For some reason, I thought that tomorrow’s episode of ‘Fringe’ was going to be the season finale. I could swear that I saw an “Only three episodes left!” ad at least two episodes back. Am I hallucinating that? I guess I was mistaken. None of the recent commercials have hyped up a finale, and the site I usually check for episode schedules was updated this week with listings out to the beginning of May. That’s quite a relief, because last Friday’s episode was yet another case-of-the-week story.
Some events in ‘Stowaway’ do have continuity with the ongoing storyline, fortunately. William Bell’s soul is now inhabiting Olivia’s body. We know this because she talks in a husky Leonard Nimoy impersonation. This alone brings to mind all sorts of questions of logic. Why would a new soul taking over the body cause the host’s vocal cords to change? I guess we’re not supposed to think about stuff like that. However, I will say that Anna Torv’s impression of Nimoy isn’t awful; she even gets in one really subtle, well-done moment where she raises an eyebrow just perfectly. The episode doesn’t call attention to it, but it’s there and it’s a nice touch.
Bell himself is bemused by the situation. He says that he’s been planning this ever since Olivia came to visit him in the other universe. He slipped the soul magnets into her tea. He insists that Olivia’s own soul is perfectly fine, just resting. He only asks for 24-48 hours to find a suitable new host body. “A human brain would be nice, but not a prerequisite,” he says. At one point, he even contemplates the cow in Walter’s lab. Walter asks how they would communicate and, more importantly, who would milk him. Bell votes for Astrid, who he’s been creepily flirting with through Olivia. For his part, Walter is positively giddy to have his friend back.
The case this week involves a double suicide – or, almost a double suicide. Two people jumped off a building together and one (impossibly) survived and fled. Walter theorizes more inter-dimensional decay, but there are no signs of it. The team is then joined by FBI agent Lincoln Lee, whose alternate we already know from the other universe. This Lincoln knows nothing at all about Fringe. He’s been tracking the woman who survived, who he says had been murdered months earlier yet keeps turning up alive in connection with suicide situations like this.
Best dialogue exchange of the episode: Peter says, “Stranger things have happened.” To which an utterly perplexed Lee responds, “Ummm, no they haven’t.”
The perp this week turns out to be a woman named Dana (Paula Malcomson, aka Trixie from ‘Deadwood’) who’d been struck by lightning multiple times and now can’t die. The magnetic force that holds her soul in has become supercharged and won’t let go. All she wants to do is die and join her dead family. She thinks that the best way to do that is to be present when someone else dies and hitch a ride with their soul. Because she’s not a murderer, she found a job working for a suicide hotline and tracks down people who are planning to kill themselves anyway. No harm, no foul, right?
So far, this strategy hasn’t worked. When she gets a call from a nut-job who’s planted a bomb on a train, Dana decides to get on the train and not notify anyone. She hopes that dying with a large group of people will be enough to get her to heaven. Fortunately, Peter and the team figure out her plan and have the train stopped. Dana runs out to a field where the bomb goes off. Somehow, that alone was enough to do the trick. She’s dead for good this time.
(Somehow, it never occurs to anyone – not even Walter or Bell – that Dana would have made the perfect host for Bell’s soul. This seems like what the episode is setting up, but nobody even mentions it.)
Bell theorizes that perhaps it was Dana’s destiny all along to save the lives of the people on the train, and that’s why she couldn’t die before then. Peter had already argued that he doesn’t believe in fate, which is why he isn’t worried about the prophesy mumbo jumbo involving the doomsday machine. In the final scene, Bell tricks Peter into drinking some tea, which is presumably loaded with soul magnets so that Bell can take over and fulfill the prophesy. Some church bells ring in the background, but rather than Bell’s soul being transplanted into Peter’s body, Olivia’s soul comes forward for a brief second before being suppressed again. Bell muses that, “This may be a little more complicated than I thought.”
It appears that (including tomorrow’s) we have about five more episodes this season. I hope that the show gets back on track with the main story arc soon. Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘Stowaway’, but there are still a million unresolved loose ends to tie up, and I fear that the producers are just going to jerk us around with a giant cock-tease cliffhanger as a desperate bid for last-minute renewal.
