Connecticut.  A car drives along a rainy night time road.  Ben, a ten or eleven year old boy in the back seat, is writing a complex musical score, dad is asking him to cool it, think about other things.  A stranded lady with red hair flags them down for help.  After a call to a tow, the dad takes a look at the engine.  He notices the transmission is dry as a red light and green light start blinking in some sequence.  Dad is hypnotized and the next thing he knows the tow driver is apologizing for taking so long.  The car is gone and so is Ben.

Opening Credits

Broyles recaps the incident to Olivia Dunham.  Three other misper cases describing the same woman, each of the victims were insane and forgetful of the events – also all of them were highly intelligent.  Walter Bishop eerily recalls a pattern of Christmas lights.  During questioning of the dad and his sister, the dad tells Dunham that Ben’s mom and Ben were in a car accident.  She died, Ben survived but lay in a coma for six weeks.  The day he came home, he started playing piano.  He’d never played before.  Two weeks later he began composing his own music, obsessively playing one song which he could never finish.  In a dark room with a TV, we see Ben in a corner.  The red haired woman enters and says Ben’s mom wants to see him.  Walter sings Christmas carols to jar his memory of the lights and talks about an old job in creating hypnotic lights for an ad agency.  He sets up a quick test positing that it’s the red and green wavelengths that do the trick.  Peter watches a series of lights flashing and the next thing he knows it’s lunch time, he’s holding scissors and has no sleeves.  To him no time has passed.  Charlie Francis calls Dunham to tell her the suspect is a woman named Joann Osler, an MIT neurologist, but records have her dead ten years from a car off a bridge – but the body was never found.  Walter remembers about the lights and a man named Dashiell Kim (credited as Dashiell Briggs) a fellow inmate at the same institute Walter was in, but he’s a 1027 – criminally insane possessing state secrets.  Broyles shows Dunham a picture of what Kim did to his wife (dead body, equations on the wall written in blood) and says he doesn’t know how Kim will help.  Joann takes Ben to another room with a piano and lots of music pages.  His mom is there too.

Peter and Walter see the same Kim photo.  Walter says he recognizes Dashiell’s handiwork, meaning the equation not the dead wife.  Apparently he could never finish the problem and would get enraged when offered help.  Dunham tells Peter that Ben could never finish his composition either.  Walter and Peter quickly transpose Kim’s equation to music and Peter begins playing Ben’s song.  Walter reminds us that even though Dashiell and Ben never met, curious minds can come to the same point at the same time as happened with calculus (Leibniz, Newton).  Ben asks his mom if they’re in heaven.  She doesn’t understand either and tells him he needs to finish his song.  She calls him Bean.  Dunham meets with a Dr. Sumner, gives him a bit of information about the case.  Sumner brings up another of his patients, Walter Bishop.  Dunham says he’s doing great, Sumner says, “He has no business being out among the rest of us.”  He then says she can’t question Dashiell, but he’ll allow Walter to talk to him.  Peter puts up a fight about sending his dad back to the institution, Walter says he doesn’t want to go either, but has to in order to save the missing boy.  The three head to the hospital and meet Dr. Sumner.  He takes Walter back to meet Dashiell.

In the rec room, Sumner gives Walter ten minutes.  Dashiell is a smiling old man holding a cup of pudding.  They joke for a minute and Walter slyly brings up the woman and the lights.  Dashiell loses his smile and shuts down, telling Walter to leave him alone.  Walter gets up and gets a crayon and starts writing Kim’s equation on the table.  Kim shouts that he doesn’t do math any more which sets off all the other patients.  Sumner motions two large orderlies to separate the two and Walter is then injected and sedated.  Peter is upset, saying Walter is in his custody and they haven’t the right to do that.  Sumner says it’s his right to protect people.  Sumner argues with Peter and Olivia until she threatens a court order.  Sumner doesn’t flinch, tells her to go get one.  Later in one of the rooms, Walter can’t sleep and some one comes into his room.  We don’t see whom it is at first but after a moment of Walter freaking out, we see that it’s…Walter in a sweater saying, “Welcome back.”

Back at HQ, Charlie tells Dunham the regular FBI tips and leads haven’t turned anything up on Ben’s whereabouts.  She gets a call from the general counsel, they tell her the court order won’t come until the morning.  Peter brings up some bits about Joann Osler’s aliases and asks for a computer, thinking he can find her.  Apparently Osler is a middle English for “inn keeper” so he starts looking up Hyatt, Ritz and soon finds a no-photo hit to a PO Box in Clarksburg.  Dunham asks for the search to include that area.  Ben is playing piano while his mom is listening.  He gets to the end and stumbles, saying he doesn’t see it.  After another try and still nothing, the mom starts decomposing or dissolving.  She says she doesn’t want to leave yet but Joanne says that’s up to Ben.  She gets fairly bloodied but we cut back to the institution.  Walter talks to Dahsiell and sees his double Walter across the way.  Walter asks about the woman again.  Dashiell resists for a moment then tells Walter it was beautiful, that she promised him things he wanted most of all.  But when he couldn’t solve the equation, she took it all away and began to hurt him.  This is cut with images of Ben strapped into a chair with a keyboard and wires hooked up to his head.  Walter keeps pressing but Dashiell breaks down saying it was all a bad dream before he could say where he was taken.  Peter comes back to get Walter and Sumner says he’s going to petition the state to have Walter removed from Peter’s care.  There’s a veiled threat to Sumner and Peter goes to get his dad.  In a touchingly sad moment, Walter says he failed and all Dashiell did was go on and on about red castles and dungeons.  Then asks Peter if that’s what it’s like talking to him.

In Clarksburg, Dunham and Agent Francis are canvassing the area looking for Ben.  Peter calls her, says Walter’s out and all Dashiell talked about were dungeons and red castles.  Directly in front of Dunham is a building that looks like a red castle.

(apple glyph)

It’s an abandoned amusement park storage place or something.  Charlie and Olivia begin searching and it leads them to the basement and then a massive substructure.  Guns drawn and music threatening, Olivia comes to a room where a limp Ben lies in a chair hooked up to machines.  Joanne appears and starts fighting Dunham.  It’s a good fight but Joanna bolts and Olivia gives chase.  In one of the corridors, Dunham yells for Joanna to freeze.  She does, but clicks a little remote which triggers red and green lights around Dunham.  Moments later Olivia is startled by Charlie and Joanne is gone.  Peter and Walter arrive at home where Walter geeks a bit and says he needs his own room now.  Peter is okay with it and also tells him it was very brave of him to go back to the hospital.

A garage opens and Joanne drives up and meets a man saying she’s got it, now lets see if it works.  The man hooks up a bunch of wires and connectors to a safe in which he puts an apple.  He puts the equation into a computer and the drapery on the back of the safe starts vibrating.  Gloves on, the man pushes his hands through the safe and pulls out the apple.  The he shoots Joanne, eats the apple, makes a phone call and says, “It worked.”  Ben and dad are reunited, Broyles hands them the release forms and they’re free to go.

Randall Duk Kim (the Keymaker from Matrix: Reloaded) turned in a wonderful performance as Dashiell Kim.  What is it about older stage actors that make such good crazy scientists?

In “The Equation” we’re introduced to a couple new pieces of fringe science.  Piece the first; you can use lights of a specific wavelength and in a specific pattern to instantly immobilize someone.  Piece the second; given the right equation, you can turn solid matter into a form of matter which is more permeable or transpose that matter to another dimension long enough to pass objects through it.  Both of these bits, like so many others on the show, seem plausible.  From what I know of quantum mechanics (which admittedly is low on a quantum scale) it would be entirely possible to shift matter or allow the state of matter to be changed.  The problem I see with this is the same as the idea of bridging two planes of existence or multiple universes or breaching or circumventing the speed of light:  It requires energy on a scale that’s not possible to us, at least not to my knowledge.  It would seem a quantum shift like they showed which need more power than what 240 volts could give you.  It was also a little sad to see it demonstrated in such a pedestrian way by having them break into a safe.  Are we dealing with nothing more than petty thieves?

As to the blinking lights, I believe that is also possible, but dramatized in this case to provide a movable plot.  External visual stimulus has been shown to have the ability to remap the human brain and it happens every day.  Each time you do something new (take a different road to work, watch a new show, try a new dish) your brain is remapping itself to the experience.  Stimulus can also have a “zombie” effect in that it can change your cortical map in a way you’re not aware of.  Given this information, it’s entirely possible to change the state of your active awareness with external stimuli; flashing lights.

I know, I know.  Blah blah science blah blah brain blah.  One of the reasons I enjoy this show as much as I do is because it makes me think about the science we have now, as it exists, the current state of knowledge possessed by human beings and examine it close enough to ask if it’s possible to do these things.  It may over shadow the plot points, writing, acting or production values, but I think the target audience for this show are the science lovers – not necessarily scientists.

That said, this episode was pretty well done.  The pacing was good, the acting didn’t seem typical (especially for Olivia Dunham) and as much as I love the Astrid jokes, I’m glad they didn’t use them this time.  There was just enough playful banter between the Bishops to decompress the visceral themes seen in the dungeon and mental hospital.  The writers did well in this.  My only sticking point was that the convenience of Oliva being in front of a red castle when Peter tells her about it was nearly laughable.  Oh, and no visual contact with the Observer this time around.

Four randomly chosen glyphs.  (Notice the new one this time around.  The smoke face.  Meaningful?)