New promo, as always, contains spoilers

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Fox won Friday night with adults 18-49 and 18-34. In its second Friday, Fringe once again averaged a 1.9 rating with adults 18-49 even though its lead in, Kitchen Nightmares was down two tenths from last week to a 1.7 rating with adults 18-49.

It was a mish-mash Friday where other than Fox’s lineup, only Primetime What Would You Do?, 20/20 and Dateline NBC were originals.

Some CW fans were very upset that the CW changed the schedule on Thursday afternoon to delay the returns of originals of Smallville and Supernatural by a week, instead opting for a variety of reasons to air encores of Thursday’s The Vampire Diaries (0.6 adults 18-49 rating in the repeat) and Nikita (0.4 adults 18-49 rating) on Friday night.

Some of those fans were even more upset once they saw that CW’s fears around American Idol and some local preemptions didn’t come to pass and The Vampire Diaries and Nikita had a strong Thursday outing. Look for more outrage from DVR viewers who got repeats of The Vampire Diaries and Nikita instead of Smallville and Supernatural. My series recording settings for Supernatural on my DVR (Comcast) did indeed pick up Nikita. The perils of last minute schedule changes.

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Next Friday on “Fringe”, a shocking crime will uncover a terror attack and the only one who can stop it is a man who can see into a mind. Titled “Concentrate and Ask Again”, the upcoming episode of the J.J. Abrams-directed sci-fi TV drama will air February 4.

When a scientist falls dead after ingesting a lethal cloud of blue powder and his bones disintegrate in his body, the CDC suspects a biological attack. As the Fringe Team investigates further, a subject from Walter’s past with ties to Olivia reluctantly agrees to assist with the intense case.

More about what lies ahead for the TV series, Jasika Nicole who plays Astrid Farnsworth once revealed to TV Guide, “It’s no longer about needing to communicate with them and say, ‘Look, we don’t want to be at war, we just want peace’.”

“It doesn’t really matter because the worlds are starting to come apart at the seams in a fundamental way. The trajectory of the show is figuring out how to stop that from happening, so that our universe doesn’t become like theirs, because theirs is practically destroyed.”

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This week’s Fringe, an episode titled “Reciprocity,” was about breaking codes and breaking down defenses. It began on a rather light note, when it was revealed that our heroes had cracked the encryption code on the alternate-world-Olivia’s case files. (In deference to Walter, who this week started using the widely-employed fan term “Fauxlivia,” that’s what I’ll call her here.) What was the key to the code? All Walter would say, with a slight shudder, was, “Fauxlivia ruined U2 for all of us.” (Bono ruined U2 for me quite a while ago, Walter.)

I was glad to see much of the hour was set in Massive Dynamic, where the nearly-assembled doomsday machine and Nina Sharp co-habit. Upon the entrance of Peter, Olivia, Walter, and Broyles, the lab surrounding the machine began to shake from a spike in electro-magnetic activity. Peter, whose nose bled at the same time, recognized that he was the thing that had set off this reaction. We also met bio-medical engineer Dr. James Falcon, who I’m sure you pegged as someone to keep a close eye on right away simply because he was too male-model perfect not to be either a new very good guy or a very bad guy. Turned out he was the latter, a shape-shifter who’d be killed a bit later. Oh, and we were blithely informed that William Bell had invented a super-duper lie detector machine far superior to the kind ordinary law enforcement uses. Really, Nina keeps a lot of stuff to herself, doesn’t she?

Walter told Nina about his mission to make himself smarter, to equal the intelligence of Walternate and restore his missing brain matter. Nina was very suspicious throughout. She balked, as she so often has in the past, about letting anyone see William Bell’s research materials. When Walter requested Bell’s notes, she said they were 15 years old and so difficult to locate. Nina has pulled this 15-years-was-an-eon-ago eye-rolling bit before. A bit later, she suddenly revealed that she’d not only found Bell’s notes, but also had vials of a “retro-viral serum” that would re-grow Walter’s brain cells. Problem was, it had been tested on rats and chimps, and Walter, in his blithe haste, inhaled the chimp stuff, which led to some monkeyshines back at the lab, suddenly craving a banana split and baring his teeth at Astrid to “display dominance.”

The humor was short-lived. Dead shape-shifters started cropping up, and they were traced to a list of names (“government employees, cops…”) in Fauxlivia’s vast file. Wondering about all this, Broyles suggested that “someone on our side” had told Walternate, and Olivia got to say, in a clipped, hardboiled manner, “We got a mole.” This kind of feint was well-done, since it briefly distracted us from Peter’s suspicious behavior right from the start of the hour, when we saw him return home and then lie to Walter about it. It turned out he was not, as I and you may have thought, out on an Oliv-ooty call, but rather on a mission that was the key to the hour.

Which was that Peter himself was dispatching the shifters. We have been periodically reminded of Peter’s shady past, so seeing him blasting mercury-filled humanoids wasn’t far-fetched. Less believable by the hour, however, was the idea that Peter was ever a very good con man. This evening, speaking to Olivia in the context of embarrassing girl-diary-like entries Fauxlivia left behind, he said, “I’ve conned people,” and in seasons one and two, we saw that side of Peter in action occasionally. But Peter can’t ever seem to con his father or Olivia for very long. Walter tumbled upon Peter secret quite quickly, and I don’t think he needed the chimp serum to do it: Peter had left the notes he’d cribbed from Fauxlivia’s file right on his bedroom desk.

Walter’s discovery of Peter’s actions led to a short speech that gave the episode its title. Boiled down: “Every relationship is reciprocal,” said Walter. “When you touched the machine, it changed you… it weaponized you.”

The steady gaze that Peter gave his father — and seconds later, as we gazed at the machine — suggested that Peter has already accepted his “weaponized” state and is willingly acting upon it.

This Peter may at first seem not to square with the more Zen-like Peter we saw last week, the man who had been sending a book to the Olivia he was in love with, to help her understand why he has trouble getting close to people. But then we remember that his favorite book is If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! — ostensibly a self-help-ish, self-awareness tract, but one that talks about accepting responsibility for who one really is. If Peter has decided that at least part of him is a killer, then Buddha and the rest of the universes had better watch out.

Stepping back a week, I haven’t figured out how this week’s hour squared with the Observer info we gleaned last week, have you? As Olivia said — twice — “We’re always just a step behind.”

Fringe benefits:

• Lotsa good Brandon stuff this week, including momentary suspicion that our favorite Massive Dynamic slab o’ science was a murderer. It was Brandon who also said that William Bell had been looking for copies of the First People book some years ago.

• Playing in the background of Walter’s lab, perhaps to rinse any lingering U2 melodies from his brain: Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing.”

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Torv plays Olivia Dunham, a gorgeous blond who’s also an FBI agent for the Department of Homeland Security’s “Fringe” division. Ironically, she’s spent most of the third season of “Fringe” in an alternate Homeland, making her feel very insecure indeed. But that’s not a normal state for her. Contrary to the bubbly image of blonds, Olivia is a cool loner. She’s also a career gal who’s known she’s wanted to be an FBI agent since she was nine years old. Her special skills include telekinesis, pyrokinesis, near-indestructibility and now expert marksmanship. She does not take kindly to having boyfriends kiss girls who look exactly like her.

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Stills from the episode that airs on February 11th:

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Stills from the episode that airs on February 4th:

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TVLine.com Fringe Exclusive: Andre Royo Poised to Return!

By: Michael Ausiello

Buckle up, Fringe fans: Olivia’s “over there” cabbie is getting back behind the wheel!

Sources confirm to me exclusively that The Wire‘s sensational Andre Royo will reprise his role as original-flavor Olivia’s alt-universe sidekick Henry Arliss Higgins for one episode later this season.

Henry was last seen in November when he helped Olivia return home.

In case you missed the other good Fringe news over the weekend, the show got off to a strong start in its new Friday timeslot. Not only did it win the night among adults 18-49, but it was up 12 percent from its last original Thursday airing.

Please join me in a chorus of, Phew!

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For “Fringe’s” first episode in its new Friday timeslot, you know they have to do something big. Not only do the mysterious Observers return, but the legendary Christopher Lloyd joins the cast as a rock musician idolized by John Noble’s Walter Bishop.

Lloyd’s character finds out the real reason his band broke up, and since this is “Fringe,” you know there’s going to be a very bizarre reason for it. “I was very excited for this role. My character is going through an experience he never expected to happen to him, and he’s adjusting to that,” he told reporters on Thursday, adding that he felt that he was welcomed in as a part of the ensemble cast.

For Noble’s part, he was excited to have Lloyd as his musical hero. ““He’s one of my heroes anyway, so when Christopher came on, it was a dream come true,” he said. “We had an amazing time together these two old guys, just reminiscing.”

Noble teased the fact that we haven’t seen the last of “Walter-nate” or the alternate world. “We’ll give you a little more background as to why [Walter-nate] is like he is. We spend a few more episodes back in the alternate universe,” he said.

It also turns out that Noble is as fascinated by the Observers as the fans are: “It’s really interesting to have them back in trying to repair the damage and put things right. At the end of the episode, the Observer says something incredibly telling, that just shows how much danger and drama there is ahead.”

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