“The Man from the Other Side” is episode eighteen of season two of Fringe.
Two teenagers are in a car next to an abandoned-looking warehouse. The boy thinks there’s a shaking; the girl asks for the joint. Then there’s an explosion from inside the building and a window is blown out. The boy heads to check, even though the girl thinks they should go. Inside the warehouse are some moving lumps. The boy comes in and sees a pile growing. He prods it with a shovel, then someone unformed behind him snaps his neck. Then uses one of the devices used by the shapeshifters to change their appearance. The boy seemingly returns to the car and the girl wants to leave. She sees another unformed person and then the boy goes for her.
Peter returns home to find Walter rearranging photo frames again. Peter thought they could make pie. Walter says they need to talk; there’s something Peter deserves to know. Before Walter can get anywhere, Oliva calls. Walter says it can wait.
At the scene where the dead girl has been found in the car, Broyles says they were called when the ME found three puncture wounds in the soft palate. Shapeshifters. Walter has found the joint; Peter says at least she died in a happy place. Olivia isn’t sure; the girl is wearing lipstick and there isn’t any on the joint. They head inside and find the boy’s body. And Peter finds a lump. Walter thinks it’s familiar. He remembers why; a bean bag chair he had. Olivia says the shapeshifters take forms because they need access; what could these kids be for? Walter is cutting into the lump. He finds mercury and a shapeshifter’s device.
The two shapeshifters find Thomas Jerome Newton. His secretary told them there were three. He’s told the third didn’t make it.
At the lab, Walter says the lump is like an embryo. Not fully formed. As the shapeshifters are partly mechanical, they can cross over in a way humans can’t. This one failed to mature properly. Olivia says two more have hatched. Walter says they wouldn’t have been fully formed and would need human features to blend. The teenagers were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Broyles calls Olivia; there’s a file on the secure FBI server.
It’s a television program recorded last night near the warehouse and there’s interference. Walter believes the interference is a signal from the alternate universe. There’s a strange noise; Peter suggests that as soldiers, maybe the shapeshifters come with orders. It may be a message.
The sound is taken to Massive Dynamic where Fayette says it’s a solar flare; one was happening. But it couldn’t have come from the Sun because it’s not in sync. Olivia posits that it came from a parallel universe. Fayette agrees. Then the signals sync up. At 3:31PM tomorrow, the universes will be in perfect sync.
Newton is giving the shifters the identities of their targets. They will; reconvene tomorrow at 3:20 at the exchange point. The one who has taken the girl’s form asks if they’re still going through with it. They’re a man down and Newton can’t take Verona’s form. Newton asks if she wants to be the one to tell the secretary. He will figure out Verona.
Peter arrives at the lab; Astrid tells him Walter is counting cars to jog his memory about what Newton asked him in “Grey Matters”, because he’s convinced that Newton is building a door to the other side. Peter heads to see Olivia; he thinks he’s figured out why Walter has been acting strange. He wants to talk to Peter about how his mother died. A month after Peter went to Europe, Walter called him from St Claire’s to says she’d died in a car crash. It wasn’t; it was suicide. The only time Peter spoke to Walter in the 17 years he was locked up. His way of trying to protect Peter.
Walter returns; he thinks he can figure out what Newton is doing. He needs supplies. Including a corpse. Any corpse, but not more than two days dead.
Newton arrives at a bank where one shapeshifter has taken the form of the manager. They end up planting a device inside the floor of the vault.
Walter is going to try and restart the embryo. Astrid asks if it’s going to reanimate the corpse. Walter says that’s ridiculous; the shapeshifter needs a form to shift into. Peter says that’s not ridiculous at all. The embryo starts growing, but something is wrong; Walter thinks he must have damaged it. It’s linked to the corpse and they manage to discover that it was looking for a Daniel Verona before it dies.
They now have one fragment of what Newton was doing and need to figure out more.