8 Excellent TV Series & Characters That Ceased To Exist In 2013

8. Fringe

Beloved cult series Fringe bowed out in early 2013 after maintaining 5 years of being the best SF show on television that no one was watching. It didn't help matters that it was unceremoniously dumped in the unglamorous time slot of 8 P.M. on Friday night, which is traditionally as the Internets like to call it, the "death slot", for its final season. (Other science fiction shows that met an untimely demise on FOX Fridays: Dark Angel, Terminator, Dollhouse, and, sigh, Firefly.) But for those loyal few that were watching on Fridays, they got to see a complex and satisfying resolution of Fringe's final story arc concerning the mysterious (and bald) Observers, which was set up by the fine Season 4 episode "Letters of Transit" wherein we see Olivia's future daughter Etta for the first time. Season 5 was set in a dystopian future 2036, where Observers have assumed control of humanity through their considerable powers of mind control and are relentlessly polluting the environment in order to create an atmosphere in which they can breathe, since the future they come from was incredibly contaminated....by them, in the past, which is our present. Still with me? The Fringe team is thawed from amber by Olivia's daughter and her team of counter revolutionaries known as the Resistance, and set to work fighting to regain their world from the base of Walter's excavated laboratory under Harvard. The plot device of Walter leaving himself videotapes frozen in amber that contain directions for building the machine that will stop the Observers was an ingenious engine to drive the story forward, and having the team of Peter, Olivia, Walter and Astrid meet their parallel universe counterparts one final time was a lovely gift for longtime fans of the show. Unlike fellow FOX sci-fi travelers The X-Files, which lost its way with convoluted and unresolved story lines in its twilight years, Fringe maintained a strong control over its diverse mythology and remained solid through the end of its run.