Fringe "Inner Child" review

Olivia Dunham may be the perfect woman.

As played by Anna Torv on Fringe, she’s smart, intuitive, strong, tender, passionate, tough, gentle…it’s kind of hard to find an attractive trait that doesn’t fit the heroic FBI agent who occasionally takes a bit of LSD and slips into a water tank in her underwear (I do so like those episodes). Perhaps series creator J.J. Abrams figured he needed a protagonist with all those outstanding qualities to ground the viewer, because the world Olivia inhabits is filled with chaos, mystery, and ugly conspiracy that the worst paranoid schizophrenic would have trouble imagining up.

It’s up to Olivia and her team to steer us through these crazed waters, and while wacky Walter Bishop (the great John Noble) may be the best character on the show, the episodes’ quality come to rest firmly on the strong, capable shoulders of Olivia.

If Olivia has one character flaw it is that she can be emotionally inaccessible or unreadable at times. There’s no mystery about why, since her FBI partner lover turned on her in the series’ opener and gave her a nice gaping wound for her world to see. Even though she’s achieved some closure on that front, she still holds back. Witness her lack of movement on the chemistry between her and Walter’s son Peter (Joshua Jackson) despite the obviousness of their attraction to each other. Olivia is in a sensitive place, and she inhabits a very wacky world to be sensitive in.

We see the barriers break down a bit in the latest episode “Inner Child” which shows Olivia bonding with a mysterious youngster found buried alive inside a cavernous area by construction crews. Of course, in typical Fringe style the place had been sealed for 70 years, and there’s no way the kid (whose bald head and dark eyes bear an eerie resemblance to the mysterious Observer) could have been there. Walter has some ideas about the kid, but no one knows how he came to be…except maybe that guy from the Department of Social Services who is really a CIA agent (or so he says) and tells someone on the phone that they’ve found “another one.”

Olivia lives in a ultra-complicated world. It’s neat how she’s always trying to make the mystery smaller. Despite the fact that Fringe is a show with a huge hulking mythology we’re supposed to be figuring out, Olivia is a woman of feelings and action. She bonds with the child, less interested than everybody else about his secrets and more interested in what his fate will be.

The child reacts to this, and starts giving Olivia the clues that will help her catch a nasty serial killer she’s been hunting for years. How the boy knows to do this is unclear (if you can make anything out of Walter’s crazy ramblings and theories go ahead…I’m with Peter, he’s not making sense in this episode) but Olivia doesn’t waste time on the hows and whys…she never does.

In the end you know she’ll bag the bad guy and help the boy. But you also know there are larger forces out there moving chess pieces around to some bad ends, and we don’t need to see the bald head of the actual Observer (although of course we do) to figure that out.

“Inner Child” is not one of the better episodes of Fringe. Walter is quite hilarious at times, but here the humor seems forced and over-written. Peter is an interesting roguish character himself, but he isn’t given much to do, and neither are the shows other worthy stars— Lance Reddick as the intimidating FBI bossman Broyles, cute Jasika Nicole as Astra, the Bishop’s assistant and sounding board, or Olivia’s partner Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) who is still so kind and pure you just know he’s secretly a bad guy.

No, what good is in “Inner Child” comes from Olivia, as it always does on Fringe’s lesser shows. Even when the episode misfires she’s hard not to care about. So heroic, and so in over her head, she always finds a way to do the right thing with smoke and mirrors.

Next week’s show will likely be better, as they don’t usually go two down weeks in a row. Whatever the case, I’ll be watching. Forget the big mysteries, it’ll be Olivia Dunham pulling me back on the Fringe.