Fringe — Episode 6 (Season 4): “And Those We’ve Left Behind”
An enjoyable episode of Fringe, but then, episodes featuring time travel usually are. (What would have made it even better would have been if the crew had managed to place a red Swingline stapler in Raymond’s house.)
The Plot: A series of strange time-related events have appeared around Boston. They all seem to relate to events that happened four years before. An apartment complex suddenly shows signs of fire damage, but the fire happened four years ago and the damage was long since repaired. A five year-old girl is reverted back to infancy. A freight train appears on a track abandoned four years before.
The Fringe Team is called in and brings along Peter, suspecting that the time effects are somehow the result of him reappearing in our universe. Mapping the disturbances, the team is able to discover that the effects seem to originate from one particular block. Soon, they are able to identify the specific house, but it is surrounded by a time bubble that will disintegrate anyone who enters it. Walter builds a portable Faraday cage that Peter is able to use to enter the house.
Inside the house are Raymond and his wife Kate. He is an electrical engineer and his wife is a theoretical physicist – or was, as she now suffers from severe Alzheimer’s disease. Raymond has used her notes on time to build a machine responsible for creating the time bubble surrounding the house. He brings the time in the house back four years, before Kate’s Alzheimer’s kicks in. Currently, his machine isn’t quite finished because Kate hasn’t finished her time equations, so it only works for a handful of minutes. That’s enough for him to bring her back to work on finishing the equations so the time bubble can become permanent. When Peter arrives, he confronts Raymond about the side effects of the machine, including the imminent deaths of hundreds of people in an underwater transit tunnel. Raymond agrees to shut off the machine, planning on building it again later. He knows that Kate has finished the equations so his next machine should be work perfectly – only, instead of writing down the finished equations, Kate blotted out all her previous work so Raymond can never build the machine again.
As the episode ends, Peter tells Broyles that his appearance in this universe provided the spark Raymond’s machine needed to work – this makes Peter think that he has appeared in the wrong universe.
1. Better Than Sylvia Brown
Peter is able to recognize that something is “growing geometrically” from just a single event?
2. Sure Natural Radiation is Good, but Organic Radiation is Much Better
Despite what Peter says, neutron radiation does occur naturally. (I’d go into a more thorough debunking of Fringe radiation here, but Karl’s always been better at that than me, so I’ll just link to him earlier than usual.)
3. The Fools-Gold Spiral
Fibonacci’s sequence creates something very close to the Golden Spiral, but it’s not quite the same thing. (A true Golden Spiral has a growth factor of phi. The Fibonacci sequence approaches this, but never quite reaches it.)
4. Time Keeps Flowing Like a River
Apparently, time is an electromagnetic wave and can be blocked by a Faraday cage (but walkie-talkies cannot be blocked by time bubbles or Faraday cages. Seriously, at that point Peter was so close to Olivia, why not just pop his head out of the bubble and talk to her?)
5. Steady Hands
Apparently Walter and Peter can both hand draw perfect Golden Spirals without mechanical aid. Must be genetic.
6. Caged Rat
Faraday cages consist of fine metal mesh which block out certain wavelengths of electromagnetic waves depending on the size of the mesh. Whatever Peter was wearing wasn’t a Faraday cage.
7. Ahead of Its Time
How long has Walter’s house been abandoned, because that look’s like a recent model flat screen TV.
8. Old Friends
This is the third episode Burlap Bear has been mentioned in. (Previous episodes 1-16 “Unleashed”, 3-07 “The Abducted.”)
The airplane in the old house looks like the one Peter bought after arriving from his universe into ours (episode 3-15 “Subject 13.”).
9. Gratuitous Product Placement
Sprint for the win.
A somewhat cliched story, but an enjoyable hour nonetheless (plus it’s always enjoyable to see Stephen Root). The Fringe Doomsday Clock retreats a minute, returning to 11:52
This week’s Fringe cipher was: LIVING.A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.Karl has more to say over at his blog.
November 13th, 2011 at 10:33 pm
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November 13th, 2011 at 11:28 pm
Maybe that LCD screen in Walter’s house was from the other universe :P
November 14th, 2011 at 7:25 am
It’s my understanding that tunnels that go under rivers actually go through the rock UNDER the river, therefore the disappearing tunnel would have reverted to plain rock, and not a deluge of water…and yeah, the “Faraday Cage” was more of a “Faraday Bondage Harness.”
November 14th, 2011 at 7:46 am
I was a little confused by the ending. Peter was in a huge rush to get the machine turned-off, and was quick to secure immunity for Raymond, but the countdown clock was already down to it’s final minutes.
Couldn’t Peter have just let the clock run out, the time bubble vanishes, and the cops swarm in to arrest Raymond (no immunity of course!)?
Yes, I know Lincoln was in the tunnel dealing with a crisis, but again that crisis would have ended in a minute anyway. Unless I’m missing something, seems like to me the whole thing would have worked better if the clock still had 10 minutes on it… meaning the tunnel crisis at ample time to get a lot worse.
November 15th, 2011 at 7:21 am
I too thought it was pretty ridiculous that they can free hand draw a golden spiral… That too extend the spiral to find the exact location of the next time shift…
November 15th, 2011 at 3:16 pm
If a Faraday cage were all that were requried, Peter could have walked into the house wearing a metal garbage can or wrapped himself in chicken wire; a Faraday cage is not some strange device that has to be powered, just a structure (not even necessarily solid) made of conducting material so that the free electrons in it will absorb the energy of a passing EM wave and sheild the region within.
Then again, who knew that time bubbles were made of EMR? I must have missed that day…
November 15th, 2011 at 3:16 pm
Grr… can do physics, but can’t spell *shield*.
November 15th, 2011 at 7:14 pm
Are we supposed to take seriously the notion that this isn’t Peter’s universe, FringePrime, the one we’ve been watching for several seasons? We’ve seen Observers trying to prevent Peter from returning here, discussing how he wasn’t fully eliminated from the timeline. But this is a different timeline? That conclusion, that this is some third universe, doesn’t jibe with everything else we’ve been told this season.
In addition, each week I continue to be disappointed that we’re getting no information about our characters’ doubles. What are they up to? Is anyone actively working to fix the trouble between the two universes?
Is anyone else troubled and puzzled by the show’s current approach?
November 17th, 2011 at 9:20 am
re:Time Bubbles
It’s an established fact (meaning, trope) of any kind field-based time distortion that if you stick a hand, head, etc, out, you’ll suffer tremendous pain due to it taking four years (in this case) for the blood to flow from the ‘inside’ to ‘outside’ body parts, or some such. This effect doesn’t occur when moving in or out, of course; time bubbles, and similar things like stargates, know the difference between “in the process of moving completely in or out” and “trying to get clever by sticking part of your body in or out”, and adjust the laws of physics accordingly.
November 17th, 2011 at 9:30 am
William… I believe we, the viewers, know this is “our” universe that has been altered by the events of last season, but from the perspective of the characters, including perhaps Peter, it makes sense to believe Peter is from a third alternate universe… why not? Within their framework, it’s much more believable than “unknown beings with mysterious motives and powers edited this universe”. Alternate realities are an established fact to Olivia, Walter, etc… Observers are not.
(Then again, if alternate universes occur at divergent points, then this IS a third universe (or a second pair of universes, as it were). Or is it? We have the original, F1 and F2, moving forward in time. At the point of the end of last season, an event occurred in both F1 and F2, namely, Peter’s use of the machine, that altered the past of each universe and, as such, the future (the current season of Fringe) as well. There’s no “September, 2011″ in F1 or F2; because of the events of last season, both of those universes stopped existing; they don’t have a post-machine existence. Since universe travel in Fringe seems to be time-locked — if it March 1, 2010 here, you can only travel to March 1, 2010 somewhere else — then there’s no original F1 or F2 that can be found anymore. BUT… if you could use the time bubble to travel back prior to the events of last season, you might be able to go from F1.1/F1.2 to F1/F2 at those points… I have a headache now…
November 17th, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Official Comment
Wrong universe, or wrong Peter?
November 17th, 2011 at 6:09 pm
Aside from all the problems mentioned, what a stupid way to deal with traffic in the tunnel. It seems that agent Lee and Co. ran to the middle of the tunnel while the authorities blocked the exit, and proceeded to tell everyone to abandon their cars and run away. Why not just stop cars from entering the tunnel? Why did is require Lee’s presence? This universe has radios, right?
Why was the final time bubble so far below grade/sea level, when all the others were presumably on the same plane as the device causing them. If the plane of the golden spiral were canted to create the tunnel bubble, only a few events would be would be detected in a rough line. All other bubbles would either be in the air, or below grade.
November 18th, 2011 at 5:57 pm
Scott, I ask myself that every morning.
December 30th, 2011 at 7:15 pm
[...] episode is debunked at Polite Dissent and Cordial Deconstruction, and you can read more about it at Fox, IMDb and the A.V. [...]
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