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#1 Jan 12 2013 at 8:57 PM Rating: Good
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Only one more episode left. I believe they did a pretty good job of tying previous seasons in with this last season. In last week's episode they tried to use the blinking red/green lights to hypnotize Windmark and get him to stay in the room when it blows up. I'm a little bummed that it's ending, and I think had it not been for the season being cut short due to funding, that they would have extended out the tape gathering episodes to be little individual adventures rather than merely a few minutes of cutting through amber in the lab.

It's nice being able to watch Marathons of the previous seasons on the Science channel while the last season is airing on Fox. It's a good refresher.

On a side note, it appears that the Science channel has become what SciFi used to be. It's picking up a lot of actual Sci-Fi television series and starting to air them.
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#2 Jan 13 2013 at 6:45 AM Rating: Good
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I'm not a big fan of the fast-forward to the invasion. I liked the weekly fringe event with the overarching story of Bell and Jones. This whole invasion thing with one big story intertwining everything just doesn't hit the spot for me (reminds me too much of what happened to The X-files). That being said, I'm still watching the last episodes, because John Noble is awesome.
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#3 Jan 13 2013 at 11:01 AM Rating: Excellent
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Mazra wrote:
This whole invasion thing with one big story intertwining everything just doesn't hit the spot for me (reminds me too much of what happened to The X-files).

I only watched it sporadically but that was back when it was more Monster of the Week. Once it became some giant plot with dimension hopping and whatever else, it wasn't worth it to tune in unless I was going to tune in for every episode. As you said, just like the X-Files.

Flea watched about 97 hours of the show yesterday when they were running the Science channel marathon.
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#4 Jan 13 2013 at 2:42 PM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:
Flea watched about 97 hours of the show yesterday when they were running the Science channel marathon.
Was she approaching the speed of light at the time?
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#5 Jan 13 2013 at 3:10 PM Rating: Excellent
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Friar Bijou wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
Flea watched about 97 hours of the show yesterday when they were running the Science channel marathon.
Was she approaching the speed of light at the time?


Time dilation is a Fringe benifit.
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#6 Jan 13 2013 at 5:40 PM Rating: Excellent
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Friar Bijou wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
Flea watched about 97 hours of the show yesterday when they were running the Science channel marathon.
Was she approaching the speed of light at the time?

Science-Fiction dramas with heavily convoluted plots tend to slow time to a crawl on all on their own.
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#7 Jan 13 2013 at 6:10 PM Rating: Good
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Yesterday was the Season 1 Marathon. It wasn't convoluted yet, just full of awesome scenes of horrific fringe science events and people being cut in half by cross dimensional portals opening/closing.
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#8 Jan 14 2013 at 7:41 PM Rating: Decent
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I think I may have mentioned this in another thread, but I've been disappointed with Fringe for some time (last couple seasons I think?). I honestly didn't have a problem when they were tying things into a larger plot versus the early monster of the week plots. I like story arcs in these kinds of shows. I even enjoyed when they did a part of a season from the perspective of the alternate fringe team in the "other universe". Kinda cool. Where they total lost me was after Peter uses the machine to fix things. IMO, they just went off the rails at that point. They first went forward to a potential future, had Peter make sure the machine was built, then popped him back to the moment in the machine, then "poof", he disappears from the time line. Then they do a whole season exploring the new time line in which Peter doesn't exist, with both universes still there (but different). Then he re-appears, and stuff gets screwy. Then they have the rogue Observer thing. Then they fast forward to the future where the Observers have conquered the world and spend this season fighting to fix things.

My issue is that I more or less got lost as to which version of the characters even existed anymore, and kinda stopped caring. I couldn't remember which events happened in the past to which characters, what they knew or didn't know, etc. It was a confusing mess and it seemed as though the writers just wanted to continually muddy the waters with more changes so that they didn't have to write any sort of consistent stories anymore. At least, that's what it felt like. Totally lost me. At the end of the day, why should I care what happens to the characters on the screen if I don't even know who they are anymore, or whether some future choice will totally erase what just happened and make some alternate set of outcomes occur?

As a side observation, I really do think you can only do those "what if" kind of stories for a short period of time before audiences lose interest. We all know you're doing an alternate future, and something will happen to change things (it's the whole point of doing that kind of story in the first place). Spending too much time and too much detail on that is going to be a waste. To provide a classic comic book example: Two issues in X-men showing a horrible potential future so that someone can come back in time to change things works great and will draw readers to your book. Whole years and spinoff books exploring alternate future time lines will result in massive sales losses as people just don't care about the characters you're spending so much time on because they aren't the "real characters" that fans want to read about. Do this too much as you can destroy the entire franchise.


That's what went wrong with Fringe IMO. You'd think folks would learn.

Edited, Jan 14th 2013 5:41pm by gbaji
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#9 Jan 14 2013 at 7:58 PM Rating: Good
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The last season kind of "retconned" (I think I'm using this right) the entire series to be about the fight between the two Observer groups. People like Windmark and people like September. Windmark and the other Observers are only out to make sure that history goes exactly as it should to end up with the Observers as is. September wishes to change it all, show the past humans that intelligence and emotion can coexist. Everything that happened previously was just Windmark and the other Observers pushing humanity toward their end. They've kind of ignored anything else.

And by now they have fused every universe personality into the single characters. At least the main ones. Peter remembers everything, because he was the only copy of himself across both realities. Olivia remembers everything because of the Cortexiphan causing her brain to leech memories from Peter. And Walter remembers everything because the "child" Observer opened up his mind to every alternate reality and caused him to experience everything. They've really ignored the development of Olivia's powers. Kind of explained away by her not being the other her who had the powers, but then of course they use the Cortexiphan and her relationship with Peter as a catalyst to make her remember the other Olivias' lives.

I blame Abrams.
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#10 Jan 15 2013 at 8:02 AM Rating: Good
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Seems to me that they cut a lot of story from the late middle of the show to make room for the final season. They could have ended the show with Peter activating the wormhole machine, but they didn't for some reason.

The problem with the final season is that it's all happening so far from the setting of the first seasons. I find myself not caring about the deaths and everything else happening, because I'm expecting a timeline reset (again). The only way this show could surprise me is if the final episode doesn't feature a timeline reset. That would blow my mind, but not in a good way.

Edited, Jan 15th 2013 3:06pm by Mazra
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#11 Jan 15 2013 at 2:41 PM Rating: Decent
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Mazra wrote:
The problem with the final season is that it's all happening so far from the setting of the first seasons. I find myself not caring about the deaths and everything else happening, because I'm expecting a timeline reset (again).


Exactly! It's like "Ho hum. Nothing matters until they resolve the situation. Move along". And since this is the final season, it means that more or less the ending will be pointless.

I was annoyed that they basically erased Olivia's powers as well. The entire first couple seasons built up to her learning about them and how to use them, then "poof", it's all gone. Hence my comment that the show really lost it with the resolution of the machine. It just created too much of a disconnect with the characters. They weren't the same people anymore. Bad choice IMO.
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#12 Jan 18 2013 at 10:26 PM Rating: Good
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The ending was what was expected. They revived Olivia's powers, reintroduced the other reality, and... everything. I'm not sure what was going on with the Alternate universe. I honestly can't remember what happened in the past seasons after Peter activated the Machine now. I was under the impression that the Universes were merged by it to heal them, but I must be mistaken.

Also... something appealing about Alternate-Olivia's slightly older, touch of grey look.
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#13 Jan 21 2013 at 4:22 PM Rating: Good
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Don't read the spoiler unless you've watched the last episode. Seriously, it's a big spoiler. "Dumbledore dies" big.

Boo, Walter ceased to exist and September died. Sadface.

I was expecting September/Donald to die somewhere in there, but I'm a bit bummed by Walter's fate, considering how much focus the series put on his relationship with his son. I honestly thought there'd be a happy ending, but bittersweet endings are all the rave these days.


Tirith, I'm having a hard time remembering what each season ended with, but I believe Peter stabilized the two universes by creating the permanent portal with the machine,

Walter's original crossing caused an instability between the two universes. accelerated by Jones's constant interference. Peter and Olivia killed Jones and Peter stabilized the universes, but was erased from both timelines in the process. He came back because magic, and then William Bell tried to collapse the two universes again by using Olivia as a catalyst. Walter stopped that by shooting Olivia, but not before they closed the portal between the two universes, which is why the universes are separated in 2036. That's when we had the 2036 intermission episode followed by a fast-forward and 13 episodes of "wtf am I watching".

Disappointing end to an awesome show. Smiley: frown


Also, there are a lot of paradoxes in the ending. People over at IMDb.com are going ******* because it doesn't make sense.

Edited, Jan 21st 2013 11:28pm by Mazra
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#14 Jan 21 2013 at 4:42 PM Rating: Decent
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Mazra wrote:
Don't read the spoiler unless you've watched the last episode. Seriously, it's a big spoiler. "Dumbledore dies" big.

Boo, Walter ceased to exist and September died. Sadface.

I was expecting September/Donald to die somewhere in there, but I'm a bit bummed by Walter's fate, considering how much focus the series put on his relationship with his son. I honestly thought there'd be a happy ending, but bittersweet endings are all the rave these days.


Yeah. It's unfortunate that writers have become so predictable with their "twists" though. They foreshadowed the whole "Walter must sacrifice to save the world" bit, so you see it coming. Then, when they retrieve the tape and syringe with the time travel antidote in it (with "one more dose"), I immediately realized that the twist would be that someone else would decide to take Walter's place (with September being the obvious throwaway choice). Then when they show the scene where September admits to having taken the antidote and explains to Walter that he will take the boy instead (making everything work out great), I looked at the clock and realized that there was still 10 minutes of show left and knew that the new twist would be that something would prevent September/Donald from making it, and Walter would have to sacrifice after all.

Ridiculously predictable unfortunately. And the moment I saw the scene where they're running towards the portal with a firefight going on around them, I knew that September would be shot and killed. Surprise! Oh wait. Not even remotely. Like I said, writers have become way to predictable with the way they do twists. It's so formulaic it's not even funny.


Having said that, in the grand scheme of series finales it was far far far from the worst.

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Tirith, I'm having a hard time remembering what each season ended with, but I believe Peter stabilized the two universes by creating the permanent portal with the machine,

Walter's original crossing caused an instability between the two universes. accelerated by Jones's constant interference. Peter and Olivia killed Jones and Peter stabilized the universes, but was erased from both timelines in the process. He came back because magic, and then William Bell tried to collapse the two universes again by using Olivia as a catalyst. Walter stopped that by shooting Olivia, but not before they closed the portal between the two universes, which is why the universes are separated in 2036. That's when we had the 2036 intermission episode followed by a fast-forward and 13 episodes of "wtf am I watching".[

Disappointing end to an awesome show. Smiley: frown


Yeah. Hence my comment about the series just totally going off the rails after that happened. As a viewer you spend the last 2 seasons waiting for the story to return to the "real storyline", so nothing in it seemed to actually matter much. I also have incredibly fuzzy memories of what the hell was actually going on, and why any of it mattered. I honestly do think the writers just kinda threw their hands up and said "We've changed things, so now we can write anything we want". That's never a good thing. Viewers become attached to the characters and the story. When you completely change things, they no longer care.

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Also, there are a lot of paradoxes in the ending. People over at IMDb.com are going apesh*t because it doesn't make sense.



You think? The treatment of time travel in that show was always a bit wonky, but then it's always that way with pretty much any show. Again though, I've seen worse finales. So while a bit disappointing, to be honest I've been disappointed with the show for 2 seasons, so it was more of a "Great. Just end it already". And it did have a reasonably happy ending, so there is that.
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#15 Jan 21 2013 at 5:11 PM Rating: Good
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I wish they'd gone with the William Bell storyline instead of the Future storyline.

First season is about Jones (Fringe events).
Second season is about Alternate Universe (Walternate/synthetics).
Third season is about Observers (September's *****-up)
Fourth season is about William Bell (the end of the world)

Fifth season should have been about stopping William Bell once and for all. It would have allowed them to go back to the Fringe events. They could have kept Walter's "brain fix" in it, which would have given them an excellent opportunity to deal with Walter's fear of becoming his old self. Walter's old self wanted to collapse the universes as well, like William Bell wanted to, so that could have been an interesting plot twist: Walter relapses to his old self, but has a change of heart in the end and stops Bell.

Happy endings make Maz sleep better at night. J.H. Wyman and BioWare should remember that. This bittersweet crap is getting tiresome.


Jeez, I'm getting too drunk to tell where I should put the spoilers.

Edited, Jan 22nd 2013 12:28am by Mazra
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#16 Jan 21 2013 at 10:37 PM Rating: Good
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I had pretty much completely forgotten about season 4. I blame the story.
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