrow. In 203, it was operation "Tin man". This week I think it was Dorothy because Olivia made a spin on herself before falling in the lab at the sound of the bell. The house of Dorothy was spinning when she was transferred to Oz.

The secret glyph word of the week was MEMORY which is appropriate since Olivia had hers back. The Observer was seen watching Fake Charlie and Olivia talking at the entrance of the Massive Dynamic building near the end of the episode.

As always, please leave any comments you feel necessary to express, they are heartily welcome.

"Popular Mechanics" talks Fringe science: Season 2, episode 4

Author: Allie Townsend
Published on: October 9, 2009
Source: Popular Mechanics

Last week's "Fracture" made us question the possibility of human bomb-making, but the latest episode of Fringe shifts our attention back to brain function as Agent Olivia Dunham begins to piece together her memories from a meeting in an alternate dimension. PM talked to Carmela Tartaglia of the University of California, San Francisco's Memory and Aging Center about inducing memory recall.

This week's "Momentum Deferred" featured a peculiar memory-jogging concoction (main ingredient: worms) that Dr. Walter Bishop whips up to restore Agent Olivia Dunham's lost memories of her other-world meeting with William Bell, the CEO of Massive Dynamic.

Bishop claims that in an earlier experiment with cryptic ex-partner Dr. Bell, flat worms were able to transfer their memories to other worms through digestion. In drinking the worm milkshake, Dunham should, according to Bishop, begin to recall the blank details of her memory. It goes without saying that an effective remedy like this one could mean big things for neuroscience, but Carmela Tartaglia of the University of California, San Francisco Memory and Aging Center tells Popular Mechanics it's pure fabrication. "There are no concoctions that restore brain function. I don't know what they're using in the show, but none have been shown to help scientifically."

Following in the vein of memory recovery, the Fringe team also picks up Rebecca Kidner, a former guinea pig of Bishop's, who allows him to pump her full of hallucinogens (most likely LSD—a trick we've seen before) in an attempt to jog her memories of some shape-shifting villains—an unconventional memory treatment to say the least.

"Much of what is done in brain injury rehab has to do with occupational therapy, giving people tricks on how to remember better," Tartaglia says. These tricks, she says, include mundane tools like planners or palm pilots, which help to regulate the mind. Actual recovery though, may vary. Tartaglia says results depend on the extent of the brain injury, the patient's age or other problems that are associated with the memory loss. Medications are used in severely injured patients, she says, but they help with motivation of the memory only: a sort of catalyst to aid the treatment.

Though experiments on Kinder seem to be generally unsuccessful (though her on-acid antics are amusing to watch), Dunham finally gets a glimpse of her forgotten past, spurred by the ringing sound of a bell. Though it is never explained why the sound causes Dunham's memory to recover, this could be a classic symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sufferers of PTSD, can re-experience traumatic events when their memory is triggered by familiar scenes, situations, smells, emotional feelings, or as in Agent Dunham's case, sounds.

Because there are so many causes of memory loss due to brain injury or disease, it's difficult to say when patients will recover (if at all). Tartaglia says that when it comes to injury, it all comes down to the patient's conscious state during the incident. "The longer the period of loss of consciousness, the longer the period of memory loss," she says. "Even short loss of consciousness can lead to memory loss, usually limited to short periods of time around the event."

Source: Popular Mechanics