Thoughts on Fringe and worldbuilding

So I finally watched the last episode of Fringe and found it, like the rest of the season, underwhelming despite hitting all the right emotional notes.


I've said this before in a bunch of places, but I just didn't care for the dystopia story, as it wasn't very dystopian. It could have been cool. In general, I've liked the weird one-off episodes, and I've liked the Observer episodes, and I like dystopias. But they did it wrong. Here's how:

Fringe, in previous seasons, involved people operating from a position of relative safety and power. Yes, they frequently got into trouble and sometimes died (though rarely for very long), but they still had jobs, houses, and authority. It's an interesting concept to take that away and make them fugitives, except that the writers didn't go far enough with it. For the most part, everyone still had cool tech, places to live, clean clothes, makeup, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of identical vans that could be abandoned at a whim. Hell, they were even able to operate out of the same lab as in previous seasons, albeit a little less conveniently. The fact that they were all alive and together was also far too convenient; if they were going to go the plucky-freedom-fighters-versus-totalitarian-state route, it would have made much more sense to split up the group. The resolution was obviously going to involve a reset button the second they killed off Etta, so why not kill a major character every few episodes to ratchet up the tension?

The dystopia also failed on a worldbuilding level. For all of the Observers' advanced technology, efficiency, and ruthlessness, they did a worse job of intelligence and surveillance than Stalin managed in the 1930s. There's only so much you can attribute to our heroes being clever and lucky before the bad guys start to look like Keystone Cops. As much as I love Nina and Broyles and thought that the season suffered because neither were in it very much, about two seconds of research would have told the Observers that neither of them were to be trusted. They should have killed both of them after tearing their minds apart for information. And then blown up the lab, ambered or not, just to be safe. These are not people known for taking undue risk.

Also, Loyalists WTF? There are actual real historical examples of why individuals in a population might collaborate with occupiers, but apparently the writers decided to ignore that and go with...because they're mean and think facial tattoos are cool? I don't know. We only really got to meet one Loyalist, and his motive was slippery at best. You need some pretty strong incentive to cooperate with people who, for all intents and purposes, are aliens and are intent on making your world uninhabitable. There could have been a really interesting critique of security culture and why people might sacrifice freedom for stability, but they missed the boat.

The other bit I missed: Olivia's superpowers. I had no idea how much I missed them until they weren't there anymore (and then showed up in the finale) but I did. For one thing, they were cool. The Cortexiphan backstory is cool, from its sketchy medical ethics to its all-monochrome wardrobe, but mostly I liked that here is this character with weird powers that manifested in subtle ways. We didn't see her suddenly kicking ass in a way disproportionate to her build, or channelling bad CGI. Instead, we saw her turning lights on and off on a decidedly analog device and appearing, soaking wet, in a souvenir shop in a parallel dimension. It was unusually believable in a genre show with the budget to do cool special effects. But for some reason, when Olivia was depowered, they also decided to not have her be the main character in the show anymore, and so she mostly spent this season looking really tired.

There were a few good bits here and there: I perked up when they finally gave us a Walter-on-acid episode, because to me the heart of the show is actually Walter being hilarious on mind-altering drugs. And the finale hit the right emotional notes. Obviously Walter had to be the one to sacrifice himself, because thematically there's no other alternative, and obviously there had to be a happy ending for the main core of characters, because the show is not actually that dark. I was greatly pleased to see Red!Verse again, and Lincoln and Fauxlivia. (But of course I was reminded that the Red!Verse has been my favourite thing about the show since it was introduced, and part of the reason why I haven't much liked this season was the lack of Red!Verse characters.) Human!September sucked a lot but he got to say "reverse the polarity" and made me laugh.

Basically just left me with a bunch of questions:

- Why did the Observers leave September alive and make him human? Wasn't his problem, from their point of view, that he was too human? It would make more sense just to kill him, and then he wouldn't end up having bad hair and conspiring to wipe them out of existence.

- As I mentioned, why leave Nina and Broyles alive and in positions of power with access to sensitive information? If you're going to stage a coup d'etat, those are exactly the first people you eliminate.

- Should they not also shoot people putting up the Etta posters as a warning to others? (I swear I'm not really that bloodthirsty; it's just, you know, the kind of thing that's routine when you're setting up your totalitarian dystopia.)

- Why did the Resistance have cell phones, and why didn't the Observers tap them?

- And why could Nina and Broyles keep their conversations with the Fringe team secret from the Observers by just stepping outside when they were making phone calls?

- With all of that surveillance apparatus, why didn't they ever recognize and track any of the vans?

- The second Etta was revealed as a member of the Resistance, why not put her apartment under surveillance? Actually, as a member of Fringe Division, shouldn't her apartment already be under surveillance?

- Why do the Observers have nightclubs?

- If the Observers no longer exist, why is Peter still there at the end? Either September never interrupts Walternate's research, the cure works, and Walter has no reason to break the universes, or for whatever reason he does anyway and then Peter drowns in the lake because September isn't there to save him. Either way, no Etta.

- What's the point of rescuing Broyles if time is just going to be reset anyway? It increases the chance for failure and misses an opportunity for reversible angst.

- When did Walter mail the tulip? Does the U.S. postal service deliver to the past now?

- If Michael is a direct result of Observer evolution and experimentation, and the Observers no longer exist as a result of him showing up in the future, then how does he show up in the future?

- The Observer plan makes no sense either. If they invade the present and do things to the environment that shorten the human lifespan and force present-day humans to live in misery and oppression, then how do humans advance to the stage of technology where they can create Observers?

- Wasn't it better when they were just weird and inscrutable and ate lots of hot sauce? I think so.

- Sick of the reset button. They've used it too many times. The only cool reset was the one where Peter stopped existing (I mean, I like Peter, but it made sense).

- Sick of the power of love being the solution to things. I suppose in this case it was the power of SCIENCE! but it was still love-motivated SCIENCE!



So that was longer than I intended it to be. Shorter review: The season 4 ending was great and they should have stuck with that.