I’m personally happy that I have this great capacity to shut off my brain while I watch TV shows, I just observe and absorb. I can suspend my disbelief pretty much like a switch and enjoy my serving of TV.

But I do have a complaint with this: Why is Fringe involved at all? This seems to be a fairly normal kidnapping where getting the hostage back seems to have gone wrong. What is Fringe (which is supposed to be investigating “the pattern” doing here at all? Once someone figures out that the boy has a form of mind control, isn’t that when they would call in the fringe division? This might have been a good place to bring the woman back in that they had in the first two episodes (and where has she been anyway?). She could have realized that there was something screwy and that the fringe division needed to be called. But noooo. . .

About the bad wiring. There are three possibilities: 1. They screwed up on the show (very possible). But suppose this happened in reality:
2. The kid was forcing the guy to put the key into the socket. If someone was doing that to me, I would sure go for the neutral socket and then act as though I were shocked (a clever ploy on the part of the victim that backfired through faulty wiring). 3. The kid was stupid (we have ample evidence of this), but got lucky because of bad wiring.

After all, you can’t have it both ways: either I can stick a key into a socket of my house (on your say so that it is safe) or it isn’t safe because of possibly faulty wiring. . . And where are the stats that say that there is at least one bad socket per house?

Finally, more evidence of the kid’s stupidity: If I had magic mind control pills, what would I do with them? Hell, I sure wouldn’t let people know I had them, I would do really subtle things, but certainly a smart kid would come up with something more than going on a rampage and getting people to kill themselves.

Sorry to go on like this, but I haven’t been around for a while and Polite Dissent is so much fun. . .

(Also ties in to the old Walter/William Bell project that Olivia was part of- ever since the episode last season with the other test subject calling her Olive, my wife has been insisting that Olivia is actually “Olive A,” and that there’s more clones headed our way)

5 – When the files were being put away they showed Tyle #X and referenced different surrogates for each of them (Dr. Y or Dr. Z), so each Doctor only has 1 son.

7 – The only explanation I could see is that the psychiatrist is doing a mental health evaluation to determine if he was mental capable at the time of the murders. Arguably, the drugs, which he may have taken “accidentally,” created a temporary insanity and the D.A. doesn’t want to prosecute a kid who was drugged. But, really, what I think they were saying is that, because he didn’t show the power to control people, the D.A. (or U.S. Attorney) didn’t believe he really forced people to murder. That is kind of hard to believe and really hard to get a jury to convict on. On the other hand, Peter should be expecting to be charged for a bunch of crimes for his actions and the defense “a mind-controlling teen made me do it” probably won’t work.

Did you see the promos all week? Every one started out with the whole “They say we only use 10% of our brain, yada yada yada”. I was kind of surprised no one mentioned it in the episode.