Next thing you know, Walter's in a taxi, looking fondly over his notebook. There's a device that looks like a blender with a jet engine where the pitcher would be. "Ah, my matter displacement invention for removing food from cans," he reminisces. The cab driver leaves to get change for Walter's fare, so now Walter is free to babble in relative privacy. He looks up from his book. "What's 'black umbrella'?" he asks. "Why is it in my head?" Carla Warren sits beside him, wearing fabulous sunglasses even though it's cloudy out. Also, even though she's not real. She just gives him a teasing smile and says nothing.

A knock comes at the window and a man in a butler's uniform offers Walter a tray of acid tabs. "Would you care for a top-off, sir?" Walter giddily partakes of another Black Blotter and returns to his book. Carla prods him to remember how he was going to start his own universe. Hopefully Walter's universe wouldn't have any giant, flying porcupine men like Belly's did, because seriously: WTF? Or, if Walter's secret plan to defeat the Observers involves sending them to a new universe, hopefully it will be full of giant, flying porcupine men.

Anyway, at the mention of the new universe, Walter starts to fight back against the growing temptation to become who he once was. That's when he realizes he's at the Observer precinct in Manhattan, having snuck out of the lab some time earlier. Walter protests, saying he wouldn't do something like this. "You're in denial," Carla says. "You've been him longer than you've been you. Why else would I be here? I'm like this journal. I represent all the things you're trying to keep buried." Walter moves to leave the cab and go back home, but an Observer opens the door.

Except it's not an Observer at all. It's Astrid who's opened the door. Walter isn't even in Manhattan, nor in a taxicab, but in the team's latest "borrowed" car, parked outside a boathouse. Poor Walter is too confused to be relieved. "What are we doing here?" he asks. "We're meeting Peter and Olivia," Astrid says. "We have to rent a boat, remember?" She takes Walter by the hand and leads him to the dock. The prospect of renting a boat cheers Walter considerably. He even does a little dance. Peter and Olivia hand a guy some cash and everyone makes their way to the saddest boat you ever did see. It looks like an old saltine cracker box someone dropped in the water. Peter points out the island to which they're headed in search of the radio signal. To Walter's acid-loving mind, it looks like Emerald City. "Oh, my," he whispers.