Season 2, Episode 1:
A New Day in the Old Town
A mysterious man involved in a downtown Manhattan collision with a SUV flees the scene to a nearby apartment building. He enters the building and attacks a random man, hooking up equipment to the man's inner mouth, which allows him to adopt his external appearance and shapeshift. The crashed SUV is discovered to be Olivia's, though she is not inside. Peter and Walter arrive and investigate the scene while being accosted by a new junior agent, Amy Jessup, who wonders what they do for the FBI. After Walter searches through the SUV, he shuts the door and Olivia suddenly appears, flying through the windshield. She is rushed to the hospital and declared brain dead. Peter and Broyles drink at a bar together in sorrow, and Broyles reveals the Fringe Division is being shut down because of their failure to provide "usable results". Suspicious and curious of Fringe Division, Jessup begins a personal investigation into their past activities.After talking to Rachel about her sister, Peter visits Olivia, who is scheduled to be taken off life-support the following morning. However, Olivia suddenly wakes up, crying the Greek phrase "Na einai kalytero anthropo apo ton patera tou." She does not remember getting injured, and incoherently tells Peter there is something they need to do, and their lives may depend on it, but cannot remember who told her this, or why. Peter tries to enter the FBI building, but is denied until Jessup agrees to accompany him. She questions him about Fringe Division, and they begin investigating the driver who hit Olivia. When they arrive at his apartment, they discover what appears to be the driver's body, but he has been dead longer than when the accident took place.
The shapeshifter makes contact with his group via typewriter (an allegedly nonexistent model of IBM Selectric, controlled by its image in a mirror), and is told his mission to prevent a "meeting" was unsuccessful, as Olivia is still alive. He is ordered to interrogate, then kill her. Meanwhile, Peter introduces Jessup to their lab at Harvard, and upon performing an autopsy on the man found in the apartment, they find three holes in the roof of his mouth. Walter shows them archived footage of one of his 1970s experiments of a drugged up girl who says she sees shapechanging soldiers from an alternate universe that can "look like any of us".
After being visited by her partner, Agent Charlie Francis and given a gun, Olivia is unsuccessfully questioned by the shapeshifter, who has adopted the appearance of a female nurse. The nurse attempts to kill Olivia, but is shot by Jessup. Peter, Charlie, and Jessup follow her into nearby tunnels, but become separated. Peter and Jessup hear gunshots and arrive to see that Charlie has shot and killed the shapeshifter. Peter returns to Olivia, and tells her the Greek phrase means "be a better man than your father," and was said to him every night by his mother.
After being told by a panel of Senators that Fringe Division is not worth the human or fiscal cost, Broyles is given the transformation device by Peter so Broyles can justify Fringe Division remaining active. Agent Jessup works at a computer, annotating an image of the creature from The Transformation with biblical verses, notably from the Book of Revelation. The final scene reveals that Charlie is actually the shapeshifter, who disposes of the real agent's body in a furnace beneath the hospital.
Tropes
- Gratuitous Greek: "Einai kalytero anthropo apo ton patera toy" said by Olivia to Peter when she suddenly wakes up from her coma. Turns out it's a phrase Peter's mother used to say to him which translates to "Be a better man than your father".
- Shapeshifter Mode Lock: What happens to the shapeshifter when its device gets broken.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting though they need a device.
- Wham Shot: Charlie is dead and the shapeshifter has replaced him.
