5.6 Through The Looking Glass And What Walter Found There Though a reference to Alice is thrown in, when Walter explains that in the pocket left is right and up is down. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland it’s Humpty Dumpty who states “…up is down, down is up, whatever suits its agenda…” Navigating the pocket isn’t easy, especially when they’ve no real idea what they’re in there to find, or why. The parallels to Alice’s adventure abound. Inside, they find a man who lived in the destroyed building in which the pocket resides, and are told he was pushed there by an explosion. That seems somewhat far-fetched since he’s uninjured, but his real narrative purpose is to remind Walter of the collateral damage in almost everything he does. Tn Trek parlance, he’s a ‘red shirt’ . We’re told that time in the pocket is progressing at a much slower rate. If five days pass inside and twenty years outside, then for each minute poor Astrid spends in there, waiting for them, she’ll be standing for 1460 minutes, or ten days. Based on that simple calculation, she’d be hanging around for six months or more. The argument could be made that there is a time leakage at the entrance, so she experiences the same time. Except this is contradicted by her seeing the Observers arrive, because they’d seem to be moving at 1460 times normal speed, which they’re not. That’s a shame, because in all other respects this was an interesting, if somewhat incomplete, story. I suspect the young Observer is September, but I could easily be wrong on that. My favourite part of the story was the great scene where Walter talks to Peter about how since his brain was reconstructed he’s becoming the person he didn’t much like again. That’s a subtle final reference to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which contains is the line, “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” What’s kept this show going for five seasons, in this reviewer’s opinion, is the extraordinary work of John Noble, and in this small part he demonstrates why he’s such a fantastic actor. The looks that Joshua Jackson gives him in response could be interpreted as being in character, or as another actor watching in awe, wishing he could emote like that. More Fringe is only days away, and perhaps then they’ll explain how the resistance can paint sixth floor-high images of Etta on the sides of building without anyone noticing them doing it. Read Billy’s review of the previous episode, An Origin Story, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
