“We’re gonna be okay.” -Nina Sharpe
Watching Fringe this season is like doing the cha-cha. For every step forward there’s a step back, you never know when things are going to go sideways, and you’re always struggling to keep things straight.
“A Better Human Being” is a microcosm of the season as a whole. What’s good is very good, but there are just enough missteps to keep it from making the jump from “very good” to “excellent.”
Let’s start with the good. Anna Torv. Two words are all I need. I can’t imagine what direction she was given as to how she should portray this timeline’s Olivia with original timeline Olivia’s memories, but somehow I never doubted her for a second. It would have been easy to simply portray her as Olivia Prime, but thankfully Torv decided to go deeper than that because despite their similarities, they really aren’t the same person. This Olivia was raised by Nina and actually had a maternal figure in her life. As a result, she’s warmer and more trusting. That said, I think Olivia Prime actually values her relationships more since more time and effort is involved to develop them. The two of them in one mind is a somewhat idealized version of Olivia who is not only capable of deep caring, but who is also possessed of a placid optimism that is completely un-Olivialike. As the sum of two Olivias, however, it makes not only logical sense, but emotional sense and Torv plays it so well that by the end it’s a little depressing to imagine going back to one of the old versions of Olivia and I suspect that’s the point.
Peter’s reaction to the mixed Olivia isn’t handled quite as well. He is reticent at first, followed by concerned. It takes until the end of the episode before he finally comes around to soul-celebrating joy which is a little late in my opinion. Is this case, it may make logical sense, but it doesn’t hold up emotionally. There has been a certain “zen” to Peter since his return. I’ve always read it as a combination of joy at being back in the world, happiness to see the people he loves (even if they aren’t quite as he remembers them), and a confidence (based on past events) that everything will be alright because almost anything is quite literally possible in the Fringe universe.
Peter is a smart guy. He may not be quite on Walter’s level, but very close. I don’t think it strains credulity to suggest that it has to have occurred to him that he could end up in this timeline forever. His scenes with Olivia play as if he hasn’t thought about all the possible ways this could all play out which is a disservice to the character. Additionally, delaying his acceptance of Olivia as ‘his Olivia’ until the end of the episode simply so that you could immediately have her kidnapped is a disservice to the audience. So Peter’s primary goal is to defy the known laws of physics in order to get back to his true love but when she miraculously appears right in front of him, there’s not even a second of awe? Not a moment of teary amazement? I don’t buy it and placing it just before her abduction wreaks of blatant manipulation. There’s a lesson here: never let your plot structure get in the way of character development. As it is, we get the character moments that we want, but the placement robs us of some of its impact.
The plot this week revolves around a schizophrenic patient in a mental hospital who shares a telepathic connection with three men who are on a murder spree. It turns out that all four men are related to each other, all having been delivered by the same fertility doctor who inseminated hundreds of his patients with his own sperm (plus some genetic toying) in an effort to produce a ‘better human’. It isn’t one of the better plots that the writers have come up with over the years. The obvious Nazi thematic reference aside, the same plot device has also been used on Law and Order: SVU. For a show that is supposed to be about cutting edge science, being compared to SVU is not a good sign.