TV Review: FRINGE 4.6, "And Those We Left Behind"
J.J. Abrams loves his time travel; time travelling island on Lost, time travelling Romulans in Star Trek, and now, mysterious time loops on Fringe.
rating: 4.5
J.J. Abrams loves his time travel; time travelling island on Lost, time travelling Romulans in Star Trek, and now, mysterious time loops on Fringe. Surprisingly, given that Fringe is really the perfect theatre to play with time stories, its been four seasons and as far as I can remember this is the first case that deals specifically with a time anomaly. Obviously I am talking about the weekly cases, and not the alternate timeline mystery that has served as the main plot since the beginning of this season. The case involves reports all across Boston of people experiencing all kinds of strange time anomalies, and were not just talking about déjà vu. A woman washing dishes in her apartment stops in shock when all of a sudden, most of her kitchen is burnt as if it had just been on fire. Her young daughter, who had just been sitting at the table, is now a baby in a cot. She grabs her daughter and runs outside, where it appears that the building is on fire. A second later, the fire is gone and her daughter returns to normal. A few miles away, three teenagers are driving up past an old decommissioned rail track, when out of nowhere, they must brake to avoid being crushed by the sudden appearance of a ghostly train. The Fringe team brings Peter (Joshua Jackson) along to the investigation, believing his return may be the cause of the strange phenomenon. On the way Peter experiences small jumps in time for himself and identifies heightened levels of neutron radiation affecting the teenagers car, suggesting that the time loops are in fact being caused by human technology. The team also surmise that the anomalies are linked by a period of four years; the train line was decommissioned four years ago, and the fire in the apartment building happened four years ago. (Coincidentally it has also been four years since the first Fringe Event in this universe.) The rest of the episode is a rather touching story about a man who built a time machine to save his sick wife. Electrical engineer Raymond Green (Stephen Root) has spent the last four years trying to get back to 2007, a time when his wife Kate (Romy Rosemont) was a theoretical physicist in her prime. Kate was working on a time travel theory before her mental state deteriorated and Raymond builds a machine based on her work. The formula is incomplete however, and initially Raymond could only go back for a few minutes at a time. Now he has managed to stretch that to 47 minutes and each time he urges Kate to finish her theory. Raymond is unaware his machine is having repercussions throughout the city but nevertheless, the Fringe team must stop him before a four year old underwater traffic tunnel disappears, killing hundreds of people. I really enjoyed this episode, for me it has been the best of the new season so far. Its been a fairly stuttering start because theyve had to iron out a lot of kinks to do with the new timeline and oftentimes that took away a lot from the episode in question. This week it feels more like the old show, despite Peter being an outsider in the team. The episode focuses on the case and the investigation at hand, just like they used to do in Seasons 1 and 2. Of course there are a few moments when we a reminded of how much everything has changed and there are some interesting interactions between Peter and Olivia (Anna Torv), who no longer knows him. When Olivia experienced a mini version of the time loops at the end of last weeks episode, I had been hoping that it would have something to do with the main plot, concerning Peters return and how that has affected time, however it appears to have been a foreshadowing of the anomalies occurring in Episode 6. That being said, Peter suggests at the end of the episode that he may have been the cause of the anomalies. Up until three days ago, Raymonds machine had allowed him to travel back for only a few minutes. Peters return appears to have fractured the laws of time, allowing Raymond to greatly increase the range of his experiment. Peter now seems to believe that it is not the timeline he needs to reset, but himself, and that all the people he knows and loves are somewhere else. It appears that this may not be an alternate timeline after all but in fact a new universe entirely. So far the show has used different coloured title cards to signify different universes; blue for the prime universe and red for the alternate universe. I had taken the new yellow title card to be an exception to this rule, suggesting an altered universe, not a new one. This is because in Episode 2 we deal largely with the alternate universe and yet there is no red title card. To me the yellow title card also signified how the two universes are now linked by the doomsday device. If Peter is right in believing that he is not in the prime universe, I would guess that there are now actually four universes. Prime 1 (Blue) and Alt 1 (Red), and Prime 2 (Yellow) and Alt 2 (Yellow). I say this because in the first two episodes this season, the characters from the other side dont notice any difference in the changed timeline, meaning that either their timeline has been altered as well, or they are a fourth universe linked to this third one. Its certainly getting confusing, and its bound to get even more so because next week is the mid-season finale, which means more questions to be raised and hopefully a mouth-watering cliffhanger! Sadly the show isnt scheduled to return until January 13th, which gives us plenty of time to speculate on whats going to happen next. Stay tuned.