Fringe fans can now rest easy, as the fate of their show has been decided, and it will indeed be back next year for a third season. The show doesn't bring in amazing numbers, but the network apparently still has faith in it and its ability to perform.

We don't often get to see Fringe's Anna Torv in much more than her FBI act, but thank Jeebus that Esquire decided to include her in their magazine, where Anna is tastefully rendered topless in a variety of poses. Grrrrr. No real news regarding Fringe, but still, I deem it newsworthy.

Right from the start, you could tell that this would be a special episode of Fringe. Marked as the winter finale, you knew they'd pull out all the stops to make it a memorial episode until the series resumes in April. So in the opening, a bizarre earthquake centralized at an office building in New York causes those inside the building to turn into grotesque husks of humanity. When the fringe team shows up, the lone survivor has two faces and plenty of arms and legs. It was absolutely gross. Before he dies, the mutated guy mentions his wife, but records show he's never been married.

If there's one constant in fiction, it's that Nazis can be always be relied on for instant villains. You can kills them and present them in a multitude of evil ways and people will always hate them because...well, because they're Nazis. Imagine my surprise (and delight) that Fringe used Nazis as villains in this week's episode. They make such terrific villains because you hate them immediately.

Claustrophobia is a fear shared by many and in fiction it can be used to create an immediate sense of dread. Such is the case in this week's episode of Fringe.

I can't stress enough how much Fringe is riffing on the X-Files. Take this week's plot, for instance. There's a small mysterious town full of deformed people, except that sometimes they're not deformed. The thing is, nobody really knows about this town or that it's inhabited by these strange folk and anyone who gets too close to the secret has their life put in jeopardy. The only reason the fringe team finds out about this place is because one of the kids there tried running away from home. A trooper from outside of the town picks him up and sees that he changed from normal looking to weird. The trooper uploaded his report before more deformed people showed up to pick the kid up and in the process kill the troopers who saw the kid. That uploaded report was their undoing, however.

I'd only recently heard that there was an unaired episode of Fringe last season. Why was it unaired? I don't know, but Fox, in their infinite wisdom, decided to air it on a Monday night after House. I'm sure the ratings boost they got was justification enough, but for regular viewers, the situations in the episode were bizarre. For starters, Charlie was alive.

J.J. Abrams, much like he helped do with Lost, recently talked about that there might come a time in Fringe's run where the team will gather together and put forth an end date.

"Just as with Lost, we didn't get to a place until the third season where we were saying, 'OK, we need to know where halfway is,'" Abrams said. "And I feel like that's something that, ... if we're lucky enough to continue going, I do think that at a certain point it would be a really smart thing to start to say, 'OK, let's figure out ... what the actual date is so we sort of know ... how far we should push things.'"

It's been rumored before, but it looks like the rumors are true - there was indeed a lost episode of Fringe that never aired. Luckily, fans of the show will soon get to watch this mysterious lost episode, as it's the special new episode that will air on Monday, January 11th, at 9PM.

In "Unearthed," a teenage girl is pronounced dead; however, when her mother takes her off of life support so her organs can be donated, the girl wakes up screaming in alphanumeric code. Talk about a rude awakening! The girl can suddenly speak Russian and possesses classified information that only a high-ranking Russian soldier would know.

One of the most notable things about the episode is the fact that Charlie is in the episode - the original and real Charlie - since this is before he was killed earlier this season.

On Monday, January 12th, FOX will be airing a new episode of Fringe - not on just its regular Thursday night - but that Monday at 9PM Eastern (this should put it in direct competition with fellow sci-fi series Heroes). Why must FOX make us choose between two sci-fi shows? Though it's a one night only event, I wouldn't be surprised to see it move if it has substantially higher ratings. It's already a known fact that ratings have been down this year because of its move, plus Lie To Me hasn't been performing exceptionally well either following House on Mondays.

As much as Fringe is the new X-Files, there is one big difference for me: my favorite episodes of Fringe are those that feed into the mythology of the show. With the X-Files, their whole alien through-line became way too complicated and you didn't know the players without a scorecard. So far, Fringe is keeping a relatively simple handle on the matter.

I wasn't really onboard with this week's Fringe offering. The story was all over the place. There were too many names, too many places, and too many cuts back and forth from here to there that I wasn't following anymore after a while. And frankly, the episode was mostly boring.

FOX just released their schedule for the rest of the television season. While one of the biggest news bits is Glee taking a four month break (gasp) there is a lot of news regarding sci-fi television. Here are the highlights:

- Human Target series preview on January 17th
- Human Target premieres January 20th Eastern
- Dollhouse series finale is January 22nd
- Fringe "winter finale" is February 4th
- Fringe returns after "winter finale" on April 1st

One of the earliest recurring elements in Fringe, starting in its first season, was the appearance of the Observers. These creepy bald men were seen at the site of major events, just recording the goings-on. So it was very surprising this week when an Observer actually got involved himself, making the news rather than reporting on it.

The X-Files homage that is Fringe continued with another solid if unspectacular episode this week that involved mind-control. Mind-control is always a scary topic to me. The idea of someone else forcing you to do things you don't want to gives me the willies. Here, two men kidnap the son of a Massive Dynamic researcher and leave a trail of suicides behind them. Whoever gets in their way seems to get killed by his or her own hand. Naturally, the Fringe team get called in on the matter.