I gotta be honest with you fine people: Given the problems I’ve had with Fringe’s preponderance of stand-alone episodes in Season Two, I’m having a hard time working up much enthusiasm for a leftover stand-alone that Fox didn’t deem worthy to air last season. (Especially with a legitimately new Fringe due this Thursday.) So I’m going to whip through this one fairly quickly.
Freak-meet: Brain-dead high school athlete Lisa Donovan comes back to life while her organs are being harvested, and begins shouting, “68339AE358!” The first half of those numbers? An ID code for missing Navy petty officer Andrew Rusk. The second half? Launch codes for ICBM missiles.
The reason: Lisa has developed some kind of psychic bond with Rusk, to the extent that she sees his face behind her when she looks into mirrors. She even leads the authorities to Rusk’s corpse, in the trunk of a junker car at a dump site. And Rusk’s pre-death illness—radiation posioning—seems to have been transferred to Lisa, even though she’s never been near his actual body.
The resolution: Walter performs a kind of scientific version of an exorcism on Lisa, and brings Rusk’s personality to the front in order to find out who killed him. It appears that Lisa returns when the procedure is over, but in fact Rusk remains in control, and then goes after his wife Theresa, who hired a palooka to kill him (to get revenge on him for beating her). The Fringe team stops him/her in time but… Rusk downloads his consciousness into a car accident victim in the episode’s coda.
Meanwhile: Walter tries to listen to coma patients, and drinks fresh milk. Lisa complains that she’s been shunned by her church-mates for being “different.” And Olivia and Peter have a conversation about their mutual lack of faith that ends with Olivia “waiting to see if lightning strikes you.”
Themes: Science is a kind of faith too. (Also, our bodies are but empty vessels, ready to be filled by whatever.)