After last week’s explanatory, emotional, unusual Fringe, we had a return to normalcy this week, with an old-fashioned Fringe Division case marked by a host of familiar moments:
-Olivia confronting Nina Sharp in her high-tech penthouse office, demanding answers that Nina claims not to have.
-Olivia feeling out of sorts and seeking counsel from Sam The Sage Bowling Alley Manager. (Or as Zack H. once aptly dubbed him: The Magic Lebowski.)
-Walter craving junk food. (“Get some blue food coloring. Since we’re baking, we may as well make some taffy.”)
And of course, one peach of a Freak-Meet. We begin in Providence, where a shaky, sickly James Heath is seeking legal advice from an old friend, Miranda Green. They reminisce about mutual acquaintances, and then James gives Miranda a grateful grasp on the wrist. And after they part, Miranda contracts immediate, eruptive, all-over skin cancer. In rush-hour traffic, no less.
In comes the FD, and specifically Walter, who with the help of a blacklight determines that Miranda’s sarcomas—or at least the ones around her forearm—are overlaid with an oddly pinkish hue, in the shape of what looks to be a handprint. After some time to study on the matter, Walter proposes that Miranda was the victim of some kind of “touch of death,” which he relates to Tantric sex in that it involves a biochemical transmission. He thinks that Miranda was killed by a cancer patient who was temporarily staving off his own demise by passing the disease along.
While Walter bakes Miranda’s skin (and taffy!) in order to raise the handprint to a point where it can be scanned into the FBI database, Olivia hunts for clues to Heath’s identity in the files of what turns out to be a string of people he’s cancer-fied. Ultimately she realizes that the victims are all connected: they were all Cortexifan test subjects when they were kids, just as she was. And then Olivia figures out that James Heath is the man they’re looking for when she determines that the “J. Heath” on her private list of The Jacksonville Children is not super-sarcoma sufferer Julie Heath, but her brother James, who was in the hospital with cancer when Julie became Victim #1.
Little does Olivia know though that James is also looking for her—sort of. He’s actually looking for anyone he can find from Jacksonville, because he’s hoping ultimately to track down the people responsible for his condition. He's getting there one name at a time: Miranda tells him about Lloyd Becker, then Lloyd (before his sudden demise) passes him on to another of their pals, Nick, whose aunt tells James about Olivia, and so on. And so we arrive at the moment where James knocks on Olivia’s door, his quivering hand reaching ever-closer to her face.
What made “Olivia. In The Lab. With The Revolver.” work I think was that the case-of-the-week was both creepy and relevant to the overall story. It turns out James Heath may have been “activated” by the same shadowy organization who’s turned past Fringe Freaks into living weapons, as part of the coming inter-dimensional war. And there was real pathos too in the moment where Heath stopped his attack on Olivia when he saw the photos of their old Jacksonville classmates—the ones he killed. James tells Olivia that his kill-spree all began when a man arrived at the hospital and tried to teach him how to use his Cortexifan-enhanced gifts to control his cancer, only to find those methods both made the cancer worse and turned him into a carcinogen-gun. Is there any more Fringe-y irony than that? A man takes steps to save his life, and ends up taking others’.