J.J. Abrams' mad science procedural continues its core story, but takes its time getting anywhere with it...

Fringe presents its viewers with the same demographic quandary as its spiritual antecedent The X-Files: are you drawn in more by the season-spanning story arc or by the 'freak-of-the-week' episodes? As with the adventures of Mulder and Scully, you can be damn sure that the 'one-off' episodes are kept well away from the top and tail of any season of Fringe, and here at the start of season three, we're knee-deep in as much character development as action. And a long way from home.

The opening credits have gone red again, so we're mostly back in the parallel dimension this episode. Not-Olivia has crossed over to our dimension without suspicion to join increasingly-lovable (and very mad) scientist Walter and his long-suffering 'I'm not from around here, am I?' son Peter.

Back in the slightly more fascist alternate world, evil doppelganger Walternate is messing with our Olivia's memories, infusing them with the memory patterns of Not-Olivia.

(X-Files fans may recognise Gabrielle Rose as Olivia's psychiatrist; Rose cropped up in several episodes of Chris Carter's 1990s series and is repeating the gig for J.J. Abrams, who seems determined to maintain a spiritual connection with X-Files, having already combined the realities of the two shows in a scene at the start of series two.)

Except for the odd improvement in her marksmanship, the graft doesn't seem to be taking, and our Olive makes an escape from the secure facility into the cab and life of Andre Royo - the latest excellent refugee from The Wire to show up in Fringe.

"Olivia" concentrates pretty solidly on the suffering of its eponymous heroine as she drags Royo through alternate New York, looking for some kind of a way back to her own dimension. It's not looking good: the theatre where our heroes crossed over has just been sealed up with the gel-forming smoke that turns buildings into warm popsicles, and there's some kind of a memorial park where Massive Dynamic used to be. Did the '9/11 bombers' have a different target in the alternate universe, given that the World Trade Center is unphased there...?

Either way, Olivia's shit out of luck, except that her doppelganger's memories help her escape by means of a 'we have the budget!'-style tank explosion, when cornered at the gas station where she had a good cry in the toilets.

Dunham is markedly more intrepid and physically capable than her other alternate, Dana Scully, but far more vulnerable emotionally, to the point where sometimes I wonder how she passed the psych evalutation test for the FBI. You'll rarely see her rescued by Peter & Co. (unless she rescues him twice as payback), but she does seem occasionally like she's living out the angst of Cosmopolitan's latest theories on the inner conflicts of powerful women. She's additionally handicapped, unlike Scully, in that she has to play the 'straight man' to not one but two wisecrackers throughout Fringe, in the form of the Bishops, and so rarely gets to crack a joke - or a smile - herself.

By the time Olivia gets to meet her dead mother (well, she's dead where Olivia comes from), she's in psychological meltdown, and all that memory-infusion treatment is starting to hit. Pretty soon, to Walternate's evil pleasure, our Olivia seems to have been taken over by the memory patterns of Not-Olivia. Which, as far as we can tell, means that there's a Not-Olivia in each dimension/universe. And Peter Bishop is ready and eager to get back to the 'freak-of-the-week' routine with his fake new girlfriend...

When I see Olivia and Peter kissing, I can't entirely stifle the same shudder of incredulity I got when Bill Murray kissed Sigourney Weaver at the end of Ghostbusters. I can't yet buy it, for a number of reasons. It's not a physical mismatch; it's just that the groundwork for this attraction was not really laid out over the previous two seasons. Also, Joshua Jackson has never really broken character, or even expression, since the introduction of Peter Bishop in the pilot episode. Even when he was running away from the horrible news that Walternate is his real father at the end of S2, he seemed to have reset his emotional temperature to 'not bothered' in a day or so. I like Jackson a lot, and his presence adds something very solid to Fringe; it's only when they ask me to believe that Peter Bishop is an all-round action man or romantic marksman that I begin to feel that they're either stretching Jackson beyond his range or just not paying enough attention to Peter's emotional arc.

Dunham provides an object of emulation and adoration in the lead role, but the emotional heart of the series is the fractured relationship between Peter and Walter Bishop, an occasionaly melting psychological glacier; when a drugged Peter inadvertantly called his father 'Daddy' instead of 'Walter' in S2, it was one of the strongest emotional moments in the show's run. John Noble's superb performance spans two characters now in Walternate and himself, but the fascination for the viewer is the conflict between the urge to mother him and the strong compulsion to have him shot for all the terrible things he used to do. But you can't shoot someone who's obsessed with candy, can you?

"Olivia" showed us very little of our beloved nut or his son, instead concentrating on Walternate's world, and this added to the frustration of an episode with a reasonable amount of action but very little plot advancement. Good as the actor is, I couldn't buy Andre Royo's motivation for turning from Olivia's hijackee to her accomplice, unless it was intended as an elliptical nod - and a kind of hopeful ending - to the story-arc of his character 'Bubbles' in The Wire. Fringe is getting pretty interested in cross-genre references, so I wouldn't rule it out.

What the episode did leave us with was a curiosity as to how the placement of Not-Olivia is going to work out. I do wonder if these two versions of the same character are going to become rather dependent on their current locales, for different reasons. I have to admit, I'm a little itchy for a series reset at this point, fascinating as the details and differences of the alternate universe are. There are freaks to be arrested out there, and it's getting pretty soapy at Fringe HQ right now.

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