“Grey Matters” is episode ten of season two of Fringe.
At the Hennington Mental Health Institute at night, a man is performing an operation, removing something from within the brain of another and placing it in a container. Before he can close it up, a watcher, the hybrid from “Momentum Deferred”, warns them they have movement. The impromptu brain surgeon – who was the head from the same episode – is told by another, who has just shot an orderly, that they have only two or three minutes. The surgeon offers his, apparently genuine, apologies for leaving him in this state, and they leave. A nurse enters and the man, Mr Slater, asks for help. The back of his head is open.
Olivia, Peter and Walter arrive at the institute; Walter reassures the guard he’s perfectly sane. They’re told by a Dr West that Slater had every classical condition of acute paranoid schizophrenia for the 13 years he’s been a patient. Until last night, when his behaviour changed. Peter checks that West is saying that two people broke in and cut a hole in Slater’s head which drove him sane. Essentially, yes. They can’t find evidence that anything was done to Slater. Walter wants to see Slater; not the sane version. They watch him in a video, talking about a girl in a red dress, as he was during the operation. An imaginary girl. Speaking to Slater shows he is definitely sane. He doesn’t remember much about the men. Except they were pleasant. Polite, even.
The brain surgeon is watched leave the place on CCTV footage, getting past what Peter says is a very high-end lock. Olivia recognises the man’s face and asks the guard to leave. She explains she went through the heads stolen from the cryonics place, and this was one of them. Thomas Jerome Newton.
Broyles is told that the name is an alias. Bell told Olivia that a man with a marking would try to open a corridor between universes, and Olivia inferred the results would be less than desirable. Global destruction, of Biblical proportions. Walter is trying to work out how Slater was cured.
In the lab, Walter asks Astrid to look up Slater’s referring psychiatrist, Dr Paris. There is no cure for madness; it’s a fantasy. Walter thinks that Slater was not mad to begin with. Astrid can’t find Paris in the database; 14 years ago, he put Slater on an indefinite prescription. And made the same prescription for two other patients that week.
Olivia and Peter talk to a patient at Dunwich, who suffered from severe OCD, a fixation on the number 28. Until last Tuesday, when she woke up it was gone. The doctors have no explanation; she thinks that’s why she’s still there, as one probably hopes to get a paper out of it. They ask if they can look at her head, and Peter finds a scar. No sutures; more like the burn from a surgical laser. When asked about Dr Paris, she says she saw him a couple of times for mild postpartum depression. Once she arrived, that’s when the other problem started.
Newton is told they can keep whatever was removed from the brains alive for a few hours, but they are dying.
The third patient, according to Astrid, woke up perfectly sane. Walter asks if Slater had an organ transplant. Because Paris prescribed him drugs that are only given to transplant patients. The man’s a quack. Unless he’s a genius.
Walter explains to the others that you can keep a brain alive for a few hours after removing it from a human body, but it will die. A problem Walter tried and failed to solve. He thinks Paris solved it by storing brain tissue inside another brain. He has scans of the three and each had foreign tissue in their brains. That’s what drove them mad; the brains were incompatible.
Dr West calls Astrid; the others are wondering who would store someone’s brain in other people, and whose brain it was. Astrid calls Peter over. Peter checks with Walter; earlier, Walter said he never had visitors at St Claire’s. Because Dr Paris visited him six times. Peter asks to have a look at Walter’s head. He has the same scar, but very old.
Whoever Dr Paris is, he did something to Walter at about the same time that he was implanting bits of brain in other people.