Here’s the persistent problem I’m having with the post-Peter Fringe reality to this point: a good chunk of each episode so far has been given over to explaining what’s changed since the season three finale. Except that very little has changed, aside from a few minor tweaks. (Tonight, for example, we found out that Olivia and Nina Sharp apparently have a warm, darn-near-familial relationship that dates back at least to Olivia’s teen years.) So when Olivia reminds Walter about the time she set fire to the room in Jacksonville during the Cortexiphan trials, or when she explains to Astrid what the whole Cortexiphan thing was all about, she’s really talking to us, letting us know that the things we’ve seen in past Fringe seasons still happened, more or less. And while I appreciate the reassurance—and acknowledge that this is information we need—every time a season four episode has paused for one of those catch-up scenes, it’s seemed (to me anyway) like it’s been wasting time that could be better spent on monsters, or trans-dimensional warfare.
I felt that sense of wheels-a-spinning especially strongly in tonight’s “Subject 9,” because it’s an episode where not much happens until the last few minutes. At the start, Olivia is plagued by a mysterious ball of magnetic energy, which Walter suggests might be an astral projection by one of Olivia’s fellow Cortexiphan subjects: the one Walter knows as #9, who demonstrated nascent magnetic powers as a boy. A little research turns up that #9’s real name is Cameron James, and that he now lives in New York. So Walter leaves the lab for the first time in three years to travel with Olivia to meet Cameron, and though Cameron’s not happy to see Walter—whom he remembers as the grumpy man who stuck him with needles when he was a boy—he is taken aback when he realizes the woman with Walter is “Olive,” who was always the strongest and most popular of their weird little group. Cameron explains to them that he had nothing to do with the energy-blob, but when Walter says that the thing might destroy everything in its path the next time it shows up, Cameron agrees to use his magnetic powers to help disperse it. But then Olivia watches the energy blob form itself into the shape of the man she’s been seeing in her dreams, and she stops Cameron before he can destroy it.
Because of Fox’s teases that Peter would be coming back, and because the Fringe cast has hinted repeatedly in interviews that Peter would be returning soon, and because the first three episodes of this season have shown Peter flickering on the periphery, I never had any doubt that the ball of energy was actually Peter. So while watching this episode I felt a little like Walter, when he experienced that glitch in his surveillance equipment that allowed him to see the troubles that Olivia and Astrid were about to be having.
And yet for all the predictability and lack of action, I still really enjoyed “Subject 9,” because it was so well-written (by Pinkner and Wyman with Akiva Goldsman) and well-directed (by Joe Chappelle) and well-performed. This week’s out-of-nowhere acting MVP is Chadwick Boseman, who played Cameron James. Before we even meet the character, we get a sense of how sad Cameron’s life has been since Jacksonville. He lives in an apartment stripped of metal, and drives a furniture supply truck back and forth to Maine (though his landlady wonders if that’s really his job, because “you never can tell with people”). And then after he initially runs from Olivia, he explains to her and Walter about how his powers flare up whenever he gets anxious, which means that on his last date he ripped his date’s fillings out after one embarrassing moment. Boseman really sells Cameron’s pathos in that speech, and again later when Cameron waits with Olivia out in the cold by a power station for the blob to re-appear. There, he tells Olivia about how Walter turned chilly and mean after she ran away from Jacksonville, and he wonders aloud whether Olivia’s unconsciously conjuring this blob herself, and whether Walter’s lying to them both.