Fringe Season 4 (1 Viewer)

[Jeffery_H]

I'd love a 2-hour tie-up movie if they can't do a 13-episode finale. And not down the line. Do it "now" while everyone's available, including all the behind-the-scenes people. The quality will be higher, plus you want to go ahead and free up people as soon as possible so they can get other jobs.

Same here, I hope it's a lot better than some sort of alternate ending on a DVD set. At least give them a 2 hour grand finale if they are not renewed to properly tie up the show, it deserves that much for sure.

 

[NeilO]

Well, tonight's episode was definitely cool and it presented some answers and loads of questions. Amber in 2015 ....

 

[Josh Dial]

That was seriously badass. If there isn't a final season, at least one more of these future episodes would be awesome.

 

[Walter Kittel]

Well, that was a lot of fun. Great fan service episode with references to The Prisoner, Star Wars, Blade Runner and probably others that I missed. Walter's line about never entering a room without another exit seemed familiar. Considering how the episode ended, I hope we see another episode from 2036.
Also great seeing Henry Ian Cusick again. (Desmond was easily my favorite character on Lost.)
- Walter.

 

[NeilO]

A question is whether David Robert Jones is trying to avoid this future or would his actions help bring it about? Or is what he's doing completely unrelated?
It did answer the question about whether Bell is around in the timeline.
Three episodes to go. It should be an interesting ride.

 

[Matt Hough]

Really enjoyed the episode, and hope this isn't the last we see of 2036.

 

[Greg_S_H]

Peter and Liv have good genes. Didn't catch the actress, but whoo.
I think Etta as their daughter was supposed to be a shock, but it was immediately obvious from her walk up. Also, it was weird how Peter just walked up at the end, taken out of amber off camera. Confusing. Otherwise, good.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Hi everybody! I remember missing the pilot went it originally aired, and then sampling the second episode and being unimpressed. I didn't have anything more to do with "Fringe" until mid-March, when I took advantage of a sale at WBShop.com and got the first season on Blu-Ray. I was captivated from the start, and basically mainlined the whole first season three or four episodes a night. I ordered the second and third seasons in one shot, and have spent the last month making my way through the entire series up to the present. Just watched the last of my DVRed episodes, the future jump episode. I'll have to spend some time going through all the season threads; it'll be fun seeing people's reactions in real time. I had some of the big secrets spoiled for me, which didn't hamper my enjoyment but did color how I experienced the show.
The more episodic first season wasn't as showy as the later seasons, but it might still be my favorite. I think the New York production quality was far better than the Vancouver production. The New York scenes were undeniably New York, with excellent use of location shooting in places like Grand Central Station. And the greater New York area provided a lot more options for faking locations across Massachusetts than Vancouver did. The main reason I prefer the first season, though, is that we got an entire season of "our" team without any interruptions. Season 1 was where I felt in love with the team and their family dynamic.
Season 2 was sort of a best of both worlds balance between the episodic nature of the first season and the heavily serialized nature of season 3 and 4, with the only main jarring note being that all of the blue skies disappeared and the Pacific Northwest didn't have the same feel as the actual Northeast.
Seasons 3 and 4 were exhilarating but also frustrating, because every time our characters seemed to be making forward momentum, their entire universes got scrambled, first with Faux-livia and then with the amber Peter-less timeline. Even now, we have "our" Peter and "our" Olivia back, but three seasons worth of development for Walter and Astrid has been jettisoned.

Didn't our Fringe division find a way to cure his son?

Our Olivia, while posing as Fauxlivia at the start of Season 3, caught the men who abducted Christopher. It was this act which caused the other Broyles to sacrifice himself rescuing our Olivia and returning her to our side. Since he's still alive, presumably he didn't help Olivia escape. Maybe without Peter, events transpired in such a way that his help wasn't necessary. More likely, in the Peter-less timeline she never captured Christopher's abductors. If she didn't capture his abductors, they never found the lab and couldn't reverse-engineer what happened to Christopher.

I think Etta as their daughter was supposed to be a shock, but it was immediately obvious from her walk up.

Yeah, a victim of just pitch-perfect casting. Georgina Haig looks like she could be Joshua Jackson and Anna Torv's, some two decades down the line. She looks closer to Torv than Ari Graynor does, but she's got some of Jackson's facial features. She did a good job of bringing in pieces of both their performances. I was half expecting Walter to use some device and send her back in time to "our" present, because neither of the other out there Episode 19s were left open-ended like that.
Were any of the actors playing the 2036 Observers ones we've seen before? I'm wondering if the Observers we've seen so far named after the months are trying to stop what their contemporaries have done. It would explain why wiping out the original timeline with Fauxliva giving birth to Peter's son was so important; because Olivia's daughter with Peter would be crucial to stopping the events we've just seen. Henrietta must be capable of doing something that Henry couldn't have done, because her mother had been altered by cortexiphan and Henry's mother hadn't. I'm assuming the cortexiphan is the reason she could mislead the Observer's mindreading.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

It did answer the question about whether Bell is around in the timeline.

What's interesting is that Bell was clearly shown as being assumed dead in the amber timeline, too. So either the 2036 we've seen is yet another new timeline, or Bell faked his death in the amber timeline around the time he was actually killed in the original timeline. Perhaps Jones is working with Bell to avert the future we've just seen.
The real question is: did they manage to lure Leonard Nimoy out of retirement?

 

[Josh Dial]

Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt /t/315036/fringe-season-4/120#post_3918905
The real question is: did they manage to lure Leonard Nimoy out of retirement?

Unknown. I would bet, however, that Abrams is in Nimoy's good graces after Star Trek, so if anyone can get him for an episode, it's Abrams.

I do like the idea that Jones is fighting (at any cost, it seems) the future we've just seen.

 

[NeilO]

Also, it was weird how Peter just walked up at the end, taken out of amber off camera. Confusing. Otherwise, good.

Well, they wanted us to think that they were rescuing Bell. Then when we just saw Bell's hand we were to be stunned and then "surprise, here's Peter."
The extra mystery here was Walter's saying about "what [Bell] did to Olivia." Is he just referring to things in Olivia's youth or more likely the cause of her death sometime between 2012 and 2015? If it is her death, it can't be too soon as she needs to give birth to Henrietta first.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

If it is her death, it can't be too soon as she needs to give birth to Henrietta first.

Walter, Peter, Astrid and William Bell got ambered shortly after the purge in 2016. Etta was four the last time she saw her parents. That means that a) Olivia's about to get pregnant or is already pregnant, since Henrietta had to be born in 2012 to be four in 2016 and b) Olivia probably died around the same time the rest of our gang got ambered, so she's probably got another three to four years to live.

 

[Josh Dial]

One interesting note was that there was no reference at all to the "other side." Simon and Etta referred to the "original Fringe team," and while that could simply mean their Fringe team, it could also be the result of the "merge" threatened by Jones.

 

[Joe_H]

For anyone else who watched that, this episode kind of reminded me of Dollhouse, where they had an episode like this in the future that was so far out there that it was hard to see how they get back to the normal stuff.
I'm sure that like that show, they have a plan for pulling us back to the normal episodes, but still it's hard to imagine at the moment.
I completely agree that Etta being their daughter was completely telegraphed from the start, though for a second I did wonder if it was Olivia's niece. Not only does the actress look perfect for that role, but she had nearly identical mannerisms to Olivia.

 

[Greg_S_H]

Joe, when she told Astrid her name, I thought for a second, "Oh, wait, she's the niece?!" Ella, Etta.

 

[mattCR]

Originally Posted by Joe_H /t/315036/fringe-season-4/150#post_3919065
For anyone else who watched that, this episode kind of reminded me of Dollhouse, where they had an episode like this in the future that was so far out there that it was hard to see how they get back to the normal stuff.
I'm sure that like that show, they have a plan for pulling us back to the normal episodes, but still it's hard to imagine at the moment.
I completely agree that Etta being their daughter was completely telegraphed from the start, though for a second I did wonder if it was Olivia's niece. Not only does the actress look perfect for that role, but she had nearly identical mannerisms to Olivia.

The problem with this.. and Dollhouse.. is that the future looks like a far more interesting basic concept then what we were getting week to week. And tha'ts an issue Fringe has. Now that we know what it's building up to, it changes the way we look at a lot of the past episodes and it gives us a look into what the show could be. And that core concept is kind of neat; would it work as a weekly.. I don't know, but the observers as evil overlords is kind of a neat concept/idea.

 

[Matt Hough]

Didn't I read somewhere that by doing this episode, the writer/producers were suggesting to Fox a possibility of where the series could go to in season five if they'd renew the show.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Didn't I read somewhere that by doing this episode, the writer/producers were suggesting to Fox a possibility of where the series could go to in season five if they'd renew the show.

“The door to the fifth season is opened in Episode 19 (airing April 20),” Joshua Jackson told TVLine. “If you watch that, you’ll have an understanding of where they want to take the series.”
They've shot two endings for the season finale. I would not be at all surprised if the "canceled" ending has the team averting the future we've just seen, while the "renewed" ending freezes the team in amber to tackle the problem in season five. Either way, I can't see Olivia being dead-dead by the end of the series, whether that comes in three episodes or 16.

 

[Quentin]

In a season where they have drifted terribly away from what they need and wandered aimlessly - they give us an alternate future episode. Great. Just another confusing wrench in the middle of the heap of confusion this season has become.
I also have a problem with this alternate future on a basic level. The observers were originally introduced as one OBSERVER, then we eventually saw two and then a few. I have a real hard time believing that there are hordes of them. It doesn't work on multiple levels. It also doesn't make much sense that they would take direct action to comandeer one or a couple of universes when they presumably have access to ALL of the multiverse. If you can think and exist on multiple levels like that, who gives a crap if a couple of them steer themselves into oblivion? In fact, it would probably be likely.
Nope...don't like the direction at all.

 

[Simon Massey]

FRINGE RENEWED for 13th episode 5th Season !!!!
Great news
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2012/04/26/fringe-renewed-for-final-season-by-fox/131104/