Springfield.  Young man is on the phone, texting someone and chatting on the computer.  A screen pops up saying “What’s the noise?” and then a video stream of shaky, overlaid images and static noises begins playing (think of a NIN video).  The young man is transfixed trying to figure out what’s going on.  His mom comes in saying she’s leaving and reminds him to feed Lucky.  He doesn’t answer, she smiles in her “Aw, my computer addle-brained son.  How adorable” way and as she leaves we cut back to him staring slack-jawed at the screen.  Tears and drool are pouring and has he looks seemingly unable to move, a shape starts emerging from the screen.  It’s a hand and it stretches further and further, reaching for the boy’s face.  In an instant it grabs his whole head and…

Opening credits.

Beyoncé is playing in the background as Olivia and Ella are playing Operation.  Rachel comes in to scold her daughter about not brushing her teeth.  The adults are smiling and sharing coffee.  At the Fringe Lab, Walter is pontification on Darwin’s inaccuracies.  Peter is getting the mail and reads a letter from an envelope simple marked “Walter Bishop.”  He finishes and looks at Astrid who makes eye contact briefly and then looks away.  Olivia calls to say a body is being delivered.  The Bishops leave as Peter crumples up the letter and throws it away.  Astrid retrieves the letter and reads it.  Agents Dunham and Frances are at the boy’s house talking to his parents.  They say he was a good kid with good grades – no drugs.  He had asthma, which the mom blames on the computer, on which he’s on constantly.  Walter is doing an autopsy on the boy when Olivia returns.  The boy’s brains have been liquefied, initial thinking is from syphilis.  Astrid is checking on the boy’s computer but the hard drive is fried.  Olivia goes to check on the boy’s friend Luke Dempsey.  Luke says they’d been chatting about stuff, nothing major and when asked if someone might have wanted to hurt the boy, Greg.  Peter calls about another body.  Broyles is on the scene of a used car lot where the GM has liquid brains.  He was a good guy, honest.  No one would want to hurt him either.  The fused platters of the car salesman’s computer exhibit the same damage as the teenager’s.  Right before they died, the machines downloaded a huge file, 657mb.  Astrid needs more time to find where the file came from.  The old phone on the wall of the lab rings, no one knew it still worked.  Peter answered and says there’s no one here by that name, gives the others a “student looking for financial aid” line and then says he knows a guy who could help with the hard drives.  Astrid tells Olivia she knows who was on the phone, then gives her the crumpled letter.

Peter visits Akim and it’s obvious the two have a past.  Peter makes an offer with a gold coin and some prestidigitation to garner some techie help.  Akim begins working on the hard drives.  Sanford Harris asks Dunham what she’s doing with the investigation.  He says it’s a CDC case and she fights back saying she did her due diligence.  He goes off on Dunham saying this case is beyond FBI purview and says she has 12 hours and then he’s shutting her down.  Akim finds out that whoever sent the file is trying to cover their tracks.  Olivia starts hunting down AMA info on brain liquefaction.  Akim can’t track its source, but he can find its destination, and it’s Olivia’s apartment.  Little Ella is online.

Olivia races home while calling on the phone.  Rachel is mixing in the kitchen and can’t hear her phone.  Ella is using a child’s painting program.  Peter and Olivia are en route and Ella sees “What’s that Noise?” on the screen and the video starts playing.  She becomes locked in and the hand starts reaching out from the laptop monitor.  Olivia mounts a curb and dashes up to the house gun drawn.  She sees Ella and the computer but no hand.  Rachel drops her mixing and says no one’s in the house with them.  Olivia remove the laptop from Ella’s lap and it’s a few moments before Ella snaps out of it.  Dunham recaps to Charlie what she saw on the screen, bursts of images.  Charlie calls computer forensics to come take a look.  Peter is playing with Ella and we detect a little flirting between him and Rachel.  Olivia says they need to check Ella out and she recaps the hand coming out of the computer.  Olivia looks at the computer to see a green light near the web-pinhole-cam.  Her face is then on a screen and we pan back to see a gruff man looking back saying, “That’s right, sweetheart.  I’m the one you’re looking for.”  A warning of a security breach pops up on the man’s screen and he’s goes to investigate.  The intruder is Luke (Greg’s friend) and the gruff man is his dad.  He’s bringing lunch.  Luke asks if he’s found a job yet and that he hasn’t been to his place in a while.  Dad says he has to get back to work on this new program, it’ll impress a lot of people.

Federal HQ.  Doctor’s say Ella is fine.  Olivia relays the camera thoughts about being spied on to Broyles.  So far there’s no connection between the victims.  Evanston, IL.  A wife comes home asking for help with the groceries.  She goes upstairs to see her hubby dead at his computer.  He was online trading stocks and I’ll avoid the “assets were liquefied” joke.  (Ok not really.)  Peter and Olivia pull a line from Men In Black by saying the world is a crazy place and no one knows about it, but if they do they’re job they won’t have to.  Charlie calls Olivia to report the Chicago death.  Peter tells Olivia he’ll meet her inside and goes to talk to an older lady, Jessica Warren.  She sent the letter and Peter says it’s too soon to see Walter, nothing will bring her daughter back but she still needs to see him.  He says it’s not going to happen and walks off.  Walter tells Olivia he has an idea about what happened, that the program runs visual and aural stimulation and the hand they see is a hallucination resulting from it.  Olivia tells Peter she knows who that lady was.  Peter tells Olivia Walter couldn’t handle seeing her, she disagrees and Peter underestimates him.  Astrid has facts for Olivia and they sort out that the latest victim was married to Luke Dempsey’s mom.  Olivia recalls that Luke said his and Greg’s dad were friends.  Peter rips the old phone off the wall and plays off Walter’s concern about what he though was a fight between Peter and Olivia.  Olivia tells Peter that Brian Dempsey is their suspect and asks Charlie to get get him.  Harris shows up and acts like a jerk as usual and Dunham and Frances start grilling Luke who lawyers up.  Olivia says wait five minutes then release Luke, screw Harris.

Luke calls a cab and Olivia listens in to get an address of where he’s going.  They follow the cab and have a discussion about Walter and Jessica Warren.  She doesn’t call for backup, thinking Harris out to get her.  We see Harris looking for Dunham, he gets ticked and has her car’s GPS traced.  Olivia is sneaking through Brian Dempsey’s hacker lair and hears him and Luke arguing.  His proximity alarm goes off and he sees Olivia on the security camera, he tells Luke to leave.  Olivia stalks in to see a dark work area when suddenly the screens light up with the brain scrambling images.  She sees herself in a webcam on the monitor as a hand with a gun enters the picture pointing at her head.

Peter’s still in the car.  Brian takes Olivia’s gun, says his life is ruined and puts his gun under his chin.  She tries to talk him down.  Peter waits his customary five minutes then gets out of the car.  Brian stares at the screens saying he wants to see his creation.  Luke intercepts Peter with a lead pipe and they hear a gun shot.  Brian went into a trance and pulled the trigger.  Luke runs and is intercepted by the feds led by Harris.  Harris talks to Broyles about Dunham disobeyed orders, Broyles fights back and says he’d defend her with his career.  “You decide to go after Olivia Dunham, you’re going after me and all the red tape in the world won’t protect you.”  Peter brings Jessica Warren to the lab.  She starts by saying her daughter’s name was Carla Warren and asks if he remembers her.  All she wants is to know is if there was anything Walter could remember about her.  He says she had a wonderful smile and that he’ll tell her everything he remembers about her.  Olivia and Rachel talk about her job and Ella goes to bed.  The doorbell rings, it’s Peter, he’s well into his cups.  He’s there to say thank you for having Walter in his life and that he was a little scared.  Rachel says hi to Peter and there’s a moment between them that leaves Olivia wondering.

I was going to take off points for all the computer writing in this episode.  I will admit, for a single file, 657 megabytes is large.  For comparison, an average CD ROM disc holds 750mb.  While we’re dealing with storage capacity that has recently hit 2 terabytes, this is still a large file to stream across a network.  Also, Akim’s hacking computer boots into what looks like Windows 2003, which is generally a server operating system, not a savvy hacker’s preferred OS.  Of course, it boots in less than 2 seconds and then shows a custom operating system with fun but impractical applications that thankfully at least included a command prompt.  Also, the idea that you can’t trace the source, but you can trace the destination was a little hard to swallow, especially considering it took maybe 15 seconds.  I’ve never liked the way TV and film deal with computers.  I believe Borne Ultimatum was the only movie I’ve seen where they used computers that look like they’re running actual programs and not some fancy, over interfaced piece of screen candy.

I only harp on it because it was the focus of the episode.  Killer with a vendetta or not, the fringe element this time around was a computer virus than can affect people.  Through the right stimulus, a program can overload a human brain.  I don’t know if it could liquefy it, that seems rather molecular.  That bit of shock value was likely to move past the fact that they’ve done brain stimulating twice before and just needed a new gimmick.

No, this time around, we’re being set up for more later.  TVZ’s now retired Jonah Knight recently espoused the idea that everything in the show is important and being brought together.  Having watched them all and seeing how they all tied in at the mid season break with Dunham being taken and David Robert Jones being sprung via teleporter, all the pieces fell in together.  Now that the break is over, we’re going to have a few episodes that seem like filler or monster-of-the-week but watch out for telltale signs of what’s to come.

To that end, Rachel (Olivia’s sister) is going to be a bigger part in the story before it’s all said and done.  She’s ducked two chances to push a new story; the first being her saying nothing was wrong less than convincingly, the second was now with her laptop being the target of a revenge killer.  Make no mistake, Brian Dempsey wasn’t after Ella, he was after Rachel but probably figured Ella was just as good.  Some how, Rachel had dealings with this guy and wronged him.  Or, Olivia did something and Brian was trying to kill Olivia.  As far as I could tell, concretely, Ella’s attack had nothing to do with the others.

Peter is also being set up and it has to do with Rachel.  There are many options left open for him and his underground dealings, but something is happening between the two of them that will likely play itself out and I fear for the worst.  She’s going to be hurt by something he’s done or is willing to do and it will put a separation between him and Olivia from which they may not recover.

A lot of knowing looks, political in fighting and a creepy computer hand.  Despite that, “The No-Brainer” was only mildly entertaining.  Establishing threads for later use just isn’t as exciting as gun fire and enormous plot reveals.  Something was lacking in action or Walterisms department.  Three randomly chosen glyphs.