“The Cure” is episode six of season one of Fringe.
A van pulls up in Milford, Massachusetts, and someone in a hazmat suit gets out. They open the back door, and a similarly dressed person in the back helps them dump a woman in the street. The van drives off and she staggers away, entering a diner and sits and coughs. The man behind the counter offers her soup, then asks the cook to call Marty as there’s a woman here who might need help. He makes conversation with the woman, asking what happened; it looks like she has a cannula mark on her hand. She can’t remember what happened.
Marty, a cop, arrives, and speaks to her. She says she was given red and blue medicine; they confused and hurt her. Marty ends up cuffing her and calling in a 51/50, being a danger to yourself and others. Then the eyes of the man who is behind the counter fill with blood. Everyone in the diner starts bleeding from their noses, eyes, ears and mouth and collapse. The woman bangs her head on the door and, by the looks of it, it explodes.
The team is there the next day and Olivia is a bit snappy; she says she has a short fuse she guesses. Broyles tells them the people in the diner were exposed to high levels of radiation, but the levels on Emily Kramer, the woman who started it, were three times as high. Walter wants to know where he can get a suit too and they all head inside. Walter says that Emily suffered from an incurable and fatal autoimmune disease. Though losing one’s head isn’t a usual outcome. But the disease seems to be in remissions. An incurable disease seems to have been cured. Walter also takes the temperature of Marty’s brain. 121 degrees. It boiled.
Olivia heads to see Emily’s doctor, Patel, at Patel Health Care. She explains Emily was found dead and that her disease has gone into remission. Dr Patel doesn’t know how that’s possible and Emily wasn’t receiving radiation therapy.
Walter and Peter are doing an autopsy on Emily. Walter can smell hyacinths. When Olivia arrives, he says it could be a mutation at the genetic level, or she’s been eating flowers. Or perhaps Emily’s perfume. They’ve found ligature and injection marks. Walter says there are two methods of scientific investigation; lab trials and field trials. Emily was let go on purpose and something inside her killed the people in the diner. He thinks another will be taken. And Olivia gets a call saying there is another missing woman.
Claire Williams, from Acton, who has the same disease as Emily. A rare disease, so likely not a coincidence. Her husband, when asked, says he doesn’t think he knows Emily. His behaviour seems a little off. Claire was also getting better from her incurable disease. Claire herself is in a lab and a woman in a hazmat suit is taking a sample. Outside the room, a man says that the last one was a test; this one counts.
At Harvard, Walter makes a papaya explode with microwaves, and offers to do the same experiment with a gerbil. This is how Emily was cooking people. There were traces of strontium 90 in her blood, from capsules set to release radiation at specific times. This was curing her disease. And made ideal for weaponization. Something else was in Emily’s blood and it made all the capsules burst at once, causing a microwave blast. Olivia asks if Patel would have access to it. Peter doubts it.
They head to Emily’s parents’ house and, outside, Peter asks if the people using human guinea pigs are not just performing experiments but preparing for something. It looks like Emily’s wake is being held and Peter suggests they come back later. Not with Claire missing. Olivia heads for Emily’s room and starts rifling through it. Emily’s mother isn’t that happy when she finds them, but it turns out she knows Claire Williams and explains she and Emily met and become friends. Showing a photo with the two and Claire’s husband. Clearly, he did know Emily. It seems both, and more sufferers, were having essentially off the books experimental treatments. Which were working.
The reason Olivia is a bit snappy today is because it’s her birthday. It’s not getting older that bothers her, but something else from her past, which she explains to Peter.