Bridge to Nowhere: Quick Thoughts on the Third Season Finale of Fringe

It's no secret that I love Fringe. I've written numerous features and posts celebrating the way in which it blends science fiction with nuanced emotional drama, positioning the fractured characters of the Bishops and Olivia Dunham as a makeshift family studying the mysteries of the universe... and the human heart.

Which might be why I was so monumentally disappointed with the Season Three finale ("The Day We Died"), which aired on Friday evening. After a season that was so tremendously emotional, which delivered a series of staggering performances from John Noble, Anna Torv, and Joshua Jackson in two separate, parallel universes, my expectations were extremely high indeed. But what I found with the future-set finale was that I didn't care about "these" versions of Olivia, Walter, and Peter and that the drama here felt entirely manufactured and without emotional weight, destroying the intense momentum established within the last few episodes.

It was clear from the start that the future timeline of 2016 Fringe was a mere detour on the road to the season finale (I had anticipated the Days of Future Past-style storyline earlier in the week), which erased all sense of narrative stakes from the story unfolding here: End of Dayers, the "death" of Olivia Dunham, the grief of Peter Bishop, all of it would be wiped clean before the final credits rolled.

And it's true: they were. While I didn't anticipate that Peter himself would be erased from the timeline (more on that in a second), the future-set storyline attempted to set up some tantalizing storylines (just what happened to Broyles' eye? Ella is now a Fringe agent! Astrid has a kick-ass new hairstyle), but it paled in comparison to the depth and scope of Over There's characters, which we had a real sense of from the beginning. In the hands of Noble and Co., those performances were incredibly nuanced, using more than wigs or funny-colored contact lenses to give us a sense of the underlying differences between the versions of these now-familiar characters.

In the future, there was a lot of shorthand going on: things that we weren't privy to happened off-screen in between the last episode and the 15 years that have gone by. But whereas the subtle differences within the characters was explored organically Over There, in the future world of Fringe, we're not given much depth, but rather just a hell of a lot of exposition. (Heck, Walter Bishop was more or less the Exposition Fairy throughout this episode.) Olivia and Peter are married; Olivia wants a kid but is unsure (her internal dilemma summed up by a refrigerator drawing of an unknown and unseen child neighbor) of whether or not they should, given the crazy world they live in; Ella has grown up and followed her aunt into the Fringe Division; Walternate somehow crossed over from his world before his universe was wiped out by Peter Bishop; and Walter is in jail, imprisoned for his vast crimes against humanity. (Interestingly, Astrid still doesn't have much of a storyline, even 15 years down the line.)

The Walter bits got under my skin in a major way. We saw in the pilot episode, clearly intended to be referenced here, what the effects were of his incarceration at St. Clare's. But here, there's no real sense of what the difference was between those two imprisonments or how his mental state further deteriorated. Or if it did. If you're going to attempt to come full circle and use that scene in St. Clare's as a callback of sorts, it needs to pay off better than it did here.

(Broyles' bionic eye grated in a way I didn't expect. Surely, if William Bell could create a bionic arm for Nina that looked extremely real, surely way in the future, a bionic eye could match Broyles' natural eye color? As for Nina, she got reduced to being a funeral guest in the future. A major missed opportunity for story there.)

We're shown scenes that are clearly meant to tug at the audience's heartstrings--Peter brings Walter licorice and calls him dad, Walter embraces Olivia as he might a daughter, Olivia is shot to death before our eyes--but these moments don't carry much weight because (A) the Peter/Walter dynamic has already played out far more convincingly within the main narrative where that same moment ("dad") had a lot more impact than it did here and (B) because these characters and situations would likely not exist by the time the final credits rolled... as Fringe would not suddenly jump ahead 15 years within its main narrative. (Sorry, but even for a show as unpredictable as this one, aging up the actors is just not going to happen on a weekly basis.)

I thought it was interesting that the producers would opt for a sort of Days of Future Past storyline here in order to undo Peter's decision at the end of the last episode by sending Peter's consciousness to inhabit his future self and see the error of his ways. But I also think that Joel Wyman and Jeff Pinkner missed a trick here by having Peter's subconscious subsume his "younger" self. Other than a throwaway line of dialogue from Ella about Peter rambling about the machine, it was 2026's Peter Bishop who was running things, rather than vice-versa.

While it meant that Peter didn't have to play catch-up within this new "reality," it also meant that the narrative stakes were eliminated for him as well. No longer on a mission, having conveniently "forgotten" that he had come forward in time, it was the status quo for Peter Bishop, able to remember what he cooked for Olivia for breakfast and containing the sum of his experiences from the last 15 years. He wasn't a fish-out-of-water, he wasn't his younger self traveling to the future; he was just a middle-aged guy that looked like our Peter Bishop who had inexplicably become a government agent and who wore a wedding band.

So much of Season Three has focused on the familial tensions between Peter and Walter and the romantic ones between Peter and Olivia, so it suddenly felt incredibly trite to see them as a married couple for a little bit here, albeit a marriage that comes to an end with Olivia's sudden (and very predictable) death. Given how much I love the character, I was shocked how little I cared about her demise here, as I knew instantly that it wouldn't "stick" and that the producers would not be getting rid of Torv (or of Jackson) any time soon.

The lack of real emotion carried through to Peter's eulogy at Olivia's watery funeral ceremony, where the cameras pulled back from Peter's speech to offer a musical montage set to Michael Giacchino's score. Lost pulled this trick before (we don't need to hear the words to get the sense of the scene and its tone), but that device only works when there is genuine emotion underneath and I didn't feel that for a second here. Rather, it felt lazy, a shorthand way of getting around having to write the eulogy without it seeming hokey or cliche.

The episode got bogged down first in a dull case of the week (End of Dayers, who weren't given any real development, and despite using Brad Dourif as their putative leader, he was an incredibly flat character) and then in a discussion of paradox, explained rather clunkily by Noble's Walter, that ends up bogging down science fiction-based time-travel dramas. The machine wasn't created by the First People but by Walter himself, sent back to prehistoric times by a wormhole that was created by the machine that they assembled. The First People were, in fact, our Fringe team: Walter, Ella, and possibly Astrid, traveling through the wormhole to hide the pieces of the machine so that they could one day assemble it and Peter could one day use it. But while Walter couldn't not build the machine (it had already been built), Peter could change his decision within the machine. He could opt to create, rather than destroy, to save, rather than damn.

And so he does, his subconscious drifting back to his body in 2011, encased within the machine, which he uses to create a bridge between the two universes, bringing Walter and Olivia face-to-face with Walternate and Fauxlivia, two halves of the same people mirroring one another within Liberty Island, two universes folding over each other at this point in time and space.

And then just when Peter declares that both sides will have to work together, to coexist (to live together or die alone, to quote another show) and that he had created in this space a bridge between the two worlds, he blinks out of existence and we're told by the Observers that, having served his purpose, Peter Bishop never existed.

It's this final moment that gives the episode some heft, a brain puzzle of a reveal that changes the status quo of the show because it means that everything has changed as a result of Peter not existing. We've still gotten to this point--to the two Walters and Olivias staring across a room at each other--but the events that lead them here have been different. Walter had to have crossed Over There but not to save his son, because he NEVER had a son, never suffered the loss of a child, never lost his mind or his moral compass because he acted out of love. Was Walter ever in St Clare's? Was his mind ever compromised? Did Olivia ever step outside the armor she'd constructed for herself? Did they skate out of some tough cases because Peter "knew a guy" that could help them? (Nope.) Did she ever love? Did Walter ever lose his wife, his family?

Peter's disappearance from reality not only changes the status quo of the two universes, but it closes the door to the 2026 divergent reality we saw in "The Day We Died." Because Peter never existed, that world never existed because Walter and Walternate never fought over a stolen son; Olivia never married Peter; Olivia never died. There's a sense of course-correction here, of the facts being true but in slightly different ways, of Walter and Olivia's lives changing as a result of the absence of Peter Bishop from them. Which is definitely interesting and thought-provoking. I just wish we could have gotten to that moment without the hokum and water-treading of the majority of this installment.

I'm still a Fringe fan and I'm sticking with the show when it returns in the fall, but it doesn't diminish the head-scratching, disappointing qualities of the season finale... and of my frustration that a show that has so consistently gotten it right lately had gotten it so terribly wrong.

What did you make of the season finale? Did you love it or hate it or did you fall somewhere in between? Agree with my assessment or disagree. Head to the comments section to discuss "The Day We Died."

Season Four of Fringe will begin this fall on FOX.