Fringe - Jan 28, 2011

Wow, I was surprised that Peter was affected that way. A rational Peter is one thing, but now, how else will be different?

My first thought was wow, this is kind of suspenseful. I have no idea where they’ll go now. That’s a great plot twist.

But thinking about it again after a few hours sleep I’m not as confident and hope that the writers do a good job with the story line.

On the one hand it bugged me that, just like everybody on that show who makes an important discovery Walter kept it a secret, but then I remembered that this is Walter we’re talking about, and if it will protect Peter then the whole world, the whole universe, could go to hell as far as he’s concerned.

My immediate thought was that after going to Peter’s room and seeing everything I would have been on the phone immediately to Broyles. Just like when Peter got the phone call that Olivia was trapped on the other side and decided to check things out for himself, instead of calling in for backup. Honestly, after Walter went into Peter’s room I expected him to turn around with Peter pointing a gun to his head. But so far Peter hasn’t turned on Walter or any of his coworkers. I wonder if that will change. It could be interesting.

Oh, and I loved how they’re calling the other Oliva Fauxlivia in the show. :smiley:

One loose end that I noticed was that the fancy MRI or whatever tests that Peter was put through at the begining, to see if he influenced the universe machine at the Massive Dynamics warehouse, were done by the doctor who was actually a shape shifter. And he said ‘nope, all readings are normal, couldn’t find a thing wrong with you.’

I think they should probably do those tests again. Dr. Shape Shifter was lying.

Yeah, Fauxlivia & Walternate. I think they’re getting their ideas directly from the internet.

Well, if they’re reading this thread, they’re telegraphing “surprises”. I knew the doctor was the mole, I knew Peter was the shooter. I got the impression we were supposed to be surprised as these things became apparent, but I knew instantly. I’m finding I’m not very surprised by the later episodes, although I did gasp aloud when Peter chopped the guy’s fingers off.

I did figure out that the doctor was a shape shifter when he heard about the first guy being killed, but I had no idea Peter was the shooter until they showed it.

For a while I wondered if it really was Peter but then Walter said that the machine “weaponized” him.

I liked how they finally addressed the idea that Fauxlivia wasn’t just hurtful to Olivia. The narcisism of Olivia not even considering that Peter might have been hurt was overpowering.

The one really sour note in this potentially shark-jumping episode was that there were five shape-shifters because there are five letters in the name Olive. If I used smileys, I’d put a rolleyes smiley here. There is no possible reason it couldn’t have been six shapeshifters spelling out Olivia, or twelve spelling out Olivia Dunham, except for the fact that the world’s most retarded code was so primitive it couldn’t handle repeated characters.

I’ll do it for you. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

That was the most contrived part of the episode. I have a feeling they wrote most of it and then suddenly went “Crap, we haven’t decided how they’ll figure out the code.”

They could’ve at least had it to where Astrid figures out the “Oliv” part and thinks it’s “Olivia,” but Olivia figures out it’s “Olive.”

There were five letters because that’s what Olivia herself would have done if she was making up a secret code. Like she said, she and Fauxlivia think just alike. You can say that both Olivias are full of themselves to come up with such a stupid code, but it does make sense that our Olivia would figure it out based on what she would have done.

So…if Peter was “weaponized” by touching the machine (and Walter definitely said when he touched it, so he’s not talking about what happened this week), and that happened last season, why would it take until now for us to see changes in him? Other than his stupidity over mistaking Fauxlivia for Olivia, I can’t think of ways that he’s been different since then so I’m not sure what Walter was going on about. I’m halfway inclined to think that this “weaponized” thing is a red herring - Peter probably just is pissed off enough about what happened over the course of this season to react this way.

Contrived or not, the code was how Olivia (and Astrid) figured who the shapeshifters were. And that was dependent on reading Fauxlivia’s journal. But Peter didn’t read the journal. So how did he figure out who the shapeshifters were? (Or did I miss how they explained that?)

It seemed to me that he DID read the journal, and that stuff about how he’d be embarrassed because she thought he was a fool was a lie he told Olivia to keep her from reading the journals.

I pretty sure Walter was referring to the event in the lab where the machine was activated. He “touched it” with his mind.

Right, I get that part. What is unforgivably stupid about this idea is that the strategic decision of how many shapeshifters to send over would be dependent on how many letters are in Fauxlivia’s childhood nickname. What if Walternate needed to place seven shapeshifters at key positions? Sorry, boss, no go, my meemaw called me Olive so you only get five spies to work with.

That’s beyond stupid.

Then the part about noticing he’s different since then would make no sense since the whole episode only took place over a day or two.

I’m not sure what you mean by that. They went to the lab, Peter activated the machine, which activated him, and he started killing shape shifters. The whole thing started that night.

Walter’s whole speech about Peter being weaponized focused on him noticing concerning differences since Peter touched the machine. He had to mean when he physically touched it much earlier, or Walter wouldn’t have had time to note any alarming personality changes, right? Even Walter isn’t going to be overly concerned how his son has changed since yesterday.

Here’s the transcript of that scene:

He doesn’t mention noticing any differences. The whole change he is talking about is that fact that Peter went off and killed a bunch of shapeshifters in secret.

I’m wondering if I’m the only person who finds it a little too cutesy and TWOP-y.

So Peter apparently did read Fauxlivia’s file and lied about it to Olivia.

About “Olive = 5 shapeshifters”: Is there a chance this is just a decoy? These five don’t know anything after all (unless Peter is lying about that, as well). Well, Newton did, but he was already dead. (He was one of the 5, wasn’t he?)

(By the way, is it axiomatic that strong encryption available to everybody - like Truecrypt - just doesn’t exist in TV land?)

They’d been working on cracking it for days or weeks. After enough work, I’m sure that just about any encryption can be broken. Especially if it’s done by the government.

I don’t. Well, not cutesy anyway. What does TWOP stand for?

Television Without Pity, the home of scathing show reviews. They usually make up names for characters they don’t like. My favorite was their names for the Charmed characters, like The Dolt because Leo was a dolt.