Did El Dooderino make a cameo in this week's Other World adventure...?

"The Plateau"

Did anyone spot The Dood in the first murder in this week's episode? All right, it wasn't Jeff Bridges, but that is seriously the most Lebowski-esque walk-on I've ever seen in a TV show. Maybe those guys in Other Place's Fringe Division should put a real detective on their cases...

Once again the red-tinted title sequence lets us know that we're going to spend most if not all of the episode in alternate reality, where the Fringe unit is not a bunch of underfunded ne'er-do-wells but a highly militarised cross between FEMA and SWAT. They've got toys that must have Mad Walter drooling (although now he's as rich as an oil sheikh back in his own universe, he can probably build them himself).

The structure of Fringe is beginning to change, the two universes presenting the writers with interesting new choices. For instance, 'The Plateau' was really a freak-of-the-week episode, except it took place at Fringe Other World division, and even though our Olivia was there, she's still pretty much brainwashed into thinking that she's their Olivia, thanks to the machinations of dastardly Walternate; so apart from a few mental fugues and apparitions (Olivia sees Peter and Walter appearing to her throughout the episode), what we're effectively watching is CSI: Fringe.

And I do wonder if Abrams and company are just having a bit of fun with the Fringe format again, or if the producers are beginning to think that the old X-Files template can really still cut it after 17 years. CSI: Fringe is low on humour and high on action, and that in itself has a very established and lucrative demographic. But it isn't why I have watched Fringe for the last two seasons. It's episode three, and we've scarcely had a glimpse of dear Mad Walter yet. Everyone is young, aggressive and sexy in Fringe:CSI. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the CSI vibe; it's just not my cup of tea, and I'm seriously feeling a bait-and-switch in progress.I guess how far it ends up going is up to the rating gods and, God help us, the focus groups.

Frankly I'm beginning to wish they'd just spin off a sidequel series set in the Other World (though Anna Torv might end up working 52 weeks a year if they don't recast a little) and get us back to what drew us to the show in the first place. Three eps is a long time for a reset, and i'm wondering now if we've potentially seen the last of the Fringe we loved.

Or maybe I'm just paranoid.

Anyway, 'Plateau' brings us a freak-of-the-week who initially resembles the 'luckiest man in the world'' from the X-Files' season seven ep 'The Goldberg Variation', but it soon transpires that our villain is not a 'luck God' but a chemically-engineered savant whose brain works so fast that  he makes Rain Man look like a banjo-plucking moonshine manufacturer. Milo Stanfield can look around him and accurately count every causal possibility in a situation that he's in. In order to murder a specific person, all he has to do is go and balance a pen on a post-box and walk away. Before you know it, this incongruity has caused a disastrous and murderous chain reaction.

So the hunt for Stanfield is on, whilst Olivia tries to ignore the voices from her real self as our nasty 'Lawnmower Man' goes on the rampage using nothing but the manipulation of causal kinetics.Let's hope he doesn't have a butterfly collection, or Tokyo's had it...

The 'Other World' detailing is getting a bit cheaper now that we're spending more time there. We still haven't seen the double-decker car that Peter had a model of in S2, and the Zeppelins seem to have vanished from the skies of alternate New York. These things are expensive, and usually reserved for season-bridge stories.

I still can't buy Peter and Olivia's burgeoning romance, since these two actors just happen to have no romantic spark together, even if they work well off each other in the course of the stories. Consequently, it isn't something that's easy to care about.

The peripheral characters continue to be fairly stock items, and Lance Reddick a clothes-horse with few enough lines to bother employing an actor of his caliber.

I am worried about this season, even notwithstanding this week's introduction of a villain with a fairly original power. I get the feeling I'm being made to beta-test a product that I know is going to just blend in with the rest.

But so long as the show's eccentricities continue to wrong-foot me (see paragraph one), I guess I'm not done yet...