“Fringe,” Season 3, Episode 14

• Courtesy of Fox
• AMBER ALERT: John Noble and Blair Brown

On the episode “6B,” Walter theorizes that this week’s potential reality-ripping phenomenon has its roots in “some kind of emotional quantum entanglement.” That phrase could be Walter’s geekspeak definition of true love — two souls, bound together in ways undetectable and unquantifiable. Sci-Fi shows and movies sometimes turn to true love to resolve a cosmic menace (in The Fifth Element, the title referred to love, for instance), but on “6B,” love also instigates the problem.

The episode presents us with three couples, counting Peter and Olivia, at different points in their relationship: the beginning, the end, and somewhere in-between. First we meet that instantly-forgotten pair at the beginning, who swap clichés about how they’re in the first bloom of their romance and meeting her friends at the Rosencrantz building. Presumably she survived the allergy scare and he avoided the subsequent disaster (I don’t remember if he was one of the bodies), and possibly they’ll grow old together.

I like the subtle detail about the older woman leaving via the stairs. The episode doesn’t spell it out, but she clearly no longer trusted the elevator given the building’s recent history poltergeist-style behavior. She’s about to get in a cab when bodies begin plummeting from the sky, unfortunately reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. “Like a flash mob — with suicide!” Walter exclaims. The real cause proves consistent with the “Fringe” universe, as Peter and Walter theorize that the guys at the party died when the balcony suddenly turned intangible, plunging them to their deaths. (Too bad there were no balconies below them.) Water deduces that, as in Earth-2, the building is becoming a “soft spot” with the potential of becoming a black hole-style vortex.