All The Things Wrong With Last Night's Fringe

I was really enjoying the season premiere of Fringe last night - which we viewed live right after re-watching the season finale from May - until they attempted to get too cute near the end of it. Spoilers ahead, if you care.

The episode sees a shape-shifter arrive who can plug one end of a device into a dead human's mouth, the other end into his own, and then suck the necessary data out to allow it to mimic the human's appearance. (Hey, it's sci fi, OK?) We see this transformation in action once, and it's a process that's very painful for the creature using it, but one which ends up with the bad guy looking like a perfect duplicate of his victim. Therefore you just know there's going to come a time when someone who appears to be ______ (perhaps a familiar face) actually turns out to be this nasty new bad guy.

And sure enough, the final few moments reveal that exactly that scenario has occurred. Agent Dunham's partner - a semi-regular from Season One - it turns out, was actually killed earlier in the episode and replaced by the shape-shifter. What we'd been shown had made it seem like the agent had shot and killed the creature but now - shock! - we discover that Agent Goodguy is dead instead and has been replaced. That's a great twist, if only it had made any sense at all! Without going into gory detail, this revelation falls very flat because the body that was substituted for the shape-shifter's (a nurse) wasn't in the right condition (it was missing some bullet wounds) and also presented a logistical problem: there should have been two "nurse bodies" when in fact there could only have been one (the actual, dead nurse). Were it not for the fact that this show revolves around FBI agents who are supposed to be masters of detail, I might accept that no one picked up on those inconsistencies that I immediately thought of... but as it is, it requires a complete mental meltdown to imagine that no one noticed that it just doesn't add up at all. Horrible, horrible writing, that.

There's also the problem that this plot development is way too similar to something that happened in Alias - another JJ Abrams production - but that didn't bother me nearly as much as the inherent logic problem presented by the bodies.