By the end of Fringe's fourth season, the audience is used to big shifts. First, we're introduced to the alternate universe, where other versions of familiar characters have lived different lives and often wound up with significantly different personalities (not to mention all the fun details about how life is similar but different to our universe, like the fact that heavier-than-air air vehicles never really took off so everyone still travels in giant blimps). Next, we're introduced to a timeline in which Peter was never rescued by the Observer September when he and Walter fell into Reiden Lake.
That's spoilery-enough, so let's put a cut here:
One thing I had not remembered about the show is how this secondary "Amber" timeline doesn't ever actually get corrected - Peter squeezes himself out of the old timeline so he can continue being part of the story, and his presence causes Olivia's "Amber" timeline memories to revert to her "Prime" timeline ones, but this means that, effectively, only Peter and Olivia actually remember seasons 1-3 of the show the way that we experienced it. I find this particularly sad for Walter, who has to effectively re-run his gradual reconciliation with his not-precisely son that we saw over those first seasons, and who still retains the memories of losing his real son, and then a memory of accidentally getting the alternate-universe version of his son killed in an attempt to cure him. From his perspective, Peter is the third version of his son that he has encountered.
I think, ultimately, we basically just have to deal with the fact that things have, despite all of this, wound up more or less where they were supposed to. Walter, by the end of the fourth season, thinks of Peter as his son, and even receives some forgiveness from the person who most detested him for what he did, Walternate.
In a lot of ways, the ending of season four does feel like an appropriate culmination of the series. The Amber Timeline set William Bell on a path toward true villainy, empathizing with Walter's fury at existence following the brutal loss of both versions of Peter and pursuing the megalomanical goal of creating a new universe through the destruction of the two existing ones (Fringe never has any true extraterrestrials... except that one Broyles-centric episode, but I do wonder if there are any intelligent aliens going "dude, Earth, you need to chill the fuck out!" Still, I imagine the show very intentionally avoided the use of space aliens to distance itself from the X-Files). While I'm always a little bummed when friendly or at least morally neutral characters wind up being villains, Bell does work pretty well as the series "big bad" given that he's basically Walter without any of the grounding human connections that placed a moral restraint on the elder Bishop.
His plot is... well, it's honestly goofy as hell, creating a new world with custom-designed life forms (many of which featured as case-of-the-week subjects in earlier seasons). Still, it feels of a piece with the series as one last, greatest act of scientific hubris.
And thus, season 5 marks a profound shift.
Of course, the weird thing is that, in a certain way, season 4's bizarre flash-forward Letters of Transit is, properly, really the premiere of season 5. The ultimate answer of who the Observers are is provided, and it's not a good one: they're invaders from our own future, who, having wrecked the planet beyond viability a few centuries in the future, have now come back to the past to conquer our world and... I don't know, just enjoy a few more centuries during which they seem to be on the path to wrecking it again.
Of course, the first Observer we met is one of, if not the only good one, who wants to help humanity free itself from the dystopian, totalitarian hellscape that the Observers put upon the world around 2015. September was a member of a scientific expedition to the past - the purpose of which is a bit unclear, but I do wonder if the others on his team might have also been less gung-ho about this "conquer our ancestors and make them suffer" plan. At the very least, though, September is the one who has tried to help.
Even not counting the massive jump forward to 2036 (funny that we're roughly halfway between the finale of Fringe and that future date - I hope that we don't find ourselves in quite the dystopian hellscape that they do, though given recent events here in the US, it's not looking, you know, great) there is a big time jump. Season four ends with the "healed back from getting shot in the head" Olivia announcing that, not only is she ok (oh, and Astrid's fine too) but that she's also pregnant. The glimpse we get of the moment that the Observers invade is years later, when Henrietta Bishop, Peter and Olivia's daughter, is three years old. (Crazy to think that this girl's father is both from another universe and another timeline. What frequency does she resonate at?)
But by the time we're in 2036, Etta is in her 20s, working as a Fringe agent but also secretly as part of the Resistance.
The show totally ditches any episodic structure in this bad future, and so the plot at the beginning of season five follows directly from Letters of Transit, with the Fringe team reuniting and trying to piece together a plan hidden by September in Walter's head.
Now, I do remember ultimately how the season and thus the series ends, but it's remarkable to me that the final season not only puts us in this future dystopia, but also does so in a way that essentially makes a case-of-the-week structure kind of impossible. The tyrannical Observers wouldn't give a crap about "Natives" (as they refer to people actually from this time period, without all the weird Observer technology implants and such) killing each other with nanoviruses and other weird science.
If William Bell was the ultimate Fringe-science master criminal, then what are the Observers, exactly?
I suppose you could say that they represent scientific progress at the total expense of all moral considerations. Observers have sacrificed much of their humanity, becoming cold and reptilian in their manner, even shedding their hair (also, I can't remember if we ever seen female Observers). In pursuing perfection through technological enhancement, they've cast aside things like art and music.
It's an even more extreme juxtaposition of the same difference in values between Walter and Bell - Walter had all the capabilities of being a science-powered menace, but ultimately what makes Walter such a beautiful and, fundamentally, good person is that he never loses that grounding that a genuine love of the world and of people. It's a silly thing, that Walter obsesses over food, especially candy and other sweets, or that he's constantly pulling out old vinyls from the 1970s, but it reflects a deep humanity that motivates and underlies his pursuit of science.
There's a scene that I wrote about before in The Consultant, when he is staying at Olivia-2's apartment and cooking for her, where you just get the sense that this is a man who is overflowing with love, even for someone who wronged him in the past.
Knowing Walter's ultimate fate, of course, and how the series come to an end, this feels consistent. He's made mistakes, for sure, and caused terrible damage to others. It's not that Walter doesn't have a darkness in him. But that darkness is not his core.
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