Fringe/Recap/S03/E03

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
< Fringe‎ | Recap‎ | S03


Season 3, Episode 3:

The Plateau

In the alternate universe, Fringe Division investigates a series of seemingly-random deaths in traffic accidents. They discover that the culprit is an autistic man named Milo who, as a result of experiments to increase his intelligence, is able to set off intricate chain reactions of events that result in a person's death (i.e. placing a pen on a mailbox, so that when it falls down, an old man bends down to examine it, which causes a bicycle to crash into a storefront, which causes a bus driver to be distracted and not see a pedestrian crossing the road). The victims are people who, as a standard part of the experiment, are supposed to bring Milo back to the hospital to have his intelligence restored to normal.

During the episode, Olivia begins to see visions of Peter while she's awake. At the end of the episode, Milo sets a trap for Olivia that is supposed to kill her, but when she ignores an orange diamond warning (an alert that air quality is compromised and everyone needs to use their portable oxygen tank) and keeps on chasing Milo, she is a few seconds faster than he predicted and manages to catch him. Charlie has to save Olivia by giving her oxygen, and she's reprimanded for ignoring basic Fringe protocol by not taking heed of the orange diamond. When she returns home, Olivia has another vision of Peter, who says that she ignored the orange diamond warning because she hasn't been conditioned with the protocol in the same way as everyone else: she is really from the prime universe.