Bookclub!

Okay! We’re winding down and watching the penultimate episode from Season Three: “The Last Sam Weiss”. (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 Season Three season premiere episode is here and the posts dedicated to the following episodes are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, 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 episode, see you after the cut!

Well, this is it. The middle of the end of the world.

Open in a hospital where Peter is, apparently, still in the coma from last week. Walter is, apparently, still keeping a vigil. Astrid, bless her, is still keeping an eye on everybody. She talks a reluctant Walter into getting up and out  and getting something to eat with promises of cafeteria desserts. Walter, bless him, is not made of stone.

Cut to a family driving in Massachusetts as they encounter a lightning storm. In a nice little scene, we see the kid notice all of the little hairs on his arm standing up and reach the point where he says “Dad???” and, ZAP!, lightning hits the car in front of them. ZAP! Another lightning bolt, swerve and drive and get around and Dad pulls over and says, paraphrased, “I’m going to get out of the car which is, presumably grounded via its tires, and wander around outside in the middle of this lightning storm”. He does and thank goodness because we see, through his eyes, the lightning storm off in the distance.

The lightning storm is, indeed, a doozy.

You’re watching Fringe. (Blue Credits.)

So now Olivia and Sam are looking at The Machine and clucking disapprovingly. In a pretty cool scene, Sam throws a pen at The Machine and the force field repels it with enough force for it to kill a monitor. He hems and haws for a second before admitting that, well, maybe he knows about a way to open the force field surrounding The Machine. Sure, it wasn’t mentioned prior to this but… well… it’s not like they thought that they would need a proverbial “Crowbar”.

Down at the cafeteria, Walter is enjoying a fruit cocktail (Walter regularly enjoys such things as fruit cocktail to a degree that I only rarely have been able to achieve… then again, Walter could be operating under, shall we say, “chemical enhancement”) and, as he’s trying to enjoy it, the poor victims of the lightning storm start being wheeled into the hospital and Walter is nonplussed. Yep, it’s the end of the world. We’re going to have lightning storms. He finishes his dessert and goes back up to hang out with Peter and Astrid provides us with one heck of a scene. She tells Walter that he should go and figure stuff out. He says that it’s the end of the world and he wants to spend his last days with his son, thank you very much. Come on, Astrid nudges. Olivia is out there… it’s hard for her too and she’s trying. Walter gets all irritated and points out that he asked God for help, thank you very much. God helps those who help themselves… and a little Poor Richard is just what Walter needed, apparently. He gets up and says that he is going to get his kite.

Jump to Olivia and Sam and they are breaking into a Sarcophagus that, apparently, has a box that contains The Crowbar and Sam is, perhaps understandably, getting cold feet. It’s not every day you break into great-great-great-great-great-grandad’s grave, after all. The Crowbar is only supposed to be used In Case Of Emergency, anyway… and Olivia, along with the home viewing audience, asks “if this ain’t an emergency, what would be?”

They find The Box (which is locked).

Walter, flying a kite, gets himself struck by lightning. Twice. This, of course, was exactly what he needed to help make the leap. “Repetition! The key is Repetition!”

Peter, of course, takes this moment to wake up and yank out all of his life-saving medicines from his arms. Seriously, you’d think that there’d be a lawsuit or something where someone wakes up in the hospital, yanks out a cord or three, and then dies. “He was doing what he learned watching YOUR show! We demand 20 million.”

Where was I? Oh yes. Peter gets up and gets dressed and is wandering through the hospital in a way that communicates confusion… he gets cornered by a nurse but she leaves for an emergency related to the lightning storm and then Peter bolts it and hails a cab to take him to New York. The cabbie points out that that is quite a fare… and Peter throws a credit card at him and New York It Is.

The Key is, of course, in the middle of a Museum that is experiencing a lightning storm of its own. Olivia shows her ID, Sam shows his Membership. Awesome. They hammer out that the key is in the Native American wing and the Museum Director says that there isn’t a key there. “I beg to differ”, Sam says.

Meanwhile, Astrid and Walter are comparing maps of the storms and hammer out that the foci of the storms center on two places. The first is over The Machine. The second is over The Statue Of Liberty. “Walternate”, Walter says with a certainty that lets you know that this season is totally coming to a head. Walter then explains all of this to us by way of explaining it to Broyles. A couple of magnets, a handful of iron filings and we have a pattern that looks a lot like the pattern of lightning storms… and the only way to buy ourselves time is to move The Machine to the Statue of Liberty.

Back at the museum, Sam has found The Case in which The Key resides. As they prepare to do what each of us has always wanted to do, lightning strikes at them and breaks pretty much every single case in the room except the one they want. Ain’t that always the way? Sam smashes it and takes out the artifact and, as the alarms go off and the doors come down, Sam rolls a rock that hits a vase that falls over and rolls under the falling door, keeping an exit open for them. In what might be the funniest moment we’ve yet seen in the series, Sam says “I work in a bowling alley.”

We smash open the artifact and find a metal rod of sorts. In waving the rod against the box, they find the right spot and the magnets kick in and out pops a scroll (and not a crowbar) and on the scroll is a picture of… Olivia. Whoa.

So Sam and Olivia and Walter are now in the lab trying to hammer out exactly what the scroll means. Sam is no help and just points out again that he was told that the box had the crowbar and that’s that. Walter figures out that we’re talking about Olivia’s ability to telekinetically turn off weird machines. (Hey! Walter watched Season One!) and Olivia is freaking out the way she freaked out in Season One. (The problem with doing things telepathically is that there’s no real way to communicate to the home viewing audience that anything has actually happened. The lights turn off? Maybe Mr. Jones was playing a practical joke to make a point. We just don’t know. Dang, he was a good villain.) We also hammer out that she’ll have to be telekinetic through universes. Which, really, isn’t that big of a stretch at this point. So we set up the quantumly entangled typewriters and tell Olivia to just start typing with her mind. Which weirds me out because whatever Olivia starts typing here will end up over there… right? Kinda showing your hand, there, Walter.

Well, we now jump back to the hospital and see that Peter left a note. “I AM GOING HOME.” The nurse grabs a phone instead of just holding the note and reading it aloud so we know that we’re going to jump to…

Olivia trying, and failing, to type across universes with her mind. She gives a “I can’t do this!” monologue that sets up Walter for yet another “This Is Why I Watch This Show” moments. He gives a short small speech about how he knows that *HE* is broken but part of what makes him him is that he is broken… and part of what makes her her is that she is extraordinary. Wow.

Olivia tries again and fails again. I’m beginning to wonder if the swerve will be that she can’t do this so they’re going to try something else. Astrid comes in and tells everybody that she just got off the phone and Peter is missing… which means that we’re going to jump to…

No, not Peter. The Machine being taken to the Statue of Liberty.

Oh, there’s Peter. He goes into a pawn shop and buys himself a silver dollar. Says it’s lucky.

Jump to our team figuring out that Peter isn’t back at the house but he *HAS* used his credit card for an $800 fare and a $600 purchase at a pawn shop in NYC… and we jump to Peter on Liberty Island talking to a guard and telling him “I need to talk to my father.” “Who is your father?” “Walter Bishop. The Secretary of Defense.”

DUN DUN DUNNNNN!!!!!

Anyway, we see Sam recriminating himself for intervening before Broyles comes in and tells everybody that Peter’s been found, he’s at Liberty Island, and we’re going over there, except, inexplicably, the First Peoples guy who knows the most about The Machine. Oh, and Astrid

So everybody but Sam and Astrid goes out to meet Peter, who is looking confused until he says to Walter (and quite sadly it seems to me) “there are two of you, aren’t there?” Walter checks Peter out and Peter is coming back into himself and it looks like the confusion is fading away and now it’s up to Olivia and Peter to talk about how Olivia couldn’t make the crowbar work… Olivia was trying to think a single phrase over and over again but… it didn’t work.

And we find out why Astrid stayed behind. It was so she could see that the typewriter was finally typing.

“Be a better man than your father.”

A phonecall later has Broyles yelling that everybody who doesn’t have a name gets out *RIGHT NOW* and we see Walter and Peter give Olivia a pep talk (“think of it as a giant typewriter”) and we see Olivia close her eyes and *THINK* *REALLY* *HARD* and… jump to Earth 2 where Evil Brandon is there watching The Machine turn off and he gets on the phone and starts yelling into it… and our Peter goes up to The Machine and experiences flashes of his previous life, gets into the machine, experiences flashes of his life with Olivia, the machine clamps down and *FLASH*.

We see Peter looking around and he sees a Memorial that was erected in 2021. September! 2021. He gets tackled by a guy who calls him “Agent Bishop” and then screams for a medic because Bishop has been hit!

Wow! What a great show!

I didn’t see *THAT* coming. It looks like next week’s part 3 of 3 season finale will be a show set in 2021. Awesome.

So… what thinks did you thunk?