Fringe - "Letters of Transit"/"Worlds Apart"

Season 4, Episodes 19-20

“I find it’s best just to go with it.”

It looks like my prediction in my last Fringe review was right – we have entered the next leg of storytelling for the season/show, one which has mostly dropped the frustrating “Peter was erased from the universe” storyline in favor of something more straightforward and easier to connect to. I only have to wonder if this was the sort of move that was planned out all along – you know show runners, always saying that they “have a plan”, a statement which is only true about a third of the time – or if this is a reaction to all of the criticism that was lobbed against the season late last year. Me, I have to think it’s the latter, but I’m not really sure how I feel about the show turning so fully away from the angle they were working it. In contrast, suddenly dropping what had originally been the main theme is quite jarring to watch, and I’m not sure that the show’s new bit of serialization is going to do it any favors either.

Fringe - "The Consultant"

Season 4, Episode 18

“Keep an eye on this universe, my dear. I’ve grown quite fond of it.”

This must be what it’s like getting used to the new normal. After spending so many episodes this season on an overarching story that was so frustrating and seemingly pointless, in the past couple weeks Fringe has just sort of dropped that original conceit in favor of something less complex and a lot more fun. I’m not sure that I believe the show’s producers when they say that all the hoops we’ve seen the show jump through has been part of a larger plan, or that I even for a second believe that any of this was worth it. But I am enjoying where the show is at right now, and I can only hope that it’s gets the chance to stay here for a good while before the next universe-upending event happens.

Fringe - "Everything in Its Right Place"

Season 4, Episode 17

“I guess I just became the man I wanted to be.”

Fringe has been turned upside down this season. Whereas the show was praised in its second and third seasons for sliding into the mythology curve and giving us deeper and more complex storylines, and the standalones became even more reviled by contrast, the opposite seems to be true this season. True, there have still be a share of stinker standalones this season as well, but’s it’s interesting to note that arguably two of the greatest episodes this season haven’t really been about the mast plot. Now, that’s an argument that might depend on how you have taken to the direction this season (as you know by now, I haven’t been a fan), but I think we can all be in agreement that the show has stepped up it’s standalone game. We can add “Everything in Its Right Place” to that pantheon, sure, but the fact that it’s so good outside of the mythology points to larger problems.

Fringe - "Nothing as It Seems"

Season 4, Episode 16

“You remember you said all of this would stop being strange?”

Apparently this is just a week for purposeful repetition in television, with both Community and 30 Rock doing episodes that used callbacks to previous episodes in order to tell their stories, and now Fringe doing the same. There's a reason that I cited two comedies for this example, as it's the form which most often uses this trope, and does so the most effectively. (One of my favorites was a fifth season Scrubs episode, which essentially just re-filmed all of the show's best bits from the previous four seasons and made it into an episode.) With dramas, such a move is a bit trickier, as it usually requires to take on some sort of thematic relevance, or barring that, at least have a specific purpose as it relates to the overall narrative. 

Fringe - "A Short Story About Love"

Season 4, Episode 15 

“I don't want to feel like this anymore.” 

It's been four weeks since Fringe aired its last new episode. Welcome back. Are you well rested? Did the time away help you to gain a little perspective about the show? Nah, me neither. However, the time away did temper the frustration that I've been feeling with the show (absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that), but I'm not really sure if it prepared me for what I was about to watch, an episode that managed to further answer some of my questions/concerns about the season as whole, but was frustrating for a large part of running time – and for reasons that surprisingly had little to do with the serialized plot. 

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. 

Fringe - "A Better Human Being"

Season 4, Episode 13

“There really aren't any normal days on this job, are there?” 

In order to truly appreciate what “A Better Human Being” is up against, it's important to recognize the long shadow that was cast by “Welcome to Westfield”. That that episode seemed to answer a lot of the complaints that had been lobbed against the show's fourth seasons – for an hour at least – while also providing some important and intriguing development of the mast plot set the bar fairly high for any episode that would come after. To that end, “A Better Human Being” was never likely to be that great of an episode in comparison, and it would only be fair not to be too hard on it. But that doesn't mean that the episode gets a complete pass, especially when it was so close to being on par with “Westfield.”

Fringe - "Welcome to Westfield"

Season 4, Episode 12

"So you just click your heels and think of home?"

In the past few reviews, I have essentially broken Fringe's standalone episodes into tow categories, those that have a strong emotional connection to the larger arcs and those that don't, and I have basically held the former in reverence while displaying some contempt for the latter. It's been unfair of me to do so, especially considering that such discussions also usually involve me saying that I have nothing against the procedural format in theory, just that few shows ever manage to tell standalone stories that work as well as they could.

What's even more unfair of me was the fact that I've left out a third option for the standalone episodes, one that I haven't even thought of in relation to this show in a long,long time: it's the standalone cases that works to further the overall season arc, even as it provides a satisfactory conclusion for the events of this hour. It's a formula perfected by Alias, and continued on show's like Justified, and Fringe even did some in it's earlier seasons, though specific episodes now escape me. It's to that end that I want to say that I enjoyed “Welcome to Westfield” quite a bit, and I consider it to be one of the best hours of the seasons. 

Fringe - "Forced Perspective"/"Making Angels"

Season 4, Episode 10-11 

“I have found that anger is usually joined with emotional investment.” 

Two weeks ago, I responded to the presence of an obvious standalone case appearing right when things with the master plot where starting to get interesting just as one might expect me to – glibly. My thoughts on the current state of the show have been made explicitly clear throughout the season, and while “Enemy of My Enemy” still gave us very little reason to care about the people in Earth Without Peter, it at least gave us something that had been sorely lacking for most of the season: momentum. So to see the show give us something to derail that momentum for the sake of a standalone case was disheartening, especially given how disconnected from the master plot “Forced Perspective” ended up being.

Yet it most also be mentioned that Fringe is always surprisingly good with its character work, albeit more fitfully than I would like, and “Making Angels”, while also being a standalone episode, delivered well on that front – or at least as well as it could do in a season full of people we technically don't know. This raises some interesting question about where we are with this show, that the show can have two standalones back-to-back, and only feel the need to have one even try to connect with the audience.

Fringe - "Enemy of My Enemy"

Season 4, Episode 9

“Something About the air on this side, it tastes sweeter” 

One of the major criticisms of my reviews (or if you prefer, criticisms of my criticisms) that I hear from people is that I often times can't just write about what a show is, rather than how it's disappointing me by what it's not. This is something that I notice many critics struggling with, and though I always thought of myself as someone who can turn into what ever curveballs shows throw at me, this season, a variety of shows (Fringe, Glee, How I Met Your Mother) are testing me at various times, and I've admittedly been faltering in that department. But I still maintain that there's a difference between wingeing about a development you don't like, and commenting when said development is hindering individual episodes, and it's important to talk about the latter without falling into the former. 

The problem with Fringe's fourth season from reviewing standpoint is that so much of it has leaned on the development of Peter's disappearance (and later, his reappearance) that's it's become hard to talk about anything else, and I've been repeating same criticisms just so I have something to say. “Enemy of My Enemy”, then, is an interesting episode for me, because it has a lot of things that I like, couched in some developments of which I'm still unsure. 

Fringe - "Back To Where You've Never Been"

Season 4, Episode 8

“It's not my fight.” 

Welcome back, Fringe fans, and what better way to be greeted by a show but with an episode that should have aired as the fall finale instead airing as the spring premiere? Okay, I see your point. In fact, not only is the ending of “Back to Where You've Never Been” one of those that probably needed more breathing room, and thus time to ramp up anticipation than what it was given, but I think I would have felt better about the season as a whole if this had aired back in the fall before the show abandoned us for over two months.

Fringe - "Wallflower"

Season 4, Episode 7

“You know, I’ve been investigating fringe events for three years. I never thought I’d become one.”

As you might have noticed from these reviews, I never been a fan of discussing the standalone cases of the week, unless perhaps they have some sort of emotional connection or impact, and even then I rarely discuss the actual plot itself. It’s not that I’m prejudiced against standalone plots – I can recognize when one is well executed, though that seems to be a bit of rarity these days – but rather I think the serialized elements of any show make for better discussion. Standalone plots are meant to be disposable, and discussing them always seems like an exercise in futility, and they kind of make reviewing a show week to week a bit pointless. So what is one to do when an episode is almost entirely a standalone plot, and not much else, and to top it all off, the standalone plot is even that good? Shake your head mostly, and then just scrounge for whatever discussion points you can.

Fringe - "And Those We've Left Behind"

Season 4, Episode 6

“Too many variables, not enough constants.”

There was a awesome scene about a third of the way through tonight’s episode, where Peter began to start skipping in time, first jumping from Walter’s lab to the site of the latest fringe event, and then from the car back to the event site so that he could gain a vital clue to figuring out was causing all the temporal displacements. It was delightfully weird and disorienting without being too confusing, and it perfectly captured for the audience the feeling of being unstuck in time. I thought that this was going to be how the rest of the episode would work, and it would grow continuously more complicated with its time skipping, to a level of gleeful bat shit inanity. However, most of the episode was fairly standard, as it often seemed to skirt the more interesting idea for the sake of a more straightforward narrative.

Fringe - "Novation"

Season 4, Episode 5

“Some things are not ours to tamper with.”

- William Bell

It shouldn’t come as a shock when I say that in its fourth season, Fringe has more or less become a rebooted version of its old self, as Peter’s exit and reentry into existence essentially meant that a good deal of things changed in EWOP, and the show had to take the time to highlight exactly what those changes are. In essence, watching the fourth season of Fringe became akin to watching an entirely brand new show; sure, we technically already knew these people, and there some things to be gleaned from the not all that subtle hints at Peter’s disappearance, but I think a newcomer could have started watching with “Neither Here Nor There”, and, apart from being blow away by the show’s blatant approach to its sci-fi elements, have with few problems understanding what was going one. “Novation” seems like yet another reboot of the show, and I think that’s what kept the episode from really cracking.

Fringe - "Subject 9"

Season 4, Episode 4

RIP, EWOP

Fringe - "Alone in the World"

Season 4, Episode 3

An episode that reminds you of the importance of cleaning your bathroom regularly

Fringe - "One Night in October"

Season 4, Episode 2

“EWOP: Volume 2” actually delivers

Fringe - "Neither Here Nor There"

Season 4, Episode 1

Trying to return to “normal”

Fringe: "The Day We Died"

Season 3, Episode 22

Wait….What?

Fringe: "The Last Sam Weiss"

Season 3, Episode 21

Who remembers Milo Rambaldi?