With Rachel out of town, Olivia's in charge of her niece Ella for a few days. So she does what anyone would do: drop her off at the lab for Astrid and Walter to babysit while she follows up some leads on Peter. Which isn't a great idea to begin with, even discounting the fact that in the wake of Peter's disappearance, Walter has gone and gotten himself astronomically high.

Inspired by his special blend of "Brown Betty" pot and Ella's desire for a story, Walter spins a noir-inspired narrative about all the regulars, but in a 1940s setting. In it, "Rachel" hires hard-boiled private dick "Olivia Dunham" to find her missing boyfriend, "Peter Bishop." Ostensibly about a broken heart, the case leads old-school Olivia to Broyles as a cop (singing jazzy Traffic covers in a piano bar), Nina Sharp at Massive Dynamic (whose office looks, hilariously, exactly the same), and then to her own client, who has been murdered all Fringey-like.

Rachel turns out to have been hired by wheelchair-bound mad toymaker "Walter Bishop," whose chest is missing the glass heart Peter stole. Olivia calls up her old assistant, "Esther Figglesworth," moments before getting attacked and intimidated by the Observer with a laser scalpel. That leads Olivia back to Nina, who says a prototype of the instrument was stolen from their labs. Nina warns Olivia about the "Watchers," but turns out to be working on the orders of "William Bell," who she's in love with despite his being a cartoon in a window. Apparently they're conspiring to use the heart to take over the world. Now that Olivia knows too much, Nina and the Watcher, "Mr. Gemini," try to kill her but she's rescued by Peter. Things get flirty until Olivia remembers to accuse her rescuer of the theft, which is when Peter reveals that Walter really gets his ideas by stealing the dreams of children and then swapping them for nightmares. And he also reveals that the glass heart everyone's after is the very one he was born with, and that he was ready to give it to Walter until he learned the truth. Right then is when they're overrun by an army of Watchers. Olivia fights them off, but Peter's glass heart is taken, and even Olivia's popping some batteries in his chest doesn't bring him back (but her singing Stevie Wonder to him does). Olivia and Peter retrieve the heart from Walter, who was behind it all along, and is left forlorn when Peter unforgivingly tells him, "Some things you can't undo." Harsh!

But then Ella makes up her own ending, in which Peter splits the heart with Walter and they live happily ever after, the end. Just in time for Aunt Liv to return from her search for Peter empty-handed. Obviously Walter likes Ella's ending better.

And in the real ending, the Observer is worried; Peter hasn't come back, and Walter doesn't seem to remember his warning. Was the warning, "Don't smoke that crap?" Because jeez, what a dense and bizarre blend of allegory, music, The Singing Detective, The Princess Bride, production design that includes 1940s cell phones and laptops, and a Gilligan's Island dream sequence. And here's my happy ending: Daniel's doing the full recap instead of me.

--M. Giant