Fringe season 3 thread (1 Viewer)

[Quentin]

It's a good point, Josh...and an idea that I'm considering myself. Even if it's not exactly as you lay out, I think it is quite possible that a lot may have happened 'in between' Peter entering the machine and landing in front of Freedom Tower in Universe 3. Only he (and possibly Olivia) will be able to figure that out. I'm also interested to see how Peter's son fits into all this.

 

[Hanson]

Maybe they'll cast a 10 year old moppet to play his son with the occasional episode centering around the boy and his friends investigating haunted houses an such. L'il Fringe FTW!

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Originally Posted by Hanson Yoo

Maybe they'll cast a 10 year old moppet to play his son with the occasional episode centering around the boy and his friends investigating haunted houses an such. L'il Fringe FTW!

Haha - that's priceless!


In other random Fringe thoughts -- I love how awesome the revamped title sequence was for the two 80s flashback episodes. I'm thinking if they ever did a flashback into the 90s, that would be a pretty cool title as well! C'mon Fringe guys, design the title sequence now, worry about making the episode later

 

[SWFF]

Fox put together a 2 minute theatrical trailer for the season finale. Have a look.

 

[Hanson]

Click on the Source button to change to HTML mode and then paste the embad code from YouTube. If you press the Source button again, you go back to normal mode.


Random Fringe Youtube video to illustrate.

 

[SWFF]

Oh, yeah, that worked. Thanks. But, what's the deal? I never had to to do that before. I can't even get the YouTube videos embedded on my blog.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Man, they do such a good job with those exclusive promos that they make for the web -- for a show that's definitely not Fox's top moneymaker, I really appreciate and am awed at the amount of creativity they put into it. As an audience member and fan, I really feel like they appreciate my viewership. It feels different from a lot of the other shows Fox (or other networks) have canceled for having numbers like Fringe's.


And somehow - as awesome as this preview was - it still feels like they're not really showing us anything of real consequence, that is, that they're not truly spoiling anything. I loved how the first half of it was just lines and clips from earlier episodes put together in such a riveting fashion.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Well, it's finally here - tonight, the season finale of Fringe. One could also so were it not for some bizarre fluke of suddenly rationality and care at Fox, it would have been a series finale. So, before tonight's festivities begin, I want to say thank you (to no one in particular I guess, Fox, the gods of television programming, and whoever else) for keeping this thing running. Tonight is.. today is.. The Day We Died.


(I'm guessing our universe goes down. Let's see how this plays out.)

 

[Simon Massey]

Im guessing Olivia A dies and Olivia B ends up on our side!!

 

[NeilO]

Quite a mind-blowing cliffhanger. I am glad it is a season ender and not a series finale.
As far as the death, as we were watching - a few minutes in most of us must have figured out how deceptive it was going to be.

 

[SWFF]

Nice. They pulled a fast one, making you think Character A was going to die, when it was really Character B. With that being said, I'm not sure I'm going like the show without one of the main cast. I mean, it's an ensemble piece, and you pull out one of those players, they ALL suffer. I gotta go rethink some shit now. Like how much I want to continue to stay invested in FRINGE without fill-in-the-blank not being a part of it. Dammit. But, man, was that good!

 

[NeilO]

Quote:

Originally Posted by SWFF

Nice. They pulled a fast one, making you think Character A was going to die, when it was really Character B. With that being said, I'm not sure I'm going like the show without one of the main cast. I mean, it's an ensemble piece, and who pull out one of those players, they ALL suffer. I gotta go rethink some shit now. Like how much I want to continue to stay invested in FRINGE without fill-in-the-blank not being a part of it. Dammit. But, man, was that good!

I am not sure what happened at the end was a death, per se. I think the death in the show description was the one we explicitly saw in the show. I'm hoping that what happened at the end was just a major cliffhanger.

 

[NeilO]

By the way, the new opening sequence words were


Screen one: Cellular Regeneration, Thought Extraction, Cryptozoology, Neural Partitioning, Brain Porting, Temporal Plasticity


Screen two: Dual Maternity, Chaos Structure, Clonal Transplantation


Screen three: Water, Biosuspension, Hope

 

[Josh Dial]

Brilliant season finale. I don't think anyone in this thread honestly saw any of the twists (at least they never once wrote them down in the thread). I'm sure Peter will be present next season--I'm not worried there.

 

[Citizen87645]

So was the funeral pyre a special thing or is that how all people go out in the future?

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Well, I wasn't entirely wrong -- but I was far from being entirely right, or even close to being partially write -- OK, basically I couldn't have called any of it. Which is what I hoped for. They showed us how the world could end if we thought only of ourselves, if we thought of existence as being only about our side or only about us. Olivia died, our universe was on the brink - but more than anything, the suggestion that it didn't have to be this way, that was very powerful to me.


Methinks Peter isn't gone for good - main cast members don't just disappear, and Joshua Jackson had been tweeting as much as anyone to try to get fans to tune in and help the show get renewed; someone who's about to get axed from a show doesn't care that much. I think he's back, even if it might take a couple episodes to sort it all out. (One of the things I love about the end of season 2/beginning of season 3 is how they didn't try to resolve the cliffhanger in one episode, that it took 8 or 9 to put things back to normal - I wouldn't be surprised if there's a similar progression next season.)


Neil, thanks for transcribing the title sequence - I tried going back a couple times but I lost my train of thought before I could figure them all out. Imagine what an f-ed up future it must be when "water" is one of the things that science views as futuristic and something to strive towards instead of something they have. And I love that "Hope" was one of the words, I thought I saw that there when the grey title flashed - in a future where all seems lost, where everyone is desperately running and struggling just to try to keep everything from falling apart - that "hope" would be the thought so unimaginable to those people, well, I thought they conveyed that well. On a metaphorical level, the idea of living in a world where hope could be lost certain resonates I think in any real universe that we all live in.


I love the idea that both worlds need each other, that even if they're not meant to be joined, that one cannot simply destroy one universe to save another, that astral physicals and whatnot are more complicated than that. And I loved that we finally saw Walter and Walternate in a room together. Please, please, please, even if it's not in the immediate first scenes next season, let's see the two of them together for more than five seconds.


I also think the Observers are sorely mistaken if they think "erasing" Peter's existence will fix all of the problems between two worlds - it's way more complicated than that (one would hope, anyway). Also loved the hint that the "first people" tech might have been something from the future left behind in the past. I'm all for quantum entanglement loops - who says this stuff is supposed to be easy?


Most of all, I appreciate that this three-part finale (which, essentially, it was - between "6:02 AM EST", "The Last Sam Weiss", and "The Day We Died") started off like a conventional episode and then just zoomed into the unknown. Someday it will all make sense, and heck. I wouldn't be shocked if rewatching it either tomorrow or over the summer yields more, but I admire how gutsy these guys are who make it. OK, maybe it's not gutsy like solving world peace or whatever, but it was daring in the sense that I think no matter how much any of us rewatch these last few episodes, there's simply no way to make sense of it all without whatever pieces they're withholding. And based on their track record, unlike most of the shows that I watch where it's a long summer break and a cliffhanger that then gets resolved five minutes into the season premiere, I don't think things will be so simple here. And I love that.


This is gonna be a long summer vacation! Pretty much every other serial show that I watch is gone, either canceled or retired - Fringe is the one carrying the torch for me, and i look forward to seeing where we go next. Tonight was The Day We Died.. but maybe it was also the day that we began to save ourselves. (Or am I taking it too literally?) This show, this season, this arc and this episode transcended what "average" TV could be and crossed into the realm of something special, and as long as this show runs, whether it's one more year or five or ten or five million, I'm hooked and in from here to the end.


(by the way - the glyphs that appear at every commercial break in the episode spelled out "NO MORE" - take that to mean what you will)

 

[Greg_S_H]

I was a little disappointed, because a glitch caused my DVR to record for 120 minutes instead of 60. I thought it was going to be a double-sized epic. Instead, it was a regular-sized epic. When it was clear that we were settled into a future setting, I became less worried about all of the flying rumours about Olivia's death. It could still happen--didn't the guy who "will kill me" not look anything like Walter, and had an X on his hoodie?--but at least we're not ending on a dead Olivia cliffhanger. I figured they'd kill her and she'd soul-magnet into Bolivia--and it would take with her since they are the same person--and we'd end up with an eventually composite Olivia. Again, it could still happen, but it's not my preference. I also am not too worried about losing Jackson as a regular. Peter has been the driving force behind Walter from the beginning, and he won't forget him forever.

I like the more confident future Ostrich, and Liv's niece grows up to be a cutie.

 

[TravisR]

Originally Posted by Cameron Yee So was the funeral pyre a special thing or is that how all people go out in the future?

 

[TravisR]

So was the funeral pyre a special thing or is that how all people go out in the future?

I'm no expert but I believe that that was an ancient Buddhist funeral. Also, it's the same way that The Others held a funeral on Lost when Fringe showrunner Jeff Pinkner was working on that show.

 

[Quentin]

I was more than a little disappointed. I thought that was, generally, pretty poor for a show I've come to really love. Essentially, a 'what if' dream episode followed by a twist that was so confusing we had to have the Observers TELL us what happened in the previous scene.


I'm not even sure any of the 'future' characters are worth talking about since they were pawns in the dream sequence and likely won't be seen again. Lame. I will say Walter in a high security lock up is about as likely as Broyles in the Senate. Whatever.


But, the real question is, where do they go from here? Does Peter influence them as a sort of trans-phased ghost ala Geordi and Ensign Ro? Does the show become semi-comedic as the mirror images of characters struggle with each other?


Sorry for the sarcasm I know does not translate. But, I was let down big time by this episode. Particularly after the brilliance of the last two. I'll see what they come up with next year.