Fringe Episode 6 – Earthling
Two whole weeks without my Fringe TV show and I was afraid I would not be able to handle it, but, thankfully, this week’s Fringe episode started out with one of the best, most shocking opening sequences I have ever seen on a sci-fi show. While there has been no mention lately of alternate universes or meetings with Nina Sharp, the latest episodes have focused on good old-fashioned detective work, even though the problems they were solving were very weird. This is Fringe Season 2 after all.
So, with that said, imagine your husband setting up the perfect anniversary surprise for you. You come home so happy to see that he’s not really on a flight out of town, but instead has set up a wonderful greeting for you at the door – beautiful flowers and the perfect card. You walk in, calling his name, telling him how he has really surprised you this time. That’s how this week’s Fringe episode starts, with a happily surprised woman’s husband sitting on the couch as she walks in, and as she touches him, he crumbles into a pile of dust. It was an awesome special effect as his head tilted off his body and crashed into an ashy pile. Instead of being all happy to begin your anniversary with the one you love, you end up screaming your head off.
FBI Lead Agent, Philip Broyles, gets a phone call because bodies dissolving into ash are definitely a job for the Fringe team. No sign of a struggle, no sign of forced entry. The body basically has to be vacuumed up to be taken back to the lab. Broyles asks specific questions about the dead man: Is he a doctor? No. Does he work in a medical environment? No. Broyles tells Fringe team member Olivia about a time when he saw this same type of death and shares the information he stored on previous, similar victims from four years ago. The 5 victims in question had all visited the same hospital at the time. Broyles had been contacted by the killer at that time, someone who seemed to want to turn himself in, but only if the police could decipher the meaning of a special formula he’d sent them. No one was able to identify the mystery formula and the previous deaths remained unsolved.
The Fringe team discovers that latest victim visited his mother in a medical treatment facility – just like the victims from four years before. Broyles and Olivia give the formula to mad scientist Walter to see what he can learn.
We next see a nurse walking the halls of the hospital with a ghost-like shadowy figure following her. Fringe members Olivia and Broyles show up at the hospital looking for a link to the killings from four years ago. Although Walter is examining the mystery formula in his lab with his son Peter, they can’t find a link between the employees at this hospital and the hospital from four years ago. We see the shadow figure visit someone in the hospital that Olivia and Broyles are visiting and then poof! another body is made of dust. As luck would have it, just as Olivia and Broyles find the new dust pile, they discover the name of the murderer from 4 years ago; Thomas Koslov. Not only did he work in the hospital where the previous deaths occurred four years ago, but he also works at the hospital they’re currently visiting. They discover that Thomas Koslov is an alias and that his records are total fakes, but they’re pretty sure he’s of Russian origin. The chase is on.
Based on the fingerprints they recover from Koslov’s apartment they discover that he’s being investigated by the Russians, the CIA, and a number of other agencies. The “big boy” agencies take the case from Broyles and as you can imagine, he’s not too happy about this because he’s emotionally vested in this case. It’s pretty obvious that he’s not going to stop investigating. Contacting Olivia, he tells her not to write anything down about their findings.
What Olivia discovers is that the Russians may have their own Fringe Team (I wonder if they have their own Fringe TV show too?) and the mysterious shadow figure may be a part of that technology. Fortunately, Broyles still has some friends in DC who know he’s decided to stay on the case. These friends send him a top secret document which provides additional information about Thomas Koslov. It turns out Thomas abducted his own brother (a Russian cosmonaut) from a hospital. His brother had been held there because of an unknown encounter in space which left him in a coma.
Peter and Walter hypothesize that the shadow figure passes through people to absorb their radiation and it dissolves them in the process, turning them into ash. All the victims had been having some kind of x-ray or radiation treatment, hence their attractiveness to the shadow figure. Walter has finally figured out what is going on by working on the formula and realizes that the shadow figure is something the cosmonaut brought back from one of his spacewalks. Not such good news though, because now he knows that the shadow can never be separated from the cosmonaut.
Thomas in the meantime has taken his brother from the hospital to a cheap motel where he has rigged some contraption trying to kept the shadow inside his brother. Turns out Thomas Koslov isn’t such a bad guy, he calls Broyles hoping to find new information about the formula and Walter tells them that the entity inside the cosmonaut can never be separated. Broyles tells Thomas he can help him but he must see his brother in order to be able to help him. Just as they begin to think Thomas is going to turn himself in, he turns into dust himself. Bummer, he’s the only guy who can handle his brother. The trace on the phone leads them to Thomas’ ash body and his brother is still there in a coma. Walter puts on a bulletproof jacket and checks the body of his brother, trying to find a way to contain the shadow before it is too late but, I think it is too late already because the shadow is on the loose and the next thing you hear is a little girl scream. Broyles shoots the ‘coma’ brother in the head thinking since the shadow and the brother were connected that killing the brother would kill both. It worked because the little girl is saved and the shadow disappears. Agent Phillip Bryoles saves the day.
Olivia asks Broyles why this case was so important to him. He tells he that this was the case that ended his marriage, due to his obsession. Broyles pays a visit to his ex-wife’s house when the case is solved to let her know that he finally closed the case. But, as usual, we all know that nothing is ever as it seems on the Fringe TV series. Phillip leaves his ex-wife’s house a little sad, no real resolution, only to find a strange man waiting for him in the middle of the street. It is the CIA, telling him next time he is warned off a case, he better cease and desist. I got the impression from their discussion that the cosmonaut started breathing again later and they ended up just shooting him back into space. Sort of like the idea one hears of taking all our trash and shooting it into space. I suspect that – just like our space trash is going to affect us in some way in the future – so too will this shadow figure visit us again in some strange way….on a future Fringe TV show episode.
