I suppose if Fringe has to do a relatively mythology-free episode, at least it harnesses a little B-movie magic. Last night's episode has shades of The Incredible Melting Man, in which an astronaut returns from space and becomes a monster who needs to consume human flesh to survive. But Fringe took a gory concept and made it creepier with its radiation-sucking cosmonaut turning people to ash. That opening scene was a great little nugget of horror; even though we expect it, it's chilling when the woman comes home and her excitement melts into trepidation, then frightened disbelief as her husband crumbles to ash. When Fringe does monster of the week, it does a solid job.

Scream Queens: I get that this was supposed to evoke classic horror movies, but does it only have to be the women screaming? Men are perfectly capable of emitting a nice, high-pitched wail.

Russian Fringe Science: It makes sense that the Russians would have fringe science (and that it might be even more developed than American fringe science). I hope this isn't just a throwaway mention, and that this somehow comes into play in the coming interdimensional war. And it's interesting that Walter still uses the term "pinko." Is it just because of his 17-year timeout, or does this indicate something about Walter's politics.

Whither Nina Sharp? It's also interesting that, in a Broyles-centric episode, we see neither hide nor cybernetic arm hair of Nina Sharp. Little has been made of Broyles' relationship with Sharp since it was revealed in the season premiere, and now that Broyles is returning to the case that ruined his marriage, he doesn't ask Sharp to use Massive Dynamics' resources. Perhaps he's trying to maintain some illusion that Olivia is the only one in contact with Massive Dynamics', or maybe he only turns to Nina Sharp when he knows she can help with the problem at hand.

Man in Black: As the episode went on, it began to feel less like a standalone episode, and more like we're lining up potential players for the battle ahead. The CIA is less than thrilled that the Fringe Division is poking its nose into the case of the missing cosmonaut. Does the CIA have its own Fringe Science Division? Although, at the end of the episode, a man from the CIA informs Broyles that the cosmonaut was still alive and gave a pointed look at the night sky. I wonder how often the CIA deals with problems by shooting them into space.

Astrid Action: This was a Broyles-heavy episode, so most of our regular cast took a back seat to Lance Reddick. Still, when are we going to see Astrid in the field already?

Walter Moment of the Week: Walter still got to be Walter despite the focus on Broyles. He maligned Russians, played with Tinker Toys, and shared yet another embarrassing memory from Peter's childhood (involving doodles of genitalia no less). But the most truly Walter moment was when we fully realized that Walter thinks of licorice the way some people think of tea cookies and canapes.

Dream Machine: If I've learned anything from watching Fringe, it's that you should never, ever join a clinical trial. Earlier this season, it was those soldiers and their neurotoxin treatment that made them explode, and this week it was the guy who wants to hijack your dreams.

Our mystery of the week kicks off when a former sleepwalker suddenly thinks one of his co-workers is a demon straight out of Angel, and starts bashing his brain in. To add insult to crazy, the demon-seeing fellow soon dies of exhaustion. And later on, a restaurant chef walks through her kitchen at work, but instead of seeing tasty cow meat on the grill, she sees human hands and flips out, convinced her co-workers are cannibals. Much stabbing ensued.

Turns out both of these lucid dreamers received treatment for sleep disorders from a Dr. Nayak. Nayak implanted a chip in the brains of these once-disturbed sleepers (second note: if you do participate in a trial, never let them put a chip in your head). The chip was supposed to act as a sort of glandular pacemaker to regulate the thalamus, but Nayak actually used it to transmit their dreams to his brain. No dreams means no rest, hence the exhaustion deaths. But he can also trigger the dream state while they're awake, causing all those freaky hallucinations. But why steal dreams? According to Walter, it's a lot like being on LSD, but also highly addictive.

As much as a dream-stealing machine sounds like something out of a child's fairy tale, we actually get some cool visuals out of it and some classically villainous mad science. I'll take this over scorpion children any day.

Promise Me, No Students: Can we just dump Agent Jessup and adopt Agent Kashner instead? It's nice to see someone enter the lab who isn't as stoic as Astrid or Olivia (I mean, eventually someone had to vomit at the autopsy table). And he's so utterly unprepared for Walter that it's kind of adorable. Dude, he's not just some crazy old man. He's a mad scientist.

No More Nightmares: Every time Peter utters a single word about his childhood, I'm sure it's chock full of significance. Here, he tells Olivia about the nightmares he had as a child, and that Walter — in one of his rare moments of parental involvement — kept him from remembering the nightmares. I was almost disappointed that we learned the reason for this so quickly. Peter has nightmares about being snatched from his room by a man who both is and is not his father — that being the Walter of our universe.

Word Jumble: Olivia's bowling guru is still in the picture, and I guess we'll have to stick with him until we learn whether he holds the secrets of the universe. Bowling Guru has Olivia do an exercise where she obtains a seemingly random set of letters and then rearrange them into a coherent phrase — the phrase she needs to hear. I'm seriously looking for a copy of The Secret in that bowling alley. Anyway, Olivia cries when she realizes her letters form the phrase "You're gonna be fine." Sure, until that other universe comes crashing down on your head.

Astrid Watch: Did Walter just call her Asterisk again? Ouch.

Walter Moment of the Week: Definitely drugging Agent Kashner. No contest.

But it does seem odd after his heartfelt apology to hallucinogen-loving guinea pig Rebecca last week. In fact, between this and the Asterisk comment, it feels like Walter is regressing a tad.

The Great Cryo-Caper: Agent Broyles nails it with the absurd Fringe quote of the night: "Why are shapeshifting soldiers from another universe stealing frozen heads?" Why not? It's weird, it's slightly gruesome, and it gives them an excuse to show dozens of disembodied heads rolling all over the ground.

Oh, but it has something to do with the plot, too. These universe-jumping warriors are looking for a certain head, but they don't know where it is or what it looks like. One of the soldiers just keeps shaving off small bits of hair, frowning, and then tossing the head over his shoulder like it's a piece of overripe fruit. A pity we don't get to see anyone stumble across this pile of unwanted heads; it would the perfect intro to a ratings-grubbing episode of Law & Order.

The last heist didn't quite go as planned, though, and the frowning supersoldier was forced to kill one of his shapeshifting compatriots, leaving behind a corpse that bleeds mercury and one of those contraptions that let's them steal another person's form.

Flatworm Smoothie: Sometimes I suspect the Fringe writers are constantly working on an empty stomach, what with all the talk of flan and apple fritters. Olivia gets a less tasty treat in the form of Walter's world-famous flatworm smoothie (patent pending). Apparently, in addition to being every kid's favorite animal to chop to bits (how I loved to create two-headed planaria), flatforms have the ability to obtain the memories of other flatworms through ingestion. Walter thinks he can job Olivia's memory by having her swallow the sliced and diced wormies, while Peter thinks that's a load of worm-flavored crap. Olivia, of course, downs the entire glass before Walter can mention that he was going to mix the vile stuff with strawberries. Oh, Olivia, I know you must always prove you're tough and game for anything, but this impulsiveness is going to get you killed — and probably get the whole universe killed with you.

The Blending of Peter and Bell: Nina Sharp reminds us that two objects can't occupy the same space, but Peter and William Bell are certainly coming close, at least in Olivia's mind. First, when she looks at Peter, she has flashbacks to seeing Bell in the alternate universe. Then, when she's just coming out of her massive flashback seizure, she hears Peter's voice layered over Bell's voice. And both Bell and Peter ring similar bells, which serve as bookends to the seizure. I'm probably jumping the gun here, but is it possible that Peter and William Bell are the same person? After all, they're both geniuses, both have worked with Walter, and both have real affinity for Olivia. Could Peter have traveled back in time, assumed the name William Bell, and worked to prevent the "final storm."

Step Through the Plot Hole, Please: Okay, so now that the Fringe team has a dead shapeshifter on their hands, they can see that shapeshifter bodies contain boatloads of mercury. And that dead nurse they thought was the shapeshifter back in episode one? No mercury. Go team! But, why everyone doesn't immediately suspect Charlie, who supposedly shot and killed the nurse, of being the shapeshifter is beyond me. Walter might have an excuse since he's apparently high all the time, but what about our trained FBI agents and uber-perceptive Peter. Gah. Instead, they have to rely on Massive Dynamic to fix the broken shapeshifting device and reconstruct data on the last recorded shape.

Olivia and Peter Geek Out: Part of me adores the impressed look Peter gives Olivia when she reveals her knowledge of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He's got a very non-sexual, sibling-ish crush on her. But part of me is bemused; is he still surprised when she raises her geek flag?

Hallucinogenic Experiments are Sexy: Walter actually gets some action this episode, and it's all thanks to his wacky unethical experiments. He meets up with Rebecca Kidner, the woman he once fed hallucinogenic drugs so she could identify people from other universes (who apparently have a certain glowing aura about them). Far from being upset about the things Walter did to her mind and body, she's grateful and more than a little turned on. When Walter tells her (rather unconvincingly) that he couldn't recommend subjecting her to more hallucinogenic drugs, she immediately and happily volunteers to be his guinea pig again. She even remembers where he keeps his salvia. How sweet.

Will'em and Livvy, Together at Last: Rebecca's psychedlic experience is interrupted by Olivia's flashback seizure. Apparently, the flatworms have kicked in and Olivia is remembering her visit to the alternate universe and her encounter with William Bell. It's a bit of an info dump, but a manageable one, and some of the revelations are a little cryptic:

-William and Olivia have cutesy nicknames for each other, or at least they did when she was a child.
-People who travel from our universe to the other universe often die in the process.
-The people in the other universe have dealt with this by creating hybrids that are part human, part machine. They are called the "First Wave."
-The supersoldiers are looking for their leader, who will have a mark that looks sort of like an omega hidden on his body.
-Bell believes a war is coming, which he describes as the "final storm."
-When Bell and Walter predicted the coming war, they tried to create an individual who could defend the gates between worlds. Out of all of the children Bell and Walter experimented on, Olivia was by far the strongest.
-Momentum can be deferred when traveling from one universe to the other, but it's only put off until your return. That's why Olivia came crashing out of her car windshield in the season premiere — because she'd been pulled out of a moving car and into the other universe.

Peter Glows: Walter is becoming more focused, but he may want to lay off the pot. After all, he should realize that once he triggered Rebecca's ability to recognize people from the other universe, that she would be able to see that Peter is from the other universe. She almost spills the beans to Peter, but catches herself at the last minute. Still, it's another step toward Peter figuring out what's up. Then again, maybe Walter is — consciously or unconsciously — just sabotaging himself.

Snow Globe Apocalypse: On Bell's orders, Olivia visits Nina Sharp to tell her about the final storm. Nina essentially reiterates what ZFT told us last season: that there will be a final conflict between the two universes, and only one universe will survive. After all, two objects cannot occupy the same space. She illustrates this by smashing two snow globes together. Then Olivia thinks, Hey, don't those snow globes look an awful lot like omegas? and she suspects Nina of being the shapeshifter. No, Olivia, it will be hidden on the leader, not held out in front of them.

Farewell, Fake Charlie: But soon reason (or more accurately technology) prevails and Fake Charlie is outed as the shapeshifter. After a battle of the supersoldiers, Olivia wins out and shoots Fake Charlie dead. Poor Kirk Acevedo. You will be missed.

The Head of the First Wave: Meanwhile, the other shapeshifter has found the head he was looking for. He shaves off a little hair to reveal the omega-ish symbol of the First Wave's leader, and then attaches it to a fresh new body.

Astrid Watch: Just a little Astrid this week, though she gets a nice joke with the "Walter Bishop Deli" line. And I did like it when Walter said he wasn't sure she wasn't a figment of his imagination, even if he meant it strictly in the scientific sense, because sometimes it does seem like Walter treats her like his imaginary friend.

Walter Moment of the Week: This week we learned that Walter smokes a little pot each night before bed and keeps a stash of salvia in his drawer. But the best moment had to be when he asked Peter if he could ride home with Rebecca (and hit him up for bus fare), only to turn around like a giddy kid about to have a playdate:

But at least we got a moment of self-awareness, too, as Walter apologized to Rebecca for the things he did in his wild and reckless scientific youth. And, he may not have gotten her into bed, but at least he's rewarded for his impulsive car ride with a kiss.

Initially, it looked like we were getting another stand-alone episode this week, involving a police officer who mysteriously crystallizes and explodes upon touching a nondescript briefcase, taking out the briefcase and everyone around him. While Walter and Astrid are putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, they discover that the exploded cop was injecting himself with something that likely turned him into a bomb. When Peter realizes the cop must have been injecting the serum as far back as his tour in Iraq, he heads off to Baghdad with a physically and cognitively unstable Olivia in tow.

We're probably meant to assume that, because this serum (known as "Tin Man") came to Iraq and happens to make people explode in very public places, Iraqi scientists were actively trying to turn people in human bombs. But no, no. The Iraqi scientist who created it had pretty unambiguously benevolent motives. He was trying to counteract the effects of a neurotoxin several of the soldiers were exposed to, and it just happened to make most of them explode. Bummer. And, if anyone is going around making soldiers explode, it's the psychotic colonel who was attached to the Tin Man project.

By using the serum to blow up a watermelon (prompting the ever put-upon Astrid to ban fruit from the lab), Walter is able to determine that a certain frequency is triggering the explosions, and by emitting a counter-frequency, the explosion can be prevented. Sure enough, the team manages to locate another former soldier injected with Tin Man headed for another nondescript briefcase; the explosion is averted and the colonel is apprehended. Everyone lives happily ever after.

Ah, but then comes the big reveal. This was about so much more than exploding watermelons and jaunts abroad. It was about the briefcases. The briefcases belong to none other than the Observer, or apparently multiple Observers, who pass their surveillance back and forth via courier.

The Observer(s): So now we know there are multiple Observers, and that they're passing information amongst themselves. No great surprise there, as we've seen the Observer talking on the phone to someone before. But is their purpose really to destroy us, as the colonel seems to suggest? And is that our Observer getting the briefcase full of pictures of Walter? And is that actually our Walter, or could it be the Walter from the other universe?

Olivia's Guru: Kevin Corrigan, as Olivia's bowling alley guru, is trying to convince us he's the world's most boring cognitive therapist, trying to restore Olivia to her former self by making her score kiddie bowling and tie her shoes. When she's fed up with his Mr. Miyagi schtick, she pulls her gun on him. She's shocked she managed to walk without her cane, but I'm more concerned with her mental health, especially since she had vomit-inducing flashbacks earlier in the episode and it looks like next week the floodgates are going to tumble open.

A Little Bit of Astrid: She's still cleaning up Walter's messes, but it's nice to see Astrid say something to Walter and have him actually hear what she's saying. When Walter is predictably resistant to Peter finding them a new place to live, it's Astrid who very gently nudges him in the right direction. Plus, Walter even managed to acknowledge that he never shows any interest in Astrid's life beyond her cleaning and culinary abilities. Maybe now we can finally see her in the field?

Walter Moment of the Week: There are so many to choose from here. Aside from the thing with the watermelon, we learned that Walter had Peter assemble a Playboy jigsaw puzzle when he was ten as a sort of misguided anatomy lesson. But the best moment comes when Walter asks Peter to be a little more considerate of Gene:

Last night's episode, "Night of Desirable Objects," had me really pining for ZFT. Now, those folks knew how to throw a freaky Fringe Science party. Compared to their antics, the exploits of a lone scientist who combines his son's DNA with that of a scorpion seem a bit ho-hum. But we did get some great X-Files-inspired moments, and the case provided a serviceable backdrop for the show's overarching mythology.

Leave it to Walter to bring in some visually weird science, replicating Olivia's car accident in an attempt to fling a frog into the alternate dimension. The frog doesn't have any close encounters with William Bell, but it looks pretty cool as it flies through the air.

But one can only indulge in so much amphibian abuse before a new Fringe case crops up. This time the team heads out to Lansdale, Pennsylvania, where the locals have been going missing. The local sheriff has had no luck solving the disappearances, perhaps because his records focus more on which victims liked wearing flannel than who in the town might be a monster-building mad scientist. Olivia's off her game, thanks to her emerging super-hearing powers, but Peter manages to charm the sheriff into handing over the records by complimenting his expensive fishing lure — the titular Night of Desirable Objects.

The records lead the team to Andre Hughes, a farmer with some sort of creepy crawly in the walls of his house and a dead wife and infant son. Suspecting that Hughes might have killed the pair (from Walter: "Finally, some good news!"), they exhume the casket, only to find that the wife's body is still inside but, once upon a time, the baby managed to tunnel its way out (just what I needed: nightmares about evil, superstrong infants). And Astrid and Walter quickly discover that mama had lupus, which would have rendered her unable to have children, and Walter decides that, logically, Hughes must have introduced scorpion DNA into his son's system so he could survive his mother's hostile womb (great, now it's evil, superstrong scorpion infants). Hughes has rather inconveniently hanged himself in the interim, but Peter and Olivia manage to locate the arachni-boy beneath Hughes' home.

The theme of fathers who go to the extremes for their sons is soaked through this episode, though it's heartbreaking how none of the characters are yet aware of its significance. Like Hughes, Walter is a man who did a terrible thing to have his son, but failed to connect with him. Even when Peter shows Walter his own Night of Desirable Objects fishing lure and tells him the story of the boy who bought it to go night-fishing with his father, Walter genuinely fails to understand that Peter is talking about himself. But now, of course, they both have the opportunity and the desire to reconnect, and that reconnection will make it all the more devastating when Peter learns his true origins. Even when Olivia comments on the lengths Hughes was willing to go to in order to have a son, it's not to anyone involved in this father-son tragedy, but to Evil Fake Charlie (who has been ordered to debrief her on the alternate universe experience she can't remember before killing her). All the information about this tragic irony is there, but the characters aren't in quite the right configurations to catch on.

The other key plot point is Olivia's supersoldier powers, which manifested this episode in a that shiny new superhearing. It might be cool to hear conversations from far away, like having a built-in spy microphone, but it quickly becomes clear that it's also really annoying when you hear everything, including flies buzzing, soap bubbles popping, and all your neighbors' petty arguments and television sets. The morally ambiguous Nina Sharp seems to have anticipated that Olivia's body is becoming "foreign" to her, and has recommended Olivia see Sam Weiss, a fellow who can put her back together. Weiss, it turns out is comedic actor Kevin Corrigan, and he works in a bowling alley. Because if The Big Lebowski taught us anything, it's that bowling alleys are dens of wisdom and nefarious dealings, it follows that Weiss knows more about Olivia's issues than she does, asking if she's been getting "the headaches."

We also get a quick but significant appearance by Agent Jessup, who inspects Hughes home to find an important clue tucked into a Bible, and a note, apparently from Hughes' pastor, written inside. This is the second time we've seen Jessup with this sort of a Bible, and she regards it as a significant object. Have the Bibles appeared in episodes from the previous season? Are these calling cards related to the Pattern, or perhaps to the other universe?

At some point during this episode, Olivia says to Peter, "There really is no point where things just can't get weirder." And while, next to exploding people and man-eating parasite, a shapeshifting supersoldier seems perfectly mundane, the mysteries on Fringe just keep getting weirder.

So Olivia is back from her visit in the other dimension, having popped quite suddenly and dramatically out the windshield of her car. But she hasn't come back alone. A soldier from "Over There" has followed her (well, technically proceeded her) so that she can be interrogated and then knocked off the chessboard. And, to help him in this quest, he can be look like anyone he kills by placing a strange three-pronged device inside their mouth.

Meanwhile, all is not well for the Fringe Division. The higher ups don't see the team getting results and want to terminate the entire group, leaving Broyles struggling to defend it. And Peter's growing a bit weary of the dimension-hopping, evil scientist-chasing game and is ready to get out of dodge. And, when a doctor tells Peter and Walter that Olivia is irreparably brain damaged and won't wake up, he doesn't exactly have warm fuzzy feelings toward her work.

But then Olivia's own supersoldier abilities kick in, and she's healed up, spouting code words in Greek, and telling Peter that everyone's lives are in danger. This is enough to put Peter back in gear and taking charge. Soon we're watching an old tape of Walter's identifying the killer of a murder victim as the shapeshifting soldier from another dimension (complete with an ecstatic, drugged-out girl telling us, "He's from another universe, man."), and our intrepid Fringe investigators are soon on the soldier's tail.

This draws another character into the team's orbit as well. Amy Jessup, an FBI agent with the New York office, is instantly intrigued by the Fringe Division and gloms onto Peter faster than you can say "ulterior motive." Granted, she seems to fit in quite smoothly with the others, and doesn't bat an eye when Walter does things like reach bloody gloved finger into Astrid's custard mixing bowl (though he does receive a nice smack from Astrid), but red flags go up when she says she's been waiting for the Fringe team all her life — and what's the deal with Bible code she's typing up at the end? At least Peter cuts her down when she tries to bullshit him by quoting cliched Shakespeare. This is Fringe, Amy, not The Next Generation.

And it looks like we'll be seeing our shapeshifter around for a while, thanks to his killing poor, poor Charlie and taking his form. We'll probably be seeing more of his transdimensional typewriter as well, a device that seems to exist in both universes and which he uses to communicate with his higher ups in the other dimension. But who's on the other end, and what information do they hope to get out of Olivia?

Oh, and let's talk about this for a moment:

Once I got past my flashbacks to The Wire, this actually made a lot of sense. After all, it couldn't have been a coincidence that Olivia was hired to work in the Fringe Division. Does this mean that everything that happened last season — Olivia's awakening, Walter's reprieve, and Peter's reunion with his father — were all orchestrated by William Bell? Well, the man is a genius.

Also, there were some great Peter details coming out of this episode. It's sort of amusing to watch the writers wink and nod at the audience, even if some of those winks are a touch horrifying. Like when Walter tells Peter that Peter loved custard as a boy and just doesn't remember, it's a little jab telling us that this Peter, the Peter from the other dimension, isn't quite the same boy Walter lost. And a new mystery has opened up with the Greek blessing Olivia delivers to Peter when she wakes up, the same blessing Peter's mother delivered to him each night. Did Peter's mother know that Peter came from the other dimension? Is another version of her still alive Over There? And do the words have a greater meaning in the coming conflict?

Finally, this episode left me hungry for some of Peter's birthday custard — preferably without the blood.

OK, so here is what happened on the surface of the brain-twisting episode known as "There Is More Than One of Everything." Olivia and the Scoobies are investigating two related cases: The shooting of Massive Dynamic VP Nina Sharp, and a bizarre incident in New York where a truck barreled out of a shimmering hole in the middle of the street. Turns out there's a very obvious connection between the two things. Security footage reveals that Nina was shot by none other than notorious underground science terrorist Jones, who stole a secret mega-ultra-super power source that Massive Dynamic boss William Bell hid in her robotic arm.

Do not ask why Bell decided to hide his mega thing in his VP's arm, OK? You are watching Fringe, where we fight to stop alternate Earth from invading our own. But I get ahead of myself.

So Jones now has the mega-ultra-super (which is about the size of a USB memory stick) and is using it to power up his dimension-opening device, which is by the way run off Dell laptops. Can I just have a moment to say thanks to the Fringe science advisory team for showing a PC running something in a scifi series? I am so freakin sick of seeing Apples in these kinds of stories. Geeks know that the only drivers available for inter-dimensional peripheral devices are made for Windows and Linux, and it's nice to see the Fringe crew knows this too.

Anyway, back to my point, which is that Jones opened a dimensional doorway between our NYC Prime and NYC-1. Which is why a truck came barreling out of nowhere, and why later on another doorway opens in a soccer field and slices a guy's body in half when he gets stuck halfway inside Earth-1 just as the doorway is closing.

Given that Jones is a terrorist, and Sharp miraculously survived the shooting due to her Kevlar ribcage, it's time for the Scoobies to go on full alert. As Sharp explains, there are "soft spots" in reality where the doorway between worlds is likely to be the most stable, and it's a race against time to find out where they are because Jones is looking for them too. No, we still don't know why Jones wants to go to Earth-1, especially given that last week we found out it's full of bombed-out buildings and quarantine zones.

While all this is happening, Walter is looking for something he lost long ago. The Observer, that bald white guy who eats a lot of chili peppers, has brought Walter back to a cottage in Rhode Island where his family used to stay when Peter was little. The Observer says he has to find something there quickly, and that "there's more than one of everything," but can't tell him more than that because he's not supposed to intervene. Unfortunately, the mad Walter can't remember anything about what he might have hidden there. But fortunately (sort of) we find out that Massive Dynamic has backdoored every camera it ever sold. It's easy as pie for them to grab and search illegally through a bunch of surveillance footage to locate the missing Walter at the beach house and send Peter off to get him.

And Peter helps out by looking rakish and telling Walter a story about how he used to make pancakes when Peter was a kid. That reminds Walter of how he lost "something precious" when Peter was young and sick (though interestingly Peter doesn't remember being sick). And how he thought he could find that precious thing over in Earth-1, which he used to see all the time after taking tons of LSD with William Bell.

So sure was Walter that he could step through into Earth-1 from Earth Prime that he actually designed a "patch" gun to close doorways opened between the two worlds. Because if the two worlds are joined that would be bad, OK? And the patch gun is the thing hidden at the cottage that he needed to remember.

Anyway, he and Peter get the patch gun and race to the soft spot by a lake that everybody has found. There's Jones using his Dell to open doorways between worlds, and luckily Olivia and Peter stop him, closing the door between dimensions just as Jones has his head halfway between them. Ohhh, sliced head! Gross and cool.

And this is where things REALLY got weird. Are you ready for full understanding, my cosmonauts?

Now don't forget that Jones was part of ZFT, the underground science group funded and created by William Bell, whose sole purpose is to bring down society through the advancement of technology. The ZFT manifesto talks about how there are two parallel Earths (though sadly it does not actually use the DC Comics preferred terms Earth Prime and Earth-1). Earth Prime (our Earth) and Earth-1 (their Earth) cannot co-exist, and Earth-1 is more technologically advanced than Earth Prime. A time is coming soon when one Earth will destroy the other.

Last week, Walter discovered the lost "ethics" chapter of the ZFT manifesto, which makes it seem like William Bell might have had good intentions and that Jones and his buddies deliberately cut out the ethics part so they could be science dicks. Also, Bell and Walter did a bunch of experiments on kids using cortexiphan, a drug that helps you see between worlds, because they were not very ethical. Olivia is one of those kids, as are many others who are currently developing superpowers to become Jones' "soldiers" in the coming war between Earth Prime and Earth-1.

So there's your quick backstory.

Olivia has been wanting to meet William Bell, partly because she knows he's behind the ZFT freaks, and partly because she's really pissed about those childhood experiments on her brain. Once she's destroyed Jones, thus doing a favor for everybody, Sharp says she'll arrange a meeting for her with Bell. But Bell "isn't in this world," says Sharp. For some reason, nobody seems to guess what the hell she's talking about even though they know all that stuff I just recapped for you about the two Earths and the dimension doors. Whatever.

Sadly, Bell doesn't show up at the restaurant where Olivia is supposed to meet him, so she enters the elevator in a big huff after waiting a really long time. As the elevator goes down, there's an INTERDIMENSIONAL LENS FLARE borrowed straight from Abrams' Star Trek. This is the sign that Something Trippy is happening. Then a bunch of people appear next to her in the elevator very briefly, and flash out again.

When the doors finally open, she's in a shiny white hallway and a woman says, "Agent Dunham, welcome." OK, so she's obviously in Earth-1, now. She walks down the hall and meets William Bell at last (yes, he's played by Leonard Nimoy, yes that's awesome, etc.). He doesn't really say much other than that he's been wanting to meet her, and then the camera swoops out his high office window over NYC-1, where we see (big reveal) the Twin Towers shining in the sun. Actually, a pretty cool scene. So the season ends with Olivia and Bell on Earth-1.

Meanwhile, back on Earth Prime, Walter is sobbing in a graveyard. The grave belongs to (BIG REVEAL) Peter Bishop, his son, the wisecracking rake who doesn't remember being sick as a kid. You know what that means, right? Peter Prime died as a kid, in 1987, and Walter crossed over to Earth-1 and kidnapped Peter-1 for himself. Then he used his patch gun to cover up the evidence. So Peter is actually from Earth-1.

Here's where it gets REALLY complicated, though, Earth Primers. Remember how Olivia saw all those people flash into the elevator when she was heading to Earth-1? I think what that means is that there are a lot more alternative Earths - infinite Earths, if you will. Those people were traveling between them. And Olivia can see more than one of the Earths, which is why the city she saw bombed out and on fire last week was healed with its Twin Towers intact this week. Last week maybe she was seeing Earth-10, but Bell lives in Earth-1. See what I'm getting at? We're headed to a veritable CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. Which warms the cockles of my nerdy little heart.

Also: A newspaper on Bell's desk shows that Obama is president of Earth-1 too. Nice to know some things never change.

So what do you guys think? Is it just Earth Prime and Earth-1 or are there infinite Earths?

Let's untangle the tangled web at the heart of Fringe, shall we? First of all, show creators Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and JJ Abrams all worked on Star Trek, which is hitting theaters on Thursday. The writer of last night's episode, Akiva Goldsman, worked on some of the cheesiest flicks in the pre-Dark Knight Batman franchise, as well as inserting a little oomph into the I Am Legend and I, Robot scripts. So yes, it was bound to happen that one day these four supernerds would get together and spawn an episode so packed with in-groupy pop culture references that smacking is probably in order.

After the Ghostbusters reference, but before the random references to Arthur C. Clark's Childhood's End and a long discussion about how Stephen King coined the term "pyrokinesis" (relevant to last night's Special Power), we had a charming scene where a Random Internet Weirdo spills first the entire mythos of the Fringe series and then recaps the plot of the upcoming Star Trek movie, all in one go (see clip). Oh so cute, Fringies. Luckily, the actual plot of the episode was so fucking cool that I will forgive you JUST THIS ONCE for self-indulgent weenie-related activities.

Basically, we're getting to the bottom of secret renegade science group ZFT (short for "destruction through technological progress" - don't ask). We learned last week that William Bell, the mysterious owner of megacorp Massive Dynamic, is funding ZFT's crazy experiments that all center around creating supersoldiers via a drug called cortexifan. And we know that Vague Agent Olivia Dunham ate some cortexifan as a kid, and has recently started developing spooooooky powers.

And last night, in "The Road Not Taken," we learned that William Bell also wrote the ZFT manifesto, though apparently a special chapter he included about ethics was excised from the version that's been circulating to the science terrorists via 4Chan. We also met yet another set of cortexifan victims, a pair of twins who have (yes) pyrokinesis. One has blown herself up accidentally, leading to a fringe unit investigation, and the other is slowly losing control of her burny powers.

But what's truly cool is that Olivia has started manifesting one of the other side-effects of cortexifan that we hadn't seen before: She's dimension-hopping. Because remember, there are two parallel Earths and one is slightly more advanced than the other. And they are about to go to war, hence the need for soldiers, hence the cortexifan, yadda yadda. As Olivia investigates the burning twins, she starts seeing visions of that parallel Earth, where apparently Boston has been bombed to hell (see first few seconds of the clip - pretty creepy). Also, in the parallel Earth, both of the fire twins are dead (only one is dead in our world), there are giant quarantine zones (unexplained), and Broyles has moved his desk (oh noes!). Plus, Olivia's phone is red instead of black. So things are more dangerous and stylish in Parallel Earth.

As Olivia and the Scoobies race to figure out William Bell's connection to ZFT, asswipey sexual harasser Harris butts in and tells them to stop investigating. Then he orders a psych consult for Olivia, just to mess with her. Thankfully the Harris harassment subplot ended last night, when we discovered that he's in on the ZFT experiments on the fire ladies. He helps kidnap and experiment on the remaining twin, and the Scoobies catch him red-handed. Quite literally. When he tries to trap Olivia in a room with the soon-to-blow firestarter, Olivia helps her to redirect her fiery urges - at Harris. Boom! That was truly awesome.

But not nearly as awesome as the parallel universes coming together, or Massive Dynamic VP Nina Sharp showing up at Broyles' house late at night with like a million pictures of the Observer. Apparently he's been showing up all over the place, and Sharp says mysteriously, "Remember last time that happened?" Indeed, crazy things are happening. After Walter discovers the missing ethics chapters from ZFT while alone in his lab, the Observer pops through the door. With a sad look, he takes off his hat and says to Walter, "It's time to go." And Walter walks out quietly with him, leaving the ethics chapter behind.

I love the little Name of the Rose flourish in that subplot, the idea that there is this crucial missing book that changes our entire interpretation of everything. Hopefully that ethics chapter won't meet the same fiery end as Aristotle's book about comedy!

So where does this leave us, Fringe freaks? Walter has disappeared with the Observer, after admitting to Olivia that he doesn't remember anything about the experiments done on her and the other cortexifan kids. Olivia is seeing another dimension, where violence is everywhere (maybe the war has begun?). We know for sure that the goal of ZFT is to create supersoldiers for the interdimensional war (though we also know that some of the ZFT types are also just showoffs who like to engage in "bizarre acts.") And - in the last breathless seconds of the episode - we see Sharp getting shot by ninjas in her apartment.

Seriously, except for the Star Trek thing, this was a truly awesome episode with a lot of payoff for those of us who have been glued to the set every Tuesday night, looking for answers. Can't wait for the finale next week, when hopefully there will be some serious interdimensional fu!

Fringe is scoring well on the tightly-plotted-o-meter - last week's episode, authored by Akiva "I, Robot" Goldsman, was scary and awesome. And this week's episode, "Midnight," kept bringing on the biological horror with a vampiric creature whose lust for spinal fluid took us one step closer to cracking the ZFT conspiracy.

For those who just tuned in, don't worry: It's an easy conspiracy to follow. ZFT is a group of outlaw scientists who show off to each other by experimenting on the human population with their weird flesh-growing bacteria and (this week) a virus that turns people into toothy creatures who must suck people's spinal fluid or they die. Attached to ZFT is mystery man Jones, who teleported out of prison using a toothbrush and string (OK maybe a few more things too), and a variety of other mad scientists who usually have labs in abandoned industrial warehouses or underneath Chinese restaurants in Boston.

But here's the creepy-spooky part: ZFT (short for "Zerstorung durch Fortschritte der Technologie" or "Destruction by Advancement of Technology") was inspired by a manifesto which states: 1. technological progress will lead to the apocalypse; 2. there is a parallel world to Earth that is more scientifically advanced than our own; and 3. a door has opened between that world and ours, but only ONE WORLD CAN SURVIVE. Got that? Now, back to hot chicks in nightclubs sucking spine.

A cute lady is eating people in Boston, severing their spines with her mega-teeth and drinking their spinal fluid. Why oh why is this? Turns out she's the nice wife of a scientist named Boone, who was working secretly for ZFT, engineering weird bacteria (like the flesh-growing stuff from an earlier episode) and viruses like the one that turns his wife into spine-drinker. The best/weirdest part is that this virus is delivered using syphillis "as a platform." So it's vampirism wrapped in an STD. Nice.

When Olivia and her Scoobies track Boone down, he admits he tried to leave ZFT and they infected his wife as revenge. He agrees to cooperate and give up some ZFT names if the Scoobies will track his wife down so he can give her an antidote. There's a great scene where Olivia asks Boone why the hell ZFT does stuff like this virus, and he says, "To create a human nightmare . . . to show off to other scientists." I love that idea, that there are crazy bio-hackers out there in the dark underground inventing weirdass viruses just to show off.

Eventually the Scoobies take down the spine sucker after finding a lot more bloody corpses and some sidebar drama about Olivia's sister getting a divorce (hubby suing for full custody of the kid! awkward to discuss via cell phone from a crime scene!). Walter works with Boone in his lab, whipping up an antidote from the guy's spinal fluid, because apparently it is the only fluid they have on hand that's "compatible." This of course leads to Boone having a stroke, since he's already drained a bunch of his fluid out to feed his wife before she took off for juicier spines. Luckily, though, the antidote works and his wife goes back to normal.

And Boone leaves behind a VHS tape naming all the ZFT names that he can. (Moment of "huh?" regarding the VHS tape: Is this a hint that Fringe is actually taking place in the less-advanced Earth dimension and we with our Blurays live in the more advanced dimension?) Olivia meets up with Broyles after-hours at a bar to discuss the names with him. Some she doesn't recognize, and Jones isn't among them. But Boone claims that the guy funding the whole ZFT science-terror operation is none other than the elusive William Bell, Walter's old friend and the founder of shady mega biotech corp Massive Dynamic. Since many of us already speculate that Walter had a hand in writing the ZFT manifesto, it makes perfect sense that Bell might be involved.

You can expect more William Bell next week, and he'll be played by (yes!) Leonard Nimoy. Strap yourself in, nerds - this is getting wild.

Allow me to recap briefly, so that last night's episode "Bad Dreams" makes sense. We learned a few weeks ago that Jones, a rogue German mad scientist who teleported out of prison, wants Olivia to become his "soldier." He tells her that he can help her solve a case if she'll do a series of puzzles for him, one of which involves using the power of her mind to switch light bulbs on on and off. At first, she cheats on the puzzles but when she discovers a bomb on a rooftop the only way she can turn it off is by using her mind to switch off the lights that control its fuse. And she does. While Peter watches, so we know it's real and not some kind of hallucination.

We also know that Olivia's strange powers are probably connected to an experiment done on her and a bunch of other kids in a small Florida town. Remember the episode when the bad guys kidnapped her and did a spinal tap? That was because she was one of those kids who'd been given a drug called cortexiphan during those tests.

OK so last night's episode starts with Olivia killing a woman in her dreams. It's a great, creepy scene, and leads to yet another weird investigation where Broyles gets mad more than once that Olivia is using FBI resources to literally research her own dreams. Still, there's a good reason because it turns out that when Olivia dreams about killing this lady, she was seeing an actual death. Same thing happens the next night, when she dreams she forces a woman to stab her own husband in a restaurant.

After a lot of bizarre crosstalk between Peter, Walter, and Olivia, plus a lot of surveillance tape footage from the scenes of the crimes, the Scoobies discover a common thread. A guy with blond hair and a scar named Nick seems to be at all the scenes. Is Olivia in Nick's head? How could this be?

Big reveal time from Walter (yay!). Turns out that Walter was involved in the cortexiphan experiments, and he speculates that Nick was too. In fact, he says, probably Olivia and Nick were "partners" during the drug trials because little kids were paired off during them "kind of the way you pair up kids to keep them safe at summer camp." Have I mentioned lately that I love Walter? This whole subplot with randomly experimenting on kids with mega-drugs is so great.

And when I say mega-drug, that's what I mean. Walter says cortexiphan has the power to allow people to travel between dimensions (???). Translate that into "it can mean whatever weirdass thing we want." So Olivia is transdimensionally connected to Nick, who also has the power to project his intense emotions onto everyone around him. Since his last home was a mental hospital, the Scoobies are able to figure out that Nick is suicidally depressed, and people around him have a tendency to kill themselves because they "catch" his emotions. And Olivia is trapped inside his brain, watching all of it.

To catch Nick, of course Walter has to hypnotize Olivia into Nick's head by sticking her in the machine with blinky lights. And absolutely of course, she enters Nick's head while he's picking up a stripper for sex. It sounds skeevy, but actually the scene is quite well-played - funny and strange - while also involving a long, sexy kiss between Olivia/Nick and the stripper. Unfortunately, after the stripper sex, Nick feels guilty and self-hating. Then the stripper does too, and she slits her own throat with a shard of glass. But at least now the Scoobies have his Brooklyn address, and can track him down.

Olivia and Nick finally meet in a weird and utterly Fringey faceoff on top of a tall building, where suicidal Nick has gone to jump off, along with half a dozen other people who have caught his desire to die as well. He immediately recognizes Olivia, calling her "Olive," and says that when they were going through the experiments that she always calmed him down. She can't remember anything about it, though, and just keeps trying to talk him down when he begs her to kill him. Finally he confesses that his powers of emotion-blasting were recently switched on, presumably by the arrival of Jones, who told Nick the same thing he told Olivia - that he had to be a soldier. Apparently, however, when Nick was told to be a soldier he was also warned to "stay in shape" and "wear black and grey." No mention of blinky lights.

Eventually, Olivia shoots Nick in the knees and he's put into a "chemical coma" while the Feds figure out what to do with him. And Olivia is left with the strange knowledge that a lot of twisted shit happened to her when she was a kid and she doesn't remember any of it. Also, presumably Broyles and her partner Charlie know about it now too. Charlie delivers Nick's secret file to her as the episode closes, and at the same time we see Walter watching an old videotape of the cortexiphan experiments.

In the video, we see a little girl sitting in the corner of a completely destroyed room, while voices in the background freak out over the destruction that's been caused. We hear Walter saying, "Don't worry Olive, it will be alright." So presumably Olivia's powers extend way beyond blinky light stuff. Looks like she can get pretty dangerous, and if she's been switched back on by Jones' machinations, we're in for a seriously groovy ride.

There wasn't much arc in this episode, called "Unleashed," so we didn't have to strain ourselves trying to figure out the conspiracy uniting the government intelligence community, a rogue underground of mad scientists led by Jones, and genome-tweaking megacorp Massive Dynamic. We didn't find out more about Olivia's newly-developed psychic powers. And we didn't even really delve into mad scientist extraordinaire Walter's shady past.

Instead, it was just balls-to-the-wall monster insanity. The science concept of the week was "transgenic animal," which as you can see from this clip means a snake crossed with a lion crossed with a spider and a wasp and a bat and a venus flytrap and a spaceship. Also I just love those drawings Walter shows Peter and Olivia of the original transgenic animals he was working on back in the day. What the hell is that? A cross between a tarantula and a snake? How awesome is that?

It also turns out that our monster shoots out venom spikes that inject eggs into its victim. Baby versions of the snake/lion/venus flytrap apparently look like regular old mealworms, which is good unless they are breeding inside your stomach. Which is what happens to Olivia's partner Charlie, and they only have (you guessed it) less than 24 hours to prevent him from exploding with bugs. I remember a few episodes back when everybody was saying that Charlie is probably in on the conspiracy and is secretly spying on Olivia. But now that I've seen him with little bugs swimming in his stomach I'm thinking no. The more I get to know him, the more warmly lunkheaded he seems - just a regular member of Olivia's Scoobies, not a spy.

So Walter figures out that the only way they can save Charlie is to inject him with blood from the monster (excuse me: "transgenic animal") for reasons too silly to go into here. And the only way to find the monster is to bring a bunch of its mealworm babies into the sewers where it's hiding - apparently because it's part-bat, it will hear the babies from far away and come running. Walter still feels so guilty about thinking up the spider-snake thing in the first place that he goes off alone to slay it, as you can see at the end of the clip above. If there's one thing you can say consistently about the Abrams-Kurtzman-Orci trifecta, it's that they don't scrimp on the monstery goodness.

Oh, the only remotely arc-y thing that happened in this episode is that we found out Peter is sort of possibly dating Olivia's sister. Which could get weird, because many of us have theorized that Peter and Olivia might be siblings or clones or something because Walter has made obscure references that seem to suggest that possibility. Though of course Olivia and Peter might be vat-grown cousins but Olivia's sister might not be. So that would be OK. Right?

Tune in next week when we head deep into what I think is arc territory. Seems as if Olivia is killing people with her mind, which we can only hope is a new and dangerous extension of her ability to switch lights on and off with her mind.

While I enjoy the overarching conspiracy plot in Fringe with the Pattern and Massive Dynamic, I think some of the best episodes are devoted to what sometimes derisively get called "monsters of the week." If you can come up with a weekly monster that's cool enough, it makes for excellent television (as X-Files and Supernatural have demonstrated many times over). And this week's monster, a 657-megabyte file that liquifies people's brains, was creepy and funny all at once.

We begin by watching an unwary teen clicking on a pop-up window that appears on his computer bearing the words "What's that noise? Click here." I swear clicking on a pop-up has become the "opening the door to strangers in hockey masks" of the 2000s. Why does the kid do it??? I think basically so that we can watch the weird images and remember the movies The Ring and Videodrome with great satsifaction.

After the kid's brain is liquified by the file, several other people suffer the same fate. But not before Walter can revel in cups of liquid brain and Olivia can once again tangle with evil internal investigations white dude Harris. Also, my prediction last week that Olivia's visiting sister and niece would be in danger came true immediately. The third near-victim of the evil pop-up was Olivia's niece, who barely avoided sneezing her brains out of her nose.

Unlike most of our bad guys, this week's monster-maker wasn't part of the Pattern or some other vast underground science conspiracy. He was just an out-of-work hacker with a vendetta against people he thought had wronged him: A boss who fired him, an ex-wife, and a used car salesman whose death wasn't ever explained (or was it? did I miss something?). He's invented this multimedia file that contains some kind of hand-wavey audio component that vibrates on a frequency that makes brains literally fry. Which doesn't explain why people are only affected if they LOOK at the file, since it would seem that all they'd have to do is hear it. But don't worry about that, because Walter is making funny jokes about Darwin and syphilis.

Olivia and the scoobies easily track our file-sharing killer to his (of course) underground warehouse lab lair. This is thanks in part to yet another underground science friend of Peter's who says things about megabytes and didn't seem to know about Google maps.

The pacing and gory brain stuff were terrific - this was a simple whodunnit episode done well. Perhaps the biggest flaw here was the slightly tedious rehashing of the conflict between Olivia and Harris from last week. Harris is some DHS mucky-muck who Olivia once helped to jail for sexually assaulting women. Now he's on a vendetta against her and the whole Fringe division, which he keeps saying is a "misallocation of FBI resources" for reasons he never really articulates. He says the division is "rogue" despite the fact that they always solve their cases and seem to be working within the FBI. Anyway, he spent a lot of time telling Olivia that she sucked, and she had to make her frowny face while ignoring him.

Towards the end of the episode, Olivia's boss Broyles finally steps in and tells Harris that if he fights Olivia he's fighting Broyles - there's going to be a three-letter-agency manager smackdown. I must confess that this whole subplot is a little boring and feels like a red herring. Harris isn't part of the Pattern and his character is so two-dimensional that he might as well live in the book Flatland. Get rid of him already and give us more menacing Massive Dynamic or Jones or something.

A subplot that did actually work in the episode was Walter confronting his past. The mother of Walter's former lab assistant gets into contact with him so that she can get some closure on how her daughter died: In a fire that started in Walter's old lab. Peter resists letting her see Walter, imagining that it will send the old mad scientist into a tailspin or breakdown. But Olivia convinces Peter to let Walter face up to his pre-insane asylum past, and we get a pretty touching scene where Walter talks to the grieving woman about her daughter. Then Peter gets drunk and goes over to Olivia's house to do his smokin' Pacey routine and say he's sorry.

I'll bet you a dime bag that he's going to wind up dating Olivia's sister. That's my guess.

Until next week, kids, ferchrissake don't click on a goddamn pop-up window.

The more I ponder it, the more I like the overarching premise of Fringe - that there is a secret network of bad guys who sell "scientific innovation" on the black market. Of course the scientific innovations are things like teleportation machines and viruses that make your head explode. And it's hard to tell who is a good guy and who is bad in this world of double-crossing scientists, secret labs, and guerrilla experimentation. Is giant company Massive Dynamic, which feeds on underground science, a bad actor? Or just amoral? Is the government, which runs the Fringe Project, trying to stop the bad guys or just steal their science?

All we know for sure is that agent Olivia Dunham is a good guy, and so is her boss Broyles. Her mad science sidekicks are also (mostly) good - Peter is an underground science guy who now breaks the law for great justice, and his father Walter is a completely bonkers genius who doses caterpillars with homemade LSD and craves cheesesteaks while dissecting monsters.

Last night's episode helped solidify our scoobies, while also wrapping up a conspiracy plot from a few episodes ago. Agent Mitch Loeb, who is somehow involved with innovation terrorist Jones, has been conspiring with his wife to do . . . something. And now we know what it is. He was building mega-viruses - giant versions of the cold virus that grow inside you ultra-fast, and kill you when they bust out of your mouth like gooey tentacles that (let's face it) look sort of like blow jobs in reverse.

Speaking of reverse blow jobs, there was a lot of gleeful perversion in this episode, including when Olivia was gratuitously stabbed in the near-ass with a giant needle when she was being held captive early in the episode. Turns out that old Mitch likes to strap people down and jab them with things in his secret warehouse lab, and though we know that he was making the megaviruses we're still not sure why he was poking Olivia. So what I'm saying is that though one conspiracy has been uncovered, there are still others to come.

We still don't know why Mitch was trying to kill epidemiologists with his mega-viruses. We do know that the two he killed had been tapped by the CDC to be on some sort of secret anti-epidemic taskforce. And we also know that after he was captured, he told Olivia that he was trying to "save" her with his back-jabbing needle and that she has no clue what is going on and which side is the right one. Is he secretly a good guy?

Or is Peter secretly a bad guy? In this episode, his got to do more with his role as "the tough dude who breaks the law." When Olivia's colleague wanted to do an illegal wiretap, he didn't just call up the NSA like he would have under the Bush Administration - oh no, he couldn't do anything illegal. So he asked Peter to wiretap Mitch's phone, and Peter asked some underground science friend of his to pull strings at the phone company. Lucky they got that illegal wiretap because they heard Mitch telling his wife to kill Olivia.

Which led to Olivia's second awesome fist fight of the episode (the first was when she fought her way out of Mitch's secret lab) and the death of Mitch's wife.

But what comes next, Fringies? Olivia will continue unraveling the Jones mystery, Peter will continue being badass, and also there's a whole new group of people to menace because Olivia's sister and niece are staying in town. I predict sister kidnappings. Also, there's this whole festering problem with a guy named Harris from DHS. Harris hates Olivia for prosecuting him for sexually assaulting several women, and has just gotten his conviction reversed and taken up his old job at internal investigations. So sexual assault guy is investigating whether Olivia is competent and the Fringe division is worth spending cash on.

Menaced by government bureaucracy, menaced by outlaw science, menaced by giant corporations, and assaulted by mega-viruses! Fringe is back, kids. Get ready to spew some tentacles.

In "Safe," we got back to our over-arching plot related to Mr. Jones, the "para-terrorist" who "deals in scientific progress." He's been in a German prison, using his weird English accent to terrify people, and last night he managed to get out with the help of a conspirator in Olivia's office. Conspirator guy not only has a device that lets people walk through walls - and become the most awesome bank robbers ever - but he's managed to steal the parts of a teleportation (and possibly time-travel) device that Walter made back in the 1970s.

Ah, the 1970s - origin of all fringey science and science fiction. Speaking of which, the other big plot development in last night's episode is that Olivia has fully integrated dead ex-BF John Scott's memories into her own and can't tell his memories apart from hers. So she's flashing back to stuff she never did. Meanwhile, Massive Dynamic exec Nina Sharp has John in a preservation tank all hooked up to her dead brain-reading equipment. But the memories she needs from his brain have been transferred to Olivia!

And conspirator guy has set up the teleportation device to transfer Jones out to Boston! Love the crazy scene where he sets up the decidedly-70s tech (including some kind of plastic inner tube and what look like old polaroids) and Jones appears in a giant flash of light. Wearing a nice suit, of course.

Thankfully, as you can see in this clip, Walter has his chainsaw. And now that the scientific progress terrorists are back in full force, I think the action will get even crazier. Plus, Peter is stepping up his game as a science outlaw himself. I really think Fringe is singlehandedly reinventing the subversive science outlaw genre.

The clip above basically captures the perfect Peter and Walter moment. Olivia and the FBI crew are hot on the tail of an underground neuroscientist who kidnaps people, hides them in her warehouse, and brainwashes them into trying to solve a mathematical equation. Turns out the only guy who might have a clue about here whereabouts is Walter's old buddy from the mental institution, Dashiell Kim. So Olivia and Peter send Walter back to the loony bin to question Kim.

Unfortunately, the creepy square-headed white guy who runs the institution thinks Walter needs to stay inside - and is willing to fight Peter to keep his dad locked up. Before Peter can use his fancy DHS connections to get Walter out, the old mad scientist manages to squeeze some more information out of Kim, whose gibberings about red castles and torture chambers turns out to be just the information Olivia needs to locate our rogue neuroscientist and her latest victim.

That's why things were so badass with both Walter and Peter in this episode. We're beginning to understand that Walter will get better, as long as he's kept out of the loony bin. Even while he's inside, he manages to (mostly) stay sane and help Olivia out. And Peter got to show his edgy side to creepy white dude at the asylum, giving him the old "I'll fuck you up if you mess with dad" treatment. The more we get to know Walter and Peter, the more I like their dynamic and the more I like this freaky science show with a family melodrama at its heart.

And just in case you started to get bored with all the running around, the episode also gave us a glimpse of a cool, throbbing teleportation machine. The rogue neuroscientist finally sucked that number she wanted out of one of her victim's brains, and raced over to give it to some guy who is building this box that looks like it's breathing. Of course it has bizarre semi-anal openings on it, which he has to reach into in order to extract an apple he teleports using the number.

The weirder the science gets, and the more we get to see this bizarro network of para-terrorist researchers who trade in "scientific progress," the more I want to plunge into the world of Fringe. It reminds me of the very best pulp fiction from the 1920s and 30s - it practically has cosmic rays and brain serums. I hope at some point there are bulbous aliens and bad guys with high, silvery collars. But for now, I'll settle for neuroscientist kidnappers living on the edge.

Every episode of Fringe should have a title that sounds like somebody yelled it while playing a videogame online. Last night's "In Which We Meet Mr. Jones" could have been called, "Dude Holy Crap Parasite With Teeth Right in The Chest What the Hell A Reanimated Dead Body!!!" And that would have been awesome.

The episode was pure, distilled Fringe mania. One of FBI honcho Broyle's pals is investigating a cargo container mystery involving stuffed pandas when he suddenly falls ill. It could be a heart attack, but actually his heart is being clutched in the jaws of a really fucked up parasite that looks like a cyber-venus flytrap. Now it's a race against time to see if Walter and Peter and Olivia can figure out how to detach the parasite.

Turns out the only dude who knows anything about parasite maintenance and removal is one Mr. Jones, a freaky pseudo-terrorist who deals in "scientific progress" instead of illegal weapons. Right now he's in a German jail, presumably for that bad batch of progress he sold to Yahoo! last year. After Olivia acts all tough and kind of sexy at the same time, Jones agrees to give up his parasite info if she'll let him ask his pal Smith one question.

Unfortunately, Smith's shady involvement with those stuffed pandas just got him shot in the head. No problem, says Walter, we'll just stick some electrodes on his head, feed his brainwaves into Peter's head, and get the answers we need. Peter will yell the answers into a cell phone, Olivia will tell Jones, and . . . yeah. So after some shenanigans and Peter moaning about being an experiment, they get Jones to relay the question: "Where does the gentleman live?" And after even more shenanigans where Peter writes in those little lines that Woodstock always uses in Peanuts, they figure out that Smith's answer is "Little Hill."

And then they get the parasite-stopping serum from Jones, and Olivia returns home from Germany without sleeping with an agent who cooks her dinner (he wasn't really that cute anyway).

But then!!! Suspenseful final plot twist OMG WTF!!! It turns out Broyle's pal who had the parasite was a total conspirator with his wife, who acted all ignorant and tearful. They pulled this whole thing just to get Smith to give up the "Little Hill" thing. Now they are mega-conspirators and you'll have to tune in next week to find out more about how Pacey will get over his electro-shock childhood with Dawson and Joey and finally put the moves on Olivia.

Frankly, I'm still excited about the idea of secret pseudo-terrorists who participate in a black market of scientific progress. It would explain so much about so many business plans . . .

I've been dubious about Fringe partly because it felt like the setup was flimsy and derivative, while the characters (except for the delightful mad scientist Walter) were falling flat. The one part of the show that kept drawing me back was the mad science, which has been so demented that I couldn't help but love it even when it was egregiously new agey. Ground zero of the science freakitude was biotech conglomerate Massive Dynamic, where bionic-armed Nina Sharp raises people from the dead and dispenses aphorisms about the sexism of high tech companies.

What makes Fringe intriguing is that Massive Dynamic is both the Big Bad and the Chaotic Good of the show. Sometimes it reanimates Olivia's ex-boyfriend in order to interrogate him, but sometimes it helps our scooby gang investigate "the Pattern" of strange experiments on human subjects in Boston. Corporate conspiracies are infinitely more fascinating than para-governmental ones ala X-Files.

Tuesday's episode deepened the ties between Massive Dynamic and Olivia, Peter, and Walter's investigation of "the pattern." It also humanized Nina, after she admitted to Peter that she and his father Walter had been "very close" when they were young. At the same time, we learned that Olivia has spine of steel. She told Peter the story of how she shot her abusive father almost to death when she was a kid. He disappeared after healing up, but he makes her life creepy every year by sending her a card for her birthday to remind her that he's "still out there." Now we know why Olivia is so intense, and we also know she's been capable of hardcore self-defense since she was a little girl. This is a character I want to know more about.

And Olivia's dad is still out there, creepier than ever. For her birthday during this episode, he left a card in her apartment mail slot, without an address on it. So we know he personally dropped it in there. And Papa Olivia isn't the only new creep we meet in this episode. A small corner of the Pattern is revealed when the scoobies investigate the strange case of two women whose bodies have been turned into microwave rays. Turns out the guy running this whole kidnap-and-weaponize-ladies operation is a pharmaceutical magnate named David Esterbrook, CEO of Intrepus (a competitor with Massive Dynamic). I just love the idea of evil pharma magnates. Plus, Esterbrook is played by my favorite actor from every Whit Stillman movie.

There are a lot of awesome mad science torture scenes where Esterbrook keeps his weaponized ladies in an isolation chamber and converts the experimental radioactive isotopes in their blood into explodey microwave ray gun things that make everybody bleed out of their eyes and die. Yeah, it's not much more sensical than that, but it makes for a cool story with a lot of gross eye-popping. Esterbrook may be part of the Pattern, or he may not. Though Olivia busts him at the end of the episode, I have the feeling this isn't the last we'll see of him.

Also, of course, the Pattern is about how pharmaceutical and biotech companies are part of an evil conspiracy to convert all of us into human weapons. Now we know exactly how Peter will get sucked into that Pattern, too. He's made a deal with Nina Sharp to trade information and favors, and his side of the bargain will involve helping her to get anti-development, indigenous people to give up some of their natural resources to Massive Dynamic. So Peter's superpower is helping biotech companies exploit tribal and aboriginal groups? That's random and fucked up and I like it.

Not only has Peter grown a new dark side, he's also managed to turn on the sexy. Yes, there was actually a moment of genuine sexual tension between him and Olivia at the end of the episode. Let's hope they don't act on it, since we know actual sex between main characters ruins everything, but it's nice to see a little racy Pacey coming out in Peter.

I think Fringe hit its stride last night because it finally showed us our main characters' true strengths. Olivia even stood up to her FBI boss Broyles, who keeps accusing her of being "too emotional." Finally she squares off with him and says, "Aside from the fact that men always say that the women they work with are 'too emotional,' I will admit I am emotional and that's why I'm good at my job." And we finally know what makes Peter interesting: He has connections with tribal peoples who are essentially the opposite of corporate execs. (Although I hope we'll never have an "indigenous people rescue the souls of white people" episode.)

More importantly, Fringe has finally gotten into its main groove: human experimentation. That's what links all the scooby gang's investigations together into the Pattern, and that's what makes this show particularly timely in an age when people are scared of how biotechnology will change humanity. Plus, exploding heads!

Since this is Fringe, where mad doctor Walter spends every episode exchanging bitter banter with his son Peter, all scientific experiments are thinly-veiled metaphors for parent-child relationships. This week's human test subject is no exception. Almost as soon as Joseph starts manifesting his electro-magnetic powers, he kills his mother with them (though first he fries the brains of a bunch of his co-workers). Poor guy has been used by our mad scientist of the week, Dr. Fisher, and has been humiliated by his mother for his poor hygiene. And now he gets his nerdy revenge.

But they key to understanding the scene I've clipped for you above is to ignore the "kid gets back at mean mom" element and go right to the heart of the Fringe fantasy. As Joseph explains, that fantasy is about what would happen if new agey therapies to realign your chi could actually lead you to a scientist who bestows super-powers. Yes, what I'm saying is that Fringe is the television equivalent of John Tesh: Half entertainment, half new-age freakout.

In fact, the overarching message of last night's episode was very finding-your-inner-crystal. Walter tells Vague Agent Olivia that the hallucinations she's having of dead ex-boyfriend John are perfectly natural because when she was psychically connected to him, part of his consciousness "crossed over" into hers. Peter continues to play piano to calm himself. And the special weapon Walter uses to find our EMP killer is a cage full of homing pigeons. Whoa, that's so organic man.

If the fantasy of Fringe is new age, then its nightmare is undoubtedly scientific weapons research. In this episode, like previous ones, the corporate conspiracy called the Pattern seems to emerge when mad scientists turn people into bioterror plague sludge or dangerous weapons (like Joseph, who can send fatal surges of electricity everywhere after Dr. Fisher works on him). So science is good when it makes you think of new agey bullshit, and bad when it's redolent of the Cold War paranoia that pervaded X-Files.

I loved the moment when Walter sums up all the work he'd done before going into a mental institution two decades before: "I'm sure it had something to do with the commies — everything did back then." These days, however, everything has to do with apolitical types who want to alter human bodies rather than human societies. Or maybe, as Massive Dynamic's strategy seems to imply, altering human bodies does alter society. But will we get a society of mommy killers or the Age of Aquarius? Hard to say. Let's just ignore that question and have Peter take his shirt off and play some John Tesh on that piano of his.

A strange cylinder turns up and Walter freaks out. Methinks the cylinder (which is not the first of its kind) is a pretty big deal. Many laboratory moments later we realize that the object is a subterranean torpedo, known as Project Thor (or a bomb that travels through the Earth as opposed to around it). How delightfully odd, but still Walter doesn't actually reveal what the cylinder is and why everyone wants it — and what does the creepy bald guy who can't taste anything have to do it with it? That being said I really enjoyed the new "bald" character and his lack of taste buds. Is he an alien? An immortal? A test-tube person? I don't know but I enjoyed his involvement in this story, good antagonist.

Half way through the episode, it's pretty obvious that Fox is leaning hard on the "We'll make you love Walter and want to sleep with Peter" button. To which I say, fine. Olivia bothers the ever-loving crap out of me, so if you want to fill this episode with maniacal Walter moments and Peter torture porn, so be it. I'll watch him get zapped in the brain over and over (but only because I have deep seeded parental issues and long to express my inner turmoil by mothering someone hurt). Oh, and for some reason watching him get brain-violated is hot, hot, hot.

Case in point on things Olivia does that bothers me: What's that you say? Peter has probably been taken to a dark graveyard in the middle of the night? Splendid, I'll go by myself and walk around with no backup, since the fate of the world is depending on me, and what-not. Oh, Olivia — while I assume that since you are in the FBI and appear to be a smart and classy lady, your decisions and easy luck continually irk me to no end. It's no lie that J.J. loves a strong female character, but right now I'd rather watch scenes of robo-lady Nina over your distraught "I'm confused but I'll figure it all out in the nick of time" storyline. Plus does anyone else think she's a wee-bit trigger happy?

But by the end all is returned to its place, besides that bomb thing that could destroy the world. But who cares? Peter's got sexy bruises and Walter is calm again. The "assistant" may or may not come back after getting injected in the neck with sedatives from Walter, which she totally has a right to be pissed about, but if she can't forgive him after his adorable "I'm a foolish old man" apology then her heart is a block of ice.

Overall Fringe is starting to grow on me, especially with the awesome addition of baldie. I enjoy the Peter/Walter chronicles and my dislike for Olivia hasn't forced me to give up on her completely. Hopefully the big return at the end of the episode will give her more depth.

Oh and finally Fringe Television points out that when the gang was in the Bishop family plot, the assumed grandfather in fact is not a pappy at all. He died too soon to be Walter's dad, so what is his significance and why did the torturer seem to know him? Is he an immortal, like baldie?

Following the formula of all our episodes so far, this week's Fringe had a mcguffin mystery and a mcguffin key to solving it. The mystery: Why is a bus full of people totally frozen in ice? Whoa! The key: A psychic office drone named Roy who draws weird Ben Templesmith ripoff pictures of scary death moments all connected to (you guessed it) the Pattern! Turns out mad scientist Walter put metal shavings in Roy's blood when he was a kid so that he could "tune" the "ghost network" for psychic shit! Holy crap what the hell! And now the guy is intercepting messages from bad guys who are using psychic frequencies for their "secure channel" bad guy stuff! This show requires exclamation points and I like it!

In a world where my government really is wiretapping every single phone call and all internet traffic, there's something weirdly believable about the idea that if there were a ghost network for psychic communications, some nasty intelligence agents would be using it to send encrypted messages. And of course, to spy on those messages too. Vague Agent Olivia and her scoobies have to figure out a way to turn Roy into a psychic wiretap. Which involves more homebrew brain surgery, and what Walter charmingly refers to as "intercranial penetration."

In the end, we find out that the bus is full of ice people because one of the dudes using the ghost network was a seriously fancy assassin. He used nitrogen-freezing chemicals (oh ok) made by Massive Dynamic so he could kill a DEA agent who had what looked like a bong screen (or perhaps a transparent Necco?) implanted in her hand. Apparently this DEA agent was also involved with the Pattern. So it seems that the Pattern exists like anywhere that somebody is an agent. I'm hoping we'll get an episode about a notary agent at some point.

There's a great scene where the brain-zapped Roy literally intercepts the secure psychic channel between two bad guys, inexplicably describing the conversation he's hearing in Latin. Armed with this knowledge, all the scoobies are able to catch the bad guys, and recover the stolen bong screen. Also, the cool thing about the ghost network? You don't need a warrant to tap it.

In typical JJ Abrams fashion, the episode ends with anti-closure. Sure, we know why the bus was frozen, but we've still got the mystery bong screen, which is apparently covered in encrypted data. Olivia's boss Broyles hands off to Nina Sharp from Massive Dynamic, which I guess means Sharp is a good guy or maybe Broyles is a bad guy. Either way, we know that Walter is truly a mad scientist, and maybe even evil too, since he's been responsible for creating at least three severely mutated boys just in two episodes.

Oh, and guess what? Olivia's lameass, traitor ex-boyfriend is all wired up and naked in a tank at Massive Dynamic. Tune in next week, when bald people and funny spaceships force Peter to beat somebody up, make Olivia pout, and cause Walter to do something MANIACAL.

Also, special notice to Fringe team: Pianos do not add anything to this show. Please stop with the piano thing.