Fringe: "The Equation" - Episode 108

There's an old joke that goes like this - A man gets in a car accident and breaks both his arms. He asks his doctor, "Doc, will I be able to play the piano after my arms heal?" The doctor says "Yes, of course." The man says, "Hey, that's great, because I never could before." Well, not only did 'The Equation' manage to take that joke and turn it into what was probably one of the best episodes of Fringe to date, but it also gave us a little background into Walter's past days in the mental hospital. Not exactly a sock hop in there, but I'm sure you knew that already. More Fringe after the jump...

 

'The Equation' started off with an abduction, that of young musical prodigy Ben after his father is mysteriously hypnotized by some flashing red and green lights hidden inside the engine of a stranded car that he attempts to assist. As Dad stands there gazing mindlessly at the red and green lights, both his son and the stranded car vanish. What's also gone is the red-haired woman who was driving the stranded car, and neither Dad or the tow truck driver who pulls Dad from his trance have any clue as to where she or Ben have gone. 

 

Enter the Fringe team, and after being briefed on the case of the disappearing prodigy, Walter claims to have some previous experience with the flashing red and green lights. He was once hired to build a similar device to hypnotize commercial viewers into buying product, and he re-tests his theories in the Harvard lab by hypnotizing Peter into cutting the sleeves off of his own shirt without even knowing it. Walter runs through the case in his head in his own loveable little Walter kind of way, and before you know it, he's got a lead. Turns out that a fellow detainee of his by the name of Dashiell Kim back at the mental institution once told him a story about how he was hypnotized by the flashing red and green lights on a Christmas tree. The person that did it to him held him prisoner and made him work on an all-but-unsolvable mathematics equation without telling him why.

 

On Olivia's end of things, she finds out that abductions like Ben's have happened before. It happened to Dashiell Kim, for one, but three or four other times, as well. They've all originated with the aforementioned flashing lights, and what's more, every person taken prisoner all possessed incredibly gifted minds with unprecedented insight and expertise in their field. Olivia can't figure out why young Ben would fit into this mold at first, but after a meeting with Ben's father, she realizes why. Ben hasn't always been a brilliant musical prodigy, but he certainly has been ever since he was in that car accident that killed his mother. After he healed from his wounds, he was suddenly blessed with unbelievable musical talent and cursed with a single piece of unfinished music in his head that he just can't figure out the ending to. It's this very piece of music that apparently spawned his abduction, and it's up to Walter and the rest of the team to determine why.

 

We also got a look at the plight of poor Ben - he's been locked in a room by himself watching Superman cartoons. The red-headed woman that abducted him walks in and tells him that it's time to get to work. Ben yells for his dad, but Red does him one better - how about his mom instead? Wait, didn't she die in the car crash that rendered Ben the next Mozart? Well, that's what we were led to believe, but apparently not. Or is she? I suppose we'll find out soon enough, but for now, Ben is taken to an adjacent room with a piano in it, and he's told to play the sheet music that he had been writing prior to his abduction strung up all over the wall. It's in an order that he'd never considered before, and while he finds the arrangement of his music interesting, he finds the entrance of his dead mother into the room even moreso. She walks in looking good as new (well, more or less, as there is a nasty scar across the right side of her face), and as she sits down next to him at the piano, she tells him if he finishes the piece of music he's been slaving over ever since she died in the crash, the two of them will be set free together. Ben is convinced, and he begins playing the piece over and over again, trying in vain to determine exactly how it should end.

 

Meanwhile, Peter and Walter get a handle on how exactly music plays into all of this. It seems that Walter's friend Dashiell went a little nutso after he was released by his captors (as did all the previous abductees), and as a result, he killed his wife out of frustration with a particular mathematical equation he could never quite solve. While thumbing through some photos of the crime scene, they spot a mathematical equation that he wrote all over the wall behind her body. Peter determines that because music is a mathematical language, maybe the equation can be interpreted in that very manner. Walter translates the mathematical equation into sheet music, and Peter plays it on the piano in the lab. Voila! It's the very same piece of music that our prodigy friend Ben has been furrowing his brow over ever since his Mom died, and with that, we have our connection. Whoever abducted Dashiell Kim is undoubtedly the same person who took Ben, and what's more, it was probably for the same reason - to find out the numerical sequence that both solves the equation and completes the piece of music.

 

The next logical step in this case is to find out who abducted Dashiell Kim (and Ben in turn), so Olivia requests that Walter re-visit his old stomping grounds at the mental hospital he spent 17 years in. He's reluctant, but because Ben's life hinges upon it, he agrees. Walter looks absolutely terrified as he re-enters the facility the next day, and his meeting with Dashiell goes all sorts of wrong. Dashiell gets downright violent when Walter presses him for information, and when the two men tussle in the day room, Walter is drugged against his will and thrown in a holding cell. Neither Peter or Olivia are very happy about this, but the hospital's director couldn't care less. He claims that Walter isn't fit to be out and about without any direct supervision and care, and he makes Olivia retrieve a court order before he agrees to free him. Walter spends a harrowing night in the hospital, and after managing to nearly bring a tear to my eye with a lonely, tortured rendition of 'Row Your Boat', he also has a vision of himself sitting at the foot of his bed. Welcome back, Walter, says the other Walter. I have to believe that this dual persona is going to come back into play later in the series, but let's get the most ridiculous question out of the way - there really aren't two Walters, are there? Preposterous, I know, but if we hadn't already seen evidence of cloning happen once on this show already...

 

Walter and Dashiell reconcile a bit the next day, and before long, Dashiell is spilling his guts about what he remembers from the day he was abducted. He was taken and made to try and solve the mathematical equation that later made him kill his wife, and in a series of crosscuts, we see Ben being subjected to the same fate. Dashiell tells Walter that he was hypnotized and made to see things that weren't really there, things that he wanted very badly, much like Ben and his mother back at the piano. When he couldn't solve the equation, those things were taken away, and as Ben's mother's facial scar begins to open and bleed all over the piano keys, the similarities increase even further. Ben's mother isn't really sitting at the piano with him at all; in fact, all Ben has really been doing is sitting at a faux keyboard while strapped into some sort of mind-altering computer that has been making him believe his mother is really there. The red-headed woman sits nearby taking notes, collecting information from Ben's musical interpretations as he plays. 

 

Back in the real world, Dashiell finishes the conversation by breaking into tears and telling Walter that he was being kept in the dungeon of a red castle. Walter feels defeated by this, fearing that he didn't get the answers that the Fringe team needed to solve the case.

 

Back at FBI headquarters, Olivia is nailing down the court order to spring Walter, and Peter has a rather hoaky epiphany by way of the magical internets that grants the team the name of the red-headed woman. It's Joanne Ostler, and all they have to go on to find her is a PO Box in a nearby town. Olivia goes out with Charlie to scour the neighborhood for clues, and Peter goes to the hospital to free Walter and get into a pissing contest with the hospital's director over whether or not Walter is sane enough to leave or not. The old guy's taking it pretty hard that he wasn't able to help, but his 'dungeon in the red castle' clue is passed along to Olivia nonetheless. She's about to throw in the towel when she glances across the street and sees a big red building. It's a children's playground, and it's rather in the shape of a castle.

 

Olivia calls in for backup while she and Charlie raid the red castle and find Ben still tied to his interrogation chair down in the basement. She's in the process of freeing him with Joanne Ostler sneaks up behind her and starts kicking her ass. The two ladies mix it up for a bit, and right when Olivia thinks she's got her target where she wants her at the end of a hall at gunpoint, Olivia pulls some sort of remote control from her pocket and presses a button on it. Red and green lights start flashing in the hallway over Olivia's head, and... uh-oh. Charlie wakes Olivia up from the trance Joanne just put her in, and it's clear that she'd been standing there with her gun still drawn for a while. Ben is safe, but much like Peter's shirt sleeves, Joanne is gone.

 

Yet here she is, driving a stolen car into a garage somewhere. There's a man there waiting for her, and as she hands him the formula that Ben's music helped to complete, he plugs the numbers from it into some wacky machine and turns it on. The machine appears to be a heavy steel box with an apple inside it, to be quite frank. However, as the computers attached to the box whirl and hum, and the man puts on a heavy black glove to slide his hand right through the back of the box and retrieve the apple with, it becomes quite clear that it is much, much more. Joanne's jaw drops at what she's seeing, but she doesn't have long to ask any questions. The man performing the test shoots her dead, takes a bite of the apple, and reaches for his phone. "It worked," he says.

 

 

Anyone get a glimpse of The Observer anywhere? Oh, there he is - right behind Olivia when she spots the red castle that Ben was being held captive in. Neato. 

 

Speaking of which, tons of good geeky Fringe fun is to be had at this website. A bit of poking around will reveal that this episode wasn't the first appearance of the red and green lights, after all. Remember the red and green dots on the stocking capped dude with the zap gun in 'The Arrival'?

 

"Did you have a party while I was gone?" Once a father, always a father.

 

There really aren't two Walters, are there? Are there? Moreso, what if the director of the mental hospital is right? What if he's correct in his assertation that Walter is a danger both to himself and others, and really shouldn't be allowed to just walk around free?

 

"What's up, Chachi?"

 

I'm not quite sure what to make of Walter's requesting his own room. Is he just moving past the various insecurities he may have accumulated during his time in the institution, or does he now want to investigate things about himself that he doesn't want Peter to be privy to? You can't just see yourself sitting at the foot of your bed and not want to question why at least a little bit, right? Personally, I just can't wait to see what kind of wacky antics Walter gets himself into after he gets his own place. I think Jean the cow should move in with him.

 

Would it have been so tough to throw a reference to Hurley and Libby in the day room at the mental hospital? A game of Connect Four is pretty cheap these days. Speaking of those two weirdos, there's a reference to the Lost numbers on the license plate of the car that Joanne Ostler stole - 332 EWD. Got it yet? I'll bet you do.

 

The previews for next week look great! John Scott! Peter kicking ass! More naked Anna Torv in the 'Altered States' tank! HURRAY! 

 

-littlebigmouth.