User Reviews

I'm sorry...was that a spoiler?

Random person reading review: "The fruit dies?!"

When a young woman is tossed out of a van in the middle of an empty street by folks in Hazmat suits...you know it can't be good. She is dazed, confused and apparently can't remember a whole lot about how she wound up in this predicament. So she naturally stumbles her way into a nearby diner. Turns out this is a pretty nice diner, with friendly staff (a guy approaches her and not only asks what she wants, but also makes the suggestion she try their "wicked good vegetable soup"). He also gets the cook to call someone named Marty, as he thinks this woman looks like she could use some help. To top off all that niceness, he also gives her some "crackers". It's too bad the way things wind up at the end of this scene - had things gone differently...perhaps these two crazy kids might have gotten to know one another better and hooked up?

Girl: "Instead of hooking up, I get my head exploded! Goddammit! Couldn't my head have exploded AFTER we hooked up? Least then I could've gotten one last shag!"

So anyway, the girl (Emily) is enjoying her vegetable soup (well...she's taking tiny sips, but I imagine she's enjoying its "wicked goodness"), but then Marty (a cop) has to come in and wreck everything. Oh, sure, he starts off being friendly enough, asking seemingly harmless (if slightly intrusive) questions, but then he starts pushing too far and gets her agitated/angry. We manage to learn that some people did things to her/hurt her, and that red (as well as blue) medicines were involved (I doubt they were in pill form and this is her reaction to having been in the Matrix). Sure enough, Marty manages to tick her off enough that he ends up having to cuff her. Stupid cop. Should have left her alone.

And here's were everything goes to hell (thanks a LOT, Marty!). The nice guy who first talked to Emily suddenly appears to be in agonising pain and excreting blood from his eyes...then so does everyone else (including Marty - serves you right, for being too pushy!). It's a rather gross visual - all this nastiness, blood flowing everywhere, people screaming, etc...but not half as bad as when Emily herself starts having the exact same reaction. She manages to out-do the diner patrons, though, by backing up to the front glass door to the diner and then *KA-BOOM*! Suddenly her head explodes in a shower of blood and brain matter all over the glass (poor girl, didn't even get to finish her wicked good vegetable soup). I have to say, this has got to be THE most memorable - and well-done - opening to an episode of Fringe (thus far) since the 'Pilot'.

They built the tension perfectly in this scene. You knew something bad was eventually going to go down...but not THIS bad. This was...something else. Definitely unexpected. The underlining sense of something nasty building, then the ensuing chaos, finally paying off with more gore than I ever expected to see on this show (even after the 'Pilot') - I don't know how they can outdo this (as far as teasers go). Of course, going from that blood-splattered glass into Fringe creepy theme music just adds to the eeriness that was already present.

While the teaser is definitely the most memorable part of the episode, the rest of it is good too. I liked Peter's reaction to seeing the body of the girl without a head, Walter shoving the meat thermometer into dead Marty's ear (you just keep paying, and paying, dead Marty) and then, in the scene where they're working on Emily's headless body, we see what's left: everything from her chin down is still intact (though, of course, bloody)...but everything above the chin? Gone. And they do a really good job of showing off that fact. The other standout scene of this episode has got to be near the end, when they find another woman who's been taken, impending head explosion counting down. As Olivia supplies the woman with the cure she needs, the woman (Claire) is struggling not to lose her head - literally. Her pain is so overwhelming and you do actually think for a moment she's not going to shove the needle in her neck in time (and that Olivia's going to get a real close-up firsthand experience of what it's like to see someone's head explode). Again, they really know how to build the tension in this show, like with the teaser. Thankfully, Claire makes it (it's just a shame that Mr. Papaya didn't in Walter's earlier "goo-ification" experiment). I'm sure Claire's grateful that there'll be no more exploding hairless rats underneath her bedsheets too.

In amongst this collection of memorable scenes is a pretty good/well-told story. Olivia and her stepfather plot line is pretty creepy (and, I think, excused her snappiness earlier in the episode), I thought Anna Torv did a really good job in that scene (as well as the rest of the episode). I liked seeing her go undercover/play someone else, as well as her and Peter's interactions (the scene where they crash a wake, their last scene together, etc) and this episode didn't feel anticlimactic. For that reason alone, it beats the last few episodes that came before it.

The Cure kicks off outside of a typical diner, a van pulls up and two men in suits drop off a female onto the street. She gets up and walks into the diner where she meets a few of the people, that including a cop. She starts to act weird and then she unleashes some kind of disease throughout the diner and making everyone else infected. And of course, dead. The Fringe team investigates and discovers that there is radiation in the now quarantined diner. They investigate and find the source of the problem, a female named Emily Kramer, who hasn't been seen in two weeks total. Testing goes well and discoveries are made regarding Emily, but at the same time someone else has gone missing, Claire Williams, who also has the same disease as Emily. She has been taken by Dr. David Esterbrook, whose team is doing these kind of experiments. Esterbrook has his motivations and they are related to him being the "traitor" of the system. In the meantime Peter makes an interesting connection between this event and the others; could these all be some sort of pattern? As if someone is preparing the world for something bigger. Olivia also is having disputes with Broyles.

I really liked this episode and have to say it's one of the very best of this season. It has a nice edge to it and gives more depth to Olivia's personality and her past and extends Peter and Olivia's relationship. This episode is mostly centered on Olivia and makes her more of a stronger character than before. We now know her reasons for being strict and very objective and sometimes subjective with her work; in short she doesn't want anyone to loose anyone. And in regards to her past, it wasn't happy, she and her step father had serious issues to the point of which Olivia actually pulled out a weapon and used it on him twice, he lived and still gives her birthday cards to remind her that he's still out there and still alive.

This was a very well written episode, it was also more thought provoking than some of the recent episodes this season. Hope there are more like this in the future.

Emily Kramer (Maria Dizzia) is dumped out in the middle of the street by Hepa-Suited guys in white. She finds her way into a small Café and is given Soup. A congenial Police Officer (William Hill from Law and Order) tries to befriend her, but she reacts and he has to cuff her, which pisses her off even more. So she turns the Café into the equivalent of the inside of a Microwave Oven and Nukes all of the people inside- but the process leaves her with an unimaginable headache!

Walter and Peter discover she had been diagnosed with a fatal, un-treatable disease that somehow is in remission, due to tiny radioactive particles in the blood. Dr Sanjay Patel (Alok Tewari) had been hired privately to make a designer cure, and he had succeeded so well that a Drug Company decided to abuse the situation. And so we get to see another of those cute little wrinkly mice get exploded.

Olivia tracks down another woman with the same disease, who was friends with Emily, although her husband denies it. The woman is in a secret Lab being injected...

"This Red medicine will cure your disease - This Blue medicine will make you... Special" and here we again hear the word "Special" which has been a Tenet of Fringe from the beginning.

This ep Also introduces the relationship between Olivia and her Step-Father.

Plot is basically about some bio-company doing experiments on people who already have a fatal disease, except that because of the nature of this disease they can give them some neat drug that will essentially turn them into a human weapon...or something like that. But the problem so far is that the subjects tend to emit radiation which makes for very messy explosions of people, kind of like a microwave oven!

For some reason only Walter Bishop comes up with a cure for this condition, not the scientists tasked with the experiments. Only problem is that the needle with the Cure has to be injected in the jugular vein and as we all know that is sure easy to do!

Episode held together fairly well until the patient having essentially a microwave seizure is given a hypodermic needle with said Cure in it and is told to inject herself! Yeah, good chance that will work out just fine...but of course it does!

Aaaaargggghhhhh...few more episodes to go to see if it gets better!

A corrupt pharmaceutical company using humans suffering from a disease as guinea pigs and they turn them into radioactive bombs. Walter finds the antidote and Olivia helps the woman the last second and arrests the corrupt man in charge of the company. (Walter's son received help from the woman from Massive Dynamics. Olivia shot his father in the past and he sends him cards on her birthday to remind her of himself.