By Daniel
It seems like forever since Fringe was last on, so in some ways it makes perfect sense that the show's final season opens in 2036, just after the events of "Letters of Transit," but the show toys with us, opening with bucolic scenes of Olivia and Peter in a park with (presumably) Etta, only a few years old. Then Observer start popping into view all over the park, buildings disintegrate — your usual sci-fi calamity, you know.
In the chaos, Peter and Olivia are separated from Etta. Peter wakes from this nightmare, but we're not back in present-day; it's de-ambered 2036 Peter remembering the horrors of the fulfillment of the "They're coming" warning, and we learn that Peter and Olivia were torn apart because they couldn't agree on which was more important: saving the world or finding Etta. Peter and grown-up Etta, Astrid and Walter track down ambered Olivia -- she was carved out of the ambered building by "amber gypsies" and sold through the black market to Markham, who's gone from eccentric to downright squirrelly in the last twenty-one years. He loves Olivia so much, he desperately tells an angry Peter, that he had to buy her -- and then, you know, use her for a coffee table.
So now that we've got the band back together (well, minus Lincoln and Broyles, of course) it's time to overthrow the invading baldies. Unfortunately, Walter gets captured and interrogated by the creepy Widmark, who fries his brain in the process. That's unfortunate, since the de-ambered Olivia has September's titular device, which is supposed to connect the scattered bits and pieces of the resistance plan in Walter's mind -- deliberately fragmented so that the mind-reading Observers can't find them.
Walter's brain is scrambled, at least for now. On the surface, it might provide respite from the misery he's experiencing in this future world, which is largely devoid of music, and people have to eat some sort of substance called "egg sticks." But we close with Walter shuffling around in befuddlement, finding in a car a mix CD that's amusingly not scratched beyond repair and a CD player that works, and he gets to listen to Yazoo's "Only You" while looking at a lone dandelion, stubbornly pushing its way up from the charred apocalyptic hellscape. Whether the dandelion (a bookend to the opening utopia, Etta scattering a dandelion's fluffy seeds) is a symbol of hope or despair may depend entirely on how much lawn care a particular viewer has to do. Thanks to my backyard, I view them as a scourge on all humanity. Much like the Observers. But I'm sure here it's intended as a symbol of hope. And hey, Dawn came back to the party to get Tim, so that song has some kind of magic, right?
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. Each episode brings us closer to the end. Bummer, right? Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.
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