As I'm on the cusp of the conclusion of Fringe's final season (I think I have two episodes left, but those episodes, if memory serves, as basically a two-part finale) I'm finding it interesting to see how the show has shifted its shape. It began pretty strictly as a case-of-the-week sci-fi procedural, but as I've talked about before, the show always seemed to enjoy a more serialized form of storytelling, right at a time around 2010 when television in general was trending toward tighter serialization.
There are a number of ways in which the show has really transformed itself, and while this doesn't fully push the cases of the week out of the picture until the final season, the writers clearly also liked essentially turning a lot of those cases of the week into retroactive set-ups for later pay-offs.
Let's get into the specifics behind a spoiler cut:
It's interesting to me that the manifesto, ZFT, which was such a central part of the first season, warns of a future struggle that will require the use of crazy fringe science to combat some threat. The implication was that it was always the preparation for the other universe's attacks on ours, and a way to fight back, eventually in season four being revealed as part of Bell's ludicrous plan to create a new universe of his own design (something that we find was actually Walter's idea first before he realized how morally wrong it would be).
Indeed, on a rewatch it seems to suggest that Bell wrote ZFT, which is funny because I could have sworn after I watched the show the first time that Walter was the one who did.
Anyway, when the truth about the Observers is finally revealed, they actually wind up looking like the real threat ZFT's suggested practices are meant to fight against. And we see our own heroes using a lot of the horrible tools created by David Robert Jones to fight the occupation - the skin-growth toxin, the flesh-melting gas. It's not only limited to our heroes, though, as we also see the Observers use a technique Peter had come up with in the episode that revealed the pyrokinetic to get a sound recording from a window.
Thematically, of course, the Observers are the perfect representation of the dark path that Walter nearly walked - pursuing scientific advancements at the expense of all moral and ethical restraints. The Observers are superior in many ways, but what is the actual point of their existence?
Once again, I sincerely doubt that the Observers were planned to be villains from the start. It's notable that the one that showed up first on the show winds up being the "good" one who tries to help humanity.
By the pen-penultimate episode, Walter's plan is finally explained: the boy Observer from way back in either season 1 or 2, has been hidden away while the team was Ambered. At some point about 150 years in the future, a Norwegian scientist will discover that they can boost cognitive function by essentially re-wiring parts of the brain that allow the person to feel jealousy. Theoretically, it's a win-win, with a person no longer feeling this negative emotion and also being smarter. However, it becomes a slippery slope, first removing more negative emotions before moving on to positive ones, until you get these cold, hyper-rational and ruthless Observers.
The boy, now known as Michael, was effectively September's (our original Observer) son, as the product of his genetic material donation. Michael had some anomalous mutation that allowed them to retain their intellect and their emotions, but the deviance caused them to cut short his maturation process, leaving him eternally a child. And non-verbal.
The intent, then, is to build a time machine, sending Michael to the future to warn that scientist about the ultimate end of their work, and also to show that emotions and intellect are not mutually exclusive.
Now, time travel narratives are always fraught (with rare exceptions - I think 12 Monkeys is one). Because as soon as you introduce the idea of changing the course of time, you have causality issues.
But Fringe's 5th season has this going both ways: the Observers invade in 2015 and establish total dominance and control over Earth. The plan, though, is to go not to the past, but to the future - a future where this scientist inadvertently creates the path toward Observerdom.
But... shouldn't the future already be under the control of the Observers? Wouldn't they ensure that that science makes it to the mainstream anyway?
Of course, the Observers' own plan creates a bit of a paradox - they flee their 2609 or whatever home time to conquer the 21st century, creating an environment that will reduce human life expectancy to 45, meaning that in a lot of cases they're effectively killing off their own ancestors, aren't they?
It doesn't exactly hold up on a logical level, though Fringe has always taken the "science" part of its science fiction pretty lightly.
Now, skipping ahead past where I actually am on this rewatch, we know that the story concludes with Walter accompanying Michael into that future, and the plan succeeds, erasing the Observers from history, and returning Peter and Olivia with 3-year-old Etta back to that park. Walter is gone, but he's essentially redeemed himself.
This does raise some questions, though I think some issues are resolved:
Peter's survival actually makes sense: it was September's appearance in Walternate's lab that distracted him from finding the correct solution to Peter's childhood illness. If September didn't exist, then Walternate has no problem finding the cure, and Peter lives.
The real question, though, is how does Peter wind up in our universe, then? After all, our Walter would have no reason to go to Universe-B if Peter lives in that universe, so instead he and Elizabeth probably just live out their lives mourning their Peter but not doing anything particularly crazy.
It also seems quite possible that the Cortexiphan trials never happen, meaning that Olivia doesn't get any weird superpowers. After all, Walter's primary goal initially was to find a way to bring Peter back to Universe-B without causing any more damage.
I suppose it's possible that Walter and Bell might have done the trials anyway (we have enough of these questions with the Amber timeline anyway). But it would seem to suggest that Olivia and Peter's history would be significantly different.
I do think that when you get into this paradox-ridden time travel narrative stuff, it might be best to conceptualize time as having multiple dimensions. We know space has three dimensions (well, and maybe more thanks to String Theory) but we only think of time as having the one - past in one direction, future in the other.
However, if we think of one as being able to move laterally through time, then a lot of these paradoxes get resolved: in this case, Walter and Michael are going to a version of the future that didn't have the Observers-from-the-future in it. As such, it might be that Walter and Michael don't blink out of existence so much as they just kind of live in the 22nd century (only a hundred years until Star Trek!)
This basically allow causality to work because it the cause isn't eliminated by the effect - it's just not in the same "lane" as it were.
But the show, or at least September, seems to be pretty explicit about there being only one timeline - after all, if Amber timeline Olivia is Peter's Olivia, then there's no "original Olivia" in some older timeline. But that also means that each act of changing time via time-travel would seem to overwrite the same timeline, palimpsest-like.
Another question that I don't believe ever gets answered is whether the Observers do anything to Universe-B. September clearly had no problem getting there, so it would stand to reason that it was on their target list.
Indeed, I think that the other universe is probably the coolest element Fringe pulls off. The Observers are interesting, and I think it's cool how their kind of throwback 1950s aesthetic (all suits and hats - this is a pre-JFK presidency style) slips into more of a 1940s Germany one when they're revealed to be brutal tyrants (I'm no fashion historian, but Windmark's double-breasted jacket feels like it's meant to make us think of him as a Gestapo agent - all of this reinforced by the fact that the Observers are exclusively white men). But I can't help but feel like the 5th season is this sort of bizarre anomaly, almost a sequel to the series rather than a normal final season.
I think probably, when all is said and done, the 3rd season is probably the best of the series, even if I really like the episodes in which the two universe are getting along as allies. As I said before, having William Bell as the big bad of that fourth season, even if it means we have to reckon with a different version of Bell than what we had in the first three, sort of fits for what the show was up until that point, even if "manimal world" was a bit of an underwhelming villainous goal.
What I recall about the finale (and you can expect at least one final post about it) is that, for whatever logical paradoxes it raises, it was pretty emotionally satisfying. This was an era, of course, in which a lot of big genre shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica kind of shat the bed in the last season. Fringe took a bold step, but wound up, if I agree with my past self, with an ending that felt like it had resolved its emotional arcs. There's happiness for Olivia and Peter, life for Etta, and ultimately redemption for Walter.
And for Astrid?
Again, I think the dirtiest, gravest sin of this show is that they had Jasika Nicole in practically every episode and did barely anything at all with her. We barely get any sense of her own personal life, and I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if she had, like Broyles and Nina, simply been in a couple season-5 episodes looking 20 years older.
Just to shout out a piece of work if you want to get some really great Jasika Nicole, take a look at the podcast Alice Isn't Dead, in which she is the primary narrator, playing a woman searching for her missing wife across the highways and byways of America, encountering the strange and terrifying along the way. The podcast was one of the first side-projects from the creators of Welcome to Night Vale, but it's a self-contained narrative that I think had two or three seasons. Check it out!
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