Finale!

This week, our assignment was to watch the Season Finale, “There’s More Than One Of Everything” from Season One of Fringe. (You can read the Television Without Pity Recap here, while the AV Club has their recap of the episode here. The post dedicated to the Pilot episode is here and the subsequent episode posts are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

As always, here are the ground rules: nothing that we have seen so far is considered a spoiler, anything that we have not yet seen should be considered a spoiler. Crazy nutbar speculation is *NOT* a spoiler, but confirming or denying said confirmation would be.

Here’s my idea for spoilers: please rot13 them. That’s a simple encryption that will allow the folks who want to avoid spoilers to avoid them and allow the people who want to argue them to argue them. We good? We good! Everybody who has seen the finale, see you after the cut!

Let me just reiterate: “There’s more than one of everything” is an awesome title.

The finale’s open takes us to the ER. Doctors running around asking plausible questions and one of the gossipy types pulls back the blanket to show us a robotic arm (with a hole in it). Must be Nina. Yep.

Dunham and Francis are looking at the security footage and there are three dudes, one in bandages, two in skimasks. They do the “can you enhance that?” thing to the tech and the tech is all “that never occurred to me” and they enhance it and, yep, the guy in bandages is Mr. Jones. If you are inclined to complain about why there were only four minutes of blank tape rather than these guys blanking out all of it, you now know your answer. Mr. Jones *WANTED* Fringe Division to know about this stuff… which means that Fringe Division, instead of asking *WHY* (let alone *WHETHER*) Mr. Jones is leading them down the primrose path, they’re demanding good jogging shoes. As well as William Bell being brought in for questioning. Let’s start jumping through Mr. Jones’s hoops!

Back at the lab, folks are looking for Walter. Ah, at least SOMEONE is not doing the whole “Let’s do what Mr. Jones is telling us to do” thing. Of course, it’s the crazy guy. Olivia has the wherewithal to wonder if she’s the one who made Walter runnoft which is, of course, dismissed by everyone there.

Cut to Walter and HOLY CRAP IT’S THE OBSERVER in a cemetery (I want to say that this is the same cemetery where the torpedo thingy from The Arrival was hidden… right? Back me up) and we cut back to Nina who is awake and her arm is going haywire… she confirms that it was Mr. Jones and, when Broyles asks “what did Mr. Jones want”, Nina says that she wants to talk to Olivia. Huh. This was a shining opportunity for Broyles and Nina to withhold information.

Mr. Jones, heavily bandaged, gets out of a van and his team starts setting up equipment in the middle of the street. I wonder: is this something that really would go as unnoticed as it seems to be unnoticed here? Eh, it’s New York City. They probably see wacky stuff on the streets every day. “I thought it was some goth subculture thing. They did vampires last year, I figured Mummies were in.”

Where was I? Anyway. They’re doing stuff in the middle of the street.

Anyway, Olivia shows up at the hospital and Nina is giving the lowdown on Mr. Jones. A former (disgruntled?) employee who knows how Massive Dynamic works and he’s now trying to get to William Bell. Olivia plays the FBI card: hey, we only want to talk to him so we can put him in protective custody. Like that guy who was killed by Mitchell with the giant cold cell? They don’t discuss that. In any case, Nina makes a promise: you stop Mr. Jones, I’ll give you an interview with Mr. Bell. First we need to hammer out what Mr. Jones wanted from Nina, though… and it turns out that Bell hid a power cell in Nina’s fake arm. Now, I know that security through obscurity works quite well but ONLY AS LONG AS NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT IT. Might as well be a screen door after that. Hide it in Bell’s office. Put it in a safety deposit box! Wait, never mind.

Mr. Jones puts the power cell in the machine in the middle of the street and does some calibrations and we see a wacky light show up, we see a truck through the light (but not behind it, if you know what I mean) and the truck drives *THROUGH* the curtain… but the machine gives out 9/10ths of the way through and cuts out. The truck is missing its back wheels… the truck does the dragging and spark-throwing thing with which we are all familiar and stops mere feet from Mr. Jones. He didn’t move. He didn’t try to get out of the way. Why? Because he’s a scientist. He even figures out that the reason it didn’t work was that he had the wrong co-ordinates. Dang, he’s good. Of course, had he the right co-ordinates, the truck would have kept going and hit him. So he’s either not *THAT* good or he’s, like, so seriously good that our minds can’t comprehend him. The latter? Yeah, let’s go with the latter.

Speaking of scientists, Walter and HOLY CRAP IT’S THE OBSERVER are talking on the beach and the Observer gives Walter a coin. Walter asks “where did you get this?” like he’d been looking for it since before being thrown in the asylum and the Observer tells him “There’s more than one of everything.”

Whoa.

The Observer goes on to say “I’ve said too much, I’m not supposed to get involved, IT’S BEHIND THE BASEBOARDS! I have to go.” Prior to that, though, he asks “Do you remember this house?” and we turn to see a boarded-up beach house. Walter says he does but he doesn’t remember why he’s here. The Observer shrugs that off.

We’re back in the lab and Nina is up and running again and she and Broyles ask Astrid if Walter had been acting strangely. As if they hadn’t been watching the show for the last year. Astrid points out that Walter had been acting within acceptable tolerances and they both look at each other and call in their special Walter-finding teams.

We jump to Charlie and Olivia interviewing the people who you’d think would be less jaded about trucks appearing out of thin air on a collision course with mummies doing science experiments. That’s New York for you. They probably figure it’s an episode of Law and Order or something.

The Walter-team has already found Walter at a particular train stop and Peter knows exactly where it is. It’s the beach house. Instead of sending Special Walter Apprehension Team, they’re sending the Parental Environment Transmission Extraction Resource. (That paragraph took far, far too long to write.)

Charlie explains that the VIN of the truck doesn’t exist in the database. Not that I’d necessarily expect it to… but is it so unthinkable that it could be tied to a 1988 Geo Metro that got junked in Indiana back in 1995 after what would have been a fender bender in, say, a Civic? Ah, fair enough. Though of all the times to say “wait, let’s not have them run down a rabbit trail!”, why choose this one?

Peter shows up at the beach house and finds Walter flipping the coin and frustratedly not remembering what he was supposed to remember.

Back to Olivia and Nina. Olivia is trying to stare Nina down and Nina is having none of that. You know, I begin to wonder if Nina and I didn’t get off on the wrong foot. Mr. Jones needed a gun, after all, to handle her. Without the gun, one wonders: Would Nina have come out ahead in the exchange? We’ve had our own Mrs. Jones all along and we didn’t like her for what reason? Because she had her own interests? Because she withheld information from Olivia (and, by extension, us)? I’m beginning to wonder if we don’t have ourselves a legit badass over here that we’ve been overlooking because she helped us when we asked her to, as opposed to Mr. Jones who only helped us against our will. Anyway, Nina and Olivia hammer out that the truck isn’t from this universe and, well, if you want to talk to William Bell, he’s not here, dude.

Mr. Jones and his van pull up to a soccer game (has anything good ever happened at a soccer game on this show? Is there a parent on the writing team out there who resents soccer?).

So Broyles and Olivia try to explain the alternate universe thing to Charlie who, apparently, is the guy on the show whose gotten the most face time who could reasonably be expected to be the dumb guy who needs “alternate universes” explained at length to him. Poor Charlie. He deserves better. Anyway, he does a good job pretending like this is the weirdest thing he’s been asked to swallow this season.

Walter and Peter talk about how Walter can’t remember what he needs to remember so Peter tries to distract Walter with some childhood memories which, of course, make Walter remember…

Cut to Charlie on the soccer field interviewing people and then going on to not understand how a person can be cut in half within, what? a couple of hours of seeing a truck that had been cut in half? Charlie: Mr. Jones is cutting things in half. You don’t need to wrap your head around more than that.

Olivia is in her office asking for files that talk about *ANYTHING* weird and making a map of the wacky assorted events and seeing if there is, in fact, a pattern. She leaps out of her office just so we can cut to Walter opening a chest and finding another coin (there’s more than one of everything) and takes out the box the coin was sitting on just in time for us to cut back to Nina explaining to Olivia, as to a slow child, that Massive Dynamic was not able to find a pattern to the pattern and Olivia points out that if you look at the two areas where Mr. Jones did his thing, the events radiate out from them. You’d think that that’s something that Massive Dynamic would have been able to catch.

Anyway, we cut back to Walter and Peter discussing the contents of the box and it looks like a flask, if you ask me, and Walter explains how much acid he used to do with William Bell. Oh, that Walter! He talks about how they did so much they could see an alternate reality that they became certain was real… and, eventually, the acid wasn’t enough. They had to figure out how to get there without acid (it was no longer the 60’s, you see. It wasn’t even the 70’s anymore.) and so Walter started talking about how Bell used Cortexiphan and how, at the same time, Walter lost something that was very precious to him and so he went over to the other side to get it back. Peter asked if it is just as simple as opening a hole and Walter (and the editors do a great job jumping back and forth for this part) and Nina explain how you first have to find the right spot with presumably, the right co-ordinates. The two places that Mr. Jones visited? Not-quite-soft-enough spots… Walter explains that what he has now is “a plug”. It’s to plug a hole between the two universes and it needs to be used at the right place which, when we cut back to the office, we find out is at the same place where Walter and Peter are running now. It’s at a lake upstate. Reiden Lake.

Of course, the next cut is to Mr. Jones pulling up to Reiden Lake in a van… so we can then cut to Walter and Peter driving and talking about how they have to stop Mr. Jones and how Walter is friends with the Observer and, yes, maybe he did attack Peter but it’s not like he actually *HURT* him and anyway they’re at Reiden Lake and Walter starts talking slowly to Peter about how he liked coins when he was young and he gives Peter the coin (or one of them) and Peter, of course, remembers nothing about it AH THEY’RE BEING JERKED FROM THE CAR oh, wait, it’s the FBI. (In an alternate universe, it was Mr. Jones’s dudes… that would have been a good episode too.) So our crack team is together again. Lights in the woods and we’re now running toward Mr. Jones and his team and people are getting shot and Peter grabs the plug and Olivia shoots Mr. Jones a couple of times and Mr. Jones explains that the teleporter changed him (which was AWESOME) and now bullets just go right through him and he steps into the shimmering curtain of light just to have Peter pull the plug and, ew, Mr. Jones gets cut in half.

We just need Charlie there to say “but how did this happen?”

Back to the office where Olivia is putting all of the no-longer-needed files away and Broyles comes in to make the kind of small talk you make before you give someone news that they’re really not going to like before he tells Olivia to stop investigating William Bell.

Cut to the lab where Astrid and Peter are talking about how Walter wandered off again BUT! He left a note this time! Which impresses everybody enough that they make jokes about it rather than worry about whether he’s getting another universe plug to stop another universe hole. Cut to Walter in the cemetery, crying, looking at a gravestone that says Peter Bishop. The kid was 7. He puts the coin on the tombstone.

Holy crap.

Cut to Olivia answering her phone and it’s Nina holding up her end of the bargain and talking about an interview with William Bell. Go here, things will happen. Olivia goes, and waits, and waits, and waits and finally calls Massive Dynamic to yell at Nina who is, of course, out of the country. Olivia gets ticked and gets in the elevator to leave when… wait… weird flashy lights happen and the elevator doors open and Olivia is escorted to an office. A guy comes in. Olivia asks “Where are we? Who are you?” and the guy says that the first question is complicated but the answer to the second is “I’m Leonard Nimoy” and we pull out to see that they’re both in an office of the still-standing twin towers (because, of course, there’s more than one of everything).

Whoa.

I was surprised to find myself taken aback at that last scene. It’s been 10 years, after all.

Anyway, when I started the show, I had thought that it was a silly trifle full of monsters of the week like an updated X-Files. What I got was something a lot more chewy. Like a peanut butter sandwich full of science episodes of the week like an updated X-Files. I’ve got characters that I really like, characters with depths that, when they’re revealed, surprise me, characters with depths that, when revealed, don’t surprise me at all and a cliffhanger of a finale that has me screaming “WHERE’S MY BOX SET OF THE SECOND SEASON AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

Well, real people had to wait from May 12, 2009 until September 17th, 2009 to get their fix. We’ll only have to wait, oh, three weeks. Beg, borrow, or steal yourself a copy of the Second Season box set (or buy it, whatever) and be ready to discuss stuff when we recongreate our bookclub on May 8th! (But, of course, keep coming back in the meantime. We’re only taking a break from the show. We’re not taking a break from *STUFF*.)

So… what thinks did you thunk?