Fringe — Episode 15 (Season 3): “Subject 13″
Another Fringe episode that flashes back to 1980s, this time revealing the events occuring a few months after Peter was brought over. A solid episode that — like most good Fringe episodes — answers some important questions, but poses several more
The Plot: A young Peter Bishop, convinced that he doesn’t belong in our world, heads out over the ice-covered Reiden Lake. He ties himself to a cement block and starts smashing the block against the ice, wanting to get back to the “other world at the bottom of the lake.” Elizabeth Bishop arrives just in time to see him plunge through the ice. She dives in and brings him back to the surface.
Meanwhile, Walter is working with the Cortexiphan children in Florida, trying to get them to cross-over into the other universe, but having no success. After the ice escapade, Elizabeth is understandably worried and arrives at the daycare center with Peter in tow. We learn it’s been six months since Walter brought Peter across from the other universe, and for the past two months, Peter has been vocal that he does not belong here, and that Walter and Elizabeth are not his real parents. Walter tells his wife that he cannot personally cross over to return Peter, like he did before, because the universes are too unstable. Instead, he tells her, the Cortexiphan children should be able to cross-over and return Peter. He asks her to give him a little more time.
At her house, young Olivia has stayed up reading well past her bed time. Her step-father grabs the book and starts yelling and threatening her. In a blink, she finds herself teleported to an open field elsewhere, and then a second later, she teleports back home to the less-than-tender care of her step-father. The next morning at the daycare, she has a black eye, but assures everyone that she “fell.” Walter also notices her drawing a picture of a blimp and realizes that she has managed to cross-over into the other universe. He deduces that moving between universes must only occur when she is exposed to extreme emotions. In the lab, he tries joy, exhaustion, anger, and loneliness, but none of these work. He finally decides that fear must be the answer — not just fear alone, but a combination of love and fear, like what her step-father brings out in her. To prove his point, Walter stages a murder scene with one of Olivia’s friends pretending to be dead. He sure gets a reaction: Olivia sets the room on fire with pyrokinesis and then runs away.
Hearing the sirens rush by, Elizabeth is concerned that something must have happened at Walter’s work (so this has probably happened before). She and Peter arrive to find a small fire being put out, and learn that Olivia has gone missing. Elizabeth leaves Peter in the hallway while she goes to speak to Walter. Looking through Olivia’s notebook, Peter finds a picture of a field of tulips. He decides he knows where Olivia is, and heads off to find her.
We flash across to the alternate universe now, where Walternate and alt-Elizabeth are not handling the disappearance of Peter well. Walter has become quite the alcoholic and their marriage is strained to the breaking point. Rather than staying home to try and repair his relationship with his wife, Walter returns to work at Bishop Dynamic in Florida
Back in our universe, Peter finds Olivia just where he thought she’d be in the tulip field. They talk for a while and she admits that her black eye is from her step-father. He urges her to tell Walter the truth. When they arrive back at the daycare center, Olivia draws a new picture in her journal, then, when she is told her step-father is coming to pick her up, she decides to follow Peter’s advice and talk to Walter. She barges in his office and blurts out that her step-father has been hitting her and that was what led to cross-over into the alternate universe. Only it turns out – and I didn’t see this coming at all – that she just crossed-over again and told all this to Walternate instead of our Walter. This is how he learned of our universe and discovered what happened to Peter.
As the real Walter hands Olivia off to her step-father, he lets him know in no uncertain terms that he has his eye on Olivia and will report to social services if anything untoward happens to her. Later, talking to Elizabeth, Peter seems resigned to the fact that he is fated to remain in our universe.
1. I Would Love to Visit That Toystore — I Bet They Still Have the Original Micronauts.
There were quite a few anachronisms in that toy store. The one that caught my eye was the shelf full of the Battlestar Galactica board games (1978 – my best friend in elementary school had this – we combined it with his Snoopy Come Home game to make Battlestar: Snoopy Come Home) and the G.I. Joe playsets (1982, if not later). Still, it’s closer than having Ice Age toys in a 1980s daycare like they had the first time.
2. Alternotes
Over there:
Walternate is “safety czar” in his world (the term czar has been used for Presidential political appointees since FDR) and develop the Star Wars missile defense program.
Bishop Dynamic, instead of Massive Dynamic.
3. Appealing Question
I still wonder whatever happened to the alternate William Bell? Or Nina Sharp? They’re the only Alternates we have yet to see — or even hear about.
4. Purposeful or Simply Inept
When Walter threatened Olivia’s step-father (rather ineffectually, it seemed to me), was he really trying to protect Olivia, or was he trying to goad her step-father into abusing her again.
Minor historical accuracies aside, I thought this was a very good episode, and I did not see that twist at the end coming at all — but it fit and did not feel cheap. If there is any downside to this episode, it’s that it required a solid footing in Fringe mythology and not would be tough to understand as a first-time viewer. Regardless, this episode was good enough for the Fringe Doomsday Clock to gain another minute. (For the record, this is the furthest back the clock has ever been — I had to make a new graphic.)
This week’s Fringe cipher was: SWITCH.A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.Karl ’s has more to say, particularly about the anachronisms, over at his blog.
February 26th, 2011 at 4:31 pm
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February 26th, 2011 at 4:45 pm
I think Alt William Bell was said to have died in a car accident before he ever really got to do anything.
February 26th, 2011 at 5:03 pm
No comment on the retro opening titles. I thought they weren’t quite retro enough, but it was a nice touch.
Walter-A apparently favors the Commodore Pet on his desk, for some strange reason. Walternate has an apparently correct-vintage Macintosh, though doubtless someone will chime in and identify it as a post-85 model. Hey, they tried.
Billy Bell-A told Walter-A that Bell-B died young. This was at the end of last season. Of course, we only have his word for it. Nimoy has officially retired, but maybe JJ can recruit Zachary Quinto as a younger Bell for a future episode, just as he played the young Spock in JJ’s Star Trek reboot.
Technically we should not call the B-universe airships “blimps”. They’re dirigibles, with a rigid structure containing the gasbags. Blimps are gasbags and nothing else.
February 26th, 2011 at 5:26 pm
first, you might want to correct this “Back in our universe, Peter finds Elizabeth just where he thought she’d be in the tulip field.”
Also, it was said that Alternate-Bell died at age 19 in a car accident.
February 26th, 2011 at 6:01 pm
Wasn’t it said that that Walternate and AlterBell never met “over there”. That has to be a crock. Everything else is just slightly off but these two great men never met. I am not buying it. More to come I am sure…
February 26th, 2011 at 7:44 pm
Great episode (and great review as always). The twist near the end really threw me for a loop. It was very well done. But there was a logical flaw in it. Olivia can’t occupy two universes at once. So our Walter can’t see her in his office to say her name and startle her to cause her to turn around unless she’s back in our universe. But if she’s back in our universe then the Walter she was looking at behind the desk would have disappeared first. I get why this they did this, it’s more thrilling if we don’t see him disappear and instead find out by Walter speaking behind her, but logically it doesn’t hold up.
February 26th, 2011 at 8:00 pm
That was a fantastic episode. I spent it wondering if they were going to pull a double bluff and they’d go completely meta on us and we’d find out that both universes were fictional. Shame they didn’t :’( I don’t think any series has actually shouted out the fact that they’re actually fictional before.
The last Olivia swap was very well handled though, I didn’t spot the switch till I watched the end twice.
I didn’t think that Walter was pushing Olivia’s step-father into more abuse till you mentioned it, nice catch. I was hoping this was Walter’s first step into ethical behaviour, and Walternate’s into unethical, but you raise the unsettling fact that neither are particularly nice.
February 26th, 2011 at 8:15 pm
“Olivia can’t occupy two universes at once.”
Can’t she?
(I honestly don’t know. They may have explicitly stated at some point that NO ONE, not even rule-breaking Protagonists, can be in more than one universe at a time. But it would put an interesting spin on the “Which Olivia Peter chooses” MacGuffin…)
February 26th, 2011 at 8:16 pm
Do we already have the 1987 Justice League (alternate version) cover on our list of anachronisms? We first saw it in the present as part of Peter’s collection, so we could have caught it then…
February 26th, 2011 at 8:17 pm
There’s a small plot hole or intentional plot point regarding the fate of the William Bell that supposedly died in a car accident.
It was cited in an earlier episode that Bell introduced Walter to his wife, Elizabeth, in “our” universe… so how were they introduced in the alternate universe?
Anyone notice that Peter didn’t really know what a plane was? and when he pretend played with it in the episode, the dialog suggested his familiarity with airship docking?
February 26th, 2011 at 10:35 pm
Re: Peter not being familiar with planes
We know that the White House was destroyed during Alt-9/ll. I wonder how if not by a plane. So far we have seen only dirigibles and helicopters above ground.
February 26th, 2011 at 10:38 pm
The LEGO sets in the toy store were from 2010, but the GI Joe vehicles were appropriate.
February 27th, 2011 at 12:25 am
@Ken I’ll be a huge contradiction if there weren’t at least some passenger jets in the alternate universe. It’s been established on screen that there’s an active space shuttle program over there. I seriously doubt they’d transport a space shuttle over long distances with helicopters or zeppelins. There’d also be no way of performing atmospheric maneuvering/landing tests without a shuttle being towed on the back of a Boeing 747.
Other random thoughts:
There was an episode in season one very similar to the ending of this episode where she speaks to Broyles in his office and notices his office is rearranged. She’s interrupted by our Broyles shortly thereafter and realizes she was speaking to the Broyles from the other universe. It’s not the first time in the series we’ve seen this.
It’s implied in this episode that Walter’s initial cross over to the other universe might not have been the event that sets into motion the catastrophes we later see in the alternate universe. There seemed to be no urgency on the news about any strange events, just news about the kidnapping. The Bishops were also at their home at Raiden Lake.
It’s been established in the season 2 finale that Walternate dedicated time and resources at his Harvard lab trying to find a way to travel to another universe after finding out that Peter was stolen.
Walternate might have screwed things up because he lacked the knowledge to create a proper machine to travel across universes.
February 27th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Leonard Nimoy has stated on twitter that William Bell will be back:
http://twitter.com/#!/TheRealNimoy/status/41243317945630720
February 27th, 2011 at 8:14 pm
Anyone notice that the retro opening titles, instead of transhumanism, precognition and six other impossible things to try before breakfast, featured stuff that is actually possible in 2011, but wasn’t in 1985? OK, maybe not invisibility, at least in the traditional sense. See all the articles on bending light and radio waves around an object.
March 1st, 2011 at 12:33 pm
I didn’t even notice that the story focus had switched to the alterverse until this odd scene with the Walters occurred. Don’t know if it was intentional, but the visual effect for switching to the other side was too subtle this time.
March 2nd, 2011 at 8:22 am
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March 2nd, 2011 at 8:34 am
The idea is that the alternate universe is a “near universe”–that is, most things–and people–are largely the same. The ride’s great fun once you except that. But the premise is still fundamentally unacceptable. The universes diverged at minimum a century ago. In that time, it seems that everyone pretty much keeps making the same decisions and having sex exactly on cue with the right people to produce perfect alternates. Reality would be so much messier that by the passage of a century, virtually no one would have exactly analogs–universe twins, so to speak, with their exact genetic material. In fact, even if everyone’s grandparents and parents still hooked up with the right people and had sex the right day, the chance that the same sperm would win the race is pretty infinitesimal. Really, the BEST you could hope for is an alter-sibling conceived on the same day.
But there are lots of silly things in this show, and that’s by far not the silliest. This can be hand-waved away by assuming there’s some sort of continuing enmeshment between the worlds that keeps drawing them back together even as they try to diverge–hence a 9/11 attack, etc.
March 2nd, 2011 at 10:38 am
Space Shuttle? I can let the scene with young Peter playing with a toy plane pass since he’s been in this universe long enough to be familiar, but for the alternate universe to go from dirigibles to a space-plane is a major problem. Satellites and rocketry could exist without an understanding of airfoils, but this makes the existence of helicopters problematic since they utilize airfoils as well.
All I can guess is that fixed/rotary wing aircraft are restricted to military use only is the otherverse. Given the distopian vibe, it’s plausible.
I DO think that Walter was genuinely threatening Olivia’s father. It humanizes his character. Walternate shares the same quality, as he’s established that he will no allow experiments on children.
March 3rd, 2011 at 11:05 am
@MimiR : I agree wholeheartedly that the odds of a different universe spawning genetically identical individuals are infinitesimal. I’ve been thinking about posting on this for a while. Even in a group of universes that are identical up to the moment of a given conception, the odds that a given individual will result are very poor indeed.
Consider: 50% of conceptions fail to implant or otherwise go to term (Scott can confirm this, I think). Of the rest, even if the same sperm gets to the egg, so we get an individual of the correct sex, there is still some genetic shuffling that goes on before we get to a fixed genome ( the point after which splitting the embryo will give identical twins). Even then, in the case of females, there is a random factor due to the inactivation of one of the X chromosomes. Depending on which is active, you get different characteristics. In some females, this can vary across the embryo, resulting in an individual who is a kind of chimera.
Most parallel world stories feature the same individuals in different lives, despite the massive odds against this. Of those I’ve read, “Worlds of the Imperium” took the most liberties (histories diverged in the 19th century, but David Niven still exists in two different universes). H. Beam Piper’s Paratime stories rarely if ever used the “parallel twin” theme, the notable exception being “He walked around the horses”.
March 12th, 2011 at 3:15 pm
Nice Ep, And I agree with @MimiR and Daedalus, about that how could the two universes can be so similar, in every sense, but especially about people…we’ve seen the butterfly effect, so if some small thing can change the course of events, imagine how many things should be differents in both universes…I think that it doesn’t have a logical explanation, and that the goal of having twins in both worlds is because of the plot, to make it most interesting…someone could explain why supposedly the characters all have alternates?
March 12th, 2011 at 9:10 pm
Maybe I got it wrong before, but I always thought the experiences with Olivia and the Cortexiphan took place when she was very young, like three or four years old. Don’t you think that if she was in that daycare from, let’s say, four to eight, she would remember Walter Bishop?
But then, I think they changed the timing in order to justify Walter’s search of a way to cross between universes with the need to “return” Peter…
March 16th, 2011 at 11:51 am
Oh! Oh! The Doomsday Clock is now Doosmday Clock – a sure sign we must be in AlternaDissent-universe! *exited*
November 4th, 2011 at 3:48 pm
@Daedalus,
if anything in the Alterverse was identical down to “quantum-level” (with the exception of plot-critical stuff) and to the survival of all the Schrödinger’s cats, there’s no reason to believe that the odds of genetically identical individuals are infinitesimal.
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