Let’s begin with the ending, because I’m certain that’s the part of “A Better Human Being” that you’re all going to want to talk about (and the part that, years from now, we’ll remember most about this episode). Not that the ending was a surprise, necessarily. As soon as Peter decided to accept that Amberlivia is now Ourlivia, and leaned in to give her a kiss, it was only a matter of time before something horrible happened, yes? Because despite all the warm flashbacks to Peter and Olivia as a couple, and despite all their talk in this episode about how deeply they know each other, and how they have their little rituals, the truth is that something always separates these two. Their moments together over the past few years have mostly been stolen ones.
So yes, when Olivia slipped into the gas station to go to the bathroom, I figured that she and Peter weren’t going to be sharing the romantic evening of “welcome back” whoopee that they’d been contemplating just minutes earlier. Now I did not specifically expect that she’d wake up shackled in a dank room—on Earth 2, I’m guessing—opposite a similarly bound and bruised Nina Sharp. But I knew we weren’t headed for a happy ending.
On the whole, “A Better Human Being” was a gripping episode, though I wish there’d been more follow-through on the case-of-the-week, which starts out strong then just… ends. We open on an institutionalized young man named Sean, who is hearing voices as always. We also see that these voices are attached to actual people, who miles away are in the process of breaking into the home of investigative journalist Daniel Greene, and throwing a bag over Greene’s head before stabbing him. Digging deeper into Sean’s past, the Fringe team learns that he was conceived via in-vitro fertilization, overseen by the man Green was investigating: Dr. Owen Frank, the latest in the parade of well-meaning-but-damaged mad scientists who have dominated this season of Fringe (and also an America’s Test Kitchen fan, judging by what’s on the TV at the rest home). Frank admits that in his IVF lab he engaged actively in genetic manipulation, looking to create a superior breed of humans. It doesn’t take too long then for Peter to figure out that Dr. Frank also provided the sperm for these experiments.
Why does this matter? Because after a good long look at his honey-bear, Walter devises the theory that Sean is communicating with the murderers much in the ways that bees do, and that Sean must share some kind of genetic connection with the killers. Which indeed Sean does, in that they’re all “brothers.” But unless I missed something—and I watched the relevant scenes of this episode twice to make sure—once these brothers kill Dr. Frank, Sean loses his connection to them, and his part of “A Better Human Being” wraps, rather anti-climactically. We get a scene of Astrid explaining to a worried Sean that he’s “normal” now, but nothing about what’s become of the other freaks. There’s an emotional beat there at the end—and a thematic foreshadowing, given what’s about to happen with Olivia—but none of this is all that satisfying as a piece of storytelling. We just get Astrid shrugging and saying, essentially, “We may never know what that was all about.”