Physics is a Bitch: Momentum Deferred on "Fringe"

"Momentum can be deferred, but it must always be paid back in full."

Perhaps it was because I had such high expectations for this week's episode of Fringe ("Momentum Deferred") that I was so brutally disappointed.

After all, this week's installment, written by Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz and directed by Joe Chappelle, promised to reveal just went on between Olivia and the enigmatic William Bell (Leonard Nimoy) over there in the space between the first two seasons. It should have been a corker of an episode yet I found myself growing increasingly impatient with some lazy plotting and some head-scratching plot holes. In other words: I felt like we lost the momentum we had established in the past few episodes amid some bizarro narrative leaps.

I was glad to see Walter's former lab guinea pig Rebecca (played in the present day by Theresa Russell) turn back up but I felt that they squandered the potential for some meaningful use of her character. Yes, there were some nice emotional beats between her and Walter (especially the sadness with which he refused to come into her house) and that moment of clarity when she looked at Peter.

But I still am a little confused why they needed her... or rather needed to drug her, considering how dangerous it was, when they had a Massive Dynamic crack staffer rendering an image of the shapeshifter within the next few hours. If it was going to only take three hours until they knew the identity of the shapeshifter, why bother drugging Rebecca and putting her through a potentially life-threatening situation instead of just waiting for the render to finish?

That whole rendering subplot also had me groaning. As soon as the tech guy said that he could send it to Olivia's phone, I knew that she was coincidentally receive the image of the shapeshifter just as she was standing there with Charlie. And lo and behold, that's exactly what happened, though we were also treated to Olivia telling Astrid to be sure to send the rendering to her phone just in case we dozed off earlier.

I'm glad that the Faux Charlie storyline didn't go on endlessly, but it also ended rather anticlimactically, I thought. No, there wasn't a coffee ice cream-related slip-up from Charlie Francis here but I'm also scratching my head wondering how the shapeshifter was so convincingly able to appropriate Charlie's life without anyone--not his friend, his wife, his colleagues--noticing that he had no knowledge of Charlie, his likes/dislikes, history, etc.

I also assumed that the story that the real Charlie told Olivia back in the second season premiere--which he hadn't told anyone before--would come into play, it being something that only the true Charlie Francis would know. But it was dropped completely in favor of Olivia getting a text message that showed her that Charlie wasn't actually Charlie. Yawn.

Sure, she had to kill someone who looked like Charlie but Olivia also fell for his ruse that Nina Sharp was the shapeshifter (though why?) and then gave away the location of the cryogenically preserved head of the baddies' leader who would open the door between the two dimensions. Even after Nina had given her some information that would serve to help her. Had she believed Nina even for a split second, Olivia could have avoided giving their enemies their greatest asset yet.

After all, even Olivia admitted that William Bell pulled her out of her world and into another dimension in order to deliver a message of crucial importance. He gave her the location of the head and the marking. And Olivia failed to use this to stop the shapeshifters from acquiring the head themselves and now the marked man--was that Thomas Kretschmann?--is awakened, having been connected to a body via mercury.

Which brings me to another oddity. Bell and others keep talking about how Olivia was pulled out of the timestream from her moving vehicle but I don't remember it playing out that way at all. What I do remember is that Nina Sharp summoned Olivia to Manhattan and then made her wait at her hotel and that Olivia journeyed to "over there" in the elevator. I don't remember anything about her vanishing from her car until that plot point was picked up in the season opener. Anyone have a possible solution? Was Olivia just disoriented from the timeslips as we saw her in the flashback in this week's episode? Hmmm...

What did you think of this week's episode? Were you as disappointed as I was? Have any possible explanations for some of the inconsistencies? Discuss.

Next week on Fringe ("Dream Logic"), the team travels to Seattle to investigate a mysterious incident involving a man who attacked his boss because he believed he was an evil ram-horned creature; Agent Broyles has a disconcerting meeting with Nina Sharp that leads the investigation in an unthinkable direction.