If nothing else this episode should be noted for its ability to take romantic melodrama and center riveting action around it. As much as I was railing against Fringe’s “Team Olivia vs Team Foliva” revelation a few weeks ago 6B made it work. All too often in fiction romantic angst exists only for angst sake. It’s a way to build a narrative by making characters star-crossed, or love lorn. It’s lazy writing and poor story telling. In 6B, Fringe subverts this and shows how self destructive getting hung up on love can be. Instead of making Olivia an objectified romantic prize for Peter, she is forced grow as a character and overcome her fears.
This week Fringe Division investigates dimensional instability it an apartment building. When a half dozen people fall through a solid balcony to their death, Walter worries that a soft spot is developing between universes. If not not fixed than this could cause a wormhole to develop and engulf half of Brooklyn. While Walter and the Massive Dynamic crew attempt to replicate the amber chemical used on the other side to seal a wormhole Peter and Olivia attempt to come to terms with their feelings for each other. The soft spot’s cause is the connection between a widow on our side, and widower on the other side reaching out to each other. Though far fetched, it’s explained that their extreme emotional duress is causing their bodies to naturally generate a Cortexiphan like chemical and breaking the universe.
Walter gets a few nice character moments realizing the damage he’s caused, and what moral implications are involved in trying to repair it. He realizes he has much more in common with Walternate than he would like to admit. Combined with last week’s episode showing Walternate refusing to experiment on children, I wonder if I might have been wrong. Walternate may not be so evil after all. ( I still don’t like Folivia!)
I also feel that this episode smooths out the logic proposed by Sam Weiss. Sam stated that Peter’s mental state will effect how the machine operates on him. My knee jerk was that this is sci-fi, not the Force from Star Wars. This episode further shows how in Fringe’s corner of the multiverse the human mind is capable of amazing things. Olivia and the other Cortexiphan subjects can only use their abilities when they tap into very powerful feelings. The resolution of this episode showed that when the widow moved on the barrier was repaired. This got me thinking, What if when Peter when enters the machine he’s in a state of total serenity? Without any angst, Maybe he can completely repair the damage to the two universes without destroying anything? What if he merges the two universe into one single universe, like in the DC comics Crisis on Infinity Worlds? This is Fringe after all, anything is possible.
On a scale of 1 to Epic, (Epic= 10) I’d give it a 8.1