The return of Fringe after the Christmas hiatus was much anticipated, as not only the two universes seem to be bound on a collision course, but the fate of star struck lovers Peter and Olivia… OK, fine, they are not quite the star struck lovers, nor are they really lovers at this point, but whatever the case may be, their fate is something that many a Fringe dedicated forum has hashed and rehashed in the last couple of weeks.

This episode seems to be yet another glimpse into who the Observers are, as a way to delve further into the mythology of the show. It makes me wonder jus how much September is going to have to fix, and/or how much Walter is going to have to do to mop up the undesirable consequences of what he did back in 1985.

Add to the two points above the fact that Christopher Lloyd guest stars in this episode, and you have the perfect ingredients for a fantastic post-hiatus premiere.

This complex episode opens up in the middle of the night with Walter trying to recover some of the intellect he lost years ago with the removal of brain tissue so as to be able to face Walternate and, ultimately, save Peter. Despite the point the latter makes that the former had undergone that procedure willingly because Walter was afraid of who he was becoming, he still injects himself with the homemade concoction.

Meanwhile, Roscoe Joyce, a resident of Parklane Senior Care, gets up in the middle of the night and is seen on the security cameras speaking with his son, who passed away around 25 years ago. We then see the son, Bobby, join The Observer, and reassures him that he told his father what he was supposed to tell him, and the two leave.

Interviewed by Walter, Roscoe admits that while he remembers seeing his son, he doesn’t remember what he told him. Reassured that Bobby was not a ghost, and having seen the security tape, the Fringe team realises that the Observer probably travelled through time with Bobby. The question remains as to why. And so, Walter takes the opportunity to get to know a member of his favourite band, and offers to put him under hypnotherapy at his lab. While Roscoe doesn’t remember the entire conversation, he does remember that his son mentioned Walter by name.

We soon figure out that September has been working behind the scenes the entire time, creating a situation in which Walter had to make a choice: obey the Observer by giving the keys to Peter and risk losing him, or disobey the Observer with potentially disastrous consequences and save Peter from harm. Walter makes what seems to be the ‘right’ decision – he gives the keys to Peter. Thankfully everything works out.

The dust seemingly settling after a heart-pounding afternoon, Peter and Olivia return to the lab, the former with a pounding headache. He washes an aspirin down with some milk in the fridge – the same milk Walter was using as part of his quest to increase his mental acuity. Peter collapses but is saved by Olivia, who, with Walter on the phone, administers an antidote.

Walter is relieved; he now sees that the entire episode was about him, and not Peter; the Observer’s plan, according to Walter, was to save his life by giving Peter a headache, so he’d need to take the milk and thus kept Walter from ingesting the serum, which he would not have survived.

But we then cut to a scene between September and December. The latter admits that Walter has in fact changed, that he was willing to let his son die, to which the former cryptically states: “And now we know, when the time comes, he will be willing to do it again”.

The glyphs in this episode spell out “Unites”, which lead to these questions: who or what unites who or what? Could it be that the theme of the episode, i.e. Walter’s potential sacrifice of Peter, is going to be the essential ingredient to uniting the two universes?

Of course the Observer was all over the place in this episode, but this lack of mystery was compounded by another, as JJ Abrams and the entire Fringe team continue to play with our befuddled minds by bringing back, with a vengeance, Violet Sedan Chair, the fictional band whose album was requested by Walter in “Grey Matters” to come down his Valium high. The next time we heard about this band was in “Northwest Passage”, when Walter played their album Seven Suns and plays a song called “She’s doing fine”. In this episode, Walter meets the band’s keyboard player, Roscoe Joyce, who tells Walter the band broke up after his son died in a car accident that was caused indirectly by Peter. I don’t know much else about this band, but I’m certain Lola and the boys from The Fringe Report do.

Once again, the interconnectedness of basically everything is underlined in this episode, making it the first recurring theme I’ll touch upon. It is a direct link to Season 3’s “The Plateau” (episode 3), when Milo was able to demonstrate the intricacies of this inherent interconnectedness. Of course in Milo’s case, he was a genius whose sense of morality was immature and who thus took advantage of his deep understanding of the interconnectedness to get revenge. Is this what could potentially happen to Walter?

The interconnectedness is also referred to, of course, in the title of the episode; referring to the firefly that Peter caught as a child, after having been saved, that caused, through a chain of events, for Roscoe’s son to be killed in a traffic accident, is parallel to the butterfly effect, which states that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly on one side of the planet can cause a tornado on the other side of the earth.