Season 1 Episode 8 – “The Equation”
Score: 89/100
Fringe picked it up this week with “The Equation.” The episode starts off with a father driving his musically gifted son called “Bean” (Charlie Tahan) somewhere when they find a woman stalled on the side of the road. The father being a good Samaritan stops and helps the pretty lady. He opens the hood to see if he can see something wrong that he can fix when green and red lights start flashing which brings us to the first of this week’s Fringe science; Induced Hypnagogia – Which causes someone to go into a half state of sleep . Next thing you know, M. Stockton (Adam Grupper) is startled by the late tow truck driver. His son, the woman and her car are gone. The team gets involved because that man had blacked out for a long while but he swears he didn’t. It turns out that these blackouts have occurred before with the same woman three other times. Walter knows the light pattern they are referring to and remembers that his fellow inmate Dashiell Kim (Randell Duk Kim) was abducted by a woman with flashing lights. So Olivia goes to St. Claire’s Asylum and asks Dr. Sumner (William Sadler) if she could speak with Dashiell. Sumner agrees as long as Walter is the interviewer. Olivia brings this to the attention of Peter and Walter agrees much to Peter’s dismay. Walter goes into the asylum which once held him captive for 17 years, to speak to his friend. Dashiell is among the rest of the inmates in the common room and Walter mindfully makes his way to him. He asks Dashiell about the woman with the flashing lights. The mentally unstable Dashiell refuses to answer the question begrudgingly. Walter pushes harder and Dashiell screams that he doesn’t know about the woman which causes the other inmates to lose their calm. Walter is sedated and held overnight at the asylum while Peter and Olivia get a court order for his release. Meanwhile, Bean is being kept in a strange basement looking facility playing the piano to match the Equation. Walter, still hard at work, approaches Dashiell again while they are outside on the balcony and asks him the question one more time. Dashiell answers the question to the best of his ability as Walter’s mentally hindered friend. It turns out that that was just the answer they needed, as Peter picks up Walter and they tell Olivia all the info Walter got from Dashiell. 
Olivia along with agent Francis find the whereabouts of Bean and his kidnapper. The kidnapper stuns agent Dunham using the flashing lights and gets away with the finished equation she has allegedly been hunting for years. She takes the Equation to a mysterious man. The man then enters the Equation into a computer and synchronizes it with speakers he just put in the back of a safe with an apple inside of it. The man then phases his hand through the safe to retrieve the apple. After a successful test of the second Fringe science of the episode; The Equation – a vibration pattern that allows objects to phase through other objects, he shoots the girl who brought him the formula.
This episode tied in well with both past episodes and later episodes. We have a consistent villain in Agent Loeb and we get to delve into the past of Walter and what he went through at the St. Claires Asylum and finally see that disgusting butterscotch pudding (he must have went in on a Monday). The characters of Walter and Peter were more toned down and believable than they have been for the last couple of episodes. Two events in the show did get under my skin however, the first being the scene with the flashing lights under the hood. It seems highly unlikely that the father would be the person to stop for the would be kidnapper and that father, a person that knows little about cars, would look under the hood to be hypnotized. The other scene is when Olivia is chasing the kidnapper and falls prey to the hypnotizing lights even though she should know that its coming and what it can do. These are small nuisances but with a show based so much on detail, I would like smarter characters and situations. This episode entertained me greatly as a viewer and it peaked my interest and now I can’t wait for “The Dreamscape”
Star of the Show: Alternate Walter
Who is he? How creepy is he? How awesome is he? Walter is an enigma of a character by himself but with two of them? I want more, I need more.
