By Daniel
As it was clear last week, Peter and Olivia are responding to Etta's death in different ways: Olivia with confusion and despair -- she wonders why they would be given Etta back only to have her taken away once more -- and Peter with simmering frustration and rage that focuses into the Resistance. The Resistance have discovered the Observers are shipping -- from the future -- in crates of equipment needed for their atmosphere-clogging project. The Resistance has captured an Observer as well as a little time-travel control box thingy, necessary to open up the inter-time window. So the plan, which Walter works up as only he can, is to use anti-matter to create a black hole that will screw up the portal and the Observers' work.
Peter interrogates the Observer to try to determine how to put together the time-travel control box thingy. He's overconfident in his ability to outsmart the Observer, but doesn't know it at first. The raid works well -- Olivia's grief not diminishing her own badassness, thank god -- and the Resistance successfully collapses the delivery window, only to find it reopening moments later. The whole plan amounted to nothing. The captured Observer taunts Peter for projecting his own expectations onto him, for believing what he wanted to believe, for not realizing that just because Peter played a lot of Texas Hold 'Em, it doesn't mean he can use those tells to figure out what an Observer's thinking. And what is the Observer thinking? Well, what do you think of an ant colony? "You think the black over you is dark skies, but it is really our shoe," says the Observer, but what really sets Peter off is the Observer's observation that the life and Etta means exactly zilch: "She was here. Now she is simply not here."
Peter kills the Observer, removing some sort of neural implant and -- in a harrowing dichotomy, Peter inserts it into his own neck, just as Olivia is watching an old video of young Etta and fearing for the future of what's left for her family. She calls Peter -- presumably soon to be humming with the knowledge and abilities of the Observer, with which he earlier said he could accomplish so much more than any Observer itself -- to tell him to come back to her. I believe the show's creators have said the series will finish on a hopeful note, but when this episode ends, it's clear there's some nasty business to work through first.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. If he had the Observers' abilities, he could watch ten times the amount of television they ever could. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.