FRINGE Final Season Recap: “Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11”

Stewart here, and welcome to the first recap of the final season of FRINGE! We got a lot to cover, so let’s get to it:

If you read my FRINGE primer earlier this week, I said last season’s flashforward “Letters of Transit” would be important going into this final season. With the exception of a very brief flashback, the entire episode is set in Observer-controlled 2036, and Walter, Astrid, Peter, and his now grown up daughter Henrietta are searching for a way to stop this Orwellian-esque nightmare. So let’s get to the big events this week:

They find Olivia. And in a slightly weird moment, meet Markham, one of Peter’s shadier sources (might remember him from season one), who has not only purchased her ambered, been using her as a table, and is hoping to reawaken her and have her fall in love with him. The future makes you that desperate, I guess. Well, good thing Team Fringe knows how to de-amber her, so off they ago to do that and have a tearful family reunion, except…

Walter gets captured by the Observers. These bald emotionless villains really do a number on Walter’s already fragile mind. They find that Walter has a plan to destroy them fragmented in his head, intentionally to avoid it being discovered. So after a few scenes of mind interrogation (and Walter getting bloodshot eyes in the process), the team recovers Walter from his holding cell to put together the plan. How, you ask?

What happened before. OK, after the Observers arrived and took over Earth a few years from now and after Henrietta went missing, Olivia was asked by Walter to find a specific device he and a sympathetic Observer named September had hidden (the same Observer who put that fractured plan in Walter’s head), but in the event they could have been caught, they were given little amber-ing devices to keep them from being interrogated. As you saw in “Letters of Transit”, cutting ambered people out for sale has become a bit of a black market deal in the future, hence the whole first act search for Olivia. What Olivia had found before amber-ing herself was a thought unifier, specifically made to extract and assemble the plan Walter has in his head. Which brings us to…

Walter’s REALLY brain-fried. Turns out that Observer interrogation has scrambled his memory so much, the plan is incomplete or next to unrecoverable. So besides that, he unwillingly pointed the Observers toward his granddaughter Henrietta, who happened to be part of Walter’s rescue. Oops. So we leave the episode with Walter in a wrecked car (surprisingly, the battery’s working enough to play an old CD-R of Yaz’s “Only You”) staring at a flower growing out of the pavement of an essentially dead neighborhood. Welcome to 2036!

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Wow. First off, it looks like we’re not going to be seeing much of the time between the end of season four and the “waking nightmare” that our heroes are in this season. There’s a lot of ground covered in what happened in that time in the conversations between Peter and Olivia (Peter couldn’t let go of finding Henrietta, Olivia pushed on and went off to save everyone), and there’s still a few characters left unaccounted for by episode’s end like Broyles and Nina. And what happened to William Bell, or more importantly, do you think he knows his ambered hand is in Walter’s care (certainly Walter forgot about it thanks to the Observers brain-beating)? Lots of questions to ask before this season (and series) is over to be sure. Stay Tuned…

–Looks like Desmond from Lost, who was Henrietta’s help in “Letters of Transit” won’t be making any return appearances.

–Fun Walter Facts: fell in love in Japan, and tried writing science-fiction novels once.

–Egg sticks? Yep, I agree with Walter: this is a miserable future.

–Walter’s indoor dressings gets questioned: “I’m aware I’m not wearing pants. I’m not an idiot.”

–“It’s always the red wire…unless it’s the white wire.”

So what do you think? This last season off to a good start? Comment below…