TV Review: Fringe 4.22, "Brave New World Part II"
So with such a neat little ending it looks like its going to be another clean slate for Fringe, which was exactly my worst fear...
rating: 2
After we got the news that Fringe would return for a fifth and finale season of 13 episodes, I was comforted by the knowledge that any loose threads left by Season 4 would be able to be tied up eventually. No matter how badly they screwed up the finale, there would always be September (the month not the Observer). What I never considered was how badly they wouldnt screw it up, and in a way, this is even worse. Things kick off where we last left them: William Bell (Leonard Nimoy) has taken Walter (John Noble); Astrid (Jasika Nicole) isnt dead (silly me thought they might do something bold for a change); Olivia (Anna Torv) and Peter (Joshua Jackson) have no idea whats going on; and David Robert Jones really was just a henchman. Bell is showing Walter a vision of the new world he is trying to create. All it seems to be is a pre-civilisation paradise for wilder beast. Youd think that a guy with the intellect capable of actually achieving the creation of a new world could imagine something a little less backward? Later on he says that theres going to be no humans, only the super species that he created and presumably various other beasts and flora. Whats the point of that? Why bother creating a whole new world if all that occupies it is a bunch of mindless animals? So you want to get rid of humanity why not just do that? Why replace it with essentially nothing? A bunch of animals eternally grazing thats your idea of a perfect world? Unless of course the super beasts are not mindless, which they didnt seem to be when they were introduced. In which case they will probably develop the same destructive, parasitic patterns that we godless humans have. Hey Bellie, Im not the one who gave them fangs and claws. He also said some other things like God and Ego mixed in with all the other drivel. Olivia and Peter track down the warehouse where Astrid got shot and find September (Michael Cerveris). It turns out to be a trap set by Jessica (Rebecca Madder from last week). Shes now a bad guy and the whole nanites case last week was all just another ruse. Ive lost count of how many times Ive said this about Fringe cases but it seems even the pointless ones are just serving as a means to another end and have no merit of their own. Admittedly though this was the only decent scene in the finale for me. It was the only time when I felt like the dramatic tension was genuine and I didnt know how the scene would play out. September finally gets his bullet wound and Jessica gets her premature demise, although not just yet because this is Fringe; where a fresh corpse answers questions better than a living person. Im not sure how theyre doing that creepy thing with her eyes, but if thats just her than she has way more talent than I give her credit for. I feel we can skip over the next couple of scenes because nothing really happens apart from the team learning that Olivia is the source of energy for Bells dastardly plans. Cue forgone conclusion: Olivia must die to stop the catastrophe. We also learn finally the reason why Bell cut out bits of Walters brain all those years ago. Apparently it was Walter who first conceived of the possibility of creating a new world, but feared he was actually intelligent enough to see it to fruition. At his behest, he had Bell physically remove the idea from his mind. Fringe HQ isolates Bells location on a cargo freighter in the Atlantic Ocean. When the team arrives in choppers however, there is no ship to be seen. Naturally, the ship is in the other universe and using Peters frequency and Olivias Cortexiphan ability, the pair is able to jump across. We then come to the unsurprising, formulaic confrontation with Bell which Im not going to go over because at this point, you can see it all happening before its even done. Walter kills Olivia and then saves her using the Fringe official Cortexiphan Sponge Technique. Jump forward a bit and everything is back to normal. Broyles (Lance Reddick) finally gets that Government funding that hes been hounding for (wait didnt they already do that?) and Olivia and Peter are pregnant. A nice happy ending all tied off in a neat little bow. Oh and also, the Observers are coming and theyre going to ruin everything. The problem for me is that this weeks finale was too clean cut. It almost felt like a stand-alone episode. You had the premise established in Part 1 last week, and then this week we have the chase the dramatic conclusion and the happy ending, all tied off in a neat little bow, almost like they thought the show might get cancelled This was the true death blow for Fringe in the whole renewal/cancellation debacle; the fact that they allowed it to go on for so long meant that the writers had no choice but to write a season finale that could also serve as a series finale. And thats exactly what we got; an episode thats so forced and contrived it felt like its only purpose was to get through this last 42 minutes and then we can go on pretending like Season 4 never happened. Youll notice I highlighted dramatic because there was such a glaring lack of tension or threat in the final confrontation with Bell. At this point, they were just going through the motions, waiting for it to all end. Yes we already knew Olivia had to die, yes we already knew she would never stay dead. So with such a neat little ending it looks like its going to be another clean slate for Fringe, which was exactly my worst fear, because now all the things they didnt resolve from Season 4 will be forgotten about, and indeed all the things they never resolved from the first three seasons will also be discarded. Instead we will get a new story based presumably in the dystopian future and also in the present, which will have no bearing or relevance to anything that has come before it. Of course this all hangs on the general assumption that Septembers they are the Observers come to take over the world as was prophesied in Episode 19. It seems like a forgone conclusion, considering he just came back from looking into the future, but you never know with these things and I for one am not particularly looking forward to seeing this become a major story arc. To me the Observers were interesting because we didnt know anything about them. It seems fated that the final season of Fringe will resemble even less the show that I first loved.