Fringe: "Making Angels" Review

Note: Full spoilers for this episode follow.

If I had to sum up this episode in a word I'd call it "cute". Yes, that's odd for a Fringe story with a serial killer, but Alt Astrid makes it happen.

The big draw for this episode was, of course, a chance to see Astrid get the spotlight, finally! The big question in my mind was whether Jasika Nicole could lead a whole episode on her own. And the answer is...I'm not sure yet, because there wasn't as much Astrid awesomeness as I was expecting. It's still more than we've ever gotten before, but the amount of Astrid screen time is surprisingly less than I than I thought we'd see. But there's no doubt that Jasika did a wonderful job here. The writers gave her a chance to expand on the alt-Astrid persona and the results make the character even more cute and endearing despite (or perhaps because of) her odd tendencies.

Universe A Astrid's reaction to seeing her alternate self is priceless, and it's the first of a number of great interactions with two very different versions of the same character. Our normal Astrid actually comes off as just a passive observer as her alternate self provides all the novelty in the story. This is our first look at either Astrid's personal life, and what we find are two characters that are more complex than they look initially. The most interesting part of this story is Alt Astrid's childlike nature paired with her freakish intellect and emotional honesty.

This episode brought a lot of humor into the mix, mostly via the Astrids, but Walter also has some great Walterisms including "nearly all cultures react to death with food", and "check his crotch". One of the nicer parts of this episode is that the "in case you forgot" montage that preceded this story has Walter's famous "vagenda" quote. Ah, memories.

- FOX

Although most plots in Fringe are driven by the extraordinary events in the Fringe universe, this story is truly character driven and it seemed the usual Fringe story elements took a backseat this week. The episode's opening, for example, wasn't one of Fringe's most shocking starts, but it was good enough. Indeed, that's mostly how I'd describe this week's main mystery of the week – merely "good enough". There's nothing special here, and our serial killer is really just background and a plot device for driving the interactions of our characters, and there are quite a lot of those. The two Astrids are fun to watch, and so is Walter's thorough dislike of Fauxlivia as she becomes a temporary resident of his lab after having deceived him. Then there's Walter's interactions with Peter, who is taking over a lot of Walter's task and making the old guy feel a tad bit obsolete. And the double Astrid storyline ends with a tender moment between Astrid A and her father (who is wearing a smile-inducing chef's apron that says "shiitake happens"). It's simple stuff, but all of it is well-done and we see interesting new aspects of the Fringe team. When it comes to character moments, this episode is packed to the brim with good stuff.

The episode wraps up with a tiny bit of plot advancement for the overarching storyline as the Observers (including a new fellow) find the device that caused so much trouble for this week's well-intentioned but delusional antagonist, Neil. Time will tell if anything comes of this little scene, but for now it looks like the Observers got the dangerous object out of the wrong hands and all is well. I suppose the "big reveal" of this story is that December now knows that September didn't finish off erasing Peter like he was supposed to, but that plot element didn't carry a lot of weight for me. December was bound to find out eventually, and I had assumed he already knew, since Observers supposedly see all futures at once. But we've seen previous evidence that Observers aren't exactly omniscient, so this "surprise" for him is not a problem. I just wish that the writers had left us with something a little more meaningful / cliffhanger-ish to take us into next week, instead of ending things with December looking all frumpy.

But this episode's goal wasn't to move the story forward or provide any Earth-shattering new revelations. It was just a fun character exploration that gave the actors and the viewers something a little different to enjoy, and it succeeds in that. If you were already an Astrid fan, you must have been tickled to death by this story, and if you weren't a fan this story gave you plenty of reasons to jump on the bandwagon.

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