- The Fringe team investigate a series of mysterious deaths caused by cancer that seems to have been transmitted by touch. Olivia realizes the perpetrator is after the kids who were part of the Coretexiphan trials.
- A healthy thirty year-old lawyer has a meeting with a man that claims that he is ill and after he touches her hand, she has cancerous blisters in her body and dies. The Fringe Division is assigned to investigate the mysterious case. Meanwhile Olivia meets Walter and tells that she will disclose the truth to Peter. When there is another similar case, they track the victims and soon Olivia realizes that the victims have been submitted to the Coretexiphan experiment. Who might be the killer?—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- When a perfectly healthy woman is found dead from a disease she never had, the Fringe team investigates the origin of this inexplicably fatal condition before it claims more innocent victims. Meanwhile, Olivia struggles to keep Walter's secret from Peter, and her loyalty to Peter is tested as time goes on.—Fox Publicity
- Providence, Rhode Island
A clearly ill man meets with a woman over coffee. They knew each other when they were kids. He thinks maybe that's when he was exposed. He wants to find people they went to school with, to maybe find out if they're sick. She remembers one name: Lloyd Becker. He puts his hand on her arm and thanks her.
She's driving back to the office when she notices a welt on her wrist. Soon, it's a bubbling growth and it's spreading up her neck. She's wracked with pain and doubles over in her car. Her face is covered with blisters in seconds.
Olivia (Anna Torv) lies in bed at 5 a.m. She gets up and goes to talk to Sam Weiss, her crossing over coach at the bowling alley.
She remembers him saying she'd "experience things" after her accident. She has. He thinks she's not sleeping because she thinks she made a bad decision. She says she did, she agreed to keep a secret.
Her phone rings.
Weiss tells her she's a good person and she must have had a reason for agreeing to keep the secret.
Providence City Morgue The Bishops arrive and Walter (John Noble) greets Olivia awkwardly. Broyles (Lance Reddick) tells them the woman was dead by the time paramedics got there. Walter looks the victim over, asking Peter (Joshua Jackson) to get some pus.
Walter thinks her burns look like malignant tumors. He uses a black light to look for the more advanced cells near the point of origin. Her wrist glows hot pink in the shape of a hand.
He wants to get a finger print from her bubbly skin. He's suggesting someone touched her and gave her cancer.
Harvard In the lab, Walter and Astrid (Jasika Nicole) prepare to cut off the woman's arm to remove skin. They want to try and get the fingerprint.
Olivia and Peter talk to the victim, Miranda's, coworkers. She did class action lawsuits and was prepping one against a pharmaceutical company.
On her calender they find the name Neil Wilson, the man who touched her.
Peter thinks spontaneous fatal tumor growth isn't exactly a subtle way to kill someone if the drug company was trying to take her out. Peter invites Olivia in for pizza but she begs off.
We see her awake in bed at 5 a.m.
Early the next day, she comes in to the lab. Astrid reports Neil's number was for a now-deactivated disposable cell phone. Olivia asks to talk to Walter alone and tells him she wants to tell Peter the secret, Walter kidnapped him from the other side.
Walter's worried about ruining his relationship with Peter. He thinks Peter will never forgive him. But Olivia says she must. He begs her for time to prepare. As Peter walks in, she assents.
Olivia learns about the cafe where Miranda met with Neil. She and Peter hit the road.
In Providence, the barista remembers her with some guy who looked sick.
Olivia says contagious cancer wouldn't be the strangest thing they've seen - though it'd be close.
"Neil," looking totally healthy, shops at a grocery store, touching produce and food. Suddenly he feels ill. He runs outside and throws up.
Back at his place, he calls Lloyd Becker, the name of his classmate Miranda remembered. But it's the wrong one. He keeps calling.
Back at the lab, Walter works on Miranda's sloughed off skin. Olivia reports back about Miranda meeting with a cancer-stricken man.
He tells her about the Chinese "touch of death," a theory about being able to kill with a touch. Instead, he thinks they're looking at something like Tantric sex, which is focused on an exchange of energy, as he describes it. He thinks the man traded his cancer for her health.
A very sick looking "Neil" knocks on Lloyd Becker's door, introducing himself as Alex Taylor. The Cancer Man shakes Lloyd's hand.
Later, the Fringies are on site looking at Lloyd's bubbling corpse, just like Miranda's. Walter finds the touch origin on his hand. Olivia is puzzled over what connects the victims.
Peter rides back to the lab with Olivia. He thinks he knows why she's been so weird around him lately and relates it back to the trip to Jacksonville, when they almost kissed. He says he doesn't want to do anything to jeopardize the "odd little family unit" they've got going with Walter. She doesn't either.
At the lab, Astrid has found five more people around the country who died similar deaths. Olivia recognizes a victim's name, and guesses his middle name. But she's not sure how she knows him. Later that night, back at her place, Olivia goes over the victim's files with a bottle of Scotch. It's past midnight and there's a knock at her door. She grabs her gun, but it's her bowling lane guru. He's brought Clue.
They're playing later. He notices she's still living out of boxes and wears bland colors like a uniform, the soldier she is.
He tells her he's older than he looks and taller than he appears. He's joking, but it triggers something for her. She pulls out a list labeled "Height Chart Names."
She goes to Peter's in the middle of the night and tells him the list is from a wall she saw in Jacksonville and all the insta-cancer victims are on it, Cortexaphan kids like her.
They go into the kitchen where Walter is making taffy -- and baking Miranda's skin on a pizza tray in the oven to dry out the skin enough to get a print.
He's upset to learn about the victims' link. He doesn't know why anyone would want to kill them, but he knows why they'd be susceptible. Cortexaphan was designed to allow children to access untapped energies.
Walter says there was no list of the kids kept. Nina (Blair Brown) denied having it before, but Olivia doesn't believe her.
Massive Dynamic Olivia visits with Nina, telling her she's always been a little "foggy" about her motives. She points out Nina has kept things from her in the past -- and she knows about Peter. She says she's going to tell Peter, but Nina thinks she won't because Olivia's not prepared to lose him.
Nina thinks Olivia came there to have her talk her out of telling Peter who he is.
A woman works on a puzzle when there's a knock at her door. It's Cancer Man. He uses a different name to introduce himself. He says he went to school with her son, but she says Nick's her nephew. She invites him in.
At the lab, Walter's skin pizza is ready. Olivia returns and says things were OK with Nina.
Walter scans the skin pizza. They get a print. But there's no match in the database.
Back with Cancer Man, the woman tells him her nephew moved to Brooklyn several years ago, but she doesn't know how to reach him. The woman mentions a woman was looking for Nick six months ago. He asks if she remembers the woman's name.
Back at home, Olivia looks at all the files and wonders what she's missing. She looks at the height chart. She calls Broyles and tells him she thinks it's James Heath, another Cortexaphan subject and brother to the first victim.
She gives Broyles the name of the hospital where she died and leaves to head there.
But Cancer Man is waiting in her hallway.
He uses yet another alias as he introduces himself from eight or ten feet away. She tries to remain calm as he walks towards her with bare hands. He says he just wants to talk. She backs up and invites him in. He sees her badge as she turns to open her door.
He grabs for her and she makes it inside but isn't able to get the door closed. He paws around for her and her gun is knocked out of her hand as she tries to avoid his grasp. She is knocked flat on her back but grabs a nearby floor lamp and swings it at him to keep him away. He's knocked over away from her. She scrambles for the phone and calls Peter, managing to tell him the man's in her house.
He comes after her and they scramble around, crashing through furniture. She stays a step ahead of him and finally knocks him down, wielding a large candlestick she tells him to stay down. He sees her files, including a picture of him as a child.
He tells her he didn't want any of this to happen. A man visited him in the hospital and told him he'd been experimented on as a child and could fight the cancer. But he didn't get better, he got worse. His sister would hold his hand for hours when the pain got bad until one day it just happened. She died, but he got better.
He wanted to find the man from Jacksonville but found another test subject instead and accidentally killed him. That's how he realized how it worked. He's crying as he tells Olivia if the man hadn't come to see him he would have died the way he was supposed to and they'd all still be alive.
Peter and the police arrive.
Later, Cancer Man is wheeled away. Peter asks Olivia why she didn't call Broyles. She says Peter's on her speed dial. She looks at him and seems about to tell him the secret. Instead, she thanks him for coming.
At a hospital, Broyles and Nina look on at Cancer Man, now in an induced coma. Broyles says there are still a dozen Jacksonville kids and 30 from Wooster who are unaccounted for but might have abilities. Nina thinks they have to find them.
Olivia drops by the Bishops to talk to Walter. She tells him he might be right and some truths can do more harm than good. She doesn't want to open Pandora's box. She won't tell Peter.
But he says he's done enough damage and it's time to put things right. "I have to tell him who he really is," Walter says.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content