Yeah, I know that I'm making a lot of posts about a show that ended over eleven years ago, but it has honestly been a delight to revisit it. If memory serves, the show also manages to stick the landing in a way that other genre shows that were its contemporaries didn't manage so well (though I'm not there yet).
I'm not done with the show's fourth season, which I believe is also its last full-length season (though season five I believe has 13 episodes, which is honestly kind of normal for shows in this streaming, high-budget era we live in now).
Fringe, as I've written about in previous posts, is a show that undergoes massive changes, reinventing its world and premise and characters in fascinating and audacious ways.
Again, I wrote about this before, but I think that the show's fourth season is a particularly interesting place to talk about this. And for that, just to be safe, I'm going to put a spoiler cut here.
So, the second season's finale gave us our first big glimpse at the other universe, with the conflict between these worlds then taking center-stage in season three. The resolution of that story, though, leaves the two universes in a state of truce, and by this late part of season four, the two sides are not only at peace, but also basically allies. Not only has the bridge between the universes that Peter created started to heal the "Red" universe, but it seems that all the murder and subterfuge that happened in the previous season's war is kind of forgiven at this stage.
The Consultant, the 18th episode of the season (and the one I just watched) sees our Walter (Walternate doesn't put in an appearance in this episode) helping out on a case of linked deaths happening in both realities. During this, he stays with Olivia-2, who is mourning the loss of her Lincoln Lee.
The Lincoln situation is truly strange - after all, we actually met Lincoln-2 well before we ever met "our" Lincoln, but during season four, Lincoln-1 has become the actual cast regular.
But it gets even more complicated, because we're introduced to this Lincoln in the alternate timeline in which both Peters died - where the Observer (now known as September) - didn't rescue him from drowning in the frigid waters of Reiden Lake. Lincoln starts working with Olivia to find the new generation of shapeshifters that killed his partner, and in doing so, starts to develop a bit of a crush on Olivia, which also seems to be reciprocated.
But when Peter flashes back into reality, and his reality begins to overwrite Olivia's memories with those more consistent with the show we've been watching for three seasons, Lincoln finds that his love interest is forgetting even the nice beginnings of a relationship that they were experiencing.
So... in a weird and kind of fucked-up way, it's perhaps convenient for Lincoln-1 that he gets the opportunity to spend some time in Earth-2... shortly before Lincoln-2 is killed. (I also like that the two of them, while they are working with one another, never manage to figure out why it is that their personalities are so different, given that almost all of their biographical details are the same.) I don't remember exactly how this plot goes, ultimately, but I have either a vague recollection or just a storytelling instinct that Lincoln-1 winds up staying in Earth-2 and maybe winds up romantically linked with Olivia-2.
(If memory serves, at some point the bridge is closed, which makes a certain narrative sense, but it'll be sad to lose the other world, which is so fascinating in its little differences - such as, as Walter points out when they're in some big Target-like store, the fact that badgers are apparently a common household pet like dogs and cats.)
Anyway, Olivia-1 from this "amber" timeline has her memory gradually overwritten by her prime-timeline self, which is not non-destructive. Not only does her burgeoning relationship with Lincoln-1 disappear, but even her daughter-like relationship with Nina Sharp is lost to her (super crazy given how utterly sinister Nina appears in the first season, even if they soften her and Massive Dynamic as a whole over the course of the series. My more paranoid thoughts are that some network executive wanted to tamp down on the whole "megacorporations are evil" trope - probably the same executive who pushed for the rather jarring and flagrant product-placement).
While September reassures Peter that "Amberlivia" is the "real" Olivia, and that it's totally fine that she's losing her memories of this timeline, that feels... I don't know, a little fucked up. Sure, I get that the show always wanted Peter and Olivia to become a couple, but...
Well, it's interesting: often, the idea of an alternate universe and an alternate timeline are treated as the same thing in science fiction. Fringe, however, seems to draw a really clear distinction. The similarities between Earth-1 and Earth-2 don't seem to be because they split off from one another at some time, but perhaps operate more on a kind of cosmic anthropic principle: their similarities are why they are so closely connected, not the result of their being so closely connected. (If you think about it, if there are infinite universes that represent every single possible reality, then some subset of that infinity would include people who are more or less identical to you, simply because clearly someone being perfectly identical to you is possible, so why not somewhat, slightly different? Indeed, this might even account for why the bigger changes don't have massive butterfly effects - the reason why these two realities are linked is that, even with all the big changes, these two universes still managed to reconverge in such a way to allow basically all the same people to exist.)
But let's talk about this Amber timeline, because I genuinely don't recall if and how this is resolved beyond what we have already. Olivia has had her memory revert to the previous version, but the world, and notably, the people in it, haven't.
That includes people being alive who weren't. Not only is David Robert Jones back (still, I believe, the Earth-1 version?) but also Broyles-2 is back from the dead, after being killed in the prime timeline to replace what was going to be the corpse of Olivia-1 after they dissected her (I remember seeing some comment on how it was crazy to think that they'd be the same mass, but Broyles-2's corpse was missing an arm and a leg).
Indeed, if Peter's absence from this timeline is the root cause of all the changes, there are some that are quite baffling - like why Olivia would have wound up being raised by Nina Sharp (or is it Sharpe? I turned the captions off) or why Olivia's sister is still with her dirtbag husband and has a second child. Sure, we know that Peter did meet Olivia when they were both children, but could such a short interaction have made that much of a difference?
It's also odd to see Walter being so chummy with Olivia-2, but then, I wonder, was her mission in the Amber timeline version of season 3 not quite as grim? Certainly this version never had the opportunity to commit rape-by-deception upon Peter. Both she and Walternate seem less like outright villains in this timeline.
As such, there's a bit of a having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too to all of this, where Peter got a special "power of love" exemption to being erased by time (I can maybe, maybe accept this if we consider that Olivia's cortexiphan-granted powers are more or less godlike, and that she brought him back subconsciously) but where the inter-universal war was maybe not quite as brutal as it was in the version we saw.
The show, at this stage at least, seems willing to treat Olivia's memory-reversion as all that was needed to return to the comfortable status-quo. But that leaves out what I think is one of the core relationships in Fringe - that between Walter and his not-quite-son Peter.
What a freaking deep and complicated relationship they have! Peter spends twenty-five years with this weird suspicion that something is off about his life, after having his memories of Earth-2 kind of suppressed via gaslighting by the woman who isn't technically his mother. Elizabeth-1 kills herself, presumably thanks to the guilt of having done this to him, and that kind of snaps the facsimile of his family and leaves Walter in a mental institution.
As a note, in season 2's "Peter," where the exact history of Peter's abduction is laid out, I love the implication that Peter-1 was closer with our Walter as a child, while Peter-2 seems to have been closer with Elizabeth-2 (based mainly on which parent sits with him as he practices his coin-juggling trick). Not only does it reinforce the utter desperation Walter has to cure Peter, but it also plays out in how the relationships fall apart. Our Peter (by which I mean Peter-2 - the one who grows up to be Joshua Jackson) is looking for his deepest parental love from his mother, but he doesn't quite get it from Elizabeth-1, while he's not quite emotionally aligned to receive it from Walter-1. Thus, Walter's deep affection for Peter (at least to start with) is sort of uncomfortably cloying to him, and Elizabeth's distance (and ultimately her suicide) is an implicit rejection from the person that Peter thought loved him more than anyone else in the world.
This does leave me a little sad that we don't get more of Elizabeth-2 in the show, but with the Amber timeline seeming to more or less be sticking around for everyone other than Olivia, it leaves the relationship between Peter and Walter in an odd limbo.
They do a lot of work over the course of the first three seasons growing the relationship between these two, but at least for the majority of season four, Walter is instead relating to a man he knows is a possible version of the boy who was very much like the son he lost. And yes, he does develop a paternal affection for him once he's convinced that that is who Peter is, but... it's still a little unsettling. This Walter spent his 17 years in Saint Claire's believing that he had absolutely no one in the world for him. Was that kinder than knowing that his estranged kinda-son was out there, intentionally avoiding visiting (and becoming an international conman? Boy does Peter's whole "criminal underworld" aspect get left behind, and I am not remotely complaining).
My interpretation of September's words, when he tells Peter he is already home, and that this Olivia is his Olivia, is that timelines work differently than universes - that the existence of one overwrites the other, using the same people. That there never was a "prime timeline" to return to because it's more that the same universe got rearranged. Thus, if this is the prime Olivia, that this is also the prime Walter, the prime Astrid, the prime Broyles.
And that's fucking insane for someone like Broyles-2, who literally came back to life because of the timeline shift (only to then be coerced by a similarly-resurrected David Robert Jones).
What I don't remember, though, is whether anyone else gets a similar memory-flood that Olivia does, or if it's just that the two of them are the only ones who remember directly how the timeline went the first time.
I do find it pretty sad that Olivia has a nephew she doesn't know. As I think I posted on this blog, my nephew was born a couple months ago, and I spent a month in New York helping my sister and her husband out with the little guy. I utterly adore my nephew (honestly, regular updates to a shared photo album dedicated to him have helped me deal with "state of the world"-induced depression). The thought that I could have my memory reset to some previous timeline in which he hadn't existed is... pretty horrible.
Anyway, on a certain level Fringe just gives itself an excuse to retcon several things (though they don't bring Charlie-1 back from the dead, I assume because Kirk Acevedo moved on from the show - notably, while Charlie-2 is still alive, he doesn't show up in season 4). And the fact that the show respects the audience enough to expect them to keep up with all of these changes is, to me, one of the things I love about it.
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