5.9 Black Blotter Most of it takes place inside the rich, and in this case, LSD-fuelled imagination of Walter, tripping through his regrets and fears. While being, like Walter, a child of the sixties, I passed on the hallucinogenic drugs, so in some respects I’m not the best person to judge how real this all seems to him, but to the casual observer, it seems a curious mix of the familiar and fantastic. Along the way we also meet the green fairy, which I associate with Absinthe not LSD, while the other characters try to fathom the mystery of the radio transmitter and the location of ‘Donald’. They also encounter an old Fringe character – Sam Weiss – though he’s hardly recognisable, to the point that they didn’t actually employ Kevin Corrigan to play him. To be honest, that’s a rather flat accompaniment to Walter’s LSD trip, and his conscious inability to solve the signal the transmitter is sending. What really blew me away though was the build-up to the moment of revelation, where he presented the password that those caring for the Observer boy expected, and specifically the animation sequence that proceeded it. My PVR cut off the credits, so I’ve no idea if they got permission for this, because it wasn’t just an approximation of what would appear on Python, it was a perfect copy of the style and graphics. The end where they take the Observer child, having no idea whether it’s a good or bad thing, seemed rather too fluid, because they’re taking him for something that nobody knows. I’m confident that the boy is indeed September, but I could so easily be wrong on that. It also pointed up how uncomfortable it is to have characters who don’t verbally respond, and unless he finds a way to communicate succinctly fast, he’s going to be a problem for the writers. Overall, I like it when Fringe goes into this mode, and parts of Black Blotter were genuinely mind expanding. The final shot where Walter sees the dark version of himself smiling back at him was a nice point to leave this trip. This underlines, as was stated by Carla, that the battle of his mind was lost long before he started to fight it. Perhaps the irony of all this is that the evil version of Walter is the only person who can fight the Observers, as the nice bumbling one just isn’t ruthless enough to cope? Four more episodes to go, and the tension is building rather nicely. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
