Fringe was never the massive hit that creator J J Abram's previous show, Lost was. Lost had people gossiping about it between every episode, holding a coveted space among TV shows that would later be occupied by Game of Thrones, and I'm not sure any other show has really reached that level of saturation since GoT's finale in 2019.
In a lot of ways, Fringe had some things working against it. The parallels with The X-Files, perhaps not a water-cooler show (in part because it wasn't as serialized as shows of the 2000s were) but one that was a pop-culture phenomenon, were pretty obvious. And to be frank, I think that some of the show's early case-of-the-week mysteries were underwhelming, and in the case of its second episode, with the bizarre accelerated pregnancies, felt like too much of a "these sci-fi writers don't know anything about science" leap.
Basically, I think this is a show that's well worth watching, and while the first season felt better on a re-watch, it really isn't until the latter part of the show's second season (the episode "Peter" in particular) that the show starts to feel really, really cool.
As discussed on this blog previously, Fringe takes some utterly wild swings, and while I still look fondly upon the show's later seasons, I don't think any quite match the fun and exciting potential of its first massive world-shifting twist.
I guess we should do a spoiler cut.
Fringe requires us to navigate several different realities:
First, we have our universe and the parallel universe. This one's the easiest, and I think most successful, because it's clear that the parallel universe is fully its own place. It's easy to understand it, because it can function as just another location. The characters - parallels to the ones we already know, largely (though I love that we meet Lincoln-B long before we meet Lincoln-A) - exist independently, and with their own histories that have led to somewhat different personalities. We never have to worry about some mythical "when these two universes diverged," because it appears they truly are parallel - they've always been separate and they just happen to be profoundly similar.
Then, we have the "Amber Timeline," in which Peter is (briefly) erased from existence. This encompasses both universes, and I think of all the "alternate worlds" is the one that feels messiest. Eventually, both Olivia and (much later) Walter are given all their memories from the original timeline, but there's just so much weirdness to how things fit together (Olivia suddenly has Nina Sharp as a mother figure rather than this super-sketchy corporate executive who felt like she was obstructing Fringe investigations until she wound up being more or less one of the good guys).
Finally, we have the 2036 (only 12 years away!) in which the Observers have conquered the world and turned it into a totalitarian dystopia.
I've said before that the final season feels almost more like a sequel. Season four, with its ultimate villain of William Bell, works out pretty well thematically as a capstone to the series even if I think his master plot feels cartoonish. Season five, then, is basically a different show, even if it's one informed by everything that came before.
But here's the thing: as strange as it is that the show goes into this jarring time-jump (and not just a time-jump while they're stuck in amber, but also that we jump past Peter and Olivia getting married or at least settling down with one another permanently enough to have a child (I think they are married, I want to say they have wedding rings) and for that kid to be 3 (Season four aired 2011-2012, and the invasion is in 2015, so yeah, the age is right if they got to work right away,)) it actually accomplishes a couple things:
For one, it finally explains what the Observers are and why they've been there, and it also sets up what feels like a satisfying emotional culmination.
I think you could make arguments over who the true main character of the series is. Olivia is the most classically heroic, to be sure. But I think the most dramatic arc is that of Walter Bishop, a man who always had this bright light inside him that fueled his genius, but also this dark and callous part of him as well.
Walter broke the world for a second chance to save his son. He may not have realized what he was doing, and he went in intending to do so in the most ethical way he could, simply curing the other Peter and leaving before anyone knew he wasn't that universe's Walter. The struggle, to perform science for the good of the world, without losing sight of the human cost of it, was always central to him. Fundamentally, though, this act that was motivated by love caused an immense amount of suffering and death.
He nearly destroyed the world by taking a boy from one world to another. Fitting, then, that he should save the world by taking a different boy from one time to another.
Fringe's approach to time travel and the paradoxes that arise from it is a garbled mess to be absolutely sure. The entire evil plan of the Observers, to colonize this earlier time period, one would think, would destroy themselves. Or, if they're not a Grandfather paradox but a Bootstrap paradox, it then makes little sense that the plan to defeat them involves traveling to the future and convincing the scientist who set humanity on the dark path not to go there. After all, if they are simply bringing about the conditions that led to their own creation, then that scientist isn't necessary, is he?
It's a bit infuriating because it would be nice if it all fit together like clockwork.
This is the thing about science fiction, and it's why I think it's actually a very hard genre to get right: it needs to appeal to both the analytical, rational side of us, as well as the emotional side. A lot of sci-fi errs on the side of the former, and the genre is often disparaged for neglecting the latter.
The latter, to my mind, is the more crucial element of a work of art, but the genre invites you to also engage the rational side of your mind, and the works that marry clever and consistent logical concepts with a deep and felt emotional story are the true gems of the genre.
But I've discovered that, when it comes to art, I tend to like an ambitious mess more than a simple story that has been told flawlessly. And where Fringe resonates and hits its highest highs, I'm very glad to have watched the series twice now. (In fact, I think this is the first actual complete viewing of it, because I believe I missed several episodes the first time around. I'm nearly certain I never saw the end of season four before this watch-through.)
The point, though, is that Walter Bishop gets a fitting redemption - a price is paid, removing him from the people he knows and loves, but in paying that price, he finds his forgiveness.
Indeed, I actually think it's less severe of a price than I previously thought: Walter and Michael are not erased from time, but merely are stranded 150 years in the future, unable to return. Walter must live with the fact that his son and daughter-in-law and granddaughter and Astrid are presumably all dead of old age (I don't know, maybe someone born in 2012 could live to be over 150, but consider me a bit of a skeptic).
Actually, given that things all reset to 2015, before the Observer invasion, I'm not sure how Walter could have arranged for the White Tulip letter to be sent to Peter. I also don't think Peter understands the symbolism: Walter, as far as he remembered, had never told anyone about the flower's meaning to him, the "sign from God" that he had been forgiven.
Now, regarding Peter and Olivia:
The ultimate goal for both of them is a shared one: the erasure of the Observers from time would mean that Henrietta not only doesn't get killed by Windmark, but they also get a chance to actually watch her grow up before she looks more like a younger sibling than their daughter. Olivia is, of course, fond of Walter, but the relationship between him and Peter is probably the most complex relationship on the show. Even despite all the odd asterisks that have existed between them, the way they part, there's nothing but love.
It is somewhat odd, then, that I feel like Olivia, who was really the main character as the show started, doesn't get quite as much of her own emotional resolution. Instead, she has her super-hero moment, in which she demonstrates that, thanks to those Cortexiphan treatments she received as a kid, even if she theoretically "burned through it all" in the penultimate episode, she's a fucking superhero.
Olivia's psionic abilities are nebulously defined, and again, there's not a great "logical" reason for why she's able to harness them in the final action sequence of the series, but what I really like about it is that Windmark, who is just so profoundly hatable, is utterly convinced of his own superiority, and to see him confronted with the mad-science of Walter Bishop and the iron will of Olivia Dunham, in his final moments, he must realize that there were other paths that humanity might have gone down to grow and evolve, and that Olivia is not some relic of the past, but a superior specimen of humanity, one who (not unlike Michael) never had to excise human emotion, but rather draws upon it. And he gets telekinetically pancaked between two cars before he can teleport away. Psionics beat cybernetics!
The show's tone and budget couldn't have let Olivia just be a nigh-omnipotent superhero the entire final season, but one wonders if, like the "Last Temptation of Christ" vision that Peter gets at the end of season 3, she might wind up eventually with a better degree of control and ease around her powers in the future.
Having now reached the finale of the series, I'll say here that it's endlessly frustrating that Astrid is not given more to do. She was in every episode (or nearly, at least) and she got maybe one episode in which she meets with her autistic universe-B version to actually get some time in the spotlight. Yes, it's touching that she's this comforting presence in the lab, but dear god, you guys had five seasons! She was a regular cast member! She was an FBI agent as well! Why the ever-loving fuck did they not give her, like, any arc whatsoever?
It's strange to say that it's a mar on the show, because I certainly wouldn't advocate her not having been on it in the first place. It just feels like such a missed opportunity. In an ideal world, Astrid would have had her own big story coming to a satisfying conclusion by the end of the series, something in which she got to really discover things about herself and assert herself and... I don't know. It's not like the show had a huge cast.
But, this complaint aside, which is valid in all five seasons, it's notable that this was from an era in which a number of popular genre shows had some very controversial and disappointing finales. Lost, for example, also took a big turn in its final season, but wound up both doing many characters really dirty and also leaving a lot of viewers (myself included) feeling that half the show's final season was kind of just wasting all of our time. Battlestar Galactica, similarly, lost itself in some convoluted mythology surrounding a bunch of characters turning out to be Cylons in a way that really felt like they had not been written with that intention from the beginning or even the middle seasons.
Sure, Fringe also takes a bizarre turn in its final season, but the show prepared us for that, and wound up bringing in enough callbacks both emotional and visual to feel like it was cohesive. The Fringe team's use of various case-of-the-week materials as weapons against the Observers is a pretty fun way to tie things together (even if it's pretty brutal in a lot of cases) and makes those seeming one-off stories feel better integrated into the serialized storytelling whole.
And yeah, basically I'm happy with where the series leaves us. Olivia and Peter are able to have the happy, peaceful life together with their daughter that they earned after four years of universe-shaking insanity, but it's not pure saccharine, giving us a tinge of melancholy that allows Walter's redemption to feel truly earned.
To a certain extent, Fringe's "cult favorite" status, rather than having been a massive phenomenon, might actually be a blessing. I'm sure that if it had been a bigger hit, we'd be drowning in rumored reboots or revivals. Don't get me wrong, the lure of a return of my favorite shows and stories is one that often tugs at me as well. But it's pretty rare that a revival truly recaptures the magic of the original work.
I think the five seasons of Fringe hold up reasonably well, and I hope, rather than seeing people trying to undo its ending in order to get more money out of it as an IP, that we'll instead see more shows inspired by its aesthetics and themes, doing their own thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment