Don’t get me wrong, I actually quite enjoy the show Fringe and having been eagerly awaiting its return to the airwaves, enough even to brave a few minutes of American Idol while waiting for the show to start. However, for a show that opened its season with a plane crash, then quickly followed with teleportation and buses full of killer goo, the discovery of a psychic child who helps Olivia, the show’s protagonist, find a killer seems a little lackluster.

In this episode, a construction team is set to demolish a building. The episode setup of explosives and wires seems promising, but a construction worker has a feeling that leads him to discover a hidden underground chamber, wherein lies Batboy, terror of a secret past. Sorry. Bad joke. In reality, he finds a small, pale child who may actually be seventy years old, an impressive feat even in today’s world of technological marvels.

The child is discovered at the same time as an old killer from Olivia’s past resurfaces. Olivia obviously wants to track this killer, but is commanded from above to investigate the child, with Bishops in tow.  Olivia discovers that the child has a psychic ability that allows them to track the killer, who calls himself ‘the Artist,’ due to his clever rearranging pf his victims’ body parts before publicly displaying them. This episode does not lack for its attempt to show us the dark side of humanity.

Olivia and Co. are slowed in their pursuit of the killer by the CIA’s almost laughable attempt to disguise their taking of the psychic child. Olivia’s boss convinces Mr. CIA to let them use the child for one day so they can track the killer. Which they do. In about the simplest order possible. With one police chase, and one slightly tense thriller moment in a graveyard? Back alley? Miniature reproduction of 1800s London?

After this daring FBI run for justice, Olivia, who has developed a bond with the child, manages to sneak him away from the CIA and get him placed with a nice family, where he will be loved, and cared for, and play with bunnies and unicorns for the rest of his days. It is in these final happy moments that we see the greatest character to barely utter a word in television, the Observer. He shares a glance with the young psychic child, and the audience is granted a possible view of an Observer in training. The pattern does exist, and thank Abrams.

Every once in a while, an TV series needs a development episode without a lot of action. Dollhouse has had a lot of these, and Fringe is definitely due, but perhaps the timing could have been better. Backstory on the Observer is something that I greatly enjoy seeing, but for Fringe’s return after two months of silence, I would have liked a little more bang for my viewing buck.