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I can’t believe it’s over. That I finished Fringe and have seen all that there is to be seen of the dynamic team of Olivia, Peter, and Walter. I’ll admit, I was slugging through this last season, only 13 episodes long. Maybe because it was accepting the end, maybe it was because I was watching TV shows live again (mostly that), but there was also the fact that for quite a while, I wasn’t motivated to watch season 5 because I felt sort of meh about it. Thankfully, the last few episodes and the finale finally delivered. WARNING: Don’t read further if you haven’t watched the series. THERE ARE SPOILERS BELOW!

So this is how season four ended…

I knew that the season 4 episode “Letters of Transit” was a glimpse into the future world that we would be visiting for season 5, so September’s words were certainly ominous. The Observers were coming, but why were they going to be so evil? September seems pretty nice! I was curious to find out, but cautiously optimistic. The world portrayed in “Letters of Transit” was quite grim, after all. And that definitely did not stop once season 5 got kicked off. The Fringe team, having been trapped in amber for 20 years, is reunited thanks to Etta, Peter and Olivia’s now grown daughter who they lost the day the Observers invaded.

Rant #1: Peter and Olivia spend a lot of time asking each other, “What happened to Etta that day? Where did she go?” BUT THEY NEVER ASK HER! At least, not on-screen, and they should have, because I wanted to know too! Obviously someone raised her, and she was raised as such that she came to hate the Observers/Invaders and joined the Resistance. But we NEVER find out what happened to her!

Walter hid tapes in the ambered Harvard Lab that would reveal the details of the plan to defeat the Observers.  The Fringe team must retrieve, watch, and follow these tapes to the letter. So for several episodes, they are basically on a scavenger hunt with a vague objective in mind, meanwhile Peter and Olivia struggle with their relationship and with how to relate to the daughter they barely knew.

I never felt the connection to Etta that I wanted. When she died, I was sad, but I wasn’t devastated, and in fact, I felt that the story really picked up after she died. I guess her death was motivation to help the Fringe team stop their lollygagging around, but still, I think I was supposed to be more emotionally connected. I mean, there were definitely some nice moments between Olivia and Etta, but there could have been more, or at least stronger, moments. Though the running theme with the bullet was poignant.

Rant #2: For a 13 episode season that was described by the show’s producers as being essentially “one long movie,” it has terrible pacing.

The first episode that I think REALLY piqued my interest a lot was episode 6, “Through the Looking Glass and What Walter Found There,” the episode where we learn that the boy from the season one episode “Inner Child” is an important part of the plan and the Fringe team travels to a “pocket universe” to retrieve him, but instead end up with a radio.  Then I felt the story lagged for another couple of episodes (though there are some nice moments in “The Human Kind”) where we have to deal with

Rant #3: the Peter-becoming-an-Observer-and-it-is-really-dangerous-and-scary-but-the-only-after-effects-from-it-are-a-couple-bad-headaches subplot,

until “Black Blotter.” That’s when, despite Walter’s LSD trip induced state of mind that provided some unnecessary weirdness (along with a very necessary emotional check-up of Walter’s subconscious), we finally seemed to move forward with the story. They get the boy! They call him Michael! He’s an Observer anomaly who was never fully matured and was set to be destroyed! They find Donald! AND DONALD, AKA SEPTEMBER WHO IS UNOBSERVERFIED AND HAS HAIR NOW, IS HIS FATHER!

Needless to say, “Black Blotter” through the end of the season easily get 4.99 stars for me for being so awesome and emotionally satisfying.

Speaking of emotionally satisfying, “Liberty” brought the Redverse back briefly (which I hated so freaking much in season 3 but thanks to season 4 did not hate anymore…) and just look how cute Fauxlivia and Lincoln are!

I’m so glad I got to see Lincoln Lee one more time.

So the finale. It tied up all the loose-ends from season 5 (except I’m dying to know what happened to William Bell. Was he left in amber without a hand? Or did the Observers get him out when they got Simon? If so, what happened? Was he interrogated? Is he running around ready to cause havoc to the timeline all over again?). It did not tie up all the storylines and questions from throughout the series though, which I sensed would be the case basically from the first episode of season 5, when the focus was clearly not on the past. So while I’m disappointed I will never fully understand the deal with ZFT, The First People, Sam Weiss (though I was glad he was at least alluded to this season), John Scott, Olivia’s stepfather, and more, it wasn’t disappointing enough to say that the finale wasn’t the right ending for the series, because it was.

My first reaction to the timeline reset: I wasn’t surprised. I had expected as much, especially thanks to The Fringe Podcast I listened to along the way where they theorized this frequently. But I kept thinking that a reset in the park didn’t make sense if the Observers ceased to exist, and that the timeline change for our Fringe team members would have to start in 1985 with September not showing up in the lab to distract Walternate. And then that would change EVERYTHING and invalidate THE ENTIRE SERIES (of course, only the fourth season really means anything now, though I am SO GLAD that Walter got the memories Peter and Olivia have of seasons 1-3, even if it all still seems convoluted to me). But also thanks to The Fringe Podcast, I heard some different ideas of how this might work and some explanations of time paradoxes and such, but it’s all too much for my brain to truly comprehend.

But there the very final moment made it all worth it for me.

“White Tulip” is easily  one of my favorite episodes of all of Fringe, and how the writers used the symbol throughout the show and then tied it all back in the end was just WOW. It was the most fitting, perfect, beautiful ending Fringe could have given me.

Random Star Trek: Enterprise Rant: Brannon and Braga and Rick Berman: I hope you watched Fringe and took notes.

Season 5 was not perfect. It needed more Astrid. It needed better pacing. It needed more answers about Etta. But the finale did deliver and while it did not do everything I wanted for the series, I think it probably did everything I needed, and I can’t really imagine it being any other way.

What were your thoughts on Season 5 of Fringe? Also, I’ll be doing a recap post of the entire series sometime in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned, Fringies! 

Two words for season three: roller coaster. This season was filled with some serious up’s and down’s. There were two episodes that made me extremely upset, to the point where I almost wanted to give up on it all, and yet by sticking through it there was a pretty decent pay-off. The pay-off at the end of this season wasn’t quite as stellar as, let’s say, Babylon 5’s season three, but it did help me realize that the writers really did know what they were doing.

Basically, it would be impossible to talk specifics about the story line of season three and not give anything away, so I’ll touch lightly on a few episodes and characters I enjoyed this season. As far as new (or fairly new) faces go, I really enjoyed Henry the cab driver and Lincoln Lee.

Henry initially appears in the first episode of the season, “Olivia.” And though he’s a major part of the episode, it’s easy to assume he won’t be seen again. But thankfully, we do! And it’s amazing how such a small character role can have such a good character arc. In the few episodes we see Henry, we see his compassion, how his concern towards Olivia grows, and he discovers things about the world that not everyone knows, even if he doesn’t know all the details. He might be just a cab driver to most passerbyers, but we as the audience get to learn about him as a person, and he’s pretty awesome.

We are introduced to Lincoln Lee at the end of season two, and he seems like a decent guy, but that was pretty much all I thought of him for a while. But then the episodes “Stowaway” and “Bloodline” made me really start to love him as a character. Spoiler in white (highlight to see): Stowaway introducing our side’s Lincoln Lee was definitely huge for me. I just loved how different he was from the other side’s Lincoln Lee, and yet saw the similarities as well. I really loved that ours was so straight-laced though, and how he interacted with Peter. And then in Bloodline, when we went back to the other side’s Lincoln Lee, I saw how great he was too; how compassionate and loving he was underneath that tough exterior. 

The first half of the second season deals with the story that left off in the season two finale, and the second half of the seasons deals with the consequences within the interpersonal relationships of the characters. “Entrada” was a favorite of mine as it seemed to resolve so much, only for some of it to somewhat unravel on me again! “The Firefly” was a fascinating look at repercussions caused from the decisions we make in life. We got more background in the characters’ lives with another flashback episode reminiscent of “Peter,” with “Subject 13.” I found “Bloodline” strangely moving for someone who was not a fan of “Immortality” for… uh… reasons (hopefully this will make sense for those who have seen the season; I’m just trying to stay vague!). “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide” was not a favorite but it was an out-of-the-box sort of episode that ended with an interesting twist that I’m still waiting for more answers on at the start of season four.

And same with the last three episodes of the season, which felt like one arc that launched us into season four with some half-answers that left me still wanting more! And while it was a good, solid pay-off, I still cannot help but forget some of the frustrations of the season. While this season is clearly better than the second in many ways, it also angered me more. Perhaps this could be seen as a testament of the writers’ amazing ability to get under my skin and give me ALL THE FEELS (not to mention the amazing acting done by everyone on the cast), but I have decided to dock it half a star and go with a 4.5 star rating, the same as last season.

I’m only two episodes into Season Four and basically nothing has been resolved, so I’m really anxious to see how it all turns out. I’m also becoming more and more glad I can watch these episodes back to back and without hiatuses!

If you’ve seen season three of Fringe, tell me your thoughts! Did you have as much of a love/hate relationship with it as I did?