Fringe

Episode about all that?

From what I remember season 4 generated some debate about how the reboot universe worked. So I'm thinking that what you say about what happened may be more the consequence of deduction, than stuff being actually shown.

That honestly sounded to me like he was being glib. Far be it for Walter to believe in conspiracy-theory-science (har), but the line was delivered in an overly-loud tone of voice that sounded to me like he was complaining just to be heard.

Uh. I just realized something else: the way things went offer the most powerful of Deus Ex Machina.

Here: http://loopingworld.com/2013/01/20/why-fringe-finale-may-make-sense/

Shoulda' went with the "Donnie Darko" ending.

Okay, now that I've had more time to process (and read about) the last ep, I'm wondering:

1) Was the timeline reboot of Season 4 necessary for Season 5? By that, I mean do they tie in together, or could the show have ended the way it did without bothering with the whole "alternate timeline" thing?

2)

General question: Why did the Observers feel it was necessary to go back in time at all? What advantage did they gain out of it?

They'd pretty much burnt out the planet by the 27th century, so the time travel effectively gives them a chance to redo their handling of the earth only by design instead of as a byproduct of their own creation. I can only assume they picked 2015 as being the sweet spot between humanity having developed an infrastructure of civilization they could use but lacking the technology to successfully fight back (which was basically true - their defeat came only from their own future tech being turned back against them).

Unfortunately I don't know the exact episode but I believe there are some flashback scenes shown of Walter "remembering" the events at the lake only without September intervening as we saw in the second season. My recollection of S4 is fairly good because I just picked this show up a few months ago and watched all the seasons straight through, so it's still pretty fresh in my mind even though watching them back-to-back muddles which episode specific events happened in.

I'm a bit torn though. What I'll totally grant you though is that September and the Observers are not explicitly required to set up the timeline going back to 1985 - if we surmise that a future Walter is aware of the events that need to transpire and has access to future tech, he could very well have tipped those dominoes off himself and done something to "distract" Walternate at that critical time.

The only piece that I have a hard time squaring is that in S4 the only reason Peter was able to stop trying to "return" to his Olivia is because after saving September he gets explicitly told that there is no other Olivia by the only person he'd likely believe on that matter. That was the biggest stumbling block in the S4 continuity between Peter and Olivia getting together and it only got resolved due to a significant series of events that the Observers were deeply involved with.

As far as I remember his Olivia DOES return. Peter does nothing. It's Olivia that progressively loses current memories and regains the old ones. In fact I remember that I was quite pissed that the show KILLED that Olivia and no one spared a single thought about that loss.

Though I don't remember how Observers were involved in all that... If they are it's a problem.

I believe they try to give a reason for this when they say that this particular timeline/universe gives them a 99.99% chance of success. You could really call this universe the "Peter timeline universe" because he's the one constant through all of the seasons. Everyone else is a different version of themselves (with their memories related to Peter conveniently restored).

In a way, the 12 members of the expedition team (hey, what should our names be?) sent back in time by Windmark's boss were focused on Peter from the beginning. Was it September's job to get Peter from there to the 99% timeline? He distracts Walternate so Walter has to rescue Peter and he saves them when they come to the original universe. Is that really happenstance?

Though it feels as if they have retconned the meaning of "the boy must live", it can be interpreted that even though September is carrying out his orders with regard to Peter he's acting as a double agent by confiding with Walter about his plan to get Michael to the future. I guess on the Observers 99% report it didn't list Michael specifically as the less than 1% potential negative outcome to their plan.

Someone remind me: Does the tulip have any significance for Peter? Did Walter ever tell him about it, and if so, would Peter still remember it? I vaguely recall Walter telling Peter he'd asked God for a sign but can't remember exactly how that went down.

(I also remember the field of tulips, but I'm not sure Peter remembers that.)

As far as we know, Peter never finds out about the white tulip. Scroll to the very bottom here (ACT VI) for the significance, at least to Walter, of the white tulip.

She returns in spirit and effectively overwrites the mind of S4 Olivia, but Peter chalks that up to being a side effect of his presence in the "wrong" universe and pulls back from Olivia because he still believes that "his" Olivia is still out there waiting for him to return. If anything he felt incredibly guilty at the thought that his presence was permanently destroying her mind, and this was doubly troubling to him because in the original continuity he had already cheated on Olivia with another version of her and was troubled about doing that to her again. Even more frightening was how much he wanted to just give in and thus give up on ever trying to get back to his reality, which I don't think he'd have been able to live with.

It isn't until September explains to him that he's not just in some parallel universe, he's still in the Blue universe but with the timeline reset and there was no other "home" waiting for him, that he's able to come to terms with his situation and accept Olivia. September would be the only one I could imagine Peter would implicitly trust to not be deceiving him about that, and without those events I don't see Peter coming to terms with Olivia in that universe.

Gah. This show is really hard if you have a memory as bad as mine.

The end point is that the finale wasn't that good, the 5th season was superfluous and season 4 was also downhill.

If they wanted to wrap it up nicely they would have set-up the season 4 rebooted universe to have an "ambivalent" past. So that at the end you'd realize and suddenly reinterpret all that happened as what was going to be revealed in the finale as a "future manipulation". But since the rebooted universe seems to have so many contradictions about the finale "retcon", in the end it was just a really sloppy wrap-up.

After all J.J. Abrams warned us. He said: "the script is unbelievable". Exactly.

But then he also said: “If it’s not satisfying, I don’t know what satisfying is.”

Well, maybe something that makes sense? But you can't know that. You wrote LOST.

From what I can tell I chose wisely to stop watching this sometime in season 3.

The episode with Peter Weller as the time traveler will always be the high water mark for the series and whatever indignities I had to put up with to get that episode are worth it.

No. No he did not. He directed the pilot of Lost but after....well, basically that, he left the series to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and their writing staff (the only name I'm bringing back is Brian K. Vaughn, but there were some people in there). He had his name stamped on the series as "creator" throughout, but that's just what he does.

And, to be entirely fair to the finale, it was emotionally satisfying. Everybody got to say goodbye and do their thing. The season was superfluous, and it could have ended pretty much the same way last year without any noticeable difference, but it was still satisfying. The plot left some inconsistencies - some of the worst in this generation - along with some fairly obvious retroactive continuity changes. That makes it feel like the overall plot structure was poorly architected (and it was, though that particular milestone was passed long ago), but that's the world we live in. At least it didn't beat Chuck out for most series finales in a series. On the whole, I kind of appreciate the fifth season for recognizing that it really ought not exist, doing its thing, and then promptly erasing almost all of its implications and leaving us exactly where we were at the end of 4.

The thing is that this whole season/timeline being superflous and rather dull ended up with me not caring what happened to anyone - yeah, sure, there was some nice scenes ("It's a beautiful name" "What is?" "Astrid"), but I had more or less stopped caring.

The whole thing about using the old Fringe event stuff as weapons against invaders was actually the best bit, but was only used sparingly and then dumped en masse on the final episode.

Somewhere around season 3 is the right place to stop watching.

For me season 4 was essentially worse than 5. So both are superfluous.

I don't agree on stopping somewhere in season 3. Season 3 holds up till its finale. There's some good stuff until the end. From the reboot onward, everything is missable.

Two extra seasons of John Noble ... superfluous?

Haters gonna hate, but I loved the whole thing. If you're feeling LOST without Fringe, watch the outtakes on Youtube. Walter calling a flashlight a torch and then being corrected by Pacey (reminding him that American English is not the Queen's English) is classic.

Er, no.
It was still better than a lot of the crap put out there and John Noble and the lovely Anna Torv was only part of the reason I stuck it out to the end. That doesn't preclude anybody with a brain from seeing how it could have been so much better or where it started going downhill.

Exhaustive recap/analysis by Jeff Jensen on EW. I don't agree with all of it (he tends to overanalye), but he mentions a couple of things I'd totally forgotten.

Thanks for that link Jerri. One thing he points out that I can kinda get behind is that it's basically true that the Observer Child's seemingly infinite knowledge allows for almost any possible outcome to come to pass. We've also been shown that extremely strong emotion can reach across timelines - Peter existing at all, Olivia gaining her alternate's memories. the Observer Child remembering all timelines, and perhaps even Peter's understanding at the very end. As smart and capable as Walter is, he's basically a thimble compared to what Michael is capable of, and Michael has always had a bond with Olivia and wanted her to be happy.

We've seen time and again (most notably through Observer-Peter) that the way Observers achieve their goals is by playing the long game - setting up sequences of events that lead to them getting their desired outcome. Michael, in theory, is capable of doing this on a level beyond even what the Observers were doing. For all intents and purposes, I like to think that he basically was the one who killed Windmark as an act of justice after that whole incident involving Nina. If his other goal was to give Olivia a happy ending, I have no doubt he could make that come to pass as well.

Obviously, the Observer Child is the reason the .0001% probability came to pass. He was subtly influencing everything from the moment of his discovery by September.

Yes, but that's basically evoking a Deus Ex Machina without even bothering to figure out how it is going to operate. It's so META and transcendent that it can manipulate the fabric of the plot any way you desire. Maybe season 6 had them turned into Teletubbies bouncing around, just because Michael loved that.

It's what I've said with the Walter example: Walter + technology = powerful god who can fix the show any way you desire.

They just created powerful devices that could fix the show. But they didn't FIX the show. They created this complex plot, and then let it resolve off-screen because they couldn't handle it.

I really liked the ending, even though with all time-travel/universe swapping things if you think too much about it it kind of falls apart. I loved the cameo by the "original" Observer, I thought that was a nice touch. I liked that the kid ended up being September's son, even though as soon as he told Walter he was going to take him I figured he was dead. And I liked that at the end Peter got the tulip and had no idea what it was, but that we the viewers did. I got all choked up twice during the episode when he called Walter "dad" and I liked Olivia going all power-crazy and killing Windmere--although that really made me wonder why they didn't keep pumping her full of that stuff every season so she could magic-power everything.

It was a good series finale. They even gave the cow a cameo.

That reminds me - what the hell happened to Windmark? I remember seeing him get squished between two cars, but I thought they did the jump effect at that point and when the two cars bounced apart there was just a bigass blood stain on one of the windows. Did he get away with it?

Olivia killed him using TK. He didn't jump out in time.

I friggin' lost it with the Walter/Astrid scene. "It's a beautiful name." "What is?" "Astrid."

I believe he was killed, but it was certainly ambiguous. At the very least, he was incapacitated and could no longer interfere.

Did you guys blink? Jesus, Windmark was turned into fucking raspberry jelly.

Yeah he tried to teleport but his head ended up exploded on that car window before he could.

I need to go back and re-watch. It was very quick.

The last two eps are partial redemption for the way Olivia was sidelined this season. She kicked ass.

Yeah, I think the Observers tend to seem to have superhuman reflexes primarily because they're good at predicting what's about to happen before it happens and factoring in all the variables. It's very hard to take them by surprise, but if you manage to do so their reflexes aren't perfect. I'm pretty sure a human manifesting massive TK to murder you with a Chevy was not something Windmark had predicted and prepared for.

I rewatched that scene, and I think what threw me is that we see that little distortion typical of Observers' entrances and exits, and then just blood on the glass. There was no body.

Because JELLY.

I thought Olivia did it too, but then why did the little kid go "shhhhhhh" to Olivia with his finger to his mouth?