Hey, remember Fringe? That wacky sci-fi/horror/detective/conspiracy show that started out with a cool premise, quickly got repetitive, and then suddenly developed a consistent narrative drive and sense of whimsy just before Fox stuck it on a shelf for two months? Yeah, well, it was back tonight. Finally. And maybe it’s just that I’d missed the show more than I’d realized, but even though “Inner Child” was a plugger episode with very little new intel on The Pattern or any of the show’s overarching mysteries, I still quite enjoyed it.
I especially liked the opening, which began with a burly demolition crew finishing up the wiring on a job. As they’re leaving, one of the dudes, Dennis, begins to worry that maybe they haven’t done a good enough job sweeping all the bums out of the building. So he halts the countdown and heads back inside. And then he notices that one of the concrete floors sounds hollow. Then he falls through that floor to an underground lair, and meets himself a freak.
The C.H.U.D. in question is a little boy, bald and pale, who Walter surmises has been surviving on rats and bugs (“maybe millipedes”) in a chamber that’s been sealed shut for 70 years. Because I don’t want to keep typing “the boy” over and over in this write-up, I’m going to call the kid “Lil’ O,” for reasons that will be obvious if you were lucky enough to see this whole episode. And if you didn’t catch the end of the episode… well, I’ll explain the name in a moment.
Anyway, Lil’ O’s amazing ability to thrive in impossible conditions fascinates the covert wing of our government, who sends out a “social worker” named Eliot. It took me a moment to recognize that Eliot was played by Erik Palladino (who was suspiciously absent from all the ER retrospectives last week), but I started to pick up on his Palladino-hood when he responded to Olivia’s dismissal his petty civil service job by revealing that he’s actually a spook. (“But you didn’t have clearance to know that,” he sneers.) Now that’s the smug asshole I remember from ‘90s TV dramas!
Eliot wants to seize Lil’ O, but Broyles convinces him to let his Fringe team hold him for 24 hours, partly so Walter can study the kid, and partly because Lil’ O has taken a shine to Olivia, and has picked up psychic vibrations related to case she’s working. A serial killer known as The Artist is apparently operating in Boston again, kidnapping women and sculpting their bodies with his knives before putting them on public display. And Lil’ O, through some strange process (that Walter thinks might involve pheromones), is able to feed Olivia names and locations of victims and potential victims.
The serial killer stuff in “Inner Child” was fairly pat—with elements swiped wholesale from Thomas Harris and Michael Connelly—and the “keep Lil’ O away from Eliot” operation struck me as a little sloppy, if not actively implausible. But the episode was fast paced and creepy, with a few good Walter lines (my favorite being a tie between “Agent Dunham knows what a penis looks like” and “obviously I was sitting on the toilet”) and the return of his wonderfully ridiculous mad scientist device, “the neural stimulator.” In classic Walter fashion, he can’t recall which wire goes where on the stimulator, so he has to run through all his mnemonic tricks until he remembers “she’s a bad mamma jamma.”