Tonight, with two back-to-back episodes Fringe will wrap up a five-season run with it’s 100th episode. With luck, Fringe will end with a bang, providing the sometimes uneven show with a strong sense of closure and a nice legacy. However, watching last week’s “The Boy Must Live” left me more downbeat than excited. With luck, tonight's finale will make me eat everything I say down below, but as it stands now I'm somewhat worried about the direction Fringe may be taking for its swan song.
The scope of Fringe has
steadily risen over its five seasons as its characters has moved from examining
isolated paranormal incidents for the FBI to being freedom-fighters rebelling
against a race of invaders from our future. Yet for all of it’s sci-fi
trappings, Fringe has always been
grounded by its central theme of the power of love. It’s a cliché-ridden
emotional core, but one of the show’s greatest strengths is how frequently it
shows that love can just as easily be a destructive force. Villains frequently
are depicted as taking drastic and misguided steps for the ones they love, and
the entire series is set in motion because Walter’s refusal to let go of his
son leads him to shatter the fabric of two worlds. By acknowledging both sides
of this powerful emotion, Fringe has
proven itself to be the most satisfyingly consistent shows of the Abramsverse.
Thus it’s not exactly a surprise that the idea of love is
once again coming to the fore as Fringe
wraps up. That’s fine. What I am not a fan of however, is whose love is being emphasized in these final hours. The sudden rise
to prominence of September/Donald and his anamolous son as the Fringe Team’s
best means of victory strikes me as a misguided choice by the writers. They
tried to make the Deus ex Machina child tied into the series’ theme of love’s
power, but instead such a connection fells not only unearned, but retroactively
weakens some of the series’ best moments.
Put bluntly: the reveal that September referred to his own
child when telling Walter “The boy must live” is completely unsupported by the
plot. The necessity of Peter’s place in the timeline has already been
changed/ret-conned several times by the writers, but it has always been clear
his survival was a key to both the Observers’ plans and the survival of our
universe. Further, it is difficult to see how Peter’s presence in any way
affected the fate of the anomaly Michael (beyond the aforementioned saving of
the universe of course).
But even beyond plot hole nit-picking, the retcon
drastically derails the themes and characer arcs built over the past several
years. It was Walter and Peter’s devotion to each other over the years that was
precisely what cause September to evolve his thinking and develop empathy and
compassion for his anomalous child. In announcing the child was freed and
hidden prior to the events of “Peter”, cause-and-effect becomes muddled. Sure
it’s possible that a September’s
time-hopping could cause these events to make sense*,
but to do so erases all the growth he’s had over the last five years.
The reveal also takes away from Walter’s story, easily the
strongest arc Fringe has produced.
From the series’ beginning, Walter has constantly struggled to confront the
consequences of his actions while trying to reconcile his cold genius with his
humanity. No event encapsulates this better than his choice to breach a world
for Peter. It was a decision born out of love, yes. But it was also a moment of
unparalleled hubris. His choice has haunted Walter for decades, but September’s
proclamation that Peter must live served as an anchor for Walter. It became, at
some level, both excuse and validation, an acknowledgement from a greater power
that despite all the despair and devastation he caused, Peter’s saved life was
purposeful and needed. To reframe this iconic statement in a moment of
late-game trickery is to dismiss the profound effect it had on Walter, and all
the other characters we’ve grown to love over the years.
This ties in to a
larger problem that has begun to hamper the last few episodes. The main
characters-Olivia, Peter, Walter, and Astrid-have not actually done much of
anything. I understand that part of the thrust of season 5 is to show how
outmatched and relatively powerless the Fringe Team is, but rather than show
this by having our heroes bravely try to strike back anyway they’ve been far
too eager to throw all their hopes behind a “plan” of Walter’s that until
recently they had no way of knowing still existed. Absent are the take-charge
Olivia and the quick-thinking, reckless Peter. With few exceptions, our core
four heroes have been reduced to agents ferrying around plot points, and with
Michael now acting as though he has his own plans I fear the show’s focus might
slip even further away from them.
I should note that parts of “The Boy Must Live” worked very
well. Given the amount of exposition the writers had to fit in here, the
episode moved along at a brisk enough pace, and the sequence with Windmark and
the Observers’ leader was superb at both giving us a better glimpse of the
Observer empire’s greater structure and revealing Windmark’s increasing
emotional responses to his own failures. But ultimately Fringe seems to be trying so hard to make an ‘epic’ ending to
itself that it is sacrificing the human elements that made its audience stick
with them to see it. For all of the crap Lost
and Battlestar get for how they
concluded, the strongest parts of those finales were always the character
pieces. Fringe can still stick its
landing, but only if it remembers that fact.
*Maybe.
Probably still not though, just look up River Song’s chronology.
