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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Impressionistic scenes of the happy family in a park: Peter (with wedding ring), Olivia and (presumably) Henrietta, who's happily blowing dandelion seeds all over creation. The surface happiness of the scene is undercut by audible-but-incomprehensible whisperings, so it's not much of a surprise when bliss turns to menace (of course, that describes many an opening on this show). In short order, we see a building in the distance vaporize from the skyline, while all over the park Observers are winking into view, making this one of the easier spot-the-Observer episodes in the show's history.
People run in terror as the Observers march implacably through the park, and Peter yells for Henrietta to come to him. She stands still, frozen in fear, while he races to her.
But before he reaches her, there is some sort of jolt and suddenly he's in a makeshift emergency room, Olivia nearby and getting treatment. Peter frantically looks and asks after Henrietta, but no one has seen anything.
Then Peter wakes up, and looks nearby to see his dad sleeping on the couch. Oh, so it was just a dream, and we're back to present day! Well, not exactly. Peter goes into a bedroom, where we see fully grown Henrietta, who sits up when he enters and asks if he's OK. He smiles and says he was just checking up on her, and then he walks out, leaving Henrietta to pull out her bullet necklace and look pensive before laying her head back down on the pillow.
Back in the living room, Walter sits up from the couch, looking concerned about something. Shimmers on the wall prompt him to look outside, and it's just the reflection of the sun off the hood of an abandoned taxi. Whole damn place looks abandoned.
In the kitchen, Astrid is playing some sort of Scrabble-esque game on a holographic display. She hands Peter a mug of tea and "egg sticks," which she found in the fridge and are apparently what they eat here in the year 2036. So this is right after "Letters of Transit," then. Peter strolls out as Astrid starts arguing with the computer over whether "Naughahyde" is a valid word. Astrid argues that it was a "very popular brand of premium pleather" but unless this is one of those Scrabble-esque variation abominations that accept brand names, Naughahyde isn't going to fly.
It's seven in the morning, but Walter still chastises Peter for letting him oversleep, since they should have been on their way to find Olivia already. Peter advances the position that the quest for Olivia will be immeasurably improved if Walter puts some pants on, and Walter snaps that he knows he doesn't have pants on. Anyway, he points to the map with the location -- in Columbus Circle -- where Olivia was calling from right before she disappeared.
Peter points out that phone call was twenty-one years ago: "She could be anywhere by now," he says, which cracked me up beyond measure. I keep picturing Peter pulling out a drafting compass and spreading it as far as it can go to represent the 21-year distance range on a map.
Anyway, apart from being near and dear to several people in the room, Olivia was also sent to retrieve an important piece of equipment that Walter needs to put together the resistance plan he and September worked out and then intentionally scrambled in Walter's mind so the Observers couldn't read it. "He told me that when the time came to implement the plan, I had to retrieve something from Grand Central Station, and that then all would be clear," says Walter, and that's what he'd sent Olivia to get. She was on her way back.
Walter -- still not wearing pants -- chews off a hunk of egg-stick before spitting it out in disgust and lamenting the state of this future, before tottering off and snapping at "Aspen" to come help him, while Peter does his best to assuage Etta's doubt that they're going to find Olivia. "If she's alive, we'll find her," he says. I imagine that makes Etta feel tons better.
Columbus Circle, we find out, is a burned-out shell of its former... glory? I don't know, I've never been there. Suffice it to say, Walter's not pleased by the corrugated steel walls covered in graffiti (including Believer iconography that makes it look like one of those street art things like Andre the Giant Has a Posse.
Peter climbs up to have a look past the barbed wire topping the fence, where he sees the park has been paved for a vast carbon-monoxide production facility. It seems Earth is too oxygen-rich for the Observers, so they're reducing the air quality for their benefit, Etta tells them, which is also reducing the average human life expectancy to forty-five years old.
Walter, growing agitated, says it was right around here where Olivia called from, before her call was abruptly cut off. Astrid points out a nearby building partially encased with amber. As the team makes its way there, Walter explains to Peter that Olivia did have her own amberization device, which they planned to use rather than be captured by the Observers. Walter bitterly tells Peter he'd have given Peter one too if Peter hadn't "abandoned" them. This earns a rebuke from Astrid. "He didn't mean it," Astrid tells Peter. "Sure he didn't," says an unconvinced Peter.
As they get closer to the base of the amber, they notice several human-sized slabs have been cut out of it: fourth-gen amber removal, done recently, figures Etta. So the Observers have her? Nope: Amber gypsies, says Etta. "What on earth are amber gypsies?" says Walter, befuddles. I think you might be able to figure that one out, genius.
Opening credits! Yay-- oh, damn, they're the ultra-depressing prison camp grey credits, featuring such wacky concepts as "community" and "joy" and "individuality." Wait, maybe they mean the show Community! So it's not so bad in 2036.
We're off to a thriving black market, which seems to make Walter anxious, at least until he spots a geisha rocking back and forth in a chair. He flirts with her, at least until we get the sense she's a robot and Peter pulls Walter away so we don't know if he might have actually continued to hit on her.
Etta sends Peter and Astrid off to deal with the amber gypsies since Fringe busts them all the time and so they'll likely recognize her. She also gives them some currency to close the deal with: a handful of walnuts worth $3,000, according to Etta. Wait, WALNUTS? I mean, I guess it's marginally better than the local currency being "future bucks" or something, but damn.
A shifty guy points some sort of device at Peter to ensure he's not a loyalist, then sends the two of them on their way for the "freshest cuts." Once they're gone, he surreptitiously pushes a red button on a device below the counter.
Meanwhile, Walter is playing the doting grandfather, thrilled at how Etta has turned out, even though, as he reminds her, for him it was just a couple of months ago he took her to the pier, where she looked at the horses. "For me, you will forever be a little girl," he says. Hell, most grandfathers are like that anyway. She kisses him on the cheek.
Peter and Astrid are wondering among the ambered people, stood up in their slabs like exhibits in a museum. Olivia's not there, so it's back to the creepy guy. Peter says they're looking for a blonde. "Those are the cuts," says the guy. Time to lay some serious walnuts on the guy! Peter pulls out the walnuts and Buddy starts flipping through a ledger, looking for the woman who had "an electronic device" in her hand. "Late 20s, black leather jacket?" asks the guy. Given Olivia was 30 at the start of this series, let's chalk this up to a commendable skin-care routine. Anyway, she was just sold. Peter asks to who.
Cut to the apartment of one Edward Markham, who has aged terribly, not that he was exactly an oil painting last time we saw him. He's watching Maverick, the old television show with James Garner as opposed to the Mel Gibson movie. It took me a while to realize it was Clint Eastwood in the scene as well, mainly because Eastwood's about 150 years younger there and actually speaking to someone sitting in a chair. Markham's eating, and he splashes some food on the coffee table, which happens to be a slab of amber containing Olivia. Seems a peculiar home-décor choice, but on the other hand, it will probably last forever and didn't require any assembly.
There's a knock on the door. "This apartment has been sanctioned! I've invoked Native Rights Statute 23-D! Go away!" Peter calls Markham's name. Markham doesn't appear to recognize the voice, but starts yelling that Markham's dead. Spinning a tale of a hero's death that involved saving a busload of small children, Markham readies a gun that shoots the ceiling when he's jostled by Peter kicking the door in.
Markham is stunned to see the three of them alive and marvels at the fact they haven't aged. He wants to know how that happened, although you'd think that since he has a non-aging amber-encased Olivia in his living room, who he apparently plans to rescue at some point, that he could hazard a guess. Markham tells an angry Peter that he loved Olivia from the moment she walked into his bookstore. While Peter readies the gurney Markham used to bring her up to his place -- Markham whining that he has gone into substantial debt over this -- Etta crouches by the coffee table for a moment alone with her mother.
Back at the black market, the amber impresario has a little machine playing a hologram of Peter and Astrid looking among the frozen people and is on the phone with what sounds like an Observer, explaining he's got some Level 4 information, and he wants "triple vouchers" for his loyalty. "Proceed," is the response.
Back at Markham's place, Peter, Astrid and Etta have loaded Olivia into the back of the Mystery Machine, but Walter's nowhere to be found. Etta says she'll go back for him, and it turns out Walter has been unable to tear himself away from Markham's treasure trove of literature and is largely ignoring Markham's annoyance at having lost Olivia. Walter is babbling about how he once -- emphasis on "once" -- tried writing science fiction, when Markham gasps because there's suddenly an Observer in the doorway, pointing a gun at Walter. "Resistance is futile," he says -- heh -- and then Etta calmly says she feels like she's heard that somewhere before, right before she shoots him with the special bullets that Observers can't catch. "Walter, run!" she yells, and then another Observer zaps into existence right there and blasts Olivia with his weapon, sending her flying against the hallway wall.
The Observer is briefly distracted by Markham cowering under his bed, and then is shot by Etta from her seated position on the floor. She seems to have recovered nicely.
Downstairs, Peter's alarmed by the sound of sirens, and when Etta joins him, she's surprised that Walter isn't there already. But with a jeep full of loyalists pulling up and shooting at them, the three of them don't have much choice but to haul ass out of there. "What are we going to do about Walter?" asks Astrid, and Etta and Peter just look at each other.
Walter's still stumbling through the apartment, when he finds himself surrounded by loyalists, pointing their guns at him. He puts his hands up. Glad you stayed behind for that Isaac Asimov paperback now?
After a commercial break, the remaining trio have made it back to home base and Etta and Peter are doing that complicated two-person thing to send Olivia shooting out of the amber, and she goes flying against the wall, and you'd think by this point they'd think of maybe PADDING the spot where the ambered person is going to be thrown to, or at least find a spot with fewer protrusions like the coat hooks on that wall, like Olivia's lucky she wasn't instantly lobotomized.
Peter rushes to her side and to give her the special de-amberization injection of whatever and to tell her she's in the year 2036, and she says she ambered herself. "We all did," says Peter. Then Olivia spots Etta standing behind Peter. She looks back at Peter. "I found her," says Peter, before correcting that to the more accurate "More to the point, she found us."
Peter calls Etta (sweetly calling her "kiddo" to come over to meet her mom), and Etta comes over to crouch in front of Olivia. The two of them stare at each other, eyes wet. "You're beautiful," whispers Olivia. Good genes, damn. "So are you," says Etta, crying. Olivia says the last time she saw Etta, she was three years old. "All this time, I thought it was four," says Etta. Olivia, hugging her daughter for the first time in more than 21 years, says, "No, it was three years, one month, five days."
Olivia whispers that there was not one moment that she didn't think about Etta. Then, looking around, Olivia asks where Walter is. So Peter gets her to a chair and explains that Walter was captured this morning by the Observers. He asks about the device that she was supposed to bring back to Walter to help him retrieve his plan. She's got it, a metal device with three curved arms. She doesn't know what it's supposed to do, though. She asks where the Observers took Walter. "We're working on that," says Peter, by which he means "We have no earthly idea."
Walter is handcuffed to a chair in one of those dank poorly lit rooms with mysterious stains on the wall that this show loves so much. The door opens, and Widmark comes in. "We have been looking for you and your friends. I am very interested in you. I don't know why you're alive," he says, as he hangs up his coat and hat on the hook on the door.
He approaches Walter, and we can suddenly hear a choir singing. "You're trying to think of music. You miss music," says Widmark. "There's not a lot of it here," says Walter. Widmark says they tolerate music, but he doesn't understand its rhythms, tones and harmonic vibrations. Walter tells Lester No-Bangs here that it amazes him: "Music helps you shift perspective, to see things differently if you need to," he says. I thought that's what the drugs were for!
Like hope? asks Widmark. Yes, very much like that, says Walter. "But there is no hope for you. Nothing grows from scorched earth," says Widmark. He finally gets his own chair and puts it down in front of Walter. "You seem much more interesting as a human being than as a vegetable," he says, with just the right amount of threat. "But, quite frankly, all things being equal, I don't mind which one you end up. The choice is yours."
Over to the Bronx, where Etta has brought the team to a hideout that doesn't look like much on the outside (which I guess is the point) but houses several rooms. No sign of Simon Foster, but some dude named Anil breaks the news to Etta that the corpse right there is a guy named Elias, who was shot this afternoon coming out of the Square. After a respectful slug from a bottle of some sort of rotgut, Etta says she needs their help.
Outside, Peter and Olivia decide to have an important heart-to-heart chat, with the huge Observer sign capping a building in the distant skyline confirming for Olivia that they didn't save the world. "Not even by half. She's still trying, though," says Peter. Soon we learn that Olivia eventually left Boston for New York to try to help fight the Observers while Peter "didn't have the will to give up searching for this perfect little soul that we made." I presume the discussion of these plans twenty-one years ago were a little more heated, but the separation and the distance (not to mention the reunion with their grown, kick-ass Observer-battling daughter) has probably taken the fight out of those long-ago arguments. Olivia says their grief made them incapable of being what the other one needed, and that's it. Peter's decision was made by the guilt haunting him over failing his daughter in the moment she needed him most. "And I wanted more than anything for that not to be true," he says, and I can sympathize with his pain. Fortunately, I have managed to stave off all Observer-invasion-related separations with my own daughter. "And in the state of mind that I was in, that meant at all costs, including us," he finishes, looking at Olivia, his eyes red.
They're interrupted by Henrietta -- damn, can't parents get a moment's peace? -- who pops outside to tell them to come in. Young lady, I know it's the year 2036, but I'm sure your parents raised you to say "please," even in just the three years you had with them!
Inside, Etta introduces them to Anil, who says it's an honor to meet them. Sure, glad to add a few time-displaced Fringe agents ready to amber themselves at a moment's notice for the two decades!
He identifies the gadget Olivia retrieved for Walter as a "transilience thought unifier, model eleven," which retrieves specifically marked thoughts in your mind and unifying them, keeping them hidden from prying eyes until you want to access them. "But it doesn't seem to work any longer," he says. Typical shoddy workmanship, these days. When I was kid, thought unifiers lasted forever. "It has to be the plan. It was fragmented and hidden on Walter's hard drive by September," says Peter.
Speaking of Walter, Astrid reports that they've found him, and takes them to the computer monitors, where they've found security camera footage from across the street where Walter was taken. We see him being escorted into a loyalist vehicle, and Anil says they'll try to track him with traffic cameras. Peter says the thought unifier is crucial to Walter's plan -- in which case he should stop waving it around like he's hailing a cab with it -- but it's conceivable he could give them that information. In other words, Peter, who just awoke from the amber to a new world of threat and technology, has decided that the whole point of this device that they just discovered today might not actually do the one thing that it's supposed to do. One of the resistance dudes says Walter might be spilling even more than that: "Does he know you're a Fringe agent?" he asks Etta.
Over to the interrogation, where Windmark, judging from Walter's spasming face, is picking Walter's brain, looking to find out who freed him and his team from the amber, and why.
Then, suddenly, he stops, surprised: "You're partitioned. Someone gave you information out of sequence. They did this on purpose -- to protect something," he says. The music swells, and Walter starts to shake even more violently, moaning and grunting in pain. A close-up of his eye makes me wince when a blood vessel bursts, coloring the sclera red.
After the commercial break -- with the dried brown stain on a nearby column a little less mysterious and a little more sinister now -- Windmark is turning up the heat on Walter, who's looking increasingly frantic. Windmark wants to know who taught him to fragment his thoughts: "Was it an Observer, as you call us, who partitioned you? No one else would know how to do that," he says. He orders Walter to put the ideas together. Walter resists -- he's turning purple and bleeding profusely from the nose with the effort -- and Windmark notes Walter's fighting much more than he would have thought possible, but Windmark is still able to piece together, from the whispers that we can hear, that it's a plan, possibly to defeat them.
"Walter Bishop, if only I had a unifier, I could unify these thoughts. I could go through the trouble to get one, but it would take weeks to break the biology key specific to your encryption," he says. I guess that's the Observer equivalent of when Briscoe and Logan explain to someone that they can get a warrant but that would take all day, so why not help them out?
Walter chuckles despite himself, but then Windmark leans in close, and laughing time is over! "That doesn't mean I will not get the information out. It will make it harder to get to it, but it will come out," he snarls. Walter's gripped in mental anguish again, and then we see flashes of a young Etta playing, blowing bubbles.
It's safe to say this isn't exactly what Windmark was expecting, and he presses Walter further, asking him who this little blonde girl is and how she could be helping them. But Walter passes out, spent.
Over at the resistance base, proud parents Peter and Olivia watch as Etta works the computer monitors, tracking Walter. "She's amazing, Peter. There's just so many things that I want to tell her and so many things that I want to ask her," says Olivia. God, she's going to go on Facebook and offhandedly brag about her kid in every status update, isn't she? Peter says it's like living a beautiful dream inside of a horrible nightmare, like LET OLIVIA HAVE A MOMENT BEFORE YOU CRAP ALL OVER IT PETER GOD.
Then Etta's found Walter, being taken into the Nepean building. "Anyone ever gotten in there?" asks Peter. Anil says no, but... and then he hesitates before saying they've been working on some tech. The other downer resistance guy, Klopinski, warns that it's not perfected yet. "It's tech which will make our bodies appear dead, impossible for the baldies to detect any life force," says Anil. Whoa whoa whoa -- "baldies"? There's no need for slurs.
An angry Klopinski says they've been saving it, because once they use it, then the Observers know they have it. "We could kill hundreds of them with this tactic. We could get in anywhere, including their headquarters. Why save one man with this?" he asks. Olivia's all, "Uh, the future?" and I imagine Klopinski's completely impressed that Olivia's already acting like she owns the place. Etta concurs with her mom, saying she believes that Walter's worth rescuing for his plan to defeat the Observers. Anil decides that saving the world is more important than killing their enemies.
An overhead shot shows us Central Park is now a utilitarian grey slab of concrete and machinery, before taking us to the Nepean building, where Etta pulls up in the van and tells the guard that Windmark wanted the bodies of these resistance fighters brought in. They open up the back of the van to unload the corpses, and the grim duty doesn't stop the guard from flirting with Etta: "I was wondering where you've been. It's always brighter when you're here." Etta smiles thinly at him.
Two bodies in bags are removed from the van, and the doors close and then Astrid immediately pops out from her hiding spot in the back of the van, like MAYBE WAIT UNTIL YOU'RE SOMEWHERE WHERE GUARDS AREN'T, like what exactly is Astrid planning to do right this very second? Outside, the guards unzip the first body bag. It contains Elias, and he's scanned. Then the second bag is unzipped. It contains Peter. This seems to be treated as a cliffhanger to go to commercial on, despite the fact we know he's not dead.
After the break, the guards scan Peter and are satisfied he's not a Trojan horse or anything, and the guard continues to hit on Etta, pointing out that he's been promoted to Level 6, and then he confides in her that he's got something to tell her.
He shows her a picture on a Future iPad thing of Agent Foster (also known as Henry Ian Cusick) and explains he was found in amber: "Your superior was a double agent. He was working with the resistance. He was with someone named William Bell," says the guard. Etta does her best to look the right amount of surprised/concerned, and asks what they did with him, and the guard says "That's above my pay grade" which is kinda funny since he just bragged for fifteen seconds about being bumped up to Level Six. He, glancing at a security camera, suggests asking Windmark herself, since he'll probably want to talk to her about it anyway.
Windmark, of course, is currently preoccupied with turning Walter's brain into applesauce. "These physics in your mind, they are also above your comprehension," says Windmark to a whimpering Walter. Windmark asks what the stones are for, and again what their plan is to defeat the Observers. Walter can barely speak. "Let down the walls. I am your ally." Aw, Windmark is the Ronald Reagan to Walter's Russian brain!
Etta and the friendly guard wheel the gurneys into Corpse Disposal Central, I guess, and the guard proceeds to loot Elias's watch. He's about to remove Peter's boots when Etta shoots him (giving him a "hey" to get his attention so he KNOWS she's about to shoot him, which is both reckless and bad-ass). She gives Peter an injection to wake him up, and he is instantly rarin' to go, and asks what happened to the guard. "Occupational hazard," says Etta, and a prouder moment Peter has likely never had. I mean, he never got to see her graduate from what passes for school in this dystopia, so shooting a loyalist will have to do.
Etta and Peter sneak down some corridors that for some reason don't have security cameras and have an awful lot of luck just in terms of not running into anyone, and then let Olivia in via a side door or back door. (Also no security camera, I guess, despite them having them at the front where they have armed guards.) They find the room with the central carbon monoxide generator, which extends several stories up. Peter explains to a surprised Olivia about the permanent one being built in Central Park, and then sets about cutting wires until the unit malfunctions.
Meanwhile, Windmark is telling a mostly fried Walter that they are done. "I must say, your brain will make an excellent specimen," he says. Really? It hardly seems to be in mint condition anymore. Suddenly there's the sound of the air conditioning shutting off and an alarm repeating "air control malfunction," and a concerned Windmark dashes out of the room. Peter and Etta than shoot off the lock on the other door -- having had another extraordinary run of luck in not seeing any of the hundreds of loyalists and Observers that must be there -- and work to free Walter, setting aside their shock at his condition.
Then they join up again with Olivia in the hallway -- she's lookout, presumably -- and then FINALLY some people get shot as the gang make their way out of the building, Walter being carried by Etta and Peter. Loyalists troops are marching through the corridors now, but they make their way outside to the van where Astrid's waiting for them. Olivia shoots a couple more loyalists, and they're off, Astrid horrified at the shape Walter is in. She's able to crack a smile, though, when Walter comes to and asks "Afro" if she's got any music.
Back at the building, Windmark is watching a holographic projection of the capers of the Fringe crew. So... there is some sort of monitoring, just nobody pays attention to it until after something happens? At any rate, he's deduced that the blonde woman is the little girl from Walter's brain.
Back at Etta's apartment, a tearful Walter hugs Olivia. He's very happy she's alive, which is nice. And then it's time to get down to business: Peter shows him the thought-unifier, which he says is "long since dead." So they're surprised when Walter picks it up and it hums to life. "He must have designed it specifically for you," says Peter. To be fair, it's not like Peter has any experience with crazy gadgets designed specifically for one person, right? Oh, wait, maybe this Peter actually doesn't. I can't keep track any more.
But Walter's befuddled by it, and asks what it's used for. Olivia says it's meant to collect and make sense of the scrambled plan that September put in his head, but Walter makes them even more concerned when he asks, "What plan?"
thing we know, Walter's got the thing strapped to his head and Astrid's showing him the severed, amberized hand of William Bell, which Walter (horrified at the hand's presence) said was needed so they can access one of Bell's storage facilities, but Walter doesn't remember any of this. "I've failed myself, and I've failed the world. What is wrong with me, what has happened to me!" wails an angry Walter. He yanks the thing off his head and stomps off.
Olivia says it's like there's nothing left to unify, all the parts are gone. Or they took them, suggests Astrid. Etta's figured out what's really happened to Poppy Bishop: "It's more likely they were destroyed when he was fighting it," she says. Olivia asks if he'll ever heal. "No. The plan is gone," says Etta, sadly.
Later, Walter wakes from a fitful sleep, surprised to see reflective flashes on the wall of the apartment. Thank god he at least puts on a bathrobe before he goes wandering around outside. Etta lives in an area of town that would make an excellent level in a near-future first-person shooter. It appears to be early morning, and the reflections are coming off some sort of strange art piece of CDs hanging from strings outside. They're all cracked and broken, but a nearby satchel yields a whole one -- with Trip Mix 6 written in Sharpie on it -- and is ludicrously fortunate to find a working CD player with power in a bombed-out car. He puts the CD in, and gets, as his reward, Yazoo's "Only You."
He closes his eyes and listens. Squinting into the morning sun, he spots a dandelion, alone in the scorched earth, and then slowly starts to cry in the kind of work from John Noble that Fringe viewers have never taken for granted and will miss when this show ends its run.
He's crying for his inaccessible brain, and for the bleakness of this future. But I'll fight anyone who thinks he's anything but happy to hear Yazoo, even if it's not his typical music. And given Windmark's promise that nothing grows from scorched earth -- and the callback to Etta's dandelion at the beginning of the episode -- there's no way that noxious yellow weed represents anything but hope.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. He shudders to think what Season 49 of The Simpons must be like in 2036. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.