Queens, New York.  Police cars scream down the street, drive up to the top of a parking garage to a parked car.  They get out and draw their weapons.  Inside the car are two shifty looking guys and a teenage boy.  The police tell the men to get out and they do and get on their knees, hands in the air.  One of the men looks at the police with a bit of a squint.  The boy in the car nods that he’s okay.  Slowly, one of the officers starts walking backwards for apparently no reason.  He’s crying and shaking but he can’t stop and he eventually plummets to his death.  Then one officer shoots another in the neck, then the remaining one in the head before turning the gun on herself.

Opening credits.

There was a media event, The Simpsons Scavenger Hunt, celebrating 20 years of Fox or 5,000 episodes of The Simpsons or something.  Either way, there are two references that I found, and I’ll point them out.

The Police, FBI and Fringe Division investigate the scene.  The boy is Tyler Carson, disappeared 36 hours earlier.  Walter invades Peter’s personal space.  He’s bored, there’s nothing to do and no food.  Plus he already has an idea of what happened.  Hypnotism, but Peter says with hypnotism you can’t be made to do something you don’t want to.  The kidnapped kid’s dad works for the aerospace division of Massive Dynamic.

The team arrives at MD and it’s the first time Walter’s been there.  We see the place through his eyes and he’s awestruck.  The group questions Dr. Carson about Tyler, and Nina about the two men, who have never been involved with MD; they’re used car salesmen.  They might be trying to get secrets from MD.  Dr. Carson explains that Tyler’s mother died when he was a boy, which causes Walter to leave the room.  Peter follows and Walter talks about William Bell and how he introduce Walter to his soon to be wife and how they planned on starting a company together.

In the back of the car, Tyler pops a candy from a Homer Simpson head Pez dispenser (scavenger hunt item one.)  They stop at a gas station and the bigger guy tells the clerk to give him the money from the register.  A large man steps up but the big bearded guy tells him he should not get involved.  The large man slowly reaches over and grabs a pot of hot coffee and pours it over his own head, then smashes the pot on his head before running headlong into the glass door of a freezer.  The big bearded man looks back at the clerk who has a gun, but after the big guy squints, the clerk puts the gun down, picks up some keys and sticks one into a power outlet.  The littler man takes the chips and drinks and leaves, the bearded man picks up the gun.  The boy gives an ever so slight nod.

The team watches security footage.  A second feed shows the boy looking scared but not running.  Peter and Olivia can’t figure these guys out.  Broyles calls and tells Olivia the two men were model employees as car salesmen.  They have an idea that these two guys might be foreign agents hiding in plane sight.

Walter and Astrid carve open one of the cop’s heads to look at the brain to look for lesions.  Walter shows Peter and Olivia the brian with trauma indicating conflicting neural impulses.  Dr. Bishop posits it’s transmitted through sound.  Dr. Carson and the feds wait for the ransom call.  It comes in and it’s a typical request for money and a meeting place.  They’re unable to trace the call, Olivia is curious why they just want money.  She thinks it’s a distraction so they set up a trap.

Walter digs through boxes and cabinets, pulling out a teddy bear that generates white noise similar to being in utero.  Agent Dunham and Dr. Bishop brief a strike team, giving them headphones that block out sound.  They arrive at the drop site, a car pulls up then a man walks up to talk to Dr. Carson.  Headphones are put on as the smaller man grabs the case and runs.  As he runs to a warehouse, the kidnapper car comes blazing out, hitting some stuff and exploding.  Olivia goes into the warehouse, Peter sees someone running away with the briefcase.  Olivia find the small man sitting on the ground with an unloaded gun under his chin, pulling the trigger and saying “Help me.”  Peter’s running is halted and he takes his headphones off.  Tyler is there with the case saying the headphones don’t work, and to take him to Peter’s car.

Walter and Olivia Peter is gone as well as Tyler.  They question the smaller man who tells them the boy was controlling them the whole time.  Peter is driving with Tyler.  Tyler says he can make the hurting stop by doing what he says and not fighting it.  After making Peter speed and wind around the two lane road, he stops controlling him.  Olivia shows Nina Sharp a CC photo of Tyler in Peter’s car, saying the son of one of MD’s scientists controlling people’s minds is not a coincidence.  Dr. Carlsen is working on a hands-free navigation; controlling by thought.  Pilots are given a pharmaceutical to enhance their brain waves, and that Tyler may have taken the drugs.  Watler puts together that the drugs, plus ADD meds and puberty hormones have created a mind control cocktail, then gets mad at Dr. Carson for being a lousy parent and letting the doctor’s son kidnap his.

In Peter’s car, Peter tries talking to boy.  He’s very emo and holds a picture of a lady.  A cop pulls them over and as Peter gets out and gets searched, Tyler makes the cop give Peter his gun.  Peter points the gun at the officer and Tyler ends up just making Peter pistol whip the cop.

Olivia is working on the teams following Peter.  Broyles tells her that the FBI director has classified the Tyler case as a matter of national security and Fringe has been ordered to stand down.  He has two tickets to Costa Rica and they think he’s delivering secrets.  Broyles, again, bucks the orders saying they need to control the situation before it’s too late.  Olivia talks to Walter who is having a hard time about Peter.  Nina talks him back into working on a solution, possibly an EMF scrambler.

Astrid shows them information Tyler was looking up online; women who died in car wrecks in their 20’s.  Last one was a Rene Davies, who turns out to be Dr. Carson’s ex wife.  Tyler and Peter are in a strip club; Tyler is watching the girls, Peter is having a steak.  Peter palms and hides a knife.  Back and forth, Tyler and Dr. Carson talk about this lady who was a drug addict and went missing a lot.  Dad lied about her dying in a car wreck for his benefit.  Tyler found her and is going to get her to be a family again.  Tyler controls Peter and makes him give up his knife.

Walter and Astrid are wearing tin foil hats.  He explains to Olivia that he’s using an EMP to hit Tyler which should short him out for a short time.  Springfield (scavenger hunt item two.)  A woman is working in her garden as Tyler and Peter walk up.  Tyler calls her mom and they hug.  He’s very excited, she’s a little taken aback.  They go inside to talk.  It’s obvious Tyler has tunnel vision and his mom disputes his idea that it was all his dad’s fault.  Then, her husband/boyfriend arrives and Tyler gets pissed; makes Peter get the gun from the bag and point it at them.

The FBI team arrives at the house, covering exits.  Broyles goes in and hits Tyler with a taser, but he’s okay enough to make Peter shoot Broyles.  Peter fights and hits Broyles in the arm.  Astrid and Walter arrive, pick up Olivia and chase after Peter and Tyler.  Walter fires up his machine and zaps Tyler.  Peter sees Tyler is spaced out and so he rams the car into a pole.  Peter is ok, Tyler was knocked out, Broyles is fine.  Later, they find out Tyler lost his power once the drug wore off.  Walter makes Peter crepes and reminisces about Mrs. Bishop.

At an old black and green terminal, Nina sends William Bell a message she doesn’t know if he receives or not.  Turns out, Tyler Carson was a project that got away and that mind control is possible, but Nina is shutting it down.  As she’s typing, we see Dr. Carson looking at files with many Tyler’s, then wheel a sedated Tyler through a corridor with other Tyler’s behind glass.

ARRIVE

Think back.  Have we seen clones before?  Yes.  Way back in season one, the second episode was a story about an elder scientist who was perfecting the method of rapidly aging cloned humans as a way to create soldiers.  We also know that Peter is a doppelganger from another dimension or he could be a clone that Dr. Bishop was keeping somewhere in case he couldn’t help Peter with his childhood ailment.  Thanks to the drug induced visions of Amy Jessup, however, Peter appears to be the mirror from the other world.

It would appear, then, that Massive Dynamic is creating clones to be soldiers for the big storm that William Bell foretold.  While Dr. Pembrose was creating his Christophers on his own, he may have had ties to Walter and William and would have been doing the same work.  MD is certainly exploring all options in preparation for whatever calamity awaits, including an army of Tylers with varied and wondrous powers.

And what of the science this time around?  For those who haven’t seen Macross Plus or the Clint Eastwood movie Firefox, there’s a little history to thought controlled flight.  The military is actually working on the idea and in simulated tests, subjects have commented on how addicting the speed of control can be.  Pushing buttons now seems clumsy.  But it’s not the type of thought control you may have in mind.  Computers and our understanding of the brain have both advanced, but we’re no where near the level of direct thought interpretation commonly understood.  Human thought is to wild and uncontrollable.  It goes off in tangents and we can be distracted.  Thought control is basically EEG interpretation and control.  It’s a feedback skill like riding a bike or playing hockey.  You learn to control the electrical transmissions your mind makes and those are then translated into controls.  You don’t just think “flaps up” and the flaps go up, you think whatever you need to to make your brain fire along pathways that tell the EEG to change the flaps up control.

This is already real-world science.  Video game developers are using it to make mind-control video games and controller head sets could be out quite soon.  It’s not as far fetch as we may think.  But would ADD medication and puberty, plus a drug to enhance brain waves lead to mind control of other people?  That’s hard to say.  Mind control and thought controlled operations are different.  One is being in tune with another person’s brain waves, the other is basic exercises.

Fringe to me at this point is a known quantity.  It doesn’t vary in its production value, its characters are set and I now take them for granted.  I expect them to perform a certain way and they do.  I’m no longer impressed or saddened by a performance or a line or the plot, I’m just waiting for reveals.  That may be a jaded view of a show, but to me it’s a comfortable place.  Fringe now only surprises me when it wants to and not because of the way the show is delivered.  I like that about the program and I think it lets the creators be more daring with the material.

I had the kid nailed as the mental lynch pin from the get go, and it was kind of a let down.  Other than that I think this was a very well put together outing.

I’m looking forward to next week’s episode, but this one did well.  Four out of five randomly chosen glpyhs.