FRINGE Final Season Recap: “An Origin Story”

Welcome to another recap of FRINGE! Let’s get to business figuring out how this mystery box is put together…

So last week, Olivia and Peter lost their little girl permanently thanks to the Observers. And that plan Walter has to defeat these bald overlords is sketchy at best (the blueprints they found last episode aren’t familiar at all to him). So how do you deal with the loss of a family member and the increasing problem of the Observers stopping them? Well…

Doors open, doors close. Peter and Olivia open this episode in mourning over the loss of their daughter, and taking away her things (in Peter’s case, her secret cache of weapons and explosives, but still mournful) from her apartment. Meanwhile in Manhattan, the Observers bring in some big containers through some interdimensional portal (probably from the future they come from). The whole tape thing also is slowed down, mostly because someone was cleaning the hibachi with propane and left it near the tapes ambered in the lab. Walter?

An Observer in a cage. Some of Etta’s resistance contacts get in touch with Team Fringe about the Observer shipment. They found some notes from an Observer that they could use to hit any future shipment from Observer-land if decoded properly. The notes came with a bonus: an Observer taken captive and some kind of future cube in a room shielded from the Observers. Peter thinks he can use this tech to seriously injure the Observers supply line or them in general, so he has an interest in torturing, ahem, talking to the prisoner.

“You don’t even know what you don’t know.” While Peter is playing stare down the Observer by assembling the Observer cubein front of him, Walter reaches out to Olivia to have her and Peter mend their loss together, instead of apart as they have been. That conversation is interrupted by some news from Astrid: the Observer’s notes have been cracked, and it points to another shipment from Observer-land later in the day. Peter thinks the device is ready and sets it off during the shipment passing through. It would have worked, but the shipment appears anyway through another portal. What went wrong?

“Miss…me?” Turned out Peter’s interrogation of the Observer through his retina reactions had a problem: Observers aren’t really human. The reactions Peter was basing it all on was a random reaction. The Observer points out Peter filled in the details based on his emotional responses to losing Etta, and that’s why the box was put together wrong. Peter is so enraged by this whole “I know more than you” and “your daughter was her, now she’s not” crap, he suggests he could understand if he had Observer tech in his head. So…he carves a piece of it out of the Observer’s spine, killing him, and inserts it into his own body. Peter then gets a call from Olivia, who has finally watched a tape of one of Etta’s birthdays Walter suggested earlier, and wants to heal their loss together. Peter, by the way, does not end that conversation with “Oh, by the way, I killed an Observer and put his future tech into me”. So yeah, that’ll go over well with Team Fringe, won’t it?

–Nice little reveal of the Etta “RESIST” posters to Olivia by just a simple camera move to another part of an alleyway.

–Weird Theory Sidebar: Considering Peter just got some Observer tech into his body and the Observers come from the future, did he just create a paradox where he may have just created the thing he has to destroy? Think on that mind blower.

–Fun Walter Facts: he was using the hibachi to cook some bratwurst and forgot to clean up before ambering the lab.

–“Yeah, it’s one of those guns.”

–“It’s okay. I know you know.”

So what do you think so far? Did Peter just make a massive boo-boo? Comment below…