“Johari Window” is episode eleven of season two of Fringe.
Thanks to “Unearthed”, this was originally shown as episode twelve; all the following episodes in this season are similarly affected.
A state trooper near Edina sees someone walking beside the road in the rain at night. The someone is a young boy called Teddy; the trooper tells him to get him. The boy is running away. The trooper is talking to him when he looks in the mirror seeing he’s deformed now.
Two other troopers at the station are talking about how they can’t believe they caught one. The first takes a photo; the other two want to call the papers. People have a right to know. The first isn’t going to tell anyone until this goes through proper channels. Then two deformed men enter the station, kill all three troopers and take Teddy away.
Peter is struggling to get Walter to get out of the car and go into a grocery shop. Since what happened to him in the previous episode, “Grey Matters”, Walter hasn’t left the house and is afraid that Thomas Jerome Newton will be anywhere he goes. Olivia calls Peter; they have three dead cops and a missing kid. Peter doesn’t think it sounds like one of their cases; Olivia tells him to wait until he sees the kid.
At the station, Broyles tells them the senior trooper on duty uploaded the reports to the state police database; all three were dead within the hour. They haven’t found anything but a photo of Teddy. Walter saw a boy who looked like this once. He played a banjo. Peter saw him too. It’s a film, Deliverance, and they watched it together. Olivia says that Teddy was apparently normal when he was picked up.
An agent calls them; in the files are 30-40 reports of strange people. Olivia says all was dismissed due to lack of evidence but the vast majority occurred outside Edina. Broyles warns her the people have managed to hide themselves for some time; they will probably do anything to keep it that way.
In Edina, Walter is worried about werewolves. He saw one once. Admittedly, he was stoned at the time. Olivia asks if they hear a buzz. Walter starts singing a gibberish song about elephants; he doesn’t know why. Sheriff Velchik meets them; he says the noise is the Edina Hum. It comes from turbines at the military base.
Velchik has heard stories about people like Teddy, but has never seen one. No-one has managed to confirm it. A man leaves the diner they’re in; he looks like he might be listening. Because he was. The man, Joseph, is Teddy’s father and his wife isn’t happy about the killings.
Broyles calls Olivia with what little he knows and promises to look into the military base. Later, Walter has fallen asleep in the car and Peter talks to Olivia about his reaction top being kidnapped. Then a pickup comes at them from the other direction and they have to swerve off the road. The driver of the other vehicle is deformed and opens fire and Peter, the only one conscious, shoots back at him with Olivia’s gun. The shooter drives off.
As emergency services are at the scene, Peter tells an agent he may have hit the other driver. The agent gets a call; a pickup truck has been found abandoned. They head to it; it lacks plates or registration. Walter spots a butterfly and calls Peter; he knows a lepidopterist who would like it. Olivia has found blood. Following it leads to Joseph, who looks normal. Joseph’s wife watches her husband’s body be taken away.
Joseph’s body is taken to the lab. Broyles calls Olivia; he’s got a heavily redacted file from classified experiments in the 70s from Edina’s army base and will fax them. Walter hands the box containing the butterfly to Astrid. Olivia reads the fax and tells Peter that the project was called Elephant. And Walter was singing about elephants. Walter doesn’t recall being involved in military testing in Edina.
Astrid was the lepidopterist Walter was thinking of. But the butterfly is now a moth. And a deformed one. And Joseph is deformed too, now.
Something is causing people to gain and lose physical deformities. The question is what. And more of Walter’s highly unusual filing system turns up.