Fringe: Season Finale Review

Note: Full spoilers for the episode follow.

The Fringe: Season 4 finale was fun and fulfilling, but it was far from flawless. If this had been the end of all things Fringe, it might not have been as satisfying. But as it stands this is just a transition point for a future we've already seen, and that casts the events of this story in a much more favorable light.

The opening minutes contain all sorts of interesting, mysterious nuggets to suck us into this episode. Bell's slick little hologram of a world without humans is an odd but compelling start. Then we have September getting stuck in a ground trap, which was a nifty idea, although the explanation as a "stasis rune" seems more like it would be at home in World of Warcraft than Fringe.

And Astrid's alive! It may have been unlikely that they'd kill her off (especially given her appearance in "Letters of Transit"), but the producers uncertain about the future of the series when they filmed the season finale, so it wasn't a far-fetched idea. But she's not dead, just bed-ridden, and Jasika Nicole does a great job of pulling at the heartstrings with an emotional scene full of tears and reddened eyes.

Then our girl Jessica Holt (Rebecca Mader) appears and shows her true colors as one of William Bell's pawns. Excitement abounds when she starts busting caps at September, finally giving him the wound he's had for the past few episodes and answering at least one mystery from this season. Too bad Jessica didn't get the memo that Olivia's gotten pretty good at killing bad guys with her superpowers.

Then Fringe does that thing they do fairly often... you know, talking to the dead. But I have to admit, this was the best of all the dead body interrogations. Crazy Eyes Jessica was a brilliant touch, and of all the scenes in the episode this is the one that's getting the most buzz on the Interwebs. It's strange and disconcerting, but in the best possible ways.

So that concludes my first gushing session for this episode. Now things get a little more critical, so gird your loins.

- FOX

In the past few weeks I've felt like Fringe has been getting a bit goofy/cheesy with its storytelling. The villains were becoming more comic bookish and less nuanced, and the dialogue has started to get stilted. That's still the case in this episode. Some of the lines border on extreme cheesiness, like "you had the power all along" from Nina. In fact, a lot of questionable lines came out Nina's mouth this week, although I still loved her role in setting up the chat with Crazy Eyes Jessica.

Then the climax arrives, and everything culminates with the showdown on Bell's ship. William Bell is there ranting and patting himself on the back as classic supervillains often do, and he's telling all the secrets of his master plan in long expository sessions so that there's only one logical conclusion: Olivia has to die.

So I wasn't really that surprised when Walter shot her.

That doesn't mean the events were any less entertaining. It was just that I was expecting it to happen since it seemed the only logical direction. I was still sitting on the edge of my seat when these events played out, but these great moments were still tinged with disappointment. Bell's reaction to the foiling of his carefully laid out plans is weak. There's barely any dejection at all. Bell's final moments in this story basically boil down to "Oh... Well, that sucks. Anyways, peace out!" Then he disappears in suitably convenient manner that seems like the equivalent of a puff of a smoke.

And for all this to pass the "suspension of disbelief" test, you have to assume that Bell, the mastermind that he is, wouldn't have considered that Peter or Walter or might have offed Olivia to save billions of lives. Hell, she might have even done it herself. It's just not airtight storytelling that holds up to scrutiny.


Leonard Nimoy Discusses Returning to Fringe


We didn't get the anticipated tie-in between William Bell's plans and the impending Observer invasion which, though predictable, would've been freaking awesome with the right execution. Instead, all these happenings were just the plan of a brilliant man gone insane and mad at the world. It's very cliche and seems like an inadequate end to a season that spent so much time building up complex plots, but it is saved by the gravitas of Leonard Nimoy and John Noble. Without them, this plot might have been laughable, at best.

Okay, let's go back to gushing now.

Once Olivia is "dead" Walter jumps into action and does what only he can do: save the day with genius. The tie-in to Walter's regenerative lemon cake was a nice touch, and the images of him having to do all sorts of gruesome impromptu surgery are charged with emotion and concern about the aftermath of all this craziness.

After all that, Walter is still just his usual self as we see at the end of the episode when he confuses urine samples for lemon jello. That was beautiful. Then the scene switches to a tender moment between Peter and Olivia. After the events of "Letters of Transit", it wasn't hard to figure out that Olivia's big news was a bun in the oven but it's still another nicely done tie-in that keeps things going flowing into next season. And that bullet that popped out of Olivia's brain is surely the same one we saw Henrietta wearing on her necklace.
Broyles getting promoted is a nice touch too, and adding Nina to the R&D division could make for some interesting moments later as well. Everything is coming together rather nicely.

Serving as a bridge for next season is ultimately the great success of this episode. It's entertaining TV, but it certainly wouldn't have been a great end to the series if it had come down to that. Questions that Fringe fans have been waiting for answers to forever (like the identity of Mr. X) were left untouched and Bell's final plan felt a little disappointing after all that build-up. But fortune and benevolent TV executives have smiled upon Fringe, and the show will have a chance to wrap up everything next year. We've seen a glimpse of what's to come, and this episode just helps to get us there.


Source : http://tv.ign.com/articles/122/1224617p1.html