Boston, MA.  A nice house/apartment.  A man answers the phone as his wife calls and they talk about his traveling and his sick mom.  He tells her he’s at the airport and they’re calling his flight, she understands and tells him she’ll be home in about five minutes.  He’s actually setting up an anniversary surprise for her, but something is turning off all the lights.  He starts to get spooked but realizes it may be all in his head.  He places flowers in the front room for her to see and as he goes back to another room and again turns the lights on, a shifting, smoky, vaguely hominid figure is there and approaches him.  The woman arrives home, sees the flowers, is wonderfully surprised, but sees her husband sitting stock still in a chair.  When she touches him, he crumbles to ash.

Opening credits.

Philip Broyles is enjoying a lunch while being watched by a little kid who is copying his every move.  It’s cute and Broyles actually smiles.  He gets a call and leaves to meet with the Fringe Division crew investigating the man who crumbled to ash.  After some banter, Walter determines the man wasn’t burned but could have been dosed.  Broyles arrives to ask if the man, Randy Dancik, was a doctor or had been to a hospital in the last 24 hours.  It’s not the first time he’s seen this.

Four years ago, several victims were turned to dust.  Once Broyles was on the case, an Eastern European man contacted them with case specific information.  He’d turn himself in if his formula could be deciphered.  The formula is a molecular compound, but it couldn’t be solved by CDC or NIHS.  Peter takes the formula to Walter, Agent Dunham gets a call that Danzig visited his mom in a hospital.  During this, they were pulling case information from a storage unit.  Broyles more than once eyed a micro-cassette recorder in a Ziploc bag.

At Latchmere General Hospital, the smoky figure walks up behind a nurse who is on a computer in a dark corridor.  The figure moves past her and she senses something but doesn’t see it move down the hall.

Broyles and Dunham arrive at the hospital and give the director a warrant so they can search for a certain employee.  Back at the lab, Walter has Astrid bring a Geiger counter and they find that the remains of Mr. Danzig have no radiation.  Normal radiation is around 7 RADs.  Walter expected it in the hundreds.  Olivia calls and she talks to Walter about the compound and he says it’s an organism (he calls the formula a she) and he’ll have to break her down to her organic and inorganic parts.  He stops talking and mutters “titanium tetrachloride…you sly temptress.”

The search for an Eastern European name at the hospital is not yet turning up anything.  Olivia tells Broyles he should go home, he stays.  She asks why the killer had called him, he tells her it was because the man was distraught and wanted it to end.  A patient lays in her bed as a nurse checks some computer screens as a shadow passes behind her.  A fly lands on the patient’s face and it begins to crumble.  The agents rush to see a woman with the top half of her head crumbled away.  The search for a name has returned a Tomas Koslov, an RN who didn’t show up to work this night.  The FBI busts into Koslov’s home but don’t find him.

The agents find that Koslov is an alias.  Peter and Olivia hover over a work table with remnant parts; wiring, electronic bits, soldering burns,  labeled in Cyrillic.  They also get some prints.  Back at HQ, Broyles listens to his old micro-cassette of his conversation with a Slovak or Russian sounding man, presumably this Koslov alias.  The man says it won’t stop until the formula is solved.  Broyles the meets with Senator Van Horn.  The Senator tells him that fingerprint search raised flags within the security community and the case will be likely taken from him.  It’s international, even the Russians are looking for this man.  Van Horn can’t do anything to help.  Broyles stands and fairly stiffly says, “Please send my regards to Patricia.”

A man opens the back of a van and removes a box and takes it into a hotel room.  The man is Koslov, the box is a battery which he places next to other batteries tied together.  He leaves and we see the equipment is labeled in Russian.  Dunham is going over security footage when she gets a call from Broyles saying the CIA is handling the case, but he’s not giving it up and not to put anything on paper; all meetings face to face.  Dunham balks at the idea but the security agent shows her footage of the smoky figure walking the halls.

The Fringe crew reviews the tapes, Walter says the Russians had their own brand of Fringe science.  Back at HQ, Broyles receives a package from Van Horn with a note saying, “I suspect your ignored my orders today at the park.  Hope this will help.”  It’s a file with two men’s photos.  One is a cosmonaut, the other is the medical worker we’ve seen.  The Russian’s name is Timor?, he abducted his cosmonaut brother, after he came back from a space mission in a coma.  Timor has been moving him from hospital to hospital, guarding him.  He smuggled him out of a research facility in Russia.  Dunham suspects the cosmonaut brother may be the shadow figure.  Broyles has a team ready to visit the hospital again.

At the lab, Walter and Peter tell Astrid the shadow entity feeds off radiation, targeting those receiving radiation treatment.  The first man was just on a flight, window seat, with lots of sunlight radiation.  At the hospital, the power goes off and the nurses check the patients in the coma ward.  Tomas/Timor comes up behind one of the nurses, says he has to take this patient, and he’s sorry she had to be there.  He’s holding a syringe behind his back.  Broyles and Dunham arrive and ask if everyone is accounted for.  They find the nurse in the bed, sedated.  Timor flees with his brother in the back of an SUV.

Walter is working the formula with some opera music playing.  Agents Dunham and Broyles arrive and Walter tells them the cosmonaut isn’t the killer, but he may have brought something back from outer space.  Broyles and Dunham ask Walter if they can call Timor and tell them they’ve solved the formula, he says yes.  At a hotel, Timor is working on his brother and listening to his voice mail.  He hears Broyles’s message as he’s hooking up his brother to a lot of electricity.  The smoky apparition  starts to leave Alex’s body and Timor cranks up the current, yelling at his brother to fight.  The entity goes back into Alex for a moment but then bursts forth again causing Timor to turn the juice up dangerously high.  The shadow doesn’t seem to be contained, but Timor seems to think so.  Alex dies for a moment.

Walter goes home to pick up Tinker Toys.  At the lab, Astrid and Dunham hook up a trace for the next call.  Dunham asks Broyles why this case is so important.  Broyles tells her this case marked the time when Fringe Division was on the ropes, and he decided his career wasn’t as important as making the world safe.  It also ended his marriage.  At the Bishops, Walter and Peter are assembling a physical representation of the formula out of Tinker Toys.  Walter see something he doesn’t like; the model doesn’t separate.  Timor calls and Broyles talks to him while Olivia talks to Walter.  Walter says the entity and the man can’t be separated, they’re bonded on a molecular level.  Timor doesn’t like the news but is hesitant to give up his location.  He doesn’t want anyone else getting hurt.  A fan behind Timor oscillates and begins blowing Timor to dust.  Outside the hotel, a shadow emerges from the door.

They’re able to trace the call and mobilize.  Dunham and Broyles arrive to find Alex in the van and Timor half crumbled still in his chair.  Walter and Peter arrive and examine Alex and talk about containing the entity, but there’s no radiation in Alex which means it’s out there already.  They make a guess at using the batteries to stress the host body so the ghostly entity will return.

In another hotel room a girl is watching TV, someone is in a shower.  The TV goes static.  Walter can’t figure out how to work the equipment, it’s in Russian.  They all hear a little girl scream in the distance.  Broyles shoots Alex in the head.  Back in the hotel room, the mom comes out of the shower and walks up to the extremely still girl but she’s ok, saying she saw a shadow man who disappeared.  As the crew looks on, a group of men in biohazard suits leads a lead casket away.

Broyles visits his ex wife and her husband to tell her he closed that four year old case.  She’s truly happy for him.  As Broyles walks to his car, a man in the street stops him and says he has a real friend in Senator Van Horn.  He says when the CIA says Cease and Desist, they mean it.  He tells Broyles that there won’t be a report filed on this.  Broyles asks what they did with the cosmonaut.  The man says, “We had no choice…after he started breathing again.”  Then looks up into the night sky, walks to his car and drives away.

DEJA VU

I’m not sure where to put this episode in terms of science quality.  I’m not a physicist or chemist so my grasp of radiation is flimsy.  I do know that what we generally think of when we hear the word radiation is ionizing radiation; the kind found in bombs and reactors.  In fact, anything that has energy will radiate.  Your body generates heat through the burning of sugars and oxygen so you do radiate a bit of heat, or what’s called thermal radiation.  Non-ionizing radiation is not dangerous because it’s too weak to ionize atoms.

I’m also unsure why Walter mumbled the bit about titanium tetrachloride, as it’s a liquid and a rare transition metal halide (which means a metal compound that’s liquid at room temperature.)  It’s used in making titanium, but what it had to do with the formula I don’t know.  Nor do I feel they really solved the formula other than the compound couldn’t be removed from the cosmonaut.  The whole bit about the formula and the space flight didn’t really tie together for me.  At first I felt like Timor created something but was unsure how to stop it.  But then the classified report showed up saying his brother came back from a space mission in a coma and the formula angle took a bit to wrangle.  It wasn’t terribly clear that the “formula” was a molecular snapshot of Alex and the parasite.  Tmior wanted it solved because he wanted his brother and this creature separated.

So what made the people in “Earthling” crumble?  It’s hard to say and they never really talked about it.  I got the idea that whatever this parasite from outer space was doing, it involved consuming radiation, or energy.  There’s more energy in ionized radiation so it went after recently irradiated cancer patients for the most part, but any background radiation would suffice.  It was an extraterrestrial radiation vampire.

The idea of a Russian shadow science project gone wrong and the brother of said experiment spiriting his sibling safely away from the public while a barely contained smoke monster feeds off the energy of living things and turning them to dust sounds exciting and spooky.  Making it an alien entity makes it sounds like The Fantastic Four or Venom from Spider-Man.  I’m not saying Fringe should avoid alien life, in fact I’m a little surprised it took this long to have a monster of the week type episode with an alien.  Thus far we’ve seen extra-dimensional beings who look pretty much like the rest of us with the exception of The Observer and we still don’t know what he is.

Will Smoke Monster Jr. be a recurring creature for Fringe Division?  The CIA has it boxed up, but it may not stay that way forever.  Is it a random traveler or part of a group of creatures sent to yet again annihilate the human race?  Personally I think it’s the former and we won’t see this again.  What’s more important is the CIA mysteriously wrapping up the case for Broyles and his gang and the idea that there’s a reflection of Fringe Division in Russia.  It brings back all the nice warm feelings hearing Cold War terms and thinking about the old Soviet Union and what they might have done with their populace given the right about of funding and secrecy.

Every government has a dark, science-y secret apparently.

No major reveals and no major character development.  But it was a rather enjoyable episode.  Four out of five randomly chosen glyphs.