This week’s episode of Fringe is a slight improvement over last weeks. As Walter’s memory is still blanked out from “Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11”, the Fringe team goes about trying rebuild his memory from notes and records he may have left to himself. They sneak into Walter’s old Laboratory in Harvard to recover a recording he left for himself.
Though there has been only meager improvement to the main narrative of the Observers ruling our time line “In Absentia” benefits greatly by finding the characters’ emotional center. Etta, Peter and Olivia’s Adult daughter has become quite bitter and hardened living under the Observers rule. She is more than willing to torture and kill loyalists, as part of their mission. Olivia is understandably worried about her child when she finds Etta ruthlessly interrogating a prisoner. Etta, Peter and Olivia are all contemporaries, and they have lost the chance to have a parental relationship. What made this episode interesting was even though her child has grown up Olivia’s optimism is able to get through to Etta, and even inspire the prisoner to join the resistance. For a character who is as buttoned down as Olivia normally is it was a wonderful bit of character development. This slight glimmer of hope in the bleak future is a glimmer of hope for the series as a whole. The best part of Fringe has always been the familial ties between Peter, Walter, Olivia, Astrid, and Broyles. Etta helps add to it.
We get a brief glimpse of some of the Observers experiments in this episode.This helped bring the Observers away from being bland Nazi imitators, and back to back to their sci-fi roots. It was a good start, but I want more. Fringe was originally billed as a show where someone (now revealed to be David Robert Jones) was experimenting and using the world as their lab. If the Observers are experimenting it shouldn’t be contained to one building in Harvard. It should be the entire solar system. I find the improvements encouraging. Lets hope Fringe keeps the trend up.
On a Scale of 1 to Epic (Epic = 10): 
“In Absentia” Gets a 7.7
