This week on Fringe, Olivia and the FBI track a girl who can predict people’s deaths. This episode is sort of a throw back to the first season of Fringe where there was a disaster every week, and apart from some details about The Observers and Olivia’s seemingly apparent death, this episode is a fairly solid stand-alone.
Power Girl
A teenage girl draws a picture of a man’s death and gives him the drawing moments before he is killed in the exact manner she depicted. Afterwords at the scene, Lincoln calls Olivia to tell her what happened. Lincoln gets a photo of the girl from a bank security camera and begins to track her down.
On a bus, the girl has another vision. She runs after the subject of her vision to give him the drawing of his death, but loses him. Lincoln and Olivia are going door to door looking for the girl and end up at her house. The girl’s parents pretend not to know her, but on the way out of the building, Lincoln and Olivia run into the girl, Emily.
They begin questioning her, but her father interjects claiming that people from Massive Dynamic are always trying to get to Emily.
Origin Story
Olivia visits Nina Sharp at Massive Dynamic, who claims that they approached Emily and her father about cataloging her ability, and Olivia questions Nina’s ethics in experimenting on children.
Emily calls Olivia, asking to meet her, and gives her most recent drawing in which a group of people are dead. Emily ends up at Walter’s lab telling the group about when her ability first started. Walter theorizes that Emily’s brain is tuning in to the vibrations of the traumatic events echoing back from the future.
Astrid and Peter manage to identify the man in the drawing, Albert Duncan. Peter believes Walter can hypnotize Emily into recalling the events of her vision in detail. Under hypnosis, Emily sees Duncan at an exploding courthouse.
Inevitable Demise
The FBI arrives at the courthouse and, figuring that Duncan couldn’t be carrying the amount of explosives needed to blow up the building, head to the parking garage below the courthouse in search of the bomb. The FBI begins evacuating the building wile Duncan looks for the judge he intends to kill.
Peter manages to jam Duncan’s radio frequency, but when Olivia and the FBI approach him, Duncan pulls out a hand-operated trigger. Olivia talks Duncan out of detonating the bomb and calls Emily’s father to let her know they stopped the explosion, but when he goes to Emily’s room to tell her, she’s gone. Olivia thinks that Emily has gone to the park, and finds her sitting on a bench with a drawing of herself dying in that spot of a stroke.
After Emily’s death, back at the lab, Peter sees a picture of the Observer and explains to Olivia who the are and that they experience time differently than normal people. Peter tells Olivia that the Observers don’t predict the future, they’ve already experienced it, confirming what Olivia has feared, that she really is going to die.
Though not the best episode this season (c’mon, can anything top Peter’s return), it was nice to see the show go back to it’s villain-of-the-week format, even if it’s just to fill episodes between big moments. I am getting rather curious as to how the whole Olivia dying thing is going to play out. Will they actually kill her and switch the show’s focus back to the original timeline, or something else entirely? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Best Quotes from the Episode
Samuel Alarcon
Contributing Writer
(Image courtesy of FOX)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
