Fringe 1.14 “Ability” Recap

Jones has planned an explosion that will occur sixteen hours from now, and turn lots of people into Honeydews. Jones wont give up any more information other than it is being transported in a white van. Harris runs in under the pretense of trying to insure that Jones doesn’t hurt Liv. She leaves to go find the key. The best line of the episode comes when Harris asks Liv where she is going by herself for two hours and she tells him, ‘to get a massage!’Harris and Broyles are left slack jawed as the elevator door closes.

As Olivia head to the amusement park, Peter tells her that Walter has found the cause of the mutation. There is a powdered toxin that is absorbed through the skin and it turns on the protein responsible for forming scar tissue. Peter has been reading the manuscript, but Walter is using it for bathroom library reading now. Apparently it also inspires the thought of coffee cake. Walter reads Peter a passage from the manuscript — the author believes that our reality is only one of many and that the passage between these dimensions has already been discovered by a civilization like us, but more advanced than we are. They are traveling through the different realities and this will cause negative and irreversible occurrences to both worlds. ‘It will begin with a series of unnatural occurrences, difficult to notice at first, but growing not unlike a cancer until a simple fact becomes undeniable: only one world will survive.’I think with that statement, they have just defined the Observers place in all of this.

Liv takes the box back to the lab and finds a number ‘tests’inside. For test one, she is supposed to turn off a group of lights in a box without touching the box. The instructions for the tests in the box use the same term — recruits — that is used to describe new soldiers in the ZFT manuscript, intimating a relationship between the two. Olivia stares at the box intently while everyone else stars at her. Just when we think that she is going to actually be successful, her phone rings scarring the crap out of her and me both! She decides that the light box is just a game and heads back to the agency. She confronts Jones about the ZFT manuscript. He looks much shakier. He is insistent that the light box is a test and that she is meant to pass it. Jones tells Olivia that she was given a drug called Cortexiphan and they were able to verify that via the spinal tap Loeb administered. He is not surprised that she is reluctant to try. Jones is becoming more and more physically unstable and at the end of the exchange, he collapses.

EMTs bring Jones to Walter’s lab. Walter is surprised that ‘it’is happening much quicker that he expected. Peter reminds Walter that their purpose is to try and stabilize Jones. So, Walter is going to administer 50 cc of saline, for some unknown reason. He might as well just spit on him. Jones is still unconscious, but Olivia tells Peter that Jones actually expects her to be able to pass the test. She asks Peter if he can re-rig the light box to make it look like she made the lights go out. Also, Olivia has discovered that the drug that Jones told her was in her system, Cortexiphan, was manufactured by, guess who – MASSIVE DYNAMIC! I bet you are as surprised as I was! So, where do we go from there, Nina Sharp of course!

Nina, who is having a little trouble with her robot hand, looks up the drug in a very cool glowing PDA. Dr. Bell created Cortexiphan in order to prevent the limitation of the human brain — which he believes is infinitely capable at birth. After using children as test subjects at the Ohio State University, the apparently unsuccessful testing was abandoned in 1983. Olivia seems sure that she could not be a part of the testing as she was in Jacksonville, Florida with her military father at that time. Peter has subsequently reprogrammed the light box and it is ready for the test.