Fringe

Fringe

Episode 2: In Absentia

By: Carlos Uribe

Fringe is a show about a small team of people who are trying to save our world from the Observers.

Spoilers Ahoy!

The season premiere revealed that there was a plan to stop the Observers but it has been scrambled in Walter's brain. It had ended with the plan being erased from Walter's mind so that they couldn't access it to put it together. The second episode decides that it needs to create a way for the characters to recreate the plan throughout the run. The best way to do this is to have them having to go from one place to another and get a part of the plan. It makes perfect sense that Walter would have put the plan within different tapes and spread them out so that anyone could piece together the plan if something were to happen to him. Now that they are out of amber, it's up to our main characters to find the tapes and try and figure out how to stop the Observers. Of course, finding out that there are tapes is something that takes an entire episode and is filled with danger and some really good character and emotional beats. In Absentia is an episode that sets our characters on a path to defeat the Observers in an effective and great manner. This is indeed yet another great Fringe installment and it's one that truly begins the final season. The premiere was about assembling our characters: this is about beginning their final fight for freedom.

It begins with Olivia sharing a dream about the day Etta was lost. It's a dream that's more clear than Peter and it helps to give more information about that day. It's also used to remind us that just like the audience, these are characters who have been suddenly transported to this future. Olivia wakes and she she soon has an idea that Walter probably wrote the plan down since he liked to keep archives. The only place he would have written anything down was in Harvard and that's where they decide to go. The problem is that Harvard has been taken over by the Observers as an experimenting lab and it's heavily guarded. Walter has a solution to this obstacle: use the steam tunnels under Harvard to inflitrate the university. Since very few people knew that the tunnels even existed, it allows them to go to their old lab without any problems. There are some plot holes in this but I'm not going to dwell on them. Sometimes you have to sacrifice logic in order to achieve greatness in a story and I feel that the sacrifice is worth it in this episode. Once at the old lab, they discover half of it has been ambered and that the power is out. Within the amber is a single recorder and Walter realizes that he had recorded the plan instead of writing it down. The only way to retrieve the tape is to get it out of the amber using a laser. They also have to deal with a single guard that they have captured. A guard who was there on his own free will and not because it was his post.

This is where it gets complicated. They must build a laser and find a way to power it. This means that someone has to go to the heavily guarded science building to turn the fuse back on. The jobs are divided. Peter and Etta will go to the science building as they post as loyalists. They will find the power switch and give their old lab some power. Walter and Astrid will create the laser out of old technology. Olivia will watch over the guard and make sure he doesn't escape or anything. The power is turned back on, the laser retrieves the tape, and the guard doesn't give them away. The tape reveals the existence of other tapes and Walter encouraging the person who finds them to look for the other tapes. They are humanity's only hope. It's a nice way to explain what the characters will be doing for the entire season and allows the series to remain a fragment of a procedural. It'll also give a clue to how the episodes will be. This is all plot but none of it conveys how this world is different from our own in terms of our humanity.

The guard does do that. The guard is a loyalist who joined because he's a coward. He didn't feel like they could beat the Observers so he joined them. Etta knows that he can't be trusted and so she tortures him. That she does this without blinking an eye tells you the state that the world is in. They're at war and human decency has been thrown out of the window. The device she's using to torture the guard is one that the rebels have acquired from the loyalists themselves. Olivia's approach is different in that she tries to emotionally bond with him. She tries to understand him despite his deceptions. He doesn't tell her the truth but he does see something in her eyes: the belief that they can win. This convinces him to switch over to the rebels. Etta sees something in Olivia's eyes as well: pity. Olivia doesn't approve of torture but she doesn't try to tell her not to use it. Olivia's behavior towards the torture is enough to condemn it. Olivia might understand why the world is now different but that doesn't mean she's going to like it. The loyalist guard is a way for the series to give a human element to the bad guys that the Observers simply couldn't. That was important for Fringe to do because that's the best Fringe villain: the one we can empathize with.

In Absentia is a great episode not because of the plot but because of the human element. Don't get me wrong: the plot was good. It might have taken an entire episode to get to the point but the journey there was excellent. It's just that the human element took what would have been a good episode and turned it into a memorable and classic Fringe episode. In Absentia is simply a wonderful episode that makes the loyalists more human and gives a direction for the rest of the season to take.