We’ve waited all season for and episode of Fringe that would finally put some of the pieces together and last evening’s episode Grey Matters delivered. As avid Fringe fans would agree, the finale to the first season gave us more questions than answers, and up until this point the entire second season seemed to be devoted to posing even more. Who was the man with the frozen head? Where is William Bell? How does Walter fit into all of this? Who, or what is Olivia?

Grey Matters doesn’t answer everything, but it does shine a light on some of the heavier subjects. One of the great things about Fringe is trying to decipher whether or not Walter Bishop has successfully recovered from his 16 year long stint in a mental hospital.

He’s quirky, brilliant and unpredictable but for all accounts, he might have always been this way. One of the questions that seems to have been forgotten, by me at least, is why Walter went insane.

The answer is in the frozen head. Grey Matters finally gives us some context as to why Walter went insane and who he is as a person. It turns out that Walter had accomplished something amazing, something dangerous and something that everyone in our world and others want. Walter created a corridor to the other world and a way for people to travel between them.

16 years ago, someone made a decision to keep Walter’s knowledge safe. In order to preserve how he was able to build the corridor, someone removed three parts of his brain and placed them within three other people. 16 years later the man with the frozen head, who Olivia has been studying for months after William Bell told her how to identify him, decides to reassemble Walter’s brain in an attempt to recreate the memory of the corridor and possibly return to the other world

Frozen head, played by Sebastian Roche doing an impeccable Ralph Fiennes impression by the way, is successful. After removing parts of Walter’s brain from three other people, he abducts Walter, recreates his memory and learns how to build the corridor. This is similar to the whole David Jones plot from last season, but there is a much larger twist. Olivia has been identified as an important person in all of this cross world drama and after almost capturing frozen head, he confirms that she is weak.

At the conclusion of Grey Matter we find out that the person who performed the original surgery 16 years ago was in fact William Bell. But here’s the question, was this Bell’s choice or Walter’s?

Just as we get closer and closer to some answers to the web of mysteries surrounding Fringe, FOX has decided to make us wait almost a month for a new episode. Cruel! And if that isn’t painful enough, the show will be going on a 7-week hiatus from February 4th to April 1st!