Medford, MA.  Couple guys are taking cryogenically frozen heads from a facility.  A car pulls up and the driver gets out eating an apple, asks for directions, then starts shooting the guards.  One of the men is with the shooter and tells him to let him know when they find something.  The shooter takes the truck as one of the dying guards shoots the accomplice.  He shoots him several times and the man shakes it off until he’s shot in the head.  The man lies on the ground bleeding silver.

Opening credits.

Harvard.  Astrid is chopping up worms.  Walter tells Olivia he has an idea about recovering her memory by eating flatworms, they apparently have the ability to transfer memory by digestion.  While the Bishops argue, Olivia downs the pureed worms without hesitation.

The group meets Broyles, he relays the crime scene information including the fact that two other cryogenics labs were hit.  Walter investigates the body bleeding silver or mercury as it turns out.  Olivia has a flash back of her meeting with William Bell.  Charlie Francis joins Walter as he checks out the body and pulls out a shapeshifting device from the man’s pocket.  In a remote location, Charlie finds the original shooter who is shaving the frozen heads, looking for something.  Charlie tells him the op was sloppy, they have a body and they understand what it is.  The shooter tells him he’s been in that body too long and he needs to get a new device, then says there’s another facility in North Carolina.  Charlie says he has another idea, Dunham is starting to remember and it’s a likely reason Bell brought her to the other side.

Broyles wins Best Line of the Episode by saying, “Why are shape shifting soldiers from another universe stealing frozen heads?”  FBI doesn’t know who and the facilities aren’t given up their client lists.  Dunham says Peter might be able to help figure out the device, Broyles wants to give Dunham a protective detail but she refuses.

Walter says the body isn’t human but a mechano-organic hybrid.  The mercury is used to receive electronic instructions on how to take shapes.  At another location (Peter’s house?) he hooks up the working device to some equipment.  He sees the device is streaming a lot of data.  Walter has bad news for everyone, the shape shifter’s blood is 47% mercury while the original shape shifter had no mercury in her blood, meaning the original one is still out there.  The good news is, Walter thinks he has a way to find it.  The woman from the video tape he showed them a while back, she may have the answers.  Charlie takes a call from Olivia about checking the crime scene.  Charlie is in a drug store buying all the thermometers.  In his car he breaks them open into a cup and drinks them.  He has a few fits, sweats, and his skin looks loose and partly disconnected.  He drinks the the mercury and the skin returns to normal.

Massive Dynamic.  Olivia meets with Nina Sharp about the device.  MD researches say they can pull an image of the last user off the broken one now that they have a working one.  We meet a sarcastic but affable engineer who says he can have it in three hours and can patch Olivia into the rendering program off a secure public server.

Walter and Peter go to Rebecca Kidner’s house and Walter gets nervous.  She immediately remembers Walter and gives him a smiling hug.  Peter is concerned.  Over coffee, she recaps the last few years after the experiments when she’d still see people with a certain glow and she knew they didn’t belong.  Rebecca is a bit smitten with Walter, and tells Peter the ability comes and goes.  Walter suggests doing the experiment again and she seems a bit excited about helping.

Back at the lab, Walter fires up a Yes album and Rebecca is hooked up to some electrodes and also remembers where a chemical was stored.  Olivia has Astrid sign on to Massive Dynamics site, the rendering program is working on they link it to Olivia’s phone.  They start the drugs on Rebecca and strap her down to a table that inverts.  Once flipped over she briefly says she met Peter as a baby, then the drugs kick in.  Walter talks her through some mental exercises and Peter rings a bell.  As soon as she does, Olivia drops like a sack of potatoes.  She’s no reliving her memory of her William Bell meeting.

Bell says he’s sorry for the crudeness of her trip over and he’s been looking forward to this reunion, and to call him Willam.  Time shifts on her, she’s disoriented.  It slips again and William is breathing oxygen (I think) and Olivia gives him crap about experimenting on kids.  He says she’s just coming into her ability.  He says he and Walter knew a war, a storm was coming and they needed a guardian to watch the gate.  He calls the shape shifters “hybrids” and says they are named The First Wave.  She doesn’t trust him, blames him and MD for starting this war.  He says choices are always made, different choices affect things differently on both sides.  Then he says there’s a man on the other side that can open the door between universes, that’s who the First Wave are looking for.  He writes down a symbol and then says show it to Nina, she can help.  Then he rings a bell and we start hearing Peter’s voice.  Bell says that Greek phrase to tell Peter, then says he’s sorry about the car wreck that’s coming.  She’s convulsing so they give her a shot of something and it yanks her through Bell’s window, her windshield and back into the present.

Olivia gets ahold of Nina and they meet.  Rebecca parts with the Bishops, but Walter wants to drive home with her, Peter reluctantly agrees.  When Peter says his goodbye, Rebecca pauses for a second and we see what looks like a little lens flare or gold light in front of Peter’s face (like the light near the glyphs.)

Charlie’s at the lab, asks Astrid where Olivia is.  Sees the computer program running the render being built.  Olivia shows Nina the symbol, she doesn’t recognize it.  Olivia tells her of the meeting and Nina recognizes a phrase he used, “A storm is coming.”  She then smashes two snow globes together.  The polyexclusion principle.  Olivia has a small flash back saying Laston Hennings Cryonics, then she gets a text from Charlie saying Nina is the shape shifter.  She leaves and Charlie says they need to get away as a SWAT team is coming in.  She says she almost told Nina everything, and she knows now where the last cryolab is and when she goes to call Broyles, he phone goes off showing her the completed render from Massive Dynamic and it’s of course Charlie.

Olivia is thrown into a wall.  She recovers but Charlie completely kicks her butt.  He makes a call and gives the name of the lab.  She tries to shoot him but he keeps kicking her butt.  A man interrupts and Charlie shoots him, and in that instant Olivia recovers her guns and shoots him a few times, once in the head.

At Rebecca Kidner’s place, Walter doesn’t want to go in but instead apologizes for what he did to her all those years ago.  She shushes him with a kiss and says he made her special, he says she always was.  Then he leaves.

Broyles is consoling Dunham.  She starts asking questions like what do they want and what did we do to them.  Broyles says Laston Hennings was cleaned out by the time their task force got there.  Olivia says she failed.  In an undisclosed location, a head is unwrapped and shaved, revealing the symbol.  As the apple eating man watches, the head is stitching itself to a body and its eyes open.

MEMORY

So long Kirk Acevado.  I really enjoyed your role on Fringe and I’m sorry they decided to write your character out.  I can see it being useful to the story’s maturation, but it’s always a sad time when a character has to be turned into a mercury fueled shape changer from another dimension and then shot in the head.

I’d also like to thank Theresa Russell for making me look up her name and what movies she’s been in trying to figure out why she’s so familiar looking.  Also, Apple-Eating-Shooter?  I have no idea who you are, but you did a decent job as well.

SCIENCE!

There were two notable bits of science in this episode.  The first was memory transference by ingesting flatworms.  This comes from a 1955 experiment in which flatworms were shocked when a light appeared.  The shock was removed but the light still produced a reaction.  Those worms were cut in two and showed the same reaction.  Ground up and fed to other worms, the new worms took less time figuring out the light meant a shock.  Weird experiment, but it really didn’t have much to do with Olivia unless the worms themselves had been taken to William Bell’s universe.

The other was Nina’s explanation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle.  The way she explains it, two masses cannot occupy the same space.  Great, we all know that.  It’s so common that you’ll see it in the game Sorry, but instead of getting your piece sent home, the world explodes.  This isn’t entirely true.  The Pauli Exclusion Principle is a big deal at the atomic level and dictates the structure of the electron clouds but giving each electron several quantum numbers.  Think of it less like Nina’s example and more like a seating assignment in a classroom.  Without it, all of the electrons would form up on the lowest energy level, or the back of the class.  If that were to happen, all elemental structures would cease to exist.

The way it was explained in “Momentum Deferred” sounds more like you can’t have two things in the same space.

A couple items of note:  First, Rebecca saw a funny light or glow around Peter.  Now, she chalked it up to the drugs (which I found odd considering they pumped her full of drugs in order TO SEE these people) but she didn’t know Peter is from the other side.  We do, which means it not only confirmed the identity of Bishop the Younger, but also indicated that Rebecca might be back.

Second, we don’t know who the head is, so don’t ask.  We know enough from this episode that it’s the leader of The First Wave.  We know they apparently can survive decapitation and ingestion of mercury.  What we don’t know is their relationship to William Bell, Walter Bishop, the Observer or even Robert David Jones and the ZFT.

Overall, while I like the discoveries and the plot movement in “Momentum Deferred,” the title really belied the feel of the second series to this point.  The mysterious bad guys keep getting more secretive, less visible, more powerful and too well connected to be worried about poor little Fringe Division and the FBI.  While Dunham and the Bishops play catch up, the bad guys evolve and flee and stay one step ahead.

If they catch up, will the show end?

Three and a half randomly chosen glyphs.