Fringe: The End of Days

“You were right. They don’t remember Peter.”
“How could they? He never existed. He served his purpose.”

Oh.

My God.

Tonight’s season 3 finale of Fringe was the most exhilarating hour of TV I’ve watched since the end of Lost, with the same sort of mind-boggling “what the hell is going on” factor that I’ve missed from that other Abrams show. I was gripped right to the end, watching the time travelling argument play out again (this time with Walter convincing Peter one could go back in time to change it, the opposite of Daniel explaining that one couldn’t do that). And that last minute? Full-on hand-over-mouth gasping aloud, with a loud, NOOOO!!! to follow it. To make matters worse? I was watching it alone. (Hm.... like I watched the Lost finale.)

So... as I suspected in my post last week, Peter has jumped ahead in time to a moment after 2021, in our universe. (I giggled this week while watching that I made that assumption last week based on the minute at the end of that episode, only to be met with a ton of comments saying, “Now wait a minute, Missy... you’re not overthinking this enough!” I was thrilled by the response, and felt like I was back in our old Lost discussions... only for it to turn out that it wasn’t meant to be overthought, and we really were in the near future in our world. It made me a bit sad that you guys weren’t right, actually, because I loved the idea of a third universe.)

Peter is now 47, it’s 15 years in the future in 2026. There were hints right away that we were in our world... Ella is there, Olivia’s niece, where in the alt-universe Rachel is dead and Ella never existed. Astrid isn’t autistic (or whatever she is in that other universe) and Broyles is alive, albeit a senator who is blind in one eye. Last week I pointed to the fact that the WTC didn’t exist as the proof, and as suspected, they’ve erected another monument in its place. Others pointed out that the Fringe team wouldn’t be as out in the open as they seemed in that episode, and I suggested that actually, if we consider that for the past decade the vortices have been opening wider, the Fringe team might have been forced out into the open just as it was in the other universe. It appears that’s exactly the case.

The opening credits were neither blue nor red; instead, they were black and white, as if to signal a bleak future that has no colour left in it. When Peter goes to see Walter for the first time in a long time, we’re meet with a repeat of the pilot episode. A shaggy, institutionalized Walter is led out of a holding cell, but this time, rather than being met with an angry, sullen Peter, he’s met by a son who welcomes him and doesn’t seem to hold any ill-will towards him for what he did. Walter appears to have had a stroke (he can’t move his right side the way he moves the left), and Olivia is also very warm to him.

Ella has grown up to emulate her Aunt Olivia, who is now married to Peter quite happily. It’s not clear how long they’ve been married, but they are still passionately in love. Olivia wants children, but cannot convince herself that theirs is a world worth bringing children into. If the End of Days is coming, there’s no future for anyone.

In the present, Walternate is not the bad guy. He’s a man who’s stern and cold, and who has reacted to what was done to him, but he’s also someone we can sympathize with for what he’s been through, and as I’ve said many times, he draws a line on experimentation that Walter didn’t. But in the future, Walternate has snapped, and truly is the bad guy. He’s lost his entire world, and is now on a revenge mission, with Peter as the main target. The red world is gone, and Walternate is the only survivor. The moment that was clear, I couldn’t help but mourn the loss of Alt-Olivia and her newborn baby.

Highlights:
• Gorecki. I can’t even begin to explain the excited gasp I gave when I heard it. When we see the End of Dayers come into the opera hall to set up their device, what you hear in the background is Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3. Now, it wasn’t live... it’s clear they were simply playing the most famous recording of it, because there’s no doubt that was Dawn Upshaw singing it. But here’s why it excited me... this has been one of my favourite symphonies for years. And I hadn’t listened to the CD in ages when I spotted it on one of our many CD racks a few days after watching the end of Lost, and I put it on. As the music rose and rose in the first movement, I was literally brought to tears because I had the Lost finale on my mind, and it just seemed to encapsulate the glory and massiveness of the whole thing. So, I decided this symphony would be the soundtrack I would use to write it. I put it aside, and when it came time to write the finale chapter, I was alone for a weekend, I had prepared my notes for that chapter over several weeks while writing the previous chapters, and finally I sat down, and put on Gorecki. I listened to that CD on constant repeat for two full days... and I mean constant repeat, from 7am until 11pm for two days. I must have listened to it 40 times. The music swelled as I typed furiously about the history between Jack and Locke. It was quiet as I wrote about the impact that show had on popular culture. Dawn Upshaw’s voice rose majestically as I talked about the church scene. Probably due to a combination of this incredible music, my love for the show, and the sudden realization that hit me as I was working on the Jack/Locke section that this might be the last time I really get to write about those two, I cried for much of it. Tears rolled down my cheeks, hour after hour. I typed 15,000 words on one day, and another 10,000 the next. It’s the most I’ve ever done in a single day, or weekend, but it was because I knew exactly what I wanted to say (and at 97 words per minute, my fingers can almost keep up with my brain). And Gorecki soared throughout the process. So now I will forever associate this magnificent symphony with the power a certain television show had to move me. And for that reason, you can now imagine how I felt when I heard it in the finale for Fringe. Wow. Talk about my heart leaping suddenly and gloriously. OK, nostalgia moment over.
• Brad Dourif! This continues the spate of Deadwood spotting that began on Lost. I wonder if he’ll be in there more next season?
• Watching Walter’s face as he eats the Twizzler. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: where the HELL is John Noble’s Emmy?!

Did You Notice?:
• The glyphs spelled out NOMORE. As in NO MORE dual universes... NO MORE Peter...
• The ringleader of the End of Dayers is named Moreau... as in Dr. Moreau, a literary precedent of Walter’s. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, Moreau has done horrific experiments on creatures with no care of their wellbeing, sending them back out into the world as groups of mangled things. Much like the cortexiphan kids in the experiments Walter and Bell did on them years ago.
• In the future, steak will come in a can and wine will always be in a box. But good ol’ vodka will still be in a bottle in the freezer.
• Also in the future, cellphones will be bigger than they are now (?) but cell signals will still be crap.
• I’m assuming the missed call that Peter got on his phone was Walternate calling him to pick up a signal of where he was, so he’d know how/where/when to transmit himself sitting in the chair? (Or perhaps I missed something where someone else took credit for calling Peter in that moment... I’ve still only watched the ep once).
• Peter gave Olivia the same burial at sea that the Others gave Colleen Pickett in “Stranger in a Strange Land” (minus the white tunics they were all wearing).

Any Questions?
• Is Peter really gone? Is it true he didn’t exist? If that’s the case, then what was the event that sparked Walter crossing over to the other side in the first place? Wasn’t it all because of Peter? Does this mean there wasn’t a Peter on either side?
• Will we get another glimpse of the future? Or was that simply an It’s a Wonderful Life cautionary moment to show us what could happen if they didn’t wise up?