“Brave New World: Part 1” is episode twenty-one of season four of Fringe.
A man buys a coffee, leaves a building, clutches himself and collapses to his knees. A woman asks if he’s okay. Smoke is coming off him, so no. Others start collapsing the same way. A woman tells everyone not to move; she thinks when you move, you die.
Olivia and Peter are looking at new places – including a nursery – when their phones ring.
People in hazmat suits are wandering around the bodies and the living still standing. One comes over and tells Walter there are no airborne toxins. He and Astrid head in. Broyles tells Olivia and Peter they have over two dozen victims of spontaneous human combustion. Inside, there are more dead and more living.
Walter is talking to a body he’s examining when a woman asks if she’s going to die. He can’t answer that. Not yet. She asks what he is. Human. Which leads Walter to wonder if she’s an alien. She meant is he a doctor. Walter tells her he’s a scientist. He asks for a blood sample, and she agrees. Walter asks where the smudging on her fingers came from. Possibly the escalator.
Astrid confirms there’s something foreign in the blood. Walter thinks it’s a virus, until he’s called to the escalator by an agent who’s found something. There’s a device and Walter says it’s not a virus at all.
Walter tells the others it’s nanites. Movement activates them and the longer they’re in the bloodstream, the more sensitive they become. He needs his lab. When asked how they get someone there, Walter says very carefully. And he doesn’t know how long they will survive.
The woman he took the sample from asks about insurance and what would happen to her next of kin. When Astrid tells her the bureau takes care of it, she volunteers. Olivia checks if the woman, Jessica Holt, knows what she’s doing. She does.
Jessica is taken back to the lab. She asks for her phone to arrange for her ex to pick up their daughter. Walter and Peter are working on a cure. It will be a couple of minutes. Jessica’s temperature is rising too quickly, though; they don’t have a couple of minutes. Except Olivia takes Jessica’s hand and her temperature comes back down. Jessica asks Olivia how she did that. She has no idea. Olivia asks Walter if he knows. An educated guess it was the cortexiphan. But as for how, he doesn’t know.
Olivia takes Jessica to a police car, then gets a call from Broyles. They know who did this. David Robert Jones. Olivia wonders how this will help Jones destroy the world. Broyles assumed that destroying the bridge in the previous episode, “Worlds Apart, stopped the plan. Olivia isn’t so sure.
Walter examines the nanites, and decides that Jones couldn’t have created them. Only one person could. And Jones is meeting with him. William Bell.
In this universe, Bell is supposed to have died in a car accident several years ago. So, no-one believes Walter when he says Bell is still alive. But he is, and it seems he is behind everything, not Jones.
The story continues in the next episode, “Brave New World: Part 2”.