Fringe: "Johari Window"

It's been a long time since I blogged on an episode of Fringe. As I mentioned last week, my husband and I finally caught up on Fringe over the holidays (we rang in the new year finishing off season 2) and I'm completely in love with it. So I'm going to attempt to blog after it each week (we'll see how long this lasts once Lost gets underway). This will be in no way as comprehensive as my Lost posts are, since I'm only starting to skim the surface of this show, and need to watch each ep a couple more times to really start to look for the threads of meaning throughout the series. But here's hoping all of you Fringe fans out there can help me out.

I jumped online after catching up last week, and was happy to see that many of the comments my husband and I made while watching fell in line with what other fans had been saying. In fact, we were referring to the "Spot the Observer" moments as "Where's Baldo?" and I was surprised to see that's exactly how Fox had been publicizing it.

I didn't see the Observer in this ep, but I wasn't really looking (and I'm presuming he was probably in that crowd scene where the sheriff was addressing the group of Edina inhabitants, or he's walking down the street in Edina when they're about to go into the diner). Did you find him?

I was also thrilled to discover there's a glyph alphabet, and that every time they show one of the glyphs before they go to commercial, it corresponds with a letter in the alphabet. I remember saying to my husband, "Do you think the glyphs have any sort of pattern?" And it turns out, they do. Use the alphabet, and you find the word.

This week's word: MUTATE.

Did You Notice?
• The episode's title comes from a psychological test that is used where people describe themselves as they see themselves and then as others see them, and they create a grid of four "rooms" (which, when drawn on a piece of paper, looks like a window) where they create the 4 facets of it: the first room is the person we and other people see. The second is what other people see but what we might not realize about ourselves. The third is the subconscious part of ourselves that neither we nor anyone else can see, and the fourth is what we know to be true about ourselves, but which we keep from other people.
• There were several Wizard of Oz references in this episode, almost all from Walter. He refers to the Cowardly Lion and the flying monkeys. There have been Oz references in other episodes as well, and it's apt here, just as it is on Lost. Dorothy goes over the rainbow to find a world that looks completely different and seems wonderful, but hidden beneath is a sinister underbelly, and she just wants to go home. I was disappointed that the population sign in the town said there were 1,943 people. I wish they'd gone with 1,939, which would have been the year of the Wizard of Oz movie. (But maybe 1943 is significant as a year, too.)
• Walter also refers to lions a lot. In "Snake Head," the episode right before the break where they found the parasitic worms in people, Walter was left behind in the car and was singing a song about Daniel in the lion's den. Here he refers to himself as the Cowardly Lion.
• When Teddy is sitting at his desk when his parents are setting the table, he has his comic book open to a page where you can see Robin and the Penguin's umbrella. The Penguin was similarly a deformed creature who turned to evil.
• Just like these people, Walter has undergone a metamorphosis (we saw a moment of bad Walter in "Grey Matter") and Peter's perception of him is different under certain circumstances. Peter is blind to the fact that Walter isn't really his father, he just appears to be.

Questions:
• Did anyone else think of that SUPER-CREEPY X-Files episode, "Home," where the inbred family kept Mama under the bed? That one was deranged to the extreme, and thankfully this episode never went there.
• Why did the cop take Teddy away from the area where he's running away from? Presumably he's still within the Edina city limits when the cop picks him up, since he still looks like a boy, and the cop, rather than return the boy to his parents, drives him far away out of town. That didn't make a lot of sense to me.
• I have to think more about the butterfly/moth dichotomy, and whether or not they meant for it simply to mean butterfly = beautiful; moth = ugly. I don't think it's that simple (and I also think most butterfly lovers wouldn't be disgusted with a moth).
• Again, I don't know if this is a general fan thought or just mine, but I LOVE Astrid and really wish they'd use her more. I really liked the scene of her sitting with Teddy.

This episode lacked the punch of the final few episodes of Fringe before the break, but it was still a good one. What did you think?