What?  Charlie’s back?  No, silly rabbit.  This episode of Fringe was originally supposed to air in season 1 as episode 21.  Thus I’m not going to give it the complete recap as it falls out of sequence with the rest of the series.  It’s so bad, there’s a dead character in it.

For this I blame Fox.  Sure, if you’d been all over the web (ie on Fox.com) then you’d probably have known that the special Monday episode was supposed to be the last episode from season 1.  I’m glad they ended season one when and the way they did.  ”There’s More Than One of Everything” introduced William Bell and the alternate universe in a very real way.  ”Unearthed’ would have felt like none of it mattered.

Because it didn’t.  ”Unearthed” is a filler episode no matter what season it’s in.  But it’s so much a filler episode that a dead character makes an appearance without so much as a title disclaimer to the effect that this took place some time ago.  Epic failure, Fox.  Epic.

Here’s why it was a failure:  I kept waiting for the Charlie explanation.  I didn’t care about the 17 year girl channeling a dead Navy man and how his spirit had traveled to her so he could exact revenge on his wife who had hired a friend to kill him.  I didn’t care about the fantastic job the young girl did playing the troubled high school junior who came back from the dead during organ donation surgery.  I didn’t care that Walter was shown in a filmstrip movie with a dark bushy head of hair and sideburns whilst shoving kebab sticks into a man’s head to test  psychic abilities.  None of it, I  cared about none of it.

Why the hell is Charlie alive and no one’s saying anything?  Did he come back to life?  Is this an alternate reality?  It must be, no one’s saying anything about Charlie being there.  Holy crap Charlie is fast and just tackled that dude.  No one is saying anything about Charlie!  But Boston’s alternate reality was burning buildings.  Newton said there was a Blight killing all the plants.  Is this a Third Reality?  Man I hope not.

And on, and on.  My investment in the episode was shot as soon as I saw Agent Charlie Francis.  None of the rest mattered.  Whether I’m an online nut about the show or a casual viewer who’s maybe seen a handful of episodes, you don’t do that.  You don’t show an episode out of order, especially one involving a dead character, without a disclaimer.  That’s poor planning, Fox.  Extremely poor.  On top of that, to say this was the season finale episode from season one which kind of negates the entire William Bell reveal?  Is anyone there rubbing their brain cells together at all?

I apologize for spending this whole review downing Fox for the fast one they pulled, but it truly colored the whole episode for me.  It didn’t help that it was a monster of the week episode with a tenuous plot.  Even Walter wasn’t sure what he was doing and at the end had to admit that as a scientist, he occasionally has to take leaps of faith.

I remember another show Fox shuffled around and played episodes out of order.

Two glyphs.  Mostly directed towards the network.