A woman is dumped from a van into a night time street in Milford, MA.  She stumbles into a diner where the counter waiter mistakes her for a runaway or homeless and offers her some soup.  He also calls a friendly local beat cop.  The lady is spacey and has some wounds on her arms and legs.  She can’t remember what happened to her or much of anything else.  Marty the cop comes in and starts talking to her and she becomes agitated, saying “they did things…they gave me a red medicine.”  When the cop says he should come with her and starts putting cuffs on her, people in the diner start reeling in pain and bleeding from their eyes and ears, including the woman.  After a few minutes of screaming her head explodes.

Opening credits.

At the scene the next day, Walter is humming in tune with a power transformer.  Agent Dunham is twitchy and on edge.  Broyles goes over the facts; Emily Kramer was missing for two weeks and there is a high level of radiation in the diner – the most coming from Emily.  The three go in and Walter diagnoses what’s left of Emily as having Belini’s Lymphocemia (which is a made up sickness, we’ll talk later) a rare autoimmune disorder that eats away at muscles and organs, however she was in remission.  Walter then jams a meat thermometer into the dead cop’s ear to find the internal temperature was 120° meaning their brains were boiled alive.  Dunham goes to visit Nadeem Patel (credits say Sanjay Patel.)  She tells him about Emily, he’s crushed and gets Emily’s records.  Walter and Peter work on a headless body and mention something about hyacinths and subcutaneous injection marks.  The four make a giant leap that Emily was a field test of some kind and Dunham gets a call from charlie that another Belini’s patient is missing.  Charlie tries to lighten up Olivia’s rancorous mood and wisher her happy birthday.  They talk to Claire William’s husband, she says he doesn’t know Emily but that Claire went into remission (like Emily.)  We cut to a woman in an operating room as a person in a hazmat suit comes in and does some medicinal work with a blue serum.  The technician comes out and talks to a man in a suit who says, “The last was a test, this one counts.”

Back at the lab, Walter explodes a papaya with microwaves.  Astrid asks how Emily is cooking people and Walter shows that there are microscopic capsules of radio isotopes, primarily used to cure her but could be weaponized if released all at once.  Peter and Olivia go see Emily’s parents and Peter makes a statement that perfectly fits in this the sixth show.  To paraphrase, he’s seeing a pattern in Pattern cases – humans as guinea pigs, possibly weapons.  What if they aren’t experiments, what if they’re preparing for something?  Good question.  Emily’s family is having a wake, Claire goes in anyway and sneaks upstairs to snoop around for clues.  Emily’s mom comes in is shocked at first until Agent Dunham mentions Claire Williams, and Mrs. Kramer knows her.  Emily and Claire were friends.  Claire’s husband is so busted.  When he spills his story it’s one of desperate experimental treatment and he also drops Dr. Patel’s name.  Dr. Patel is also so busted.  Quick shot of Claire getting an injection of red than blue medicine.  Dunham is the heavy at Dr. Patel’s office and after he drops the name of David Esterbrook (head of the large drug company Intrepus) he blows his head off.

Federal HQ, Dunham sorts her mail and Charlie gives her some facts on Esterbrook and Intrepus’s wild experiments.  Dunham poses as a guest at a conference and flirts some information out of him before coming clean about her being an agent.  He gets all righteous and she gets in his face.  Broyles gets a phone call about it and goes to find Agent Dunham.  He slaps her wrists about her methods and she gets indignant.  She asks if there’s anything else she needs to run past him.  He says, “Not anything.  Everything.”  The lab tech in the hazmat suit puts a rat in Claire’s room and tells Esterbrook that she’s ready to be delivered.  Back in the room the rat crawls around while Claire gets anxious.  As the rat crawls under the sheets, it explodes.  Peter and Dunham go and she’s snippy and defensive.  She then tells a story about her father beating up her mom and how a nine year old Olivia got her dad’s gun and shot him.  He didn’t die, recovered, and disappeared and to this day she gets cards from him on her birthday – which is today.  Peter tells her Nina Sharp (Massive Dynamic) might have dirt on Esterbrook but Dunham doesn’t think she can go get it.  Peter does though and meets Nina at an equestrian club.  They chat, she mentions that she’s knows him from childhood and that she and Walter were once close.  Hmmm.  She gives him information about Intrepus testing facilities in return for a favor to be called in later.

Walter figures that the hyacinth smell is related to a trigger to the radioactive capsules, methyl eugenol, and he can create a bonding agent to stop the triggering of the capsules.  Peter gives Olivia his information about where Claire is by lying about seeing heat signatures from the isotopes from reconnaissance satellites.  She orders a full tactical invasion of the facility.  There’s some gun play and Olivia finds the lab tech who triggers the radiation in Claire.  Olivia puts the antidote in the airlock and convinces a panicky Claire to inject it into her neck which she does shortly before the radiation levels reach critical.

Agent Dunham confronts David Esterbrook who dances around the accusations and she mentions all the press waiting outside, then she cuffs him.  Back at HQ she checks her mail again, no card from daddy.  Broyles dresses her down again and she lashes out and says if he doesn’t like it, he can fire her.  He doesn’t, but says she’s not going to get off that easy.  On the radio, Nina and Olivia separately hear the reports of Intrepus stock tanking and Massive Dynamic becoming the largest pharmaceutical company.  Olivia and Peter share a nice moment in front of the Bishop’s hotel, cute and almost flirty.  She goes home to see a card slipped under her door with her name on the front and “Thinking of you” inside.

Before you go looking up Belini’s Lymphocemia, let me save the trouble of spending a half hour coming up with variant spelling and scouring Web MD for answers to this rare and debilitating disorder:  It doesn’t exist.  That’s right, Fringe has gone so far out into the edges of practical and ethical science that they are now making diseases up.

This brings up two problems.  The first being J. J. Abrams does not think, after all the nuanced mayhem of Lost, that people are paying attention to every detail of his shows enough that they won’t try to look up a rare disease simply out of curiosity.  Admittedly there are more ailments of which I am unaware than aware so of course I tried looking it up – mainly to spell it right.  Which leads to the second problem:  The entire story hinged on the treatment of this false illness.  The illness was reverse engineered from the story concept.  There are conditions that require radiation therapy and there’s even a Burkitt’s Lymphoma that requires the traditional chemotherapy, so why create a fake disease?

I have a theory and that is the creators and writers don’t want people seeing the show and then going to their doctors asking for that injection of radioisotope capsule serum like they saw on TV.  Have people with visions asked to check their iridium levels?  Have people who short out wrist watches ask physicists to chart their EM signatures?  I don’t know, but the only explanation I can figure to concocting an illness is to avoid litigation of some kind.  However, this is one of those facts you don’t realize until after and only if you’d bothered to do any research.  This isn’t exactly like seeing a 555 phone number, but it’s similar in that it reminds you that this is just a fictional universe.

The shock value was really amped up in this episode.  We don’t actually see a head exploding, but we see a lot of blood and a headless corpse later.  And yet again, an otherwise regular person is in danger because they’re a lab rat and the Harvard crew has to save them thanks to the quick work and brain power of the Bishops.  A few new levels of character were explored; the link from Nina to Peter, the mysterious Daddy Dunham and I honestly think Broyles was mad at Olivia because Esterbrook was somehow involved in whatever high level circles he’s running in.  Speculation, but I can’t imagine “making the bureau look bad” is reason enough to keep harping on her.

Nothing really special about this episode except the bad taste in my mouth from the falsified sickness.  For that reason alone I’m leaving “The Cure” with two and a half randomly chosen glyphs.  They need to find a new tack or the ship’s going to lose passengers quickly.