Fringe/Recap/S01/E14

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
< Fringe‎ | Recap‎ | S01


Season 1, Episode 14:

Ability

Once he's recovered from the teleportation, David Robert Jones orchestrates a small release of a toxin that causes skin to grow over people's orifices, suffocating them, before turning himself into the FBI and demanding to speak with Olivia. When he does, he claims that a hidden bomb full of toxin will detonate if she doesn't pass his "tests", which she finds in a hiding place that Jones describes. The first of the tests involves deactivating a light grid using only the power of her mind, which she and the rest of the Fringe team find ridiculous.

In the meantime, Peter tracks down a copy of the ZFT manifesto, a document called "Zerstörung durch Fortschritte der Technologie" ("Destruction by Advancement of Technology") which claims that a war with an Alternate Universe is coming and that special people have been prepared to fight in it. Jones claims that these special people are real: when they were children, these people were part of trials conducted by William Bell using the drug cortexiphan, which gave them special psionic abilities. Jones' test can only be passed by one of these cortexiphan children, and he believes that Olivia is one of them, though information from Nina Sharp seems to disprove the claim. To convince Jones to give up the bomb's location, Olivia and Peter rig the light grid and fake the test, but when they arrive at the bomb's location, they discover that it has been rigged with a light grid as well: the only way it can be deactivated is if the light grid can be deactivated psionically. Both Olivia and Peter are sceptical, but with no other choice, Olivia attempts the test and somehow is able to deactivate the grid using nothing but her thoughts.

Jones is taken to hospital to recover some illness that he's suffering from, but he manages to escape. Nina Sharp contacts Olivia after discovering that despite what the records say, a cortexiphan trial was conducted on an army base in Jacksonville, Florida -- at the exact same time when Olivia was living there as a child. And Walter, after finding something odd in the typed ZFT document, discovers that it was originally written on his own typewriter.