‘Fringe’ 3.11 Recap: “I’m Tired of Being Reactive”

I’ve written before that – while I think this current season of ‘Fringe’ is overall the show’s best yet – I’m not a fan of the storyline involving an ancient doomsday machine, apocalyptic prophecies handed down from a civilization before dinosaurs, and the other fantasy mumbo-jumbo that reminds me too much of the later (awful) seasons of ‘Alias’. Unfortunately, last week’s episode dove head-first back into that all that mess. On the other hand, for what it is, the episode is handled well and is surprisingly better than I expected.

‘Reciprocity’ begins with Walter, Peter and Olivia being rushed out to a testing site where Massive Dynamic (with the help of the U.S. military) has built a working model of the “Vacuum” doomsday device, but can’t figure out how to turn it on. The mysterious thing doesn’t seem to have any power source at all. But then, as if sensing Peter’s presence, it fires up on its own and starts moving around parts to get ready for him. This gives Peter a nosebleed. Nina from Massive Dynamic orders her chief specialist Dr. Falcon to run a full battery of medical tests on Peter to find out what’s so special about him that the machine is responding to.

Walter is still opposed to all of this, of course. He’s been trying to concoct a formula that will re-grow his missing brain cells so that he can match wits with Walternate and become smart enough to figure out a solution to all these problems. In a silly bit of comic relief, Walter erroneously drinks a serum meant for chimp testing and starts craving bananas. It sounds dumb (and it is dumb), but fortunately the episode doesn’t play it too broadly.

Meanwhile, shapeshifters keep turning up dead all over the place. Someone has been hunting them down and executing them. Broyles assigns Astrid to decode and sort through the data on Fauxlivia’s laptop, which contains information about the identities of shapeshifters buried within it. The problem is that Fauxlivia wrote all of her notes in jumbled stream-of-consciousness blocks of text with all the information mixed together with other mission details and personal thoughts. Olivia offers to help, reasoning that she and Fauxlivia must think alike, and she would be the most likely to understand what’s written. Broyles nixes that idea. The files are essentially Fauxlivia’s diary entries, and contain a lot of information about her relationship with Peter that Broyles knows Olivia isn’t ready to handle.

(Incidentally, this is the episode where the “Fauxlivia” nickname is made official, when Walter pronounces that as his name for her.)

Olivia does eventually read those files, though. What she learns is that Fauxlivia was really in love with Peter. This really isn’t going to help her sort through her emotional issues.

In a plot twist that isn’t the slightest bit surprising, Dr. Falcon turns out to be a mole working for Walternate. He turns up dead soon enough, but how much information about Peter was he able to feed to the other side?

In the second plot twist that isn’t too difficult to guess, we discover that Peter is the one who’s been killing the shapeshifters. Walter figures this out before anyone else and confronts Peter at the scene of his latest victim. Peter explains that he’s not just going to let the universe(s) dictate his fate any longer. He’s taking charge of his own destiny. “They’re not even human! I’m not doing anything wrong,” he insists. Walter theorizes that contact with the doomsday machine has not only activated the machine, but has also “weaponized” Peter. This frightens Walter, but he agrees to keep Peter’s secret in order to protect him.

As I said, I still don’t love this storyline, but this was at least a much better-than-average entry in it. Since it appears that the last part of the season will be focused on this, I just hope that it doesn’t get too cheesy.

In better news, it looks like ‘Fringe’ is doing better than expected in its new Friday night time slot. Could this possibly mean that there might be a shot at renewal for a fourth season after all? We still have a few months before we find out the answer to that.

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