Walter has something in mind when a comatose terrorist proves hard to interrogate...

"Concentrate and Ask Again"

I can stand all the viscera and grue that horror movies can dish out, but anything to do with damage to bones is almost impossible for me to watch, though I have no idea why. What's that Steven Segal movie where he breaks somebody's back every five minutes? Maybe that's what made me phobic. Anyway, this episode of Fringe woke me up real early with its motif of a terrorist attack of deadly dust that dissolves a human's entire bone structure within seconds. Snap! That's your wrist gone. Snap again! There goes your leg. Gah - revolting.

Fringe has returned to its former tone of horror in 'Concentrate And Ask Again' and in some of the Peter-on-the-rampage aspects of last week's 'Reciprocity'. By the way, Peter's feeling much better after all that murder stuff. Maybe he got it out of his system the same way Walter rid himself of the monkey DNA. Or maybe the jarring effect of discontinuity is created by Fringe trying once again to get back to its roots in a season that is so unstable it can barely stand a 'straight' closed-episode any longer.

That said, these are the ones that complement the Walter/Peter set-up as the heart of the show, so a good one like 'Concentrate' is always welcome.

Some aggrieved ex-Marines, having discovered the hard way that they can only sire boneless children after an overseas test-mission involving the aforementioned skeletal-melter, decide to systematically pick off the scientists and politicians who created and green-lit the project, dosing them with their own medicine in the form of voodoo-esque birthday dolls that prove to be a deadly gift.

(The 'dark birthday' motif set up early doesn't quite follow the logic of events, since the first victim is presented with a deadly ammanuensis of one of the dead children on his own birthday, but presumably all the following victims are unlikely to have birthdays near his - but never mind.)

When one of the suspects is left comatose after fleeing from the Fringe squad straight into a car accident, there seems no way of interrogating him to find out who the other participants in the revenge campaign might be. But trust dear old Walter to have yet another Cortexiphan alumnus up his sleeve - and this one can read minds. Trouble is, after twenty years of enforced isolation from the terrible nonsense of sidewalks and towns, our homespun Scanner isn't particularly receptive to his old mentor's entreaties for aid. Only the fact that he can't read Olivia's mind (as she is also a Cortexiphan 'victim') pacifies him enough to agree to locate the remaining aggressors.

And that's kind of what he does, and that's really the end of this episode's core plot. But if Fox hadn't set up the pre-credits recap to be so on-the-nose, we might have guessed a little more slowly that the Scanner's secondary purpose for S3's plot-arc is to answer the question that is torturing Olivia - does Peter retain feelings for Fauxlivia?

And this too is delivered by the end. Yes he does. Not only that, but we're told that whichever Olivia he chooses, her universe will survive.

Until last week, I was kind of believing Peter's endless reassurance to our Olivia that she was really the one for him, and that Fauxlivia's deception has closed his heart off to the infiltrator forever. But truth is, as our Olivia fears, Fauxlivia is a bit more fun than Olivia, and with a whole lot less baggage. Additionally, Peter always struck me as the type with enough sense to try for the nice girls, but a natural inclination for the dangerous ones. Perhaps he's only now figuring out that the recent revelation of her deception has actually made Fauxlivia more, not less, attractive to him.

Also, there's nothing less romantic than endless moaning and pleas for reassurance, such as our Olivia has been firing at Peter for weeks. That's a bit of a tough obstacle when two people haven't even laid the foundations of a relationship yet. Or each other. Thorny stuff.

It's clumsy - really clumsy - to associate the love-triangle aspect of S3 with the 'apocalyptic' one at this late stage. It reeks of a desperation to tie up the disparate threads into some kind of unity that season 3 -  whatever little jewels it may have thrown our way - has definitely lacked.

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