This season of Fringe is just burst with storytelling potentiality . The intrusion of the bald-pated superfreaks from the distant futurity , and the dystopian humans they ’ve created in the present , are productive seam of story . But last Friday ’s instalment of Fringe was the first clip in a few workweek that the show seemed willing to search the deepest , sour recesses of that mine . And the event was very , very dark .
looter forrader …
First of all , sorry I did n’t get to recap this instalment for a couple of twenty-four hour period . I was in Toronto for the World Fantasy Convention , and did n’t oversee to determine it for a while . But when I did , I was moderately astonished .
In the previous sequence , the show had thrown us a major curveball , killing off Peter and Olivia ’s daughter Etta — the only sympathetic new character this time of year . This shocking development was more or less tacked on to the terminal of a “ caper gone unseasonable ” episode , but this week was entirely focused on the decline - out . We see Olivia and Peter snitch with Etta ’s death in very dissimilar path .
Olivia is grieving for Etta , but trying firmly to be stoic and unshakable — and worrying that losing Etta will break Peter and her up , just like Etta ’s disappearance as a child did . Olivia is trying to keep it together and keep up a brave grimace , until Walter comes to her with another one of his videotape . But it ’s not a raw tape in the endless “ Walter ’s design to vote out the Observers ” sequence , it ’s a video of Olivia ’s childhood birthday party , which Walter found in his desk . ( And even without amber ’s preservative properties , it ’s still playable . Another item for Betamax . )
Walter — who ’s select for himself a vial of Etta ’s scent to help him remember her despite his screwy store — tells Olivia that it will be fantastically unspeakable to watch that tape , but it ’s extremely necessary . He has a raft of experience with lose a kid — especially since he ’s from the timeline where his attempt to save the Peter of the other universe failed — and he knows that grief can cause you to keep out down emotionally , and also make you want to do things that break the universe . So it ’s important for Olivia to watch the tape and fully experience the loss of Etta , so she can start out the grieving process .
At the end of the episode , Olivia watches the tape recording of her and Peter with their niggling lady friend , and she violate down and call out at last , faced with the image of her perfect family as they once were . She call in up Peter and tells him she loves him and Etta would have wanted them to survive her destruction as a couple — but she ’s already too late , because Peter has already chosen a different path .
Peter and Olivia have a conversation about what to do about Etta ’s death , midway through the instalment , but it ’s sort of cloaked in terms of what to do about the Observers ’ tunnel to the time to come . The Observers have a wormhole that allows them to transmit components for their breeze debasement system to New York , so they can make out the process of wrecking our atmosphere and reduce human lifespans to around 45 old age . Peter want to get hold a way to use the Observers ’ own car ( which has fallen into his hands ) to destabilize their wormhole , mayhap turn the next side of it into a smutty hole . Olivia mean it ’s too risky , and she ’s scared she ’ll lose Peter too .
And then Peter tells Olivia that Walter ’s plan to defeat the Observers is still just a few fragments that they have no idea how to piece , with a dwindling chance that they ’ll be capable to make it work . Meanwhile , this is an chance they can take in good order now . Now that Etta is idle , he need to make certain she did n’t snuff it for nothing — when the Observers are defeated , he want everybody to know that Etta was responsible . ( Even though Etta died for the plan that Peter is choosing to put in hazard . ) Peter ’s way of honoring Etta ’s memory is to go Rambo on the Observers .
Luckily for Peter , not only did the Resistance entrance the Observer wormhole gadget , they also capture an Observer and his notebook — which Astrid decrypts , by figuring out that every theatrical role has multiple significance at once . Peter manages to convert the Resistance folks to let him interrogate the Observer alone , and he use the nameless Observer ’s involuntary facial responses to help him figure out the right way to assemble the wormhole machine . ( The Resistance have dose the Observer so he ca n’t just blip out of there . )
This mean one matter : a lot of scene of Peter facing down the imprisoned Observer . Peter proceeds on the premise that the Observers are still , on some stratum , human — they ’ve just been enhance with lots of succeeding technology . ( He seems to ignore the possibility of inherited engineering or accelerated variation . ) He believes the Observer is still up to of feeling something like concern , and he ’s determined to instill the closest thing the prisoner can find to that emotion . And he believes the Observer still has an instinctual desire to quash dying , which will lead to involuntary responses such as dilatation and expansion of the pupil — signals that Peter uses to direct him in forgather the equipment .
The Observer , for his part , keeps tantalize Peter with the estimation that Peter is an ant , and the Observers are walking past his anthill without any feelings about him whatsoever . An ant may imagine the sky is getting darker , when in fact it ’s just a shoe coming down to shell him . Likewise , Peter thinks the Observer has involuntary “ Tell , ” but in fact the Observer is as probable to respond to a fly ball on the windowpane as to a puny twenty-first century man . Peter ’s success in meet the wormhole machine just comes from his hunch and his experience as an applied scientist — think , incorrectly , that he could register the Observer ’s response gave Peter the self-assurance he needed .
In any case , Peter is trying to be an expressionless badass and channel his fad at Etta ’s expiry into an effective smash against the Observers . It ’s not vestal revenge , because retaliation is an end in itself and Peter ’s finish is to deal a monumental reverse to the other side of a warfare he ’s engaged in fight . It ’s only after Peter ’s plan appears to go wrong that he falls back on pure retaliation .
I say “ appears to die ” because it ’s not at all vindicated what happen . Peter set off his wormhole twist , and then go off the wormhole using a shotgun — crude , but apparently efficient . The wormhole go in black eye , go down on stuff back indoors , until it collapses . According to Walter ’s possibility , this should lead to a black hole at the other end . Instead , the Observers plainly open another wormhole nearby , sending out the same hooey they were trying to send out before . Except that all of a sudden , the poster that showed an Observer ’s face and the phrase “ The Future In club ” now deliver Etta ’s face and the Holy Scripture “ Resist . ” Does this have in mind the Observers were weakened somehow ? Did the timeline variety in some path ? It ’s really not light .
But Peter believe his plan has bomb , and so he run back to the captive Observer , who deflects Peter ’s interrogative sentence about why collapsing the wormhole did n’t create a black hole in the future . “ You do n’t even know what you do n’t know , ” allege the Observer , repeat something he said earlier .
The Observer contends that Peter ’s emotion have clouded his judgment to the point where he ’s make huge mistakes . He quote something Anil said at the get-go of the episode : “ When you coiffure a course for retaliation , prod two graves . ” ( A quote from the James Bond movie , For Your eye Only . ) And now , the Observer wangle to prick Peter into taking actual revenge , cutting his chief capable while saying that the Observer is feeling something like the pain a father feel on losing his daughter . Peter insists that he ’d be ten times as great as the Observers , if he only had all that tech in his own head — and then sets out to turn out it , implanting a objet d’art of Observer equipment in his neck .
That ’s the moment that Olivia select to call and assure Peter that she loves him and she still wants to be with him . Peter manages to say he loves her back , but he ’s clearly struggling with something nasty — and this does not seem like something that will terminate well .
There are still some brow - set up logic holes in this episode , like the show ’s common notion that Harvard University and Midtown Manhattan are about 15 minutes apart , if the dealings is ok . And the idea that you’re able to mount a major terrorist attack on the Observers , in the heart of their fastness , and then make a clean lam in a vanguard , even pausing to audit the results of your attack . And the notion that everybody can blab out on cellphones openly about their terrorist plans , without ever getting snooped on .
But nevertheless , the attempt - and - true “ interrogative ” storyline provides some capital opportunities to slough some spark on both Peter and the Observers . The debate over whether the Observers are still human on some level , still susceptible to fear and to Peter ’s “ reading ” technique , is pretty enthralling , particularly since Peter is one of the few citizenry who could claim to have been friends with an Observer .
And I ’m totally down with the “ Peter becomes an Observer to campaign the Observers ” plot line . peculiarly since he was sort of prick into give up ( some of ) his humanity because his emotion allegedly prevent his attack on the wormhole from win . Fascinating . This development did what nothing else , including Etta ’s death , has done of late — make me really curious to see what find next .
Screencaps viaThe Fringe Podcast .
J.J. AbramsTelevision
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