Fringe: "Worlds Apart"

It was great having you on board, Seth, but now
it's time for ME to go back to being the
only hot guy on this show.

Look at me, I'm back and blogging on Fringe and it's the same night of the episode! (Yes, I cleaned out my garage and found my TARDIS! Whew...)

Over the past few days I've been madly catching up on all the Fringe that I'd fallen behind on, after the Great PVR Shutdown of 2012. Peter realized that the Olivia who was in love with him was, in fact, his Olivia (in a WONDERFUL episode with another tour de force performance from Anna Torv, where she realizes loving Peter hurt so much she begged for Walter to take the pain away); Alt-Nina has been put in prison; we saw a rehash of the porcupine-man on a plane from season 1; Alt-Broyles has been put in prison... and then there was last week's episode, where I rejoiced to discover that Desmond will still be alive and well and he'll just be called Simon in 2036 (and he'll look strangely the same, just with more facial hair), that William Bell will somehow return before 2015, and that Peter, Walter, Astrid, and Bell will be encased in amber. And... Olivia will probably be dead, due to Bell. The Observers will take over the world and not act like Observers anymore (they're supposed to see across time but these Observers didn't even know what was happening three minutes from now), Olivia and Peter will have a daughter named Henrietta who will grow up to be a resistance agent. And did I mention Olivia won't be encased in the amber like the rest of them? That realization just made my heart sink into a very painful place. And makes me wonder where they're going to go for the next several episodes.

But here we are in the third last episode of the season.

Glyph code: ALIVE

We open with Walternate... no, wait, psych! It's Walter wearing a tie!! He makes a presentation to Walternate, Olivia, Alt-Olivia, Peter, Lincoln, and Broyles, explaining that he thinks he's finally on to David Robert Jones: he's trying to collapse the two universes to create another Big Bang, causing mutual destruction. He, of course, will find a way to remain safe throughout the process, creating a Noah's Ark of him and his weird creatures (which we saw in the porcupine episode), and they will be the first beings of the new universe, in which David Robert Jones will essentially be God. (I found it interesting, by the way, that the scientists all used biblical references to describe the brave new world DRJ would create.)

But while they're chatting, four people are converging on various parts of the earth, creating earthquakes. They must find out who these people are and why/how they're creating earthquakes, and Olivia's the one who eventually discovers these are Cortexiphan kids; her cohorts in the Cortexiphan experiments that Bell and Walter had done on them when they were children to heighten their consciousness and give them senses that people shouldn't normally have. She figures this out when Nick Lane steps forward in the Alt-universe.

Dude, I'm just doing tree pose!! Sheesh, can't
a guy do yoga in a public park and not get
rushed by a bunch of guys with guns?!

Now, you may recall Nick from season 1: he's the Cortexiphan kid who had developed a psychic link with Olivia, and he could make her see what he was thinking and doing when he was creating criminal acts. He had found a way to channel his urges at the end of season 2, and he was one of the ones that, with Olivia, went over to the other side. The last time we saw him, he was with his girlfriend, Sally Clark (who is the one on the video Olivia is watching in this episode) who was the pyrokinetic. They were trying to escape together, and the alt-fringe team was trying to stop them. Sally turned and threw the fireball that engulfed Lincoln, and caused him to have to lie in that burn chamber for so long afterwards.

So that's Nick and Sally, and why when Olivia heard the one name, she immediately figured out who the other one was. (Small nitpick: when we see the subjects getting into position as their little watches are counting down, why did they all get in position at the last possible second? Wouldn't you have shown up, oh, I don't know, half an hour in advance just to be on the safe side? I mean, you just don't want traffic getting in the way of trying to collapse universes!) Walter realizes that DRJ is using Cortexiphan subjects because they have a psychic link to their alt-universe counterparts, and where a couple of episodes he realizes we vibrate at different frequencies (in our universe we vibrate at the key of C; in the alt they're in the key of G), he's discovering that DRJ is attempting to make them vibrate in the key of E. That makes sense; C is the tonic of the C chord, and G is the fifth. E is the third (I guess if DRJ were even creepier, he'd have them vibrate in the key of E♭ to create a minor-key collapse. That just seems more appropriate to me...).

Just as we saw Nick psychically linked to Olivia back in S2, here as she's tapped into alt-Nick's alternate brain and watching our universe's Nick, at the last second he suddenly turns his eyes and seems to be looking straight at her, as if he knows she's watching him and is watching her too, a very eerie moment that even makes Olivia gasp and open her eyes.

And now, as they realize these earthquakes will continue no matter what they do (they catch Nick, but it doesn't stop the quake), the only thing they can do is remove the bridge to the universes. Just a couple of episodes ago we discovered that the bridge was beginning to heal the alt-universe, and many previously ambered sites were being de-ambered, but they must sacrifice their healing process to save themselves as a whole.

We lived without the alt-universe characters for a long time, and then when we met them, we didn't like them. We much preferred our characters to any others. Now, as they said they were going to close the bridge, I imagined what it must feel like for the characters to know they'll never see these people again. And then it hit me: I will never see these people again. It's unlikely they'll continue to follow them, and now we'll just see our universe. (I'm hoping I'm wrong on this one!) It absolutely felt like a long goodbye, and maybe that was just for the sake of the characters and not us. But I felt like we were saying goodbye to Seth Gabel as Lincoln (waaaaaaaaaaahh!!) and Alt-Livia and Walternate.

Regardless of whether or not we were, the characters certainly were. Our Lincoln decided to stay on the other side, and it's a bit of a dubious decision: he is in love with our Olivia, who was taken by Peter, so he's going to take a shot at Alt-Livia, who has not shown any romantic inclination towards him. Here's hoping she does, for the poor guy's sake. Olivia sees another possibility of who she could have been in Alt-Livia, and while she always seems so uncomfortable around her, you can tell she's sad to see her go. "Keep looking up, after it rains. Keep looking up," she tells her.


I, for one, will probably miss Altstrid most of all.

Lincoln and Olivia, cross your hands. Astrid and
Walternate... um... just stand there. 

But the best part of this was that extraordinary scene between Walter and Walternate: what a wonderful moment. These two men, fraught with tension and high emotions, because one man took the other man's son and made him a hard, cold, person, sit together on the floor of a corridor, and Walternate finally makes his peace. He has had the chance to see Peter and how he's turned out, but this is also because this isn't the Walternate we first saw; this is the one who did not spend the last several years hating Walter because Walter had his son -- remember, in this universe, up til recently Walter did not have a son, so Walternate didn't harbour quite the same anger. Yes, Walter still took Peter, but Peter "died" at the lake. I loved seeing them together, with Walternate looking very together and stern in his suit and whiter hair; Walter looking awkward in a tie with his darker hair, fretting like he usually does. Walter is afraid that once the machine is deactivated he'll lose Peter; after all, if Peter disappeared when it was switched on, it stands to reason it could happen again once they play with the machine's controls. But rather than letting him drown in his own fear, Walternate instead comforts him, and helps put him at ease so he can do what needs to be done. Walternate knows that Walter is simply doing what needs to be done to save Walternate's world.

And then the machine deactivates, and the alt-world is gone. Walter looks around slowly, fearful of what might be missing, but Peter is standing right there.

"I think that I shall miss them, more than I imagined," Walter says. Which is almost word for word what I had just written in my own notes.