Amber Alert

Well, I've come to the end of Fringe. And even if I hadn't known going into it that the fifth season was kind of a surprise and kind of an afterthought...it's pretty obvious. What a bummer!

Knowing nothing about the actual plot of Season 5, "Letters Of Transit" felt like a very weird departure. The Observers are villains now? How? Why? The only ones we've come to know over the course of the series have been very protective of humanity; suddenly just because they have superior intelligence, that automatically makes them human slavers? What kind of anti-intellectual bullshit is that? Then, after seeing that Peter and Olivia's child is going to grow up fighting an even worse menace than they've ever had to deal with, we're supposed to go back to the present day and root for them? Why, when we know things are just going to end up in an even bigger pile of shit than we've ever seen thus far?

That final season has so many deficits: Peter and Olivia going backwards in their relationship AGAIN; the dullness of a basically omnipotent enemy; the Scrappy Doo-ness of Etta; and the 8000 scenes of someone melting amber and digging a thing out of it. But one of the most problematic has to be how much our "heroes" torture and kill people. I'm not saying this version of the Observers or their kapo-ish Loyalists are good people (though I would be remiss if I didn't say "The World In Order" is an ideal we'd all do well to strive for), but when Etta tortures a Loyalist for information and excuses herself by basically arguing that he's subhuman, it doesn't get me on her side, and I certainly don't think the Olivia I've come to know to that point would go along with it. It's also pretty rough to see Peter torturing an Observer and stripping him of his implant. Even if this is recast as a rock-bottom moment that Peter has to repudiate in order to remain worthy of Olivia, the way it's portrayed in "An Origin Story" makes it seem like he's just a grieving dad taking care of business.

And then, for all the learning and redemption Walter's had to go through, in multiple timelines, to connect with his son and rejoice in his having made a family with a woman Walter adores, his "reward" is to be rocketed into the future with this weird Observer kid? I get that it's supposed to be a noble sacrifice, but I don't care. Poor Walter has been battling loneliness ever since we met him; that he should end up hundreds of years in the future as the guardian of a child who can't express love to him feels like a punishment that exceeds his various crimes.

So, if I were advising anyone else to pick up Fringe, I would recommend not just stopping at the very satisfying end of Season 4, with everything in its right place, but skipping over "Letters Of Transit" and pretending it never happened (or...never will happen). Season 4 is just such a solid payoff for the series: the Peter arc is legitimately sad, and his reconnection with Olivia moving for having been so hard to achieve. The creation of the bridge between universes lets the characters and their doppelgängers grow and evolve, and even though I saw it coming, I liked Lincoln deciding to move into the other universe and try out that kind of life; the subtle differences between both his and Olivia's other-universe iterations makes the compatibility of Universe A Lincoln and Universe B Olivia click in a particularly believable way. And at the end of it all, William Bell is a real bonkers villain -- whose vision of The World In Order is much more terrifying than the Observers' anyway -- who kills our heroine as she had foretold, even if she triumphs over his attempt to extinguish her forever.

And then Olivia and Peter find out they're going to have a baby, and that baby is surely going to grow up happy and healthy and loved in a world no longer plagued by fringe events or any kind of hardship! The end!

I said, THE END.

Most Horrifying Indignity Visited Upon A Human Body Part: Featured extra: "I think when they move, they die."

Me: "NO PROBLEM, I CAN LIE HERE ALL DAY."

Favourite Character Actor From The HITG! Pantheon: This has to go to Tim Guinee, one of the last actually recognizable actors to guest on the show before it apparently turned into star repellent in Season 5.

But! I must give an Honourable Mention to this real-life candid shot of Josh Gad...

...real-life friend since childhood to Seth Gabel and godfather to Gabel's son.

Heartbreakingest Walter Moment: Walter pops Yazoo's "Only You" into the CD player in an abandoned car in the dystopic future.

I know we're supposed to follow his gaze to the dandelion and see it as an optimistic sign that life finds a way, but I just see the loneliest man on earth. In his jammies.