"Fringe" on Fox HD - Page 210

That also has me puzzled. Usually, the gesture means to be quiet. Maybe it had to do with trying to settle Olivia down so she could use her powers???? Don't know.

HDMe2:

Thanks man, I'll accept that as my official explanation.

Freaken writers... they should spend some time in the forums.

But, if you remember the look on the boys face at the same time that I took as he was responsible. Also the timing of the cuts back & forth between the two. I just feel it could be either even though one would assume and thought it was Olivia, but as a curve ball, it could of been the boy. Or, don't worry, I will take care of it, which is the way I interpreted the gesture which is the way I took it..
. It didn't hit me at first until I saw the guy waving his hands at the imaginary bugs flying around and his face getting scratched. Remember the episode when that guy jumps out of the office window when those butterflies (?) he imagined attacked him?
Also remember the other episode where that squid (or whatever that was) came out of the guys stomach? Then the views of those with their heads blown off among others that seem to reflect other 'weird' episodes IIRC.

.
Edited by videobruce - 1/19/13 at 6:16am

Ok, answer me this;
If Walter goes into the future, back to the present, is there a Walter? Since all of that didn't happen yet, then shouldn't Walter still be there?
If not, then was there ever a Walter and if so, when did he ease to exist in this timeline? Further, if there is no Walter, or ever was, how did Peter even exist? How was he pulled from the other side with no Walter doing so. Of course I could then ask about the trials in Jacksonville, but that is stretching things a bit.

I was hoping for at least one one scene with Bell. IIRC, the last we saw him was on the ship and him ringing that bell with him disappearing (transporting somewhere).

This ending was as sudden and short as the one the X Files had. Both left you unfulfilled.

I loved it. No, it wasn't perfect but how could it have been? This show has rebooted itself and retconned itself so much a 'full' ending wrapping up all plot holes and loose ends is impossible. As it is we got an extremely emotional episode (yes, I cried like a baby three times) that gave us the red universe, the death of Widmark, the return of bad ass Broyles, the death of September, Walters sacrifice, Etta's return and a calvacade of nasty Fringe monsters from the past.

Great. Love the show and will miss it greatly but so glad they got to go out like champs.

And remember, somewhere in Fringe-land current continuity:
Peter, Olivia and Broyles are in 2015 running Fringe division
Bell is still out there p to no good
Walter and Michael are enjoying milkshakes in future Norway
Walter is able to forgive himself
Charlie, Lincoln and Fauxlivia are solving red universe Fringe cases
Nina running MD

And that's a wrap.

The big question I had was how was Walter able to traverse into the future without the protection of the serum that September/Donald had injected the last of...? Seems to me he never would have survived the trip, and Michael would have popped into 2167 alone (of course, he didn't take the serum either, I don't think). If that's the case, then maybe Walter didn't actually accompany Michael there. Ergo... he's still in this timeline (time paradox thus averted) and was therefore able to send the letter to Peter with the white tulip though the U.S. mail. Somebody had to do it, right? Because, if the U.S. mail has through-time next-day delivery, then 45 cents for a first class letter really is the greatest deal in the world! The last expression we saw on the show on Peter's face, the slightly furroughed brow. I think perhaps that was intended to convey just that message. 'Fringe' movie, anyone?

We paused on the return address on the back of the envelope. We couldn't make out the street address under "W. Bishop"'s name. But it looked like some kind of hieroglyphic, maybe the Observer language? So what the heck does that mean?

I kind of like the way it ended. Questions remain. Just like a lot of great shows. 'The Sopranos' comes to mind, 'T:Sarah Conner Chronicles', etc. Something for the obsessive fan to obsess over.

R.I.P. 'Fringe'. Thanks for the ride.

That part confused me. I saw the blood, which indicated she got him, but there was no body when the blood splattered.


And I hope that will be in the works soon. Let's be honest, John Noble is no spring chicken here and it would be a shame if anything happened to him before a potential reunion. As far as I'm concerned, he made that show.

Two possibilities: First, it was a pickup truck that smushed him, so his smushed body could have been below the level of the hood and you just couldn't see it. Secondly, maybe he teleported away at the last second but not quickly enough to suffer a smushed body part - leg, arm, something. So he could still be wounded-but-alive to serve as the villain for a 'Fringe' telemovie to come.

I think the killing of Windmark could only have come from Olivia, purely out of the idea that when a parent's child is murdered, that parent will absolutely wish the killer dead, even if it's the last thing they do.

First of all, I am most thankful that Fringe had a chance to finish up "the way it was intended". I loved the "shoutouts" throughout the finale (white powder etc) but I personally have a few things I'm not getting:


1) When/how did Walter send the white tulip to Peter?

2) As others have said, how is Peter even there? I listen to the podcast and they made a good point ahead of the finale that if there is a "reset" then Walternate would never be distracted by September and therefore would have found the cure for Peter in the Redverse.

3) VERY predictable from the standpoint that it was a given that the show would end with the scene at the park with the dandelion. PLUS Olivia even mentioned that what they were doing would reset time. Why not have the plan of sending the boy into the future and let the viewer try and figure out what the consequences of that would be?

One other thing I feel I am just not very smart about is how does showing the scientists a "better version" of Observers keep them from invading? I guess I lost track of why they invaded in the first place

The finale was entertaining but half of it was "busywork" to prepare the wormhole. Lots of mulling around for items etc.

Walter had been injected in 2015. There was a second syringe for someone else to use in case Walter wasn't around to make the trip. At least that's what he said in the episode last night. Or something to that effect.

When Peter dug the serum out of amber Walter denied knowing what it is. Then Peter digs out the tape addressed to him in which Walter tells him that he has to accompany Michael into the future and then Walter admits that he knows what the syringe contains, an inoculation for time travel. He explains that he was already inoculated in 2015 and that he left the extra dose behind in case something happened to him.

It was an okay ending--I didn't feel particularly unfulfilled. Whereas the ending of The Sopranos was entirely intentional, T:SCC's was a wild cliffhanger season finale. They didn't know whether they'd be cancelled or not until after it'd aired. Fox was going to cancel either it or Dollhouse and decided to keep the latter into another season, and it gets cancelled after an additional thirteen episodes. I was watching and enjoying T:SCC and didn't care for Dollhouse so I was not happy.

I also believe Olivia was the one, she always was the ONE. The frustration of having lost Etta to Windmark (remember he was talking s__t about what she(Etta) thought of before she died?) and seeing him about to teleport away triggered the release.You have to go back and watch the older episodes to recall when she became upset and the outcome following it. Remember she had moved stuff before and blown out lights when her emotions were high, that's what the cortexiphan experiments were about. Walter had changed her when she was a child and she first set the room on fire. Michael had nothing to do with Windmark's death. Michael was teaching her that SHE was the ONE to make it happen. The fact that he did it more than once indicated he was teaching her. Just my 2 cents

Agreed.

I've already slow motioned the scene and couldn't difinitively tell that Windom was flattened. If he was, wouldn't the writers have shown that? Also, there is some distortion going on towards the last moment that makes you question about getting away.

I think the writers wanted to leave a window open in case there is a movie and they need one armed Windom as the evil guy.

If there was blood there was a significant traumatic injury don't you agree? He was smashed as he teleported away. Of course they aren't going to make it definitive in case there is a movie developed. Have him return a la Nina Sharp, missing a limb perhaps? If he teleported away does it matter, to where anyway? I though the Observers timeline changed with Michael going into the future?

Okay, thanx; didn't catch that. September would have ceased to exist in any event, even if he hadn't been shot. So, Walter somehow figured out how to return to 2015 to send the letter to Peter. Again, I would reference the strange lettering on the return address.

Who was our glyph-guy? Wonder what the ad-break glyphs said since there's no episode "next week"...?

One thing we learned from this episode is the Observers can not only teleport though time, they can just as easily shift into other universes as well. If there's a 'Fringe' telemovie (a theatrical film is definitely a no-go), then you can bet your black fedora Windmark, complete with some kind of injury, will be the main villain.

I think the Fringe finale set up a movie as forcefully as it could. (I suspect Joshua Jackson will be involved in more comic books, to help keep the franchise in people's minds.) Who knows, with J.J. Abrams' clout in Hollywood these days, a theatrical motion picture might be possible down the line. He's very comfortable with both reboots and time travel paradoxes (see Star Trek). Imagine him at the helm, with John Noble and the rest of the cast. You couldn't pay me not to go see that.

Will. Never. Happen. 'Fringe', good as it was for what it was, is no 'Firefly'. And even with the latter's rabid and relatively large fanbase (compared to 'Fringe'), Serenity was more or less a flop at the box office.

The address reads, "1815 St./Boston, MA 02214". 02214 is not a valid zip code.

I looked it up in one of the Fringe wikis and the glyphs read LOVED for the first episode ("Liberty") and CLOSE for the second ("Enemy of Fate").

Well there's obviously a lot of questions. And good commentary here. Just someone remind me, was there ever a point in an earlier episode where they foreshadowed Walter's disappearance from 2015? Did reset Peter and Co. have no recollection of him? Or to them, did he mysteriously disappear at that point?

I concur with other posters...I'm fine with time resetting to 2015. Certain events could still have happened as they did, with Walter controlling the creation of a better Observer. In that respect, everything could be the same up to the point of the invasion, yes? (Don't nitpick that statement too much. No time travel story has been flawless.)

I just frame stepped through the Windmark-getting-slammed-by-a-truck thing and while it looks as though he started teleporting away, subsequent frames show him through the driver side window of the truck getting smashed pretty hard, with his head snapping and striking the window a couple of times with what looks like a lot of brain matter smattering one of the window, not just blood. I think his body was still there, just not upright. IMO he's well and truly dead. From the moment the car hits his body to the end is no more than a second, so they put all of those frames in there for geeks who'd step through them . (I tried to get a series of screenshots but I can't figure out how to keep my camera from flashing so they were obscured by big glare spots; I can't find where anyone else posted anything like it).

I don't know that it's a "re-set to 2015," per se. It's simply showing us the moment when the overt invasion happened, and that now it didn't happen. They could have shown us a scene from the new 2036 with a living adult Etta, or a scene from 2010 with Olivia working on a routine FBi case, or any of a number of other things.

We saw the scene in the park because that was the symbol of the Observers invasion that was set up in S5E1.

Much is obviously unexplained. Without September's interference when Peter was young and ill, the whole timeline should have been different from that point on. But since Peter would have lived in at least one timeline, and since Olivia and Peter could still have somehow connected through Walter, Bell, and the experiments in Florida, I can accept that there is a timeline where Peter, Liv, and Etta ended up in the park on that day, even with Walter and Michael having succeeded in re-setting the timeline. The intervening events would have been completely different, but we can't expect all that detail to be explained.

While I wish the last two hours had had more content and less running around, more exposition and fewer arbitrary obstacles, I am inexpressibly happy that this outstanding series had the opportunity to reach a natural and satisfying conclusion. These may have been a bit underwhelming as episodes, but stacked against the overwhelming greatness of Fringe as a completed work, that's easy to forgive.

I'm OK if there is no more Fringe, but I want to see what Anna Torv and John Noble do next. They have made a fan out of me.

In between the "1815" and "St.", there is a word - the name of the street - that I couldn't make out. Looks like hieroglyphics, perhaps "Observer-speak"...? Peter's address on the envelope's other side, on the other hand, was perfectly clear. We need a screen cap...

Looks like a badly scrawled "Hano St." of which there is one in Boston.

Ooops! I wrote "<something>" between "1815" and "St.", without surrounding it with [noparse] tags. I guess that the board eliminated it as a possible HTML tag .

That was a plot hole they could have easily addressed by including a brief glimpse of September observing Peter and Liv in the park from a bench in the distance, standing, putting on his hat, and smiling as he teleported back to the future.

That would have left the clue that The Observers still existed but hadn't all sacrificed their emotions to attain their abilities and September had maintained timeline continuity.

I was expecting something along those lines so much, I kept stepping through the final scenes expecting to see an observer in the background.

Ah well, the finale hit so many of the right notes and callbacks that it didn't bother me that much and Peter saying goodbye to his dad as Walter stepped into the blue was a great emotional payoff. Gunfights, Redverse, the corridor of Fringe events, Olivia going Akira ... plenty of action and funny and touching moments.

Hopefully the producers will fill in some of the loose ends in a Q&A somewhere. Like the glyphs and magic bullets from last season.

"Peter! What did I say! That is cool!"

The last videotape and Peter's conversation with Walter explained both things. The videotape is of Walter from some point in the past saying that he had sent Peter a letter... and that when he got it he might be confused... but that he would understand now from the videotape.. At the time, Walter assumed he was going to be able to build the machine then and take care of things... instead, he spent 20 years in amber. One assumes that in the pre-reset timeline, the tulip was still mailed but Peter never got it because he too was in amber.

The tulip-mailing works in the same way it worked when "Robocop" did it... "Robocop" mailed the tulip to Walter before his last time jump... so Walter got a tulip in the mail that he didn't know why... Similarly, Walter here mails a letter in the past before being ambered, before the time-jump, and after the time-jump Peter in the past gets that tulip.

The serum was explained by Walter in that conversation after the video... he tells Peter he was already injected but had prepared another serum just in case it was needed.

See my earlier post for a likely plausible explanation: http://www.avsforum.com/t/1063404/fringe-on-fox-hd/6250_50#post_22849870

Walter helping to preserve the past by orchestrating the future is the only way that makes sense for all of the universe's past not to be unraveled. There was even foreshadowing because Walter in-episode stated that he would not "change a thing" with regards to how his life had progressed and the "bonus time" he had with Peter. Resetting the timeline would in fact be Walter's chance to rewrite history... but he presumably chose to accept the bad with the good AND instruct the future more benevolent Observers on how to preserve the past that led to them.

As to "the plan"... We were told two key things about the Observers.. First, that they had ruined their planet and wanted to come back and take "ours"... Second, that the future of humanity had evolved where emotions were sacrificed to achieve intellect... and along with that went morals and other things... so these emotionless Observers thought it perfectly fine to do what they were doing.

So... "the plan"... "Michael" proved to be more powerful and apparently more potentially intelligent than the Observers... and more importantly, he was so because of his emotions being intact... So, the scientists in the semi-future would see him as a better evolution, smarter and stronger... and at the same time he would keep his emotions... so presumably that future race would be more capable of right from wrong AND might be enough smarter so as to save their planet rather than have destroyed it. Or at least the theory I'm going with.

I pretty much agree with HDMe2...I thogut it was a great epssode that not only called back to past episodes but tied up the lose ends. No matter what they did however no one would be 100% satisfied and someone will always be left wanting on some storyline level. With everything this show has put out I think they did a pretty good job tying up what they could with the time they had left....


For the who killed Widmark....It was Olivia ;-) The reason I say this is the prefaced this with the lights of the city "draining" behind her and with the lights blowing out....If you recall the same thing happened when the Observer tried to kill her in the hallway and has happened previously in prior seasons......If you recall to season 1, she needed to "turn off lights" to pass a test...When her powers are "activated" there is a draining of surrounding power sources.....

The "hush" sign IMo was more of be slient and stop "trying" whenever Olivia tried to force her powers she never could get them to work, tis when she "just let them happen" that they were the most powerful. There is power in silence as we saw with the converstation between Michael and Widmark.....

For the reset there was no need to go back to when The Observers 1st entered the universe.The only "point" of siginificane was the invasion point, everything else was observations to get to that point....Without the need for a reset (becasue of the changes that Michael would allow) There was no need to observe nor invade the past.......

As far as Peter goes, remember this is Peternate not Peter...The same things happen without Walter that happened with Walter just slightsly different (the same as when Peter was "erased"........This is just another "branch" per se of the original timeline.....

I liked all of the call backs to prior seasons with the white powder they used..It seeemed they blended a littel bit of everything into that stuff....The "worms" that infeected Charlie, the head exploding (call back from episode called "The Box" season 3), The butterfly hallucinations from Season 2, amongst others)..I also liked how The liquid September made was "amber\yellow"...and of course all of the Green\Red lights that have been used throught the series from the get go.....

I have to say that this episode\season will probably be enjoyed much more as people make the journey back and watch the seasons again in close succession.....This is a show that if you have trouble remembering past episodes ect you will get lost easily...

The final episode recap (ever) of Fringe, courtesy of io9:

"A lot of this final episode requires accepting, once and for all, that the Observers really are the Keystone Kops of evil overlords."

http://io9.com/5977342/so-now-we-know-what-fringe-was-really-about-all-this-time