Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep? (S03E04)
Airdate: 14 October 2010
Written by: David Wilcox & Matthew Pitts Directed by: Kenneth Fink
Running Time: 44 minutes
Fringe has always worn its pop culture influences proudly on its sleeve, but "Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep?" practically winks at the camera with its Philip K. Dick homage. The title nods to both the 1968 novel and Ridley Scott's 1982 cinematic adaptation Blade Runner—fitting, given this episode spends considerable time pondering what happens when artificial beings start developing inconvenient feelings. As the fourth instalment of Season Three, it follows the show's established alternating-universe pattern: even-numbered episodes keep us firmly in the Prime universe, where Anna Torv's Fauxlivia continues her impersonation of our Olivia, burrowing deeper into the Fringe Division's trust while secretly reporting back to her superiors in the Redverse.
The plot machinery kicks into gear when Senator James Van Horn (Gerard Plunkett), lands in hospital following a traffic accident. Broyles considers him a genuine friend—one of those rare personal connections we've seen him nurture—and when Thomas Jerome Newton attempts a brazen, violent abduction from the hospital room, Broyles intervenes. Newton responds by shooting Van Horn, and the subsequent revelation of mercury bleeding from the Senator's wounds tells that Van Horn was a shapeshifter spy, positioned at the highest levels of American government. Broyles, processing both professional betrayal and personal loss, dispatches the body to the Fringe Division laboratory now housed at Massive Dynamics, where Walter has improbably become sole shareholder and de facto manager.
What follows is vintage Fringe pseudo-science: Walter discovers residual neural activity in Van Horn's supposedly dead body, prompting him to bring the Senator's widow Patricia (Shannon Cochran) to the lab in hopes that her presence might elicit some response from whatever consciousness remains trapped inside the synthetic form. It's classic Bishop—equal parts genuine scientific curiosity and emotional manipulation—and it works, after a fashion. Meanwhile, Fauxlivia covertly informs Newton of these developments, revealing their established chain of command: he operates as her second-in-command in this Prime universe operation, though their dynamic suggests something more complicated than a simple reporting structure.
Newton, demonstrating the ruthless efficiency that has made him such a compelling antagonist, recruits Ray Duffy (Matthew Giamatti), a shapeshifter who has embedded himself so thoroughly in human society that he's become a police officer with an actual wife and son. Newton tasks him with retrieving a data disk from Van Horn's body, and the subsequent discovery that the Senator maintained extensive surveillance files on the entire Fringe team raises the stakes considerably. These shapeshifters weren't merely hiding; they were systematically cataloguing weaknesses.
The episode's centrepiece arrives when Fauxlivia arranges for the laboratory to be conveniently empty, facilitating Duffy's retrieval mission. Walter's unexpected return disrupts the plan, and Duffy—who has clearly developed something approaching affection for the his family—knocks him unconscious rather than eliminating him. When Duffy subsequently informs Newton that he refuses to shapeshift again, declaring his intention to remain with his human family permanently, Newton responds with chilling pragmatism: he has already "taken care of" Duffy's family, and then shoots the protesting shapeshifter without hesitation. The ensuing car chase and Fauxlivia's capture of Newton provide the requisite action beats, complete with her recovery of the crucial data disk.
The final act delivers one of the season's more unsettling sequences. Fauxlivia visits Newton in his cell to provide him with a suicide pill—a mercy and a security measure combined. Rather than beg for his life or reveal her secrets, Newton delivers a devastating assessment of her capabilities: she lacks the ruthlessness necessary for this mission, he warns, and her growing attachment to Peter will inevitably expose her. He takes the pill calmly, dying with the satisfaction of having planted a seed of doubt that will bear poisonous fruit. Fauxlivia's response—sleeping with Peter that same evening, ostensibly to distract him from noticing "Olivia's" increasingly apparent inconsistencies—feels less like romantic development and more like desperate maintenance, a temporary patch on a widening crack.
As a piece of television, this is solid, functional stuff that advances the season's overarching mythology without ever quite transcending its obligations. The script by David Wilcox and Matthew Pitts grants the adversaries genuine menace through the revelation of Senate-level infiltration, and the shapeshifters emerge as more complex antagonists than simple shape-changing assassins. Newton, in particular, reveals himself as a superior leader to Fauxlivia in nearly every respect: better at reading character, more decisive, utterly unsentimental about sacrifice. His death feels almost wasteful from a narrative perspective—here was an antagonist with genuine presence and philosophical weight, dispatched to raise the stakes for a protagonist who seems increasingly out of her depth.
The Ray Duffy subplot explicitly invites comparison to Dick's replicants, and Giamatti's performance nearly sells the conceit of a synthetic being discovering authentic human connection. There's something genuinely affecting about his refusal to abandon his constructed identity, his preference for the fragility of human relationships over the immortality of shapeshifter existence. That said, the storyline tends toward mawkishness—his family's fate is telegraphed well before Newton's revelation, and the tragic ending feels predetermined rather than earned. Still, these moments of emotional texture distinguish what might otherwise have been a purely procedural instalment.
If there's a significant misstep here, it's the continued amplification of Walter's eccentricities, particularly in his new role managing Massive Dynamics subordinates. What began as charming oddity has started to curdle into something approaching shtick—scenes of him addressing employees with inappropriate familiarity or bizarre digressions feel increasingly like tonal miscalculations, unnecessary departures from the episode's otherwise taut momentum. Similarly, Newton's hospital abduction attempt strains credulity even by Fringe's generous standards; one questions how such a conspicuous operation could possibly advance without immediate catastrophic exposure.
These quibbles aside, Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep? delivers exactly what the season requires at this juncture: it complicates our understanding of shapeshifter motivations, establishes the depth of enemy infiltration, and positions Fauxlivia on increasingly unstable ground. The Philip K. Dick reference proves more than decorative—it informs the episode's central inquiry about whether manufactured beings can achieve genuine consciousness, and whether that consciousness constitutes a liability. For Newton, the answer is clear: attachment is weakness, identity is fluid, and survival demands the willingness to shed any skin that no longer serves. For Fauxlivia, still wearing Olivia's face and perhaps something of her feelings, that lesson may arrive too late.
RATING: 6/10 (+++)
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