Ham radio isn't the harmless hobby it once was...

"6955 kHz"

Just as I'm beginning to feel less hostile towards season 3 of Fringe and to begin anticipating episodes again, each ep continues to be capped with an info-burst of incomprehensible retro-snippets that are determined to remind me why I began to hate season 3 - they certainly can't remind me of anything else. How about following the lead of The X-Files on this, J.J., since you love that show so much? Chris Carter only put recaps to episodes of The X-Files which referred back to very distant or obscure events, and did so sparingly.

Moving on, and we find a group of cult hackers tuning into the mysterious 'number stations' whose transmissions are said to pre-date Marconi and which only put out sequences of numbers that appear as an arcane code. This particular transmission is very interesting, since it wipes the memories of everyone who hears it.

Once they're able to tear themselves away from the bed they now share (Our Olivia is going to be so peeved when she finds out), Peter and Not-Olivia are on the case, and discover that the numbers may be related to an ancient calendar from the mysterious pre-historic human race called 'the first people'. But it's time for Astrid to step up and, as Walter says, play Watson a little, as she determines that the numbers indicate the location of a potentially apocalyptic death-machine called 'the vacuum' (that name needed a second draft, but never mind).

The nearest of the global co-ordinates for the 38 divided pieces of this ultimate war-machine happens to be in New Jersey, and when Fringe have the site dug up, sure enough they find a section of mysterious technology that has 'series finale' written all over it.

Throughout all this, it becomes clear that Not Olivia has been intrinsically involved in the plot to wipe the memories of those who have discovered the 'number stations', as well as assigning a crony to tinker with the mysterious machine that Walter hates Peter experimenting with so much. Just to remind us that while Not Olivia may be softening a touch to Peter and even to 'nice' Walter, her loyalties are still firmly with Walternate, and she's as uncompromising as ever, throwing the bumbling henchman out of a twenty-storey window to splat in a pool of liquid metal that reveals him as a 'shape-shifter'.

A session at the secret trans-deminsional typewriter reveals to Our Not Hero that it's time for phase two, whatever that may entail...

Rather thrown into the midst of this episode was a half-realised plane-crash that seemed to validate our heroes' fear that the mind-blanking wave is a terrorist device, and this looked like off-cuts of the pilot episode pre-credits sequence with a quick insert thrown in, with no budget apparently for visual effects. The net-effect of this was to remind us of something better than itself, and one wonders if the writers couldn't have achieved the same plot-point without half-assing it on this under-funded sequence.

On the plus side, Walter's as descriptive as ever about all his bodily functions, and still totally obsessed with cakes (how can he eat nothing but cakes and not get fat?). It's also good to see Jasika Nicole's Astrid finally stepping up to do something meaningful in our universe, since her own alternate version is a bit more lively over in the Other Place.

Also very pleasing was the park-bench scene where Blair Brown and John Noble recall their salad days at Harvard, and some hint of a romance past or yet to come, as Nina Sharp tries to convince Walter that he should cut Peter the same slack that Walter needed as a young man.

Only this doesn't make a lot of sense, since young Walter nearly fried two universes in his prime, there's no indication that he won't yet finish the job yet, and there's every indication that what Peter's tinkering with in Walter's lab is likely to accelerate this process.

Still, they were sweet together.

I can't help feeling that Anna Torv must be getting a rictus ache from all the smiling that Not Olivia does, which is getting less and less convincing each episode. Since the evil Other Placers grafted Not Olivia's memories onto Our Olivia, could they not have done a 50% similar job on the agent they were sending on this dangerous trans-dimensional mission? Her changed character and the sheer number of things that Not Olivia doesn't remember or know about that Our Olivia would...

But then Peter's love-struck, as was perhaps Not-Olivia's intention, and inclined to overlook everything so long as it all ends up in the sack.

I'm getting tired of Lance Reddick's character coming on and deep-voicing a load of exposition; Reddick must be pretty jealous of how good Mitch Pileggi had it by comparison. We're heading for two and a half seasons now that the writers have done nothing with Reddick's character except bask in the fact that the actor playing him was such a lynch-pin in The Wire.

These are niggles, really; though not as cohesive or self-contained as last week's episode, 6955 kHz at least had some interesting sci-fi ideas to offer, and a continuing glance at the widened range of Joshua Jackson in season 3 of Fringe.

Frustratingly, the Walternate set are on to the machinations of Our Olivia, and have cancelled her sessions with the sensory-deprivation chamber that lets her briefly return to our universe, so presumably next week will see an escape attempt.

In all, I don't think the season 3 experiment is really working, and it does continue to feel like something that is intended more for focus groups than fans. A lot of executives are having a lot of say in what happens this season, I'm thinking. I've never seen a TV show deviate from its previous course this radically without a typical Hollywood dose of demographic-driven panic.

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