So, two episodes left of Season 1. I have used some of a work Amazon gift card to purchase Season 2 on Prime, because I can download the episodes and don't have to sit through the ads. Also ITVX has a nasty habit of losing your place in the episode.
Anyway, let's head back to Boston in 2009 and this show actually has some bangs.
In this one, a woman gets on the bus in New York City, paying $2 fare (about £1.50 at that time) and then gets rather agitated. She's feeling rather hot under the collar and not in a good way. She gets the driver to stop the bus, gets onto the street... and then spontaneously combusts, followed by blowing up.
It's one for Olivia Dunham and the Fringe Division of the FBI. Yet something weird is going one, because Olivia sees dead people... when there's just one dead person. Is she going crazy?
This episode returns to the William Bell/ZFT arc - with a handy brief recap at the start, although I was a bit worried we were going to get a clip show. Nina Bishop proves that you should never trust a woman called Nina on a FOX show, we learn that Harris is very dodgy indeed and we get more revelations over the Cortexiphan experiments that Olivia was part of as a kid in Jacksonville, Florida. Incidentally, also the hometown of Jason from The Good Place. I believe it's considered outlandish an outlandish place even by the standards of Florida.
I only have four pages of notes here, which suggests this is an episode where not a lot happens, although some interesting stuff occurs, like Olivia suddenly shifting to a parallel universe and using that for intelligence gathering about the case in hers.
It's certainly well-done (no pun intended), but one lowlight is the scanning of temporarily melted glass that's been spoken around to obtain an audio recording that is good enough to extract a phone number from the dial tones heard. Seriously, I don't think glass works like that!
The climax sees Olivia, after a shootout, having to talk another woman out of spontaneously going boom... and then Harris himself goes boom. Somehow, this stops the first woman from going boom instead of making her more panicky. Perhaps this could have done with a further script pass.
The ending has two dramatic cliff-hangers - Walter is collected from his lab by a mysterious bald stranger we've seen before and Nina Bishop is shot in the chest by two masked gunmen. Well, they're probably men.
Where's Walter? Is Nina alive? What more will we learn in the finale? Watch this space.
Conclusion
A good episode, but let down rather badly by the glass bit that blows through the suspension of disbelief like a hot knife through tracing paper.
7/10
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