Right away the episode got off to a shaky start. The lead-in had a very strange overwrought tone to it (the title of this post is derived of a recurring and shallow metaphor that makes its first appearance here), and the whole episode failed to recover from it or redeem itself. Now, the episode had a lot going against it immediately. Because Olivia was taken out of the field, Peter was relied upon to do much of the legwork. The plot also revolved heavily around suicide and featured two, and suicides are easy to handle badly. The only way to enjoy Fringe is to forgive some cheese every now and then, here and there, but "Stowaway" had a pile that just got too big too quickly. There was an abundance of questionable philosophy about life, death, fate, and purpose coming from scientists. At one point William Bell said something to the effect of: "As a scientist, I don't like the idea that anything is without purpose," and while anyone can believe that, it's not a scientific ideology. The science behind this week's monster was pretty lame and loose, the plot was bloated with exposition for an episode where very little actually happened, and characters came to unreasonable conclusions based on sketchy data and were proven correct. The only highlights were an occasionally good Leonard Nimoy impression from Anna Torv, and seeing William and Walter working together (even if only sort of) is fun even when it's stupid. Normally I would think that introducing this universe's Lincoln Lee would win it points, but even that was mishandled, with Lee playing a rookie sidekick to Peter (even though Lee's a goddamn FBI agent and Peter's not anything) and offering no insights on Lee's character nor building a relationship with the rest of the cast. Hands down the worst episode of season three.
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