“We have to get out of this town.” -Peter Bishop
Hey Fringe, your influences are showing. It has been no secret that Fringe draws from a long list of sources, Lost and The X-Files being the two primary parents. The open, with its magnetic disturbance, dying cars and plane crash, makes it pretty clear whose territory we are crossing into. Stephen King, with his long list of stories involving alternate universes, alternate twins and creepy New England towns, seems a very likely fount as well. Tonight’s episode wears its history like a badge of honor, and for a mash-up, the results are surprisingly good.
A town you can’t leave isn’t a new idea in science fiction (King just explored it two years ago in Under the Dome), but like many well-worn ideas, it can still pack a punch if done well. Fringe does it well.
This episode could easily have existed in the first season as a stand-alone with no ties to the larger story, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling. It is the ways it connects to the larger story and advances it that make it as good as it is.
The phenomenon at the start of the show is determined to be magnetic in nature, so the team scatters to look for clues. This leaves Walter open to look for pie. With Peter and Olivia in tow, they head to the nearest town, which is Westfield, population 584. The town seems friendly enough until the counterman at the diner tries to kill Walter with a butcher knife. The really creepy part is that the counterman also has two irises in each eye and doesn’t seem to know where he is half the time.
After finding a small group of survivors holed up at the high school, including a “sick” woman with an extra row of teeth, Walter surmises that the problem is that the two Westfields (prime and alternate) have somehow merged. And the people are merging as well. The survivors are the people whose doubles weren’t in the other Westfield when the merge happened. I’m not entirely convinced that double-DNA equals double-features, but it works visually so I’m going along with it.
This is all very interesting in a 1980s John Carpenter sort of way, but the real draw is twofold. One, the merge was caused by David Robert Jones (unseen, but it’s amazing what just dropping his name does for the stakes). Two, Olivia may be one of the people being merged. Also very John Carpenter is the blood test that Walter devises to determine who is a merger and who isn’t (a la The Thing). It turns out that Olivia’s lightheadedness and confusion aren’t being caused by the merge. So what is causing it? We’ll get to that in a minute.