“Fracture” is episode three of season two of Fringe.
In Philadelphia, a police cruiser pulls over and one officer gets out to get coffee. The other gets a call on a mobile from someone he calls colonel. The colonel tells him his contact is someone in a black trench coat carrying a black briefcase at the station. The officer heads to the station and finally sees the man he’s looking for. Who doesn’t want to relinquish the briefcase. Lights and monitors start to flicker as the officer grabs the case, starts to crystalise and then explodes.
Olivia is at the bowling alley with the Sam Weiss that Nina Sharp gave her the name of in the previous episode, “Night of Desirable Objects”. She’s struggling to tie the laces on bowling shoes. Sam is giving her advice. Olivia asks what he did for Nina. Taught her how to eat french fries. Which seems simple. Unless you have a cybernetic prosthetic arm. Olivia doesn’t have time to waste. Sam knows she isn’t sleeping, and wants to know if the headaches have started. Not yet. Sam wants Olivia to let him know when they do. That’s all for tonight.
At the lab, Peter is looking at new places. Walter is happy where he is but Peter wants his own bedroom. Astrid has been trawling the FBI database for atypical case reports. The bombing in Philadelphia is one. 11 dead, 28 wounded and no traces of explosive residue.
At the station, the bomb techs are stumped. There are witnesses, but no-one saw anything useful and the station has major anti-terror security. No bombs were detected. CCTV showed only magnetic static; whatever happened wiped the images. Peter wants the tapes. Walter is examining a body; he’s found shrapnel from the bomb. Crystals, hard as diamond, kind of salty. Silicon he guesses. Peter has spotted something, which he takes to Olivia and Broyles. A badge from Officer Daniel Gillespie. Who isn’t amongst the wounded. Walter has found something; he thinks the crystals are organic. It’s an ear.
Peter and Olivia take the tapes to someone Peter knows. They see Gillespie about 20 seconds before the explosion, then the image is gone. Peter returns to the lab, where Walter asks if he remembers a jigsaw puzzle they did. Miss July, as it happened. Peter asks the relevance. Meet Officer Gillespie. The jigsaw puzzle. Walter has found injection marks between the toes which solidified water in Gillespie’s cells then emitted massive energy that shattered the body. Walter believes Gillespie was injecting himself; he stopped counting at 47 needle marks. There was no need to smuggle in a bomb; Gillespie was the bomb.
Peter and Olivia speak to Gillespie’s wife; he served two tours in Iraq. She’s asked about whether her husband was taking any medication, then Olivia’s hand trembles and she’s hit by a headache. She asks where the bathroom is and heads there, having brief memories of the meeting with William Bell in “There’s More Than One of Everything” before throwing up. Kneeling on the floor, she spots a tile that’s loose. Behind it is an injection kit. Gillespie’s wife has ever seen them before.
Outside, Olivia tells Peter that Gillespie doesn’t fit the profile of a suicide bomber. She thinks he was turned into a bomb. Peter asks her about the headache; she skips over discussing that.
In Oak Park, Illinois, a woman gets out of bed during the night and injects herself with the same stuff. Her foot briefly crystallises. The next day, she’s approached by a man she calls colonel. He calls her Captain Burgess and says she’s being called back to active service. She needs to head to Washington. He gives her a phone and tells her to wait further instructions. And has she been taking the serum?
The colonel looks to be using ex-military that he knows as walking bombs. They seem to think they’re doing something else; he looks to be targeting specific people with briefcases and killing them. Sam Weiss, it seems, may know more than he’s letting on.