“The Transformation” is episode thirteen of season one of Fringe.
A man is writing in a notebook on a plane when he suddenly gets a nosebleed. He heads to the toilet, worried, checks his teeth and wipes a cotton bud inside his mouth, which he then puts in a vial of liquid. Which turns red. He leaves and finds a flight attendant. Speaking privately to her and another, he says he doesn’t have the time or authorisation to e3xplain what’s happening to him. She needs to collect as many tranquilisers and sedatives as she can or they will all die.
This isn’t a threat and his nose starts bleeding again. He asks if there are any weapons. A taser in the cockpit. Not good enough. He’s going to lock himself in the toilet and they need to keep him in there. Get the sedatives and knock. If he doesn’t answer, or what they see isn’t him, keep the door closed. Inside the toilet, he starts losing teeth and screaming as spines erupt from his body. Outside, the flight attendants are wondering what they should do when a monster bursts out of the toilet.
Scarsdale, New York, and a plane is seen heading low over a football pitch, before crashing.
Ella has got into Olivia’s makeup and jewellery, and Olivia and Rachel are talking when Rachel sees the engagement ring from Scott. She presses Olivia who says that Scott was a traitor and he never asked her to marry him. She doesn’t know who he was working with but everything was a lie. Then she gets a call.
Broyles briefs the team at the crash site. It’s not just an air crash, because whatever happened had something to do with what was found. It was thought to be an animal at first. Walter is examining the creature, which is definitely not an animal. Charlie has the passports and Olivia recognises one of the photos from a memory of Scott’s. Marshall Bowman. The man who transformed.
At the lab, Walter, Peter and Astrid are working on the body when Walter discovers a glass disc in Bowman’s palm. At the Federal Building, Charlie has the details on Bowman. Allegedly a banker. And his clients, one of whom, Daniel Hicks, Olivia recognises from the same memory of Scott’s. Broyles then plays the black box recording in which something breaks into the cockpit. Olivia asks Charlie to pick up Hicks. He wants to know how she knows. She explains the memory thing. He’s surprisingly accepting.
Olivia calls Peter who confirms the body is Marshall Bowman and Walter thinks he was transformed by a designer virus that rewrote his DNA and would have killed him anyway. And sends her an image of the glass disc. Which Olivia recognises as like the one found in the DEA agent in “The Ghost Network”.
Hicks is brought in to be interviewed and is told about Bowman and shown a photo. He’s claiming to know nothing when his nose starts bleeding. Which worries Walter who asks for sedatives. Olivia wants a name before Hicks is sedated, though. Conrad.
In the lab, neither Astrid nor Olivia have found anything on Conrad. Walter has put Hicks in a medically induced coma to slow the process. He’s working on an antidote, but doesn’t know if he’ll finish it in time. Olivia has a thought and asks for Hicks’ hand to be cut open.
There was a disc in it and Olivia takes both to Broyles. She asks if the NSA ever determined what it was. A data storage device. Olivia wants to exhume Scott’s body and check it; Broyles tells her that won’t be possible. She’s telling him to make it possible when he’s finally able to say it’s not possible because he wasn’t buried. Nor was the disc given to the NSA. It went to Massive Dynamic.
The virus that transformed Bowman is a weapon, one being sold. And it looks like Bowman, Scott and Hicks were working together. Though Scott’s memories reveal a different side. Worse, the weapon is being sold, and it would be very bad if that happened.