Review of Fringe Episode 4 – Momentum Deferred

This week’s installment of the Fringe TV Show, Momentum Deferred, begins with some guards loading canisters into a truck at a cryonics lab. A mysterious car pulls up and a man gets out asking for directions, then starts shooting. And another Fringe episode mysteriously begins. One of the guards is ‘on the inside’ after everyone is shot and he still lives. Then, you realize that something is very wrong when a wounded guard lives long enough to shoot the bad ‘inside’ guard with enough bullets to kill an elephant and the bad guy just keeps getting up. He finally he goes down but then something strange is pouring from his neck – capturing your imagination as the opening credits start to roll.

As the week passed from the last Fringe episode, Walter has been busy dreaming up a way to get parallel universe memories out of Olivia’s head. He has asked Olivia to come by and suggests he can get to her repressed memories by having her eat flat worms. Yes, EAT THEM – or rather – drink them, since Astrid has made a nice ‘flatworm shake’ for her. In the past, Walter and William Bell (the missing scientist who’s in the parallel universe) had trained flatworms to move toward light. In the early experiment, light-trained flatworms were fed to untrained flatworms and guess what – the newly fed flatworms now responded to light even though they had never been trained. So, now Walter hypothesizes that if worms can transfer their memories, why shouldn’t Olivia be able to transfer her memories by drinking a flatworm shake – she is much like a worm right? Peter tries to stop all of this nonsense but Olivia gobbles the flatworm shake down before he has time to talk sense into anyone. It all becomes a moot point because, just as she gags the worms down, the Fringe Team gets a call to go to the murder scene of the security guards at the cryonics lab.

It turns out that this is the third robbery of a cryonics labs in a week and the single thing that has been stolen from all locations has been frozen heads. Naturally, the Fringe Team is called in because it is even weirder than that – one of the bodies (the inside guy) is bleeding some silver-looking substance and Walter cannot wait to get his hands on it. Charlie Francis, Olivia’s former friend who is now a shape shifter, slides in to see what Walter has found. You then see Charlie as he talks to the bad guy who shot all the guards at the cryonics lab. Fake Charlie ’shape-shifter’ looks bad, we’re told he’s dying, due to the fact that he cannot go home until the mission is finished. What mission – still trying to figure that out – but it apparently has something to do with shaving the back of the heads stolen from the cryonics lab as they look for something specific, and they don’t find it. is a step in the right direction even though it appears they have not stolen the right head.

The Fringe team focuses on the immediate problem of why shape shifting soldiers from another universe would want to steal frozen heads. The cryonics lab will not tell them who the stolen heads belong to so they brainstorm a way to get the information. The first idea is to use the machine left behind by the shape shifters in one of the previous Fringe episodes and they decide to let Peter have a crack at it. He realizes the device streams data in a constant mode. Walter has realized that the silver-leaking guard’s body at the lab is not the shape shifter anymore and that the shape shifter is still active and out there. This revelation brings us o a videotape of an experiment with a girl who could see strange glowing men from another universe. Walter sees this girl as someone who can help the Fringe Team find shape-shifters. Olivia naturally calls Charlie to tell him they have an idea of how to find the shape shifter and fake Charlie proceeds to drink some thermometer mercury to keep himself together.

Olivia takes the alien device to Nina at Massive Dynamics and tells her that they believe the streaming data contains the information about the people that the shape shifters copy. Perhaps they can use this to find out what person the shape shifter has copied. Needless to say Nina’s scientists have already theorized this and they think the shape shifter must be trapped here since he lost his alien device. Nina’s nerd scientist attempts to hit on Olivia by giving her access to the device’s data from every possible media platform – server, PC, cell phone – in real-time. How romantic.

Peter and Walter pay a visit to the girl (Rebecca) from the LSD experiments of years before. Walter expected her to be angry, but she welcomes them into her home. Over time, she came to realize that she was seeing people that did not belong in this universe. She considers what Walter has done for her a great gift by opening up her mind. She tells Peter she still has visions of the shape shifters even now and the Fringe Team hopes she can identify the shape shifters by going through the experiment again. She readily offers herself to more hallucinogenic drugs. What a surprise! All the psychedelics you want for free under a “doctors” care. There might be a line at the door for the next round of experiments.

Olivia gives Astrid a secure website address from Massive Dynamics to log in to so she can monitor the progress of decoding the alien device. Astrid logs in to it but she is also monitoring the experiment with the psychedelics as Rebecca begins her “trip”. I especially like it when she starts saying woooooooo. Walter talks her through the trip as Peter helps by ringing a bell nearby. This produces an unexpected consequence of Olivia immediately passing out with the bell tone. She sees William Bell telling her he is so happy to se her after all of these years. Bell tells her that this reunion is something he has been trying to do for a long time but people have been trying to stop it.

In the parallel universe, he tells her how she used to call him William as a little girl and offers her tea. He explains her disorientation from the ‘time slips’ which are due to sliding across universes, commenting that she is lucky to have the talent which enables to her to cross dimensions. She does not feel lucky at all – in fact, she is angry at what they did to her as a child. She lets Bell know that Walter has told her about how they experimented on her and other children and the damage that they caused. He says it is collateral damage from the “search for knowledge” – how convenient – arrogant scientists who always think they know what’s best for everyone. And, he finally he tells her what is truly going on – he created Olivia to be a guardian to protect the gate between universes because a war is coming. About hybrids that Bell’s universe has created which can cross safely into our universe. Olivia lets him know that she will never trust him, she believes it his fault the this cross-universe war is starting and he basically says…”So what? You have to trust me because only I know what is going on.”

William Bell says a storm is coming and Olivia must find the shape shifters who are in our universe. They are looking for the one person who can open the door between the universes. Olivia was especially prepared to fight this battle, William Bell says she was always the strongest. He shows her a special symbol that will be found on the leader of the shape shifters head (now we know why they were shaving heads!) and Olivia must remember a phrase to tell to Peter after she goes back to our universe. He then informs her that the changes he made by taking her out of her universe must be paid back – hence the name of this Fringe Episode – Momentum Deferred – because she was pulled from a moving car and she had to live through the pain of the car wreck when she returned. Another excellent line – the Fringe TV Series is full of them – Physics is a bitch. I love it! Olivia is pulled back into our universe from this latest passing-out episode remembering the car wreck and yelling out that she has to speak to Nina Sharpe.

Olivia contacts Nina by phone as she races to Massive Dynamic to give her the message from William Bell. Walter’s experiment is over but he still want to escort Rebecca home. Peter gets a strange look from Rebecca (Fringe spoiler – remember, she spots people from the parallel universe) but she does not explain it. Fake Charlie shows up at the lab and sees that the information from his device is being transformed into a face, you see it’s soon to be his face. At the same time, Olivia is asking Nina about Bell’s symbol. Nina claims no knowledge of it. Olivia also mentions Bell’s statement about the impending storm. Nina quickly recognizes this phrase as something Bell used to speak about when discussing the idea of universes colliding and the consequences of that happening. The last great storm as he put it. Just as she makes this revelation to Nina, Olivia gets a message from Fake Charlie telling her that Nina is the shape shifter. Charlie is waiting outside for her but as they start to discuss his plan to capture Nina, she gets another message from Astrid showing her that Charlie is the shape shifter. The next scene is Charlie throwing Olivia into a wall and basically kicking the crap out of her. She pulls her gun but Charlie overpowers her. A stranger tries to help her and gets shot got for his trouble, but it gives Olivia a chance to shoot Charlie the shape shifter, and shoot him, and shoot him. He finally goes down.

There is a little bit of happiness in the episode when we see Rebecca and Walter starting to fall for each other but he leaves and its back to reality. Or the reality of the Fringe TV Show anyway. For Olivia, shooting the shape shifter was like shooting her good friend, she is guilt-ridden. Broyles tries to alleviate some of her guilt, she is so angry that the shape shifters are destroying everything for no understandable reason. Broyles tells her that the last cryonic lab was hit fifteen minutes before the Fringe Team got there and now the bad guys have the head with the critical symbol on it. This Fringe episode ends with the shape shifter who shot up the cryonics lab in the opening scene putting the symbol-branded head on a body. We see it start to repair itself and his eyes open and…..that’s it, we will all need to see next week’s fringe episode to get our next fix!