Edina, NY.  (Pronounced eh-DINE-uh)

A cop driving along a country road finds a boy walking along.  He tells him to get in.  He starts talking about running away when he looks again in the rear-view to see the boy’s face has changed; he’s now severely mutated.  At the police station, two cops talk about actually seeing one in person.  Original cop takes his picture and uploads it to proper channels.  Just then two similarly mutated men come into the station with shotguns and open fire.

Open Credits.

Peter tries to urge Walter out of the car and into a grocery store.  Olivia calls and has them meet up near Edina.  Walter sees the boy’s photo and says he’s seen a boy like that before, playing a banjo.  Peter tells him it was from Deliverance.  Another FBI agent, Agent Frug, shows them the local police files of deformed people; no photos, just sketches.  Broyles reminds Olivia that these people have been able to hide for 30 years, possibly for a reason.

The crew heads to Edina, Pop. 1,943.  Walter thinks there are werewolves in Edina, hence the change in appearance; a therianthrope, or a creature that changes between man and beast.  (Technically a therianthrope is part man, part animal, like you’d see in an Egyptian tomb.  Gods with man bodies and dog or bird heads.  Shape-shifting is a subset and would more commonly be used with specific animals, ie lycanthropy or werewolves.)  Olivia stops the explanation to ask if they also hear that noise.  Walter immediately begins humming “The Toreador Song” from Carmen then begins singing nonsense words along with it.  He doesn’t know what they mean, they just popped in there.  The group is met by Sheriff Velchik, played by the ubiquitous jack-of-all-law-enforcement Michael O’Neill.  He tells them the Edina Hum is from an army base with its generators.  Over coffee, Velchik sees a picture of the boy and he says it’s a local pastime to tell stories of these deformed people and the sightings but he’s never actually seen one.  They ask for records and reports and he complies.

In a nice house, Joseph and his wife (normal looking young couple) talk about the FBI coming into the diner with a photo of their son, Teddy.  Teddy is doing homework and looks normal, undeformed.  Broyles exchanges info with Peter and Olivia.  He agrees to look into the government base.  Walter is alseep, they talk about him being unable to snap out of his current fear.  A car heads directly toward them and they swerve to miss it, running off the road and into a tree.  Olivia is out cold, Walter is still asleep.  The driver of the other car gets out and starts shooting at them.  Peter gets Olivia’s gun and fires back.  After couple of exchanges, the car pulls away.

Agent Frug heads up the accident investigation, Peter says what he shot was a creature.  They find what could be the vehicle that ran them off the road a few miles away.  On that scene, Walter finds a large blue butterfly.  One he’s never seen this big.  He goes to get his kit and Olivia and Peter find blood.  The trail leads them to a dead body, Joseph.  Walter is excited at the find of a metamorph.  He’s still singing the song.  Olivia comforts Peter about killing the man and her first time.  Joseph’s wife appears from the woods and spies on the scene.

The FBI takes the body back to the lab.  Broyles tells Olivia there’s something to the government testing in Edina in the 70′s but it’s almost all redacted.  It was called “Project Elephant” (a word from Walter’s song) and they ask him if he was involved.  He says no.  Astrid opens the case from Walter and it’s a giant brown moth with a deformed wing.  Astrid opens the body bag, and the body has transformed.

Walter tries sadly to assure Astrid the butterfly was gorgeous.  She’s doubtful.  Walter posits the government experimented on butterflies because they already transform.  But analysis of the body doesn’t bring up any metamorphic compounds.  Peter and Olivia follow up with Sheriff Velchik who knows of Joe Falls, used to work in the mill, lives up the road, etc.  They ask to see town records to get a photo of Joe.

The work up of the moth and man shows that they have a genetic mutation.  It’s what causes them to be disfigured, but not what causes them to change.  He starts singing again, thinking he may have worked on Project Elephant.  Astrid writes down the song words, it’s a mnemonic for Harkness, the law school library.  Peter and Olivia find that all the F’s in the town record are gone.  Walter finds a vent in the library and opens it.  Inside are a box of Devil Dogs and some files with US Army on the front and inside are photos of deformed people.  He says, “I understand now.”

Peter thinks there’s something weird with the population number, just births and deaths.  Olivia talks to the sheriff about the missing records.  He says he has an idea and to meet them at Joe Falls’ place on the edge of town.  He then goes outside and addresses the gathered townspeople by saying they don’t know anything.  Rose (Joe’s wife, Teddy’s mom) says they have proof.  Velchik says he’ll make it all go away.

Walter and Astrid drive up to Edina and Walter describes the experiment the army used.  It was an EMP for the optic nerve to scramble it and render soldiers invisible to the naked eye; a form of camouflage.  Prolonged exposure to the pulse caused genetic disorders.  At the city line, Walter gets out with the moth in the jar.  As he moves into the city, it changes to a butterfly, but Astrid still sees the moth.  As she walks toward him, it changes.  Walter says, “A friend of mine once wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  They aren’t changing at all, just the viewer’s perception.  Relaying this to Peter and Olivia, he adds that an Edwin (Edward?) Cobb would be the only one who could have perfected the pulse.  He then lies to Astrid and tells her that Peter told him to find the source of the pulse instead of going back.

The sheriff and a couple men load shotguns.  Rose says they’re going too far, but the sheriff says no one came looking for the federal marshal last time and to stick to the machine, that’s her job.  Walter and Astrid find a large antenna, used possibly to discharge the energy from the pulse.  It’s the Falls’ house and he recognizes the name Rose as Edward Cobb’s daughter.  Teddy answers and lets them in.  Walter asks to use the bathroom.  Peter realizes that the census data means no one ever leaves the town, Olivia asks if everyone in town is “one of them?”  That’s when the cop car arrives and starts shooting.

Peter and Olivia flee into a barn.  Walter snoops around the Falls’ house and finds the machine in the basement.  Astrid is playing Operation with Teddy.  The camera pans behind her and on the other side Teddy’s appearance has changed.  Walter turned the machine off.  The deformed cops continue to hunt down Olivia and Peter.  Olivia caps one but Velchik tells her to drop her gun.  Rose comes in and blasts Velchik.

Back story:  The original pulse deformed the whole town.  Rose’s dad retired in 1979 and worked on the pulse to perfect it so it concealed their deformities.  The Army never told her dad they were expanding the scope of the test.  The whole town became the experiment, but her father created a good life for them.  Broyles arrives and Walter pleads with him not to go public and to keep the secret.  Broyles says in that wink wink nudge nudge way, if Walter didn’t find the machine, there’s nothing to report.

The Feds all leave, driving by the city sign as Teddy looks on.  Peter tells Walter he’s brave, Walter responds by saying he’s glad Peter sees him the way he does.

MUTATE

There are a few issues with “Johari Window” that prevent it from being a decent episode.  But let’s start with a little reference.

The title refers to a psychological tool whereby people are asked to describe a subject (friend) and that subject is asked to describe themselves.  They are generally given a set of words (positive in this test, negative word testing is called Nohari Window.)  The overlapping words are the Arena or what everyone sees.  The words only used by you are the Facade, the words only used by peers is the Blind Spot and the words used by neither is the Unknown.  It’s more of a self help tool when diagnosing problems with communication and only has a tenuous tied to the perception qualities of its namesake episode.

As to the EMP scrambling of the optic nerve, that’s something I’d not heard of.  I’ve read studies on nanomechanical light refraction, but nothing involving an electromagnetic pulse.  EMPs are used mostly in action movies as a weapon to disable vehicles.  The pulse scrambles electronic devices rendering them useless.  I’ve never heard of them causing the same thing to happen in the optic nerve specifically.  The experiment the Army was doing must have involved a frequency at which an EM wave will disrupt human neural transmitters, but that would include the whole of the brain, not just a single type of nerve.

The other idea is that this pulse causes the human brain to interpret signals as a normally formed human face is so specific as to be laughable.  In my limited capacity as a neural hobbyist, even I know that the visual cortex is not a specific location but a mass of disparately located neurons.  Reassembling scrambled visual data is not the job of the optic nerve but the brain itself.  Whoever this Edward Cobb was, he not only figured out the fine tuning of the pulse in his free time, but also the complete map of the human brain.

I guess that’s why it’s called Fringe Science.

And an EM pulse causing deformities?  Constant exposure to anything not encountered on a daily, human, Terran basis would likely cause a mutation.  I’m not sure about it changing the DNA into something that would cause generational mutations.

Aside from that, what I found really sad were the mutations they chose.  They picked the Elephant Man, facial disfigurement.  This way, they could have the sheriff run around and shoot a shotgun.  They could have Rose wear average clothes and talk about her dad.  They could have Teddy drink from a juice box.  The problem is, deformities don’t always affect just the face and head.  I know the budget may have been limited to a few people, but a hand with 3 long fingers was out of the question?  How about an ungrown arm?  This was like a Star Trek episode where the Bajorans meet the Vulcans; a nose rubber-band here, some latex ears there and blam!  Aliens.

The tragedy of “Johari Window” is that the residents chose to live life disfigured.  They live in the pulse that hides their faces but living in the pulse causes their disfiguring.  It isolates them and it isolates this story.  We see again that Walter’s experiments have touched many lives, some that were mere colleagues.  And his colleagues were also wrapped up in tests and experiments from which the consequences are still being felt.  Walter was apparently everywhere in the 1970′s science circles and almost nothing he worked on saw any benefit, at least thus far.  When the pulse was turned off, we saw Edina for what it really was.  But they can turn that machine on.  Walter can’t hide his past with the same machine and each new story like this mutates his history even more.  For that sadness alone, this episode rates fairly decently.

Three and a half randomly chosen glyphs.