FOX
Spoilers ahead for the Fringe season finale:
Fringe committed more than ever to hardcore sci-fi, if that were possible, in its multipart finale, with mixed results. I thought the last installment, “The Day We Died,” was not Fringe’s finest moment as an individual finale. But it left me reasonably hopeful for the overarching storyline as Fringe heads into its fourth (and I’m guessing final?)* season.
*This, by the way, is only a guess, based on no inside knowledge but simply the ratings—enough for renewal but definitely meager in recent weeks—and the hope that the show gets a certain end date in time enough to wrap up effectively.
Though J.J. Abrams is not minutely involved in the day-to-day of Fringe, it’s always been hard to avoid comparing this with other Bad Robot series on some level, and the multipart finale made it even harder. The penultimate episode, “The Last Sam Weiss,” cranked up the Alias vibe higher than ever, substituting the First Men for Milo Rambaldi—right down to the discovery of an ancient manuscript that anachronistically depicted the central character as some kind of prophesied savior (here Olivia rather than Sydney).
But in “The Day We Died,” it turned out that Fringe was Lost as well! Well, sort of, in that the twist that the finale was built on concerned time-travel and, with it, hardcore time-geek issues like making a consciousness move forward in time (a la Desmond) and—you guessed it—whether What Happened Happened. Fringe, however, seems to be proposing an alternative solution to the causality paradox: that while certain events are written in stone, one can change one’s choices within the set parameters to alter the future. Or, as Walter put it: “I can’t change what happens because it’s already happened. But you can make a different choice within what happened. I simply need to find a way to bring your consciousness forward to now so that you can witness what will happen if you make the same choice.”
Well, God bless John Noble for being able to utter that mouthful and make it sound like it emerged from the lungs of an actual human being. Without a strong cast, much of the technical exposition and explanation in this episode would have played like the dullest kind of sci-fi cliché; as it was, there was a bit too much dialogue on the order of “Go back to Science Division. See if maybe something’s wrong with the radiation detection sensors.”
The principals in this series are at least capable of selling that, however. A guy like Lance Reddick can, in the smallest of scenes, convince me that he has been changed and hardened by 15 years of experience, even while sporting a distracting artificial eye. (One thing I love about Fringe, in its presentation of both universes, is its choice of disturbing, small changes and unexplained details that suggest by implication the larger, horrific events that we haven’t seen.)
But even capable performances weren’t enough to get me really invested in the first 45 minutes of the final episode, if only for the simple fact that I had to assume, by the laws of television, that all of it—the disastrous future, Olivia’s death—would somehow be negated by the end of the episode. Besides the assumption that Fringe was not going to write off Olivia for a full season, for instance, I could not imagine a full year of the show set in a 2026 where Peter, Astrid and company were somehow still in their 2011 bodies—plus or minus a different haircut—preserved, one assumes, by military-grade advances in cosmetic science.
I look, then, at the first several acts of the finale as a wormhole that got us from point A to point B. That point B, however, is a promising setup for Fringe’s endgame. Just as the—overall extremely strong—third season was structured around switching between the two warring universes, the fourth will twist that twist by bringing the two together, having Olivia and Walter play opposite themselves in an effort to save their inextricably linked worlds. (Let’s hope their body doubles are getting generous raises!) And the twist has dramatically interesting potential: I’m much more interested, for instance, in Walternate as a complex, hardened, but reasonably motivated frenemy than as the evil supervillain we glimpsed in most of this episode.
Oh, and that final twist? No, I don’t expect Peter to actually permanently have disappeared, any more than I expected Olivia to actually permanently have died. But I am very interested to see how Fringe gets him back, and how nicely the universes play together in the process. Time travel paradox stories, are like history: they can’t fundamentally be changed when it comes down to it. But it’s the choices you make along the way that can be very interesting indeed.