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"Fringe has been off air for two weeks, so here&amp;#039;s a quick refresher - after inserting some nasty-looking tech into his brain, Peter (Joshua Jackson) is seemingly being transformed into an Observer - right down to the chrome dome... This week, young Master Bishop is using his newly-developed sensory skills to chart the future of bald baddie Windmark (Michael Kopsa) in his quest to avenge Etta&amp;#039;s death. This may have given him a badly-needed edge in the war against the Observers, though he&amp;#039;s arguably not using his powers to his best advantage - we were left wondering why Peter didn&amp;#039;t just blow up Etta&amp;#039;s apartment with Windmark inside when he could predict where he was going to be at 5.42am... Regardless, while Peter plots, Olivia (Anna Torv) shares his secret with the others, setting Walter to running tests on a piece of recovered Observer tech. But it may already be too late to save Peter - his emotions are rapidly slipping away and Walter&amp;#039;s rejected when he begs his son to give up on his mission of vengeance - a typically emotive piece of work from the fantastic John Noble. With Walter and Astrid (Jasika Nicole) working on the tech, Olivia heads to Fitchburg, Massachusetts to seek out an electro-magnet that Walter&amp;#039;s latest tape reveals is part of the plan to defeat the Observers. She ends up bargaining with junkyard queen Simone (Jill Scott), who has a funny way of getting into people&amp;#039;s minds - in appearance and demeanour, she&amp;#039;s basically The Oracle from the Matrix movies.  Simone&amp;#039;s been waiting over 20 years for someone to come for the magnet - Walter visited the yard decades previous to set his plan in to motion - but after all that she&amp;#039;s lost, Olivia is growing understandably cynical and bitter. Simone still has faith in both the future and her abilities, despite Olivia&amp;#039;s cynicism, and this leads to a nice sequence in which Olivia opens up about her own powers - a sub-plot that Fringe has arguably never explored in enough detail, bar the odd &amp;#039;special&amp;#039; episode here and there. Heading back from the junkyard with the electro-magnet, Olivia is jumped by a pair of bounty hunters - who plan to sell her and the truck to the Observers for profit, but the resourceful Agent Dunham is able to escape with relative ease. This kidnap segment of the episode doesn&amp;#039;t 100% work - it doesn&amp;#039;t advance the story much, Olivia&amp;#039;s capable enough that we never really like she&amp;#039;s in much peril and the whole thing is resolved so swiftly that it can&amp;#039;t help but feel like filler. Meanwhile, Walter and Astrid&amp;#039;s tests reveal that the Observer tech physically transforms the human brain, with the cerebral cortex growing so large that it inhibits human emotion. We kind of always knew it, but it&amp;#039;s nice to have it directly stated the Observers&amp;#039; gifts are directly tied into their loss of humanity. Their state of being is a choice, rather than a natural evolution, though that doesn&amp;#039;t necessarily make their villainy any more clear-cut. Peter transformed himself for the right reasons, after all.  Speaking of Peter - who still has a lush head of brown hair for the time being - he&amp;#039;s still busy playing a game of cat-and-mouse with Windmark. At one point, the two men clash and the villain snarls &amp;quot;Your emotions make you weak&amp;quot; - though it&amp;#039;s perfectly clear that Peter will ultimately have to drag up whatever&amp;#039;s left of his humanity to beat the Observers. That&amp;#039;s just the Fringe way. But can he be saved in time? Having sustained a knife wound, Peter is forced to return to the lab for treatment and is informed by Walter that the changes to his physiognomy will soon be permanent. The father&amp;#039;s efforts to dissuade his son from his current path again prove fruitless and it&amp;#039;s ultimately up to Olivia to appeal to Peter to turn back before it&amp;#039;s too late... In an emotionally satisfying climax, she succeeds in reaching him and Peter cuts out the Observer tech. This final scene raises &amp;#039;The Human Kind&amp;#039; above the familiar and the unremarkable, and into the realm of something a bit more special. Joshua Jackson has played a wide range of emotions this year - grief, hope, rage, pain - and now he excels at playing an emotional void, with just a subtle hint of his real feelings about Etta&amp;#039;s murder bubbling underneath the surface.  Action is reasonably sparse this week, but where &amp;#039;The Human Kind&amp;#039; thrives is in its quieter character moments - Peter&amp;#039;s journey, Walter&amp;#039;s reaction to his son&amp;#039;s transformation, Olivia being unable to let go of Etta&amp;#039;s bullet, and so on. We&amp;#039;re invested enough in these characters that watching them go on yet another emotional rollercoaster is enough to keep us entertained for 42 minutes. Fringe rarely fails to reach an appropriate climax on an emotional level. But this episode left us with the lingering feeling that, with just five episodes left, the show&amp;#039;s final season will need to start taking some larger steps forward in the season arc soon if it wants to reach a satisfying climax on a plot level too. \u2022 This week&amp;#039;s Fringe glyphs spell out the word P L E A D  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/fringe/review/a444171/fringe-recap-peter-hunts-windmark-in-the-human-kind/>