This week’s Fringe Episode 3, “Fracture”, begins with a police officer getting a mysterious call as he sits in his cruiser. The caller tells him to intercept a man who will be in the train station wearing a black coat and carrying a briefcase. The policeman hurries to the train station and confronts the man who was described to him. As the policeman jerks the briefcase away from the man he starts to crystallize, explodes, and kills everyone around him.

The Fringe Team is asked to investigate this bizarre event since there’s no trace of a bomb or an explosive. At the crime scene Peter finds the exploded policeman’s badge and identifies him as an Officer Gillespie. Walter then finds what looks like a crystallized ear; they immediately link the ear to Officer Gillespie. Pretty quick detecting, not quite sure I would have made that connection quite so fast.

Back at the Fringe lab, Walter begins putting ‘crystal Gillespie’ together. He finds more than 47 needle marks between the officer’s toes which makes him think the police officer was injecting himself with some sort of substance – perhaps the same substance that made him into a human bomb.

When Peter and Olivia visit the policeman’s widow they discover that he was formerly stationed in Iraq. As they’re talking, Olivia gets flashes of her parallel universe visit and rushes to the bathroom. Hanging over the toilet and losing her lunch, she spies a loose tile under the sink (nothing holds this woman back from her job). Prying it open, she finds a black box with vials and a syringe. She confiscates it so Walter can investigate the vials back at the lab.

We then see a housewife, who was formerly a military officer, inject herself in the foot with a substance from the same mysterious vials. She then meets with a man she calls “the Colonel” who orders her to DC on a mission.

Olivia goes to Sam Weiss, the bowling alley owner, demanding information from him on her medical condition. You see Sam seems to know about her insomnia and correctly predicts that she’ll soon start having headaches. Sam doesn’t tell her too much but gives her menial tasks to do, like tying and untying her shoes, in the hope that it will help ward off some of her “fits.” He does reveal that she’s having these flashbacks because her memory is slowly returning.

Back at the Fringe lab Walter shares his suspicion that Officer Gillespie had been injecting himself with the mysterious serum for more than a year, given the amount in his cells. Then there is a great moment when the cow that Walter keeps in his lab ‘moos’ each time Peter bites into his cheeseburger. Walter tells Peter ‘to be discreet’ in front of the cow when eating meat. I like that cow, it’s a great touch.

The Fringe group gets their hands on Gillespie’s military file and Peter states that it contains four words that should never show up together in a sentence: “Classified Experimental Military Project”. Love it! Since the file talks about a project in Iraq called Tin Man Peter and Olivia head overseas to investigate. As you can imagine, this is a top priority investigation since it’s unknown how many people are walking around as human bombs.

While Olivia and Peter are in Iraq Walter conducts a test by injecting a watermelon with the serum, trying to determine how the liquid explosive is detonated. He discovers that radio waves that are broadcast at a certain frequency are the catalyst. The watermelon explodes in a manner that would do Peter Gallagher proud.

Next we see Peter and Olivia entering some kind of a hookah bar in Iraq. They approach a man with a scarred face and ask him about the Iraqi doctors who worked on the Tin Man project. The guy doesn’t want to help at first but then agrees and tells them to wait in the bar until he returns. When he comes back he takes them to a former doctor who tells them that several soldiers were exposed to an experimental neurotoxin that they tried to neutralize under Project Tin Man. Although only a few soldiers survived the treatment they discovered that it has an unintended byproduct – it builds up in the tissues and turns them into bombs. He gives them the names of the soldiers that survived and also tells him that the mysterious Colonel’s name is Raymond Gordon.

The Fringe group realizes that the next walking bomb is Dianne Burgess (the housewife we saw earlier) and that Colonel Raymond Gordon is detonating each soldier using an encrypted cell phone. They frantically try to locate her. We next see Diane Burgess entering the DC train station. She’s told (via her cell phone) to look for a man in a black trench coat with a briefcase. Sound familiar? As Diane approaches the man with the briefcase the FBI attempts to jam the cell phone signal. Unsuccessful, Peter sees Colonel Gordon and attempts to stop the signal by tackling him while Olivia smashes the transmitter with her cane. Fortunately, Diane Burgess is saved before she totally crystallizes. But what about the serum that’s already in her body?

Olivia goes back to the bowling alley and asks Sam why he knows so much about her condition. At the end of her rope, she puts a gun up to his head, demanding answers. Sam realizes that she walked over to him without the use of her cane. Again, being evasive, he tells her that the next time she comes in, he’ll have a bowling ball ready for her.

Fringe Episode 3 wraps up with Colonel Gordon telling Agent Broyles that “they are here, observing us, taking data, and making plans to attack us right under our noses.” That’s what’s in the briefcases and that’s why Gordon was trying to destroy them – he’s trying to save the world. The last shot is of someone opening up one of those briefcases. Its contents? Photos of Walter and Peter!

Until the next episode of The Fringe . . . .