Fringe: "Welcome to Westfield" Review

Note: Full spoilers for the episode follow...

This week's Fringe starts off with some sex! It's been a long time since we've seen anything remotely close to hot boot-knocking in this show, and at first it seemed it was just another one of Peter's dreams of the way things were in another timeline. But wait! It's not Peter's dream...but Olivia's! Oooooooh!

I'll delve more on Olivia's sudden change of heart later. Let's talk about the real core of this episode first. It's a mystery-of-the week episode for sure, but it has enough meaningful links to the "big picture" story to make it feel like it has continuity with the series lore instead of just being an inconsequential one-off.

The weirdness of the episode combines a little of The X-Files with some Twilight Zone and maybe a little zombie movie styling thrown in for flavor. Unpredictable crazy people always make for good drama, and that's certainly the case here as initially we're presented with our horrifying schizophrenic diner owner and the bodies he's left lying around his restaurant. As Walter and Peter decipher the nature of the problem, things get clearer and the link to our pal David Robert Jones is made. This story is structured well, with a good mix of thrills and surprises evenly distributed between the chatty parts that connect everything and reveal what's going on. However, I did feel that the opening with the plane crash felt a bit thematically disconnected from the rest of the story (the dramatic plane crush, while cool, was ultimately not a factor in the story).

Also, the scene with Cliff talking about how his family wasn't supposed to be there didn't feel like a natural fit in the flow of conversation, and it seemed like a forced plot device to explain things faster. These aren't big complaints though, and they don't take away much from the story as a whole because there are plenty of good elements to make up for it. Like, for example. The special effects. The woman with the double-set of teeth and the double-irises seen in the afflicted townspeople are small but very well done sci-fi effects. The complicated CG and makeup we saw in previous seasons aren't present as often these days, but the effects that are used are still memorable.

Then we have our good friend Walter Bishop, who is actually out of the lab and on-site in this week's investigation, and once again things feel familiar to the timeline we knew. The effect Peter has on him is clear, and the episode is chock full of quintessential Walter moments, including Walter using the school's PA system to call Peter and Olivia, his attempts to make a cinnamon bun cocktail, and his extremely timely and effective use of a can of pepper spray. But the most revealing scene comes near the end of the episode, where Peter leaves and it's clear that Walter misses him (which is a stark contrast to the fear and emotional distance Walter treated him with just a few episodes ago). These characters are steadily becoming the more familiar versions we knew before "The Day We Died".

The biggest, juiciest reveal of all continues the trend of making things they way they used to be as Olivia is remembering things that didn't happen in this timeline, and she's all of a sudden in love with Peter again. On the surface, this appears to lend validity to the popular theory that this has been Peter's real timeline all along, and that he was already "home". But this could also be something else, and this episode's theme might actually be a sign of things to come. Maybe the David Robert Jones/Nina Sharp plot is working to integrate timelines/universes and the Olivia we knew is somehow being "brought over" here. As usual, Fringe leaves us with more questions than answers, but it seems like we're about to get a much clearer picture of what's really been going on this season.

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