The third episode of Fringe's second season marks the return of The Observer. Even if he is only present for a couple of seconds at the very end of the episode, it's an important scene nonetheless, as it reveals more about what this mysterious figure is up to.
And it's not good.
Still looking for atypical cases that might lead them to what happened to FBI Agent Olivia Dunham during the hour and a half she was missing from the scene of the car crash in the season premiere, as well as trying to figure more about The Pattern and the people instigating it, the Fringe Division heads to Philadelphia to investigate an explosion with seemingly no explosives — at least, none that conventional science is aware of.
The explosive ends up being a person. Not a person with a bomb strapped to himself, but a person. Yes, that's right — the person himself exploded. After injecting himself daily with a serum he thought was to treat a chemical exposure he suffered in Iraq, Officer Gillespie was detonated by being subjected to a specific radio wavelength. The good part is that he first became a hard crystal, saving us from a messy, organs-and-tissue-everywhere scene.
Olivia and Peter, after a trip to Iraq (yes, THAT Iraq), figure out that Officer Gillespie isn't the only person who can potentially be used as a bomb, and race against time to identify the person behind this devious plan.
The episode's plot is simple enough; however, I did find it a little disturbing, and not because of the X-Files-worthy autopsy scene — if you can call the reassembly of Officer Gillespie's blown apart crystallized body pieces an autopsy (wouldn't I have loved to see Scully's face at that moment). I found this episode disturbing because it made me think of terrorist attacks, suicide bombers, and injustice in the world. I have to admit sometimes I do wish I could turn my brain off while watching fictional characters go about in a fictional world.
Officer Gillespie, who was detonated by Corporal Gordon without prior knowledge of his fate, isn't a suicide bomber, but rather a victim of the Corporal's plans to unveil the secrets of The Pattern. While Officer Gillespie thought he was being used as a way to help his country, he was actually being sent to his death.
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