Okay! This is it! The final episode from Season Three: “The Day We Died”. (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, 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!
Peter sure gets wheeled around in gurneys a lot.
Could be worse, of course. If he were Olivia, he’d be strapped to them while they take samples of spinal fluid or accelerate his gestation.
Anyway, it’s 2026, Peter Bishop has crow’s feet (HOW CUTE) and, look! There’s Astrid! Who has different hair, sure, but otherwise hasn’t aged a day! And medical science now does this thing where they just fix you without anaesthesia! And there’s a young agent who calls herself “Ella”! And she calls Olivia “Aunt Liv”! (I wondered whatever happened to them) and Olivia looks like she’s been promoted a whole bunch of times… and, apparently, it’s because she has. Ella mentions the “End Of Dayers” and Aunt Liv mentions “Moreau” just in time for a no-longer-screaming Peter to show up and lie about how good he’s doing… hey, wait! He and Olivia have matching wedding bands! Well, that’s one way to remove some of the tension from the next couple of seasons, I guess.
Anyway, they hammer out that Peter has been told to relax a bit but he cannot relax while Moreau is still out there droppin’ bombs… and Moreau is that guy Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings. He’s really good at doing the intelligent/creepy thing. Anyway, Moreau is now at an Opera House doing something… creepy… with some canisters and, yep, an innocent bystander becomes an innocent victim on the way to the canisters blowing up.
You’re watching Fringe. (Grey credits.)
Fringe team visits the site of the bombing and find that one of the bombs did *NOT* go off! A dud! Hurray! This is the first dud they’ve encountered but… with hushed tones, we find out that there’s only one guy who might know how it works… and we find out that Walter is in prison and looking exactly as grizzly as he did in the pilot. A great line from Walter: “it must be bad if they’re letting you see me.”
And, as we find out over the next hour, it is.
Earth-2 has collapsed. Earth-1 is currently in an even worse state than Earth-2 was (and Earth-2 was ambering sports stadiums). Broyles is president or something. Olivia is a full-fledged telepath now (?) and Walternate is, of course, the guy behind Moreau. It seems that Walternate is really, really ticked off that Earth-2 was destroyed… so he’s going to accelerate the destruction of Earth-1 with the help of a bunch of wacky terrorists.
The moment that got me was when Walter explained to Peter about the day we used The Machine. When we chose our universe over theirs, and when we “saved” our universe by destroying theirs, “that was the day we died”.
The rest of the show is a study in false hope being crushed by (future) reality. There’s a lovely scene with Peter and Olivia discussing having a baby as they look at a picture drawn by a child from across the street (the child looks forward to babysitting) and this scene is followed by a terrorist attack in Central Park. We get a moment of hope from Peter talking to Walternate about how to fix things… followed by us learning that Walternate was just a hologram and the *REAL* Walternate is shooting Olivia in the head. Like, as in *DEAD*.
Whoa. Didn’t see that coming.
After a lovely funeral, we go back to the grind and Walter and Ella (in a lovely scene that involves Ella remembering the cow), discuss how things used to be and how there aren’t any happy endings anymore… when Peter shows up and Walter realizes that, yes, WALTER is the one who made the machine! And… um… sent it back in time via the wormhole? In Central Park?
I admit that I didn’t understand this episode.
Anyway, Walter says to Peter that he needs to not destroy the other universe. *ANYTHING* is better than this. *ANYTHING*.
And… WHAM. We’re back to today from the future. Peter is in the machine and everybody is freaking out… and they’re freaking out on Earth-2 as well. Fauxlivia (captured, remember?) is sneering at Evil Brandon about how Peter outsmarted Earth-2. Sure, Earth-2 turned their machine on… but Earth-1 one-upped them and now Earth-2 can’t do diddly.
Back at Earth-1 Olivia is climbing the stairs to look at Peter and Peter looks at her and smiles to see that she is still alive and he uses the machine to will desks (?) into the room and now Walternate and Fauxlivia are staring at Walter and Ourlivia and Peter gets out of the machine and explains that we can’t destroy each other… he created a place where the universes overlap so they can work TOGETHER to fix… and he blurs out and is gone.
And everybody stops looking at Peter and turns to look at their other self… with scowls. And they’re yelling at each other. And nobody is talking about Peter…
And we go outside to see the lawn littered with Observers. And they explain to us that Peter served his purpose. He never existed.
WHAM.
Now that’s how you build up some suspense for the next season!
I liked this show but probably would have liked it more if it didn’t confuse the crap out of me. The big note they hit was, of course, the machine could have destroyed us and saved them (however temporarily) or could have destroyed them and saved us (however temporarily) but Peter found a third way… a corridor between universes that would allow Fringe-1 and Fringe-2 to work together to save the world.
And all it cost was Peter.
So… what thinks did you thunk?
I liked the show, but WTF? Why did Peter get wiped off the face of existance? And wh7y did it not happen in the 2026 future? This is why I dislike time travel episodes. Still, I love the tweak of the nose they gave people like me when Peter asked Walter how he would send the machine back in time and Walter said, ‘Don’t worry about that, it has already happenned so it wil. Deal with it.’ A nice touch.
This does make me want to see the next season. I would be pissed if that really was the end of Peter. I also will love to see the two Walters bicker. Awesomeness awaits.
One of the things that consistently impresses me is that to get us to be able to tell between Olivia and Fauxlivia, they have to have Fauxlivia wear red and dye her hair and Olivia just wears grey/black and pulls her blond hair back… Astrid vs. Bad Astrid requires similar costume shenanigans.
All John Noble has to do is change facial expressions and you know if you’re dealing with Walter or Walternate.
If there was any justice Noble would have gotten recognition for his work on Fringe. He is consistently fantastic. (Plus he has a great face to begin with. That is a lived-in face).
And he tidies up his hair. Still, I love the range of facial expression that he can keep for each distinct character.
This isn’t really a spoiler, because I’m not telling you anything specific, but I’m going to say what you can infer from this episode (which will be entirely true).
Lbh jrer jngpuvat n fubj nobhg Crgre naq naq n ohapu bs punenpgref qvq n ybg bs guvatf gung punatrq gur jbeyq. Abj, lbh’er jngpuvat n fubj nobhg n ohapu bs punenpgref yvivat va n jbeyq jurer Crgre jnfa’g gurer, naq gurersber qvqa’g qb n ybg bs gubfr guvatf, be vafcver bguref gb qb bgure guvatf.
Rirelguvat’f oenaq arj. Naq fgvyy gur fnzr. Jrypbzr gb Sevatr.
Anyway, Walter says to Peter that he needs to not destroy the other universe. *ANYTHING* is better than this. *ANYTHING*.
Reminds me of the line at the end of BtVS‘s “The Wish” – Giles (the librarian, played by Anthony Head) is asked how he knows for sure that the other (original) reality is any better than the current (alternate, super-dark) one that he is getting ready to end.
He replies, with grim-yet-determined heartbreak, “…Because it has to be.”
JB, I know you resist BtVS, but if you ever decide that you’d like to see a show that muses on the nature of responsibility, authority/power, family, and love, whilst engaging in formal experimentalism, jokes/wordplay, Howard Hawks-style zippy repartee and yes, often-cheesy, cheesy (yet metaphorical!) monsters being dispatched by kung-fu, you could do a lot worse.
Yeah, Maribou keeps telling me that.
In this, as undoubtedly in so much else, she is 100% correct.
I used to get SO MAD when Jay took someone else’s recommendation on stuff I’d been pushing at him for years and then told me how good it was. Now I am far more mature and so my response is more like OH GOOD AT LEAST YOU LISTEN TO SOMEBODY. 😀
Spoil a small moment in one episode. Nothing major. Just a pinprick, no knives.
I accidentally spoiled someone on Game of Thrones, I just got to talking and let the defining event of the first season/book slip.
I felt awful.
So, she had just seen Drive, and I wanted to; so I told her to spoil me on that one, telling me how it ended.
She did, and all was well.
We do a spoiled eye for a spoiled eye around Chez Glyph.
It was a fun series to watch. Just do not take it seriously.
As opposed to Fringe? 😉
Fringe is designed as a more serious show than Buffy.
I liked Fringe a lot, so please don’t take that as a slam on it.
But I see both shows as ones that snuck a lot of weightier stuff into what appear on the surface as simple genre shows; BtVS was not afraid of outright jokeiness and camp, but it was also the first show I had seen in a long time that reminded me that TV could be art. The writing, acting and direction were frequently excellent.
Do some people take BtVS too seriously? Sure, but that’s true of everything, especially in nerd-dom.
I think it’s far more common that people underestimate what it’s up to (and that was by design).
Yeah, I can’t take Fringe any more seriously than I take Buffy, either. If I did, the WTF ARE YOU FRIGGING KIDDING ME handwaving science would break this science major’s brain too hard. Their lack-of-seriousness shows up in different spots, I think…
However, they are still 2 of my very most favorite shows. Along with early (campy, funny) X-Files, which was much in the same vibe.
I disagree, while Fringe has moments of levity, BtVS had it constantly throughout each show. It is part of what made it so fun. And then there is the gore/gross-out factor.
Hm? Plenty of episodes of both shows had a gore / gross-out factor. Maybe I’m not as sensitive to that what with the bio degree… I’m honestly not sure which show you are saying is grosser than the other.
As for comedy elements, there were plenty of BtVS episodes with little or no silliness – The Body, or Hush, for eg.
I would agree that the premise of Buffy is more deliberately funny than the premise of Fringe… but otherwise there is little difference for me. If I were only thinking of, say, the first two seasons of both shows, I could maybe see things the same way you do, but the later seasons of Buffy are quite dark…Guess we will have to agree to disagree?
I’d disagree that “Hush” had little silliness. (Think about Xander “saving” Anya, Buffy’s “slaying” gesture.) In general, the silliness only lets up in the season finales, but even then rarely disappears. “The Body” is a glaring exception, but even it still had that stuff with Willow’s shirt and Xander’s wall. It was Fringe-level comedy.
I haven’t been keeping up with Bookclub, so I watched all the last 3 Fringe episodes today – which really works well, since they’re all the same plot and happen immediately after each other.
6:02am is pretty much perfect; it’s incredibly unsettling to see all these extremely determined people who we’ve been watching solve every problem for three seasons just looking completely helpless and at a loss when faced with the world’s end. The Last Sam Weiss is also pretty good, although the reason for Peter buying the silver dollar is never alluded to, and his very temporary amnesia just feels like a plot device to get him to Liberty Island on time.
The Day We Died…I like most of this episode, and I like the conclusion that the two worlds are linked and need each other (it should have been obvious after a season in which we spent a fair amount of time in both worlds that destroying one could never be an acceptable ending)…but if Fringe Team are the ones who sent the First People books manuscripts back, why wouldn’t they have said that? What the heck was with the earlier idea of Sam Weiss’ that one of the worlds had to be destroyed and that the one that survived would be the one whose Olivia Peter loved best? The show would have been better if it had laid a few more seeds for this episode rather than running off on tangents for most of the middle/late third of the season.
And I don’t like them erasing Peter, if only because it made the fourth season so much of a rehash instead of focusing more on building on the extremely interesting situation that we end this episode with.
And as a last point…if all Walternate needed to turn on the machine was some of Peter’s DNA, then he could have just grabbed some hair or something while Peter was on the other side at the end of last season.
There was a Fringe comic book. Like, Fringe: Beyond the Fringe
was written By Joshua Jackson. This explains a lot of the stuff that happened while Peter was in the machine. Like, that Peter was actually doing… like putting pieces of the machine around in time.
I dunno if they explain anything more with that story but… well, you’d *HOPE* that they would.
Olivia is a full-fledged telepath now (?)
Telepaths read minds. The term you’re thinking of is telekinetic. (It’s kind of amazing how many specific, technical words we’ve come up with for abilities that don’t exist.)
It’s kind of amazing how many specific, technical words we’ve come up with for abilities that don’t exist.
Let alone the fact that we’ve also come up with their Klingon translations.
Humanity’s epitaph will probably read Too Much Time On Their Hands.