'Fringe' recap: In The World To Come, We Will All Be Monsters

An alternate reality riff on the season 1 episode The Transformation (aka the one where the nerdy Bruce Banner hulked out into an incredibly rubbery human porcupine), Nothing As It Seems was chockablock with strange mutations. Many of them were crammed into the episodes final moments, which gave us a hideous menagerie of creature feature monsters locked away on a ship cruising the ocean. Call it: The Super-Tanker of Dr. Moreau. We saw a spider leg and a rattlesnake tail protruding between the bars of cages, as well as a squid thing squirting through an aquarium jail. All of them were presumably human beings once the latest members of an ancient cult known by a Sumerian tat and organized around the principle of guided evolution. (Were these abominable critters call-backs to other Fringe freaks, too? Many readers say: Yes.) And so Fringe gave us a major new mythological idea, one thats something of a hybrid itself, a blend of ZFT and The First People. Call these extreme science whackjobs: The Next People. Their motivation: To become gods. Or maybe they just want to morph into cockroach-tough genetic constructs capable of surviving the catastrophic extinction event that is imminent. (It is the year 2012, after all. The year that the Mayan celestial ship emerges in the heart of the galaxy, turns into a bearded snake, and gives us all enlightenment. OR EATS US.) Their new leader: David Robert Jones, of course. Only the brainiac with the David Bowie name could be behind something so spacey and odd. The zany zoo of scary monsters and super creeps reminded me of any number of comic book ideas, from The Un-Men to The Ani-Men,Swamp-Thing to Man-Thing,and more. Also: spider-man + reptile-man = The writers of Fringe are, like me, eagerly anticipating the forthcoming reboot of the Spider-Man movie franchise. Are they also gearing up for a story that comments on a calamity-spooked culture thats gone crazy for stories about super-humans? My brain: A heaving Heap of geeky muck and mildewed newsprint. I will not apologize for it.

The opening sequence of Nothing As It Seems impressively restaged the opening sequence of The Transformation except this time, Marshall Bowman (again played by Neal Huff) didnt erupt into the Were-porcupine aboard Vertus Air flight 718 and crash the plane. Instead, Bowman blew up on the ground, during an interrogation by TSA agents. In the old timeline, Bowman was an undercover NSA agent working with two other men a guy named Daniel Hicks and Olivias former partner and lover, John Scott -- to hunt a bioweapons baddie. In Rebootlandia, Bowman was a transhuman cultist, one of many in the world, experimenting with serums developed by David Robert Jones during his days at Massive Dynamic. (Bowman + David = David Bowman, the astronaut turned plus-human Star Child of 2001: A Space Odyssey?) He had a partner, also named Hicks, who had a lover, a Beauty who dug his Beastly cheese especially when he unfurled his leathery bat wings and took her flying across the city. (I was suddenly reminded of Lois Lanes soaring date with the Man of Steel in the first Superman movie.) (You can fly! You belong to the sky! You and I belong to each other!)

The investigation into the mystery of these artificially-induced lusus naturae -- a cornucopia of porcupine people; a porcucopia! -- took Peter and Olivia to a new version of an old friend: Rebootlandia Ed, the near-neckless, manners-challenged proprietor of Markham's Used Books and gnome-like know-it-all specializing in undergound and esoteric knowledge. I always liked Ed, always wished Fringe would do more with him. Peter and Olivia curried Ed's favor by name-dropping Gene Wolf's sci-fi novel Lake Of The Long Sun(the second book in The Solar Cycle series; Peter said it was for "the lady," which left Ed doubly dazzled) and pushed his buttons by suggesting they had a research challenge he couldn't possibly meet. In between his clumsy-funny attempts to hit on Olivia, Ed explained the cuneiform brand on Bowman's body and sketched the framework for this new dimension of Fringeverse mythology. The Sumerian mark means "renewal" or "rebirth." Ed explained there had been "some rumblings lately about a group out there... obsessed with the guided evolution of man. They want to create a new species. A better species. Mutation by design." Mutation By Design -- sounds like an HGTV show that Charles Xavier would love. Later, Astrid would find a website that elaborated on the cult's ambitions: "Each generation of gods is overthrown by its children who become new gods with new tools." Sounds like David Robert Jones -- by seizing control of the creative powers of nature or God (depending on your perspective, as Walter noted) -- wants to pull aTitanomachy and become our new Zeus.

Searching for porcu-rogue Hicks, the agents of Fringe division got the final breakthrough they needed when Walter realized The Next People were using medical waste specifically, human fat to fuel and manage their changes. A gunfight within a plastic surgery clinic inside a Boston skyscraper left the Hicks dead and his heartbroken Lois in a pool of tears. In a beat prior to the super-tanker finale, we saw two more Next People -- Bowmans sister and her boyfriend, played by Battlestar Galacticas Alessandro Juliani shooting up with super-serum. "We can be born anew," she enthused, "children of the new world!" They shot up... and then we faded to the super-tanker, and saw two porcupine creatures stuck in a cell together. Was that the sister and her lover? Gaeta! Don't leave us so soon!

It should be noted that David Robert Jones himself never appeared, and the episode did not specify the relationship between these experimental life forms and the villains other passion project, next-gen shape-shifters, though I suspect these different endeavors are but varied iterations of the same ambition. As much as I worry that TV show special effects arent going to be able to do this mash of monsters the justice they deserve, I like them better than the shape-shifters, as the shape-shifters havent been capturing my imagination the way they did in earlier seasons. That said: My guess is that the next time Fringe revisits this story, The Next People will be more superman than super-beast, thanks to improvements in the formula. That super-tanker? A prison for mutant mistakes a floating island of misfit X-Men.

BURNING QUESTION: Remember the scene when Peter was trying to recall the Bowman case that he investigated in the original timeline? What did you make of the moment when Peter couldn't remember Daniel Hicks' name? Was it just a way to get Olivia involved in the story? (She had been ordered to take leave because "the tenth floor" was worried about the implications of her rapidly dissolving Rebootlandia identity.) Or did you wonder if Peter might now be losing hismemory? Is this Peter Bishop's cosmic function? To keep falling into and out of alternate realities? To love all possible Olivias and save all possible worlds?

NEXT: Agent Lincoln Lee = Gregor from Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Yes?

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'Fringe' recap: In The World To Come, We Will All Be Monsters