Sunday, February 26, 2012

Fringe - "The End of All Things"

Season 4, Episode 14

“You have to go home.” 

This week, I did something different in order to process this episode of Fringe. I got together with a few of my friends on Google Hangout, and we set about talking about the episode. This exercise came about thanks to some Facebook conversations about the show, and our collective desire to really talk about the show in a more suitable format to exchange our idea. For my part, it was an interesting experiment, as I finally was able to have an active experience of this season's divisive nature, something which living alone and the diminished “water cooler culture” haven't exactly facilitated. Fittingly, our conversation clued me into the various views when it comes to the season's big questions, a debate which only helped to solidify my position that the season's biggest problem is it's inability to define its narrative. 

The past few reviews have been in part an exercise of me working through the various theories of where this season is heading. I recognize that this has been in part an exercise in futility (the show's going to do what it's going do, right?), but given how little the show gave me to talk about some week's, it was often one of the few wells that I could go to. And as the season grew on, my frustration grew as the show refused to give us definitive answers to these questions, leaving everything as pretty much a muddled, distancing mess.

Now, there's nothing wrong with a show having long-running, lingering questions. Lost did it for years, and even if everybody wasn't happy with the answers, the questions kept it's fans intrigued for years. However, in order for intrigue to work, the viewer has to have some sense, however vague, of where the questions are leading, and why they are worth spending so much of our consideration. For Lost, The Island was presented as the central mystery, and thus any of the questions that spun out of that (and boy, were there a lot of questions) all seemed a part of a master plan, a plan who's general conclusion was already known – that we would find out what was up with The Island.

Fringe hasn't had that luxury. The show's turn from lighter to heavier serialization meant that it began to burn through it's original long-terms plans more quickly than expected, and the writers had to start to come up with new ideas without necessarily having an endgame for those ideas in mind. It's under these conditions that I believe the writers came up with The Machine and it's corresponding prophecy in season three, and have been using the alternate universe conceit in season four. Thus, much like with Lost's flash-sideways in its last season (which Damon Lindelof admits the writers came up with as a way to split the difference between fan expectations and the show's narrative needs), the fourth season of Fringe has given us a narrative device that's sort of cool to look at and experience for a few episodes, but quickly grows tiresome when left without an explanation as to why it's appearing on out screens. The show has yet to prove to its audience that there is a genuine connection between the events of the first three seasons and what's happening in the fourth, and that makes it really hard to care about what's going on right now.

That the show began to take steps toward correcting this problem over the past few episode by attempting to give the audience a clearer picture of how things worked in this timeline, as it became apparent that what we were seeing in fact wasn't a different timeline, but rather the same timeline that has undergone a change of events. Or at least so I thought. But with “The End of All Things”, Fringe began to reverse its stance on some questions that it seemed to have answered just last week. In the space of one week, Peter has come back to Walter's side of thinking and definitely believes that he must get back to his own separate timeline, and the changes in Olivia's thoughts and memories are the result of his own mental projection. I believe that the intended result of these whiplashes is actually to raise ambiguity about what this timeline actually is (and I know it works because me and my friend spent some time debating it) but with each “reveal” the show puts so much force and gravitas behind it that it becomes hard to think that we are not in fact seeing the god-honest truth play out in front of us, no matter how many times it happens. It makes for a very frustrating viewing experience, as we are watching a show that at best can't make up it's damn mind, and at worst is just treading water until the season finale, because the writers can't come up with enough actual story.

In fact, the episode spent a lot of time rubbernecking about a lot of things. Though the show has led us to believe that Peter's return was due to the purposeful actions of September, here he tells Peter that it's merely the result of him not erasing Peter well enough. (And considering that this is this guy's like fourth or fifth mistake, I have to wonder how he stayed an Observer so long while fucking up so often.) Similarly, the show spent a portion of the hour playing off what appears to be a long con in regards to Nina's role in all the grand scheming, and they used a short-term switcheroo within the episode to do it. There's something admirable in which the show used the two versions of Nina to play on out perceptions, but without any real payoff, it just ended up feeling a bit cheap, just another ploy that doesn't add up to much.

I'm focusing on this rubbernecking because I feel like what could have been a great episode of the show – haven't the show's strongest hours almost always been those that deal in heavy serialization? - was brought down by the show's general unwillingness to pin anything down firm. Most heavily serialized episode exist (and usually work) because of one reason and one reason only – they move the plot forward, and the audience is usually shocked and/or moved by at least one reveal within the episode. But “End” was mostly filled with small reveals that didn't mean all that much (Nina) or just a whole lot of backtracking (everything concerning the reality of the timeline.)

Even the one actual bit of forward momentum – Peter's rather brief meeting with September inside the latter's mind – wasn't nearly as monumental as one might expect. Putting aside the fact that the scene was played as one giant infodump, it was a bit disappointing how little information was actually revealed. We already knew about September causing the whole universe crashing mess in the first place, and the the fact that he kept messing it up while trying to fix it (including his inability to completely erase Peter from existence) doesn't exactly strike as shocking information. The fact that the Observers are a future genetic step in human existence feels like something that we've been told before, but my friends tell me that I'm wrong on that count; regardless, it's not a big shocking secret, so it too falls flat. The only real pertinent information here is the reveal that Henry Bishop, Peter and Olivia's son, is important to the grand scheme of history, but by having it with the wrong Olivia, Peter actually caused more damage than good. It's an interesting tidbit, but the fact that this was the reason that Peter had to be erased from time feels almost too slight to be believable. I mean, couldn't somebody have just killed the baby, or fixed time just enough that Henry was never born, and Peter was allowed to stay alive?

Does the fact that this episode was a huge narrative mess mean that the rest of the season is doomed? No, not necessarily. To return to the that Lost parallel for a minute, as much frustration as the flash-sideways caused during the show's last season – up to and including the finale narrative twist – they did have one upside, in that the provided the show's greatest emotional moments during the series finale. That those moments were due entirely to character beats were no surprise, given how the show used the characters to ground a lot of the story reveals and keep viewers interested for six years. What struck me about “End” was how despite all the storytelling missteps, there were still some great character moments, like Olivia realizing that she was trapped with Alt-Nina, or Peter telling Olivia that they can't be together. In fact, it was those character beats that seemed to keep this episode from outright bombing, something that I never would have said just a few weeks ago. But now that we have characters acting more like the versions of themselves that we originally met, the show is able to give us these bits of pathos that help make everything work.

So still the question remains of just what the season means in terms of the overall Fringe story, and while I can't say that I have confidence that it will work narratively, I am curious to see if the show will take the Lost route and give it all a strong character connection. Because it this episode is any indication, that's the only way it's really going to land.

Fringe will return in four weeks' time with the last eight episodes of the season. Hopefully this will all make more sense then.

Other Thoughts:

Okay, so that might not actually be Alt-Nina. It could be a shapeshifter, if my friends are to be believed.

None of us were entirely sure as to when and where David Robert Jones got fixed/atomically reassembled, but we believe that he must have gotten fixed on Earth-2 after he was able to successfully crossover. Just another example of this season's inability to pin down just exactly what the narrative of the Amber-timeline actually is.

If you care, while Olivia was tasked with turning lights on in this episode, when she had to do it in season one, it was turning the lights off.

That being said, I'm little worried that Fringe now seems to be “bringing it all together” or “tying up loose ends” or whatever, given my discussion above about how I believe the show has burned through a lot of its original plans. I guess we'll have to see, but I expect something of a bumpy ride.

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