Pretty good episode. When the not quiet successfully merged person appeared on the bus I thought, of course. They couldn’t resist throwing in a shocking moment, and it makes for good TV.
Since Olivia is getting the memories of Olivia from the other timeline I’m wondering if …
OK, this is just a guess, but I’ll spoiler it anyway, just in case there’s somebody who doesn’t want guessing, or my guess turns out to be right.
The Observer’s warning about Olivia having to die only refers to her current personality and that the personality of Olivia from the previous timeline will take over.
I hope this recap is short but informative and not confusing in any way.
Peter, Walter, and Olivia get trapped in a town that they can’t leave. Only a few people remain. Some have gone mad, 12 haven’t. It turns out that the city in both universes are being joined together by David Robert Jones and the people are merging with their counterparts on the other side. The 12 who haven’t don’t have counterparts there to merge with.
Olivia at the start of the show was having a dream of making love to Peter. In the town she feels like there’s someone else in her head and she worries that what happened to some of the townsfolk is happening to her, but Walter does some blood work and determines she’s fine. She also mentions a case that Walter worked on, but he doesn’t remember and Peter says they worked on it in his timeline. Later on Olivia asks Peter about the Olivia from his timeline. He mentions a ritual they had every Friday night ordering food from a certain restaurant (I forget the name).
Anyway, Walter says the merging of people is stage one. Stage two is complete annihilation of the area as both areas can’t exist in one place at the same time. So Peter figures out there must be a safe area. Walter agrees comparing it to the eye of a hurricane. They all go there, a bike shop, and are saved. Broyles says they found devices around the city and are sure Jones did it, but not why.
Peter goes to Olivia’s house, I’m not sure why, asks what smells good. Olivia mentions buying food from the restaurant, says she remembers the ritual, and everything else about their old lives together.
When they were trying to think of transportation to the safe zone, I was afraid the next scene would be all of them on bikes, pedaling madly away from a wave of annihilation.
Getting back to civilization would require a GPS and an all-terrain vehicle since there are now no roads in the Westfield bubble.
Speaking of roads, when Peter and Walter were mapping out the bubble they displayed a remarkable knowledge of the layout of the town considering they had only been to a few places and had only been there a few hours.
Yay, Olivia’s getting her pre-altered timeline memories back.
I liked the event this week. Quite creepy. And hooray for no one being able to tell the future like the last two in a row.
Nice to see Walter back out of the lab. Almost like his old self. Wonder if he’ll wind up remembering too or if Liv’s a special case because of cortexophan or whatever it is Nina’s doing to her.
John Noble is really great at playing all the different versions of Walter, and I thought he was particularly great in this ep. That stuff with the guy in the diner, I just think he’s great at what he does.
At first, when “Big” Willy (the guy serving Walter) forgot they met and chatted I was wondering if it was some sort of time loop. But then Willy went back to normal so I figured that wasn’t it.
The biggest problem was, unless two people merged perfectly they should have had physical problems, or died. The guy with the two faces for example. That would mean the two brains would be out of synch and materializing into each other should have meant death…but I know, then we wouldn’t have that cool horror scene.
I dunno–every single element this week was fantastic, the acting was solid, the story was good, there were hints about the meta-plot…but it didn’t gell for me like the previous week’s episode did.
When LOST did the crappy “Flash-Sideways”, everyone was wondering how they were going to make it meaningful* and I’ve heard similar concerns about this timeline.
Maybe there’ll be an event where the two timelines merge safely–that gives us a less neurotic Olivia and other, minor changes are possible: so both timelines actually mean something.