Note to television writers: If you aren't going to reveal the meaning behind the title of an episode until more than halfway through, maybe don't make it the name of a person?
That sounds harsh, because this wasn't actually that bad an episode. I was just really confused as to why they decided to name it after a character who wasn't even mentioned by name until the fourth act and whose very existence wasn't even hinted at until just before then.
So the whole time, I knew the episode was called 'Trevor', but I thought that maybe Netflix had screwed up or I had selected past the episode and was watching whatever came next - that's happened to me before, when I watched 'Born Again' in the first season before watching 'Tooms'. Most of the time the episode titles make sense earlier on.
In any case, this is another fictional ability I remember coming into play on Fringe at some point, or maybe even a couple of points, though I'm pretty sure in that the background was better and the people gaining the ability did so voluntarily, though it did not always have the desired results. Here, though, there's some vague hand waving about the electricity from a thunderstorm and a whole lot of really disturbing images of people cut in half and burned in the middle and a guy with has face missing.
So Pinker's death scene was somewhat predictable, too, since Mulder made a point to mention that electrically resistant glass would prevent him from passing through, and I knew he'd be splattered on the windshield with the rest of his body passing right through the car. Also, gross.
The whole episode, though, was one series of kind of hackish misdirects. First we're supposed to think he's after his ex, then maybe he's after the money, then out of nowhere he's after the son who doesn't even know him and sure as hell isn't going to like him after he beats the crap out of the only mother Trevor has ever known, and his 'aunt'. Plus, why does the pantry have a security lock on it? For drama, I suppose, but still, are you afraid someone's going to cut a hole in the back of your house to get into the pantry and then break in that way?
Plus, as soon as we found out he had a son and that June gave the son up for adoption (sort of), it was pretty obvious she'd given him to her sister, who seemed to at least have made a stable home for him. And taught him to run away from creepy people trying to snatch him, so there's that. But there couldn't have been a story - at least not one titled, 'Trevor' - had he been adopted by anybody else. Plus, it led to extra special anger on Pinker's part because he never had to find June in the first place, just her sister.
There's one other major area in which this episode fell flat. It was about a guy who can walk through walls, right? SHOW, DON'T TELL. The effects here were horrible because they just didn't have the budget to actually show him walking through a solid object. Maybe that would be the point at which the writers should reconsider his ability. It could have been awesome. Well, OK, maybe not awesome, but it could have been more visually interesting.
There were some good creepy moments, especially before we learned of Pinker's true ability (though reading the Netflix description of the episode would have given much of that away), but not enough to really make this episode stand out among the rest of the season or the series as a whole.
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