Fringe Mid-Season Finale (Yes there's a thousand of them now)

Fringe Mid-Season Finale

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

            Olivia has been kidnapped!  Last week the Fringe team was lead to believe that Nina Sharp, played by Blair Brown was behind Olivia’s (Anna Torv) strange headaches and time slips but in reality it turned out that it was David Robert Jones (Jared Harris), the man who first appeared in episode 7 of season one and proceeded to walk through walls to escape prison. 

            It appears that Jones is very interested in Olivia’s extra sensory abilities.  Jones is the person behind Olivia’s headaches and the presence of Cortexifan, that liquid that enhances ESP capabilities in young kids, in her bloodstream. 

            Last episode, the Fringe team detained Nina Sharp suspecting that she was the only person capable of obtaining the special liquid but as we have learned over the course of the series, Jones has the ability to walk through walls using special equipment.   

            Jones has apparently kidnapped Nina and is torturing her in the hopes of using that emotional stress to enable Olivia’s ESP powers.

            As the Fringe team is debating how to find Olivia, an Observer, one of those derby’d, eyebrowless gentlemen that appear at key moments of history, appears out of thin air in Walter Bishop’s lab at Harvard.  Except he has been shot!  But who shot him?

            Jones seems to know that the one way to get Olivia to use her ESP powers is from great stress so he straps Nina Sharp to a mattress spring and electrocutes her in the hopes of eliciting a response from Olivia, but to no avail.

            Outside we see a group of Observers meeting in a park and discussing the injured Observer, whose name we learn is September.

            The episode uses quick-cut editing to indicate insistence and we see Broyles, played by Lance Reddick, preparing to interrogate Nina Sharp.  She protests, and claims innocence to kidnapping Olivia. 

            We cut to Olivia’s apartment where Peter and Lincoln Lee continue the search for the missing Olivia.  Peter browses the room and figures out that a random fixture on the ceiling is a spy-cam.

            We cut to Jones preparing to torture Nina, and Olivia trying to illuminate the light board that was first introduced in season one as a signal to how much ESP power an individual possesses.

            Back in the secret lab, the other Nina is stalling to keep from being tortured, and Olivia figures that she needs Nina to refresh her memory of some traumatic event in order to access her ESP powers.  Olivia claims that the Cortexifan is blocking her ability to use her ESP. 

            Broyles tells the Fringe team of how the Observer appeared a few weeks back when Peter went to the Alternate New York to talk with Walternate in regards to getting back to his own timeline.

            Peter decides that he wants to go into the dying Observer’s consciousness to speak with him.  Ominous music ensues as Walter tells him that if the Observer dies he might be trapped in the Observer’s mind forever.

Peter enters September’s mind and speaks with him.  September tells Peter that he is originally a member of the science team part of his group of Observers.  The Observers are apparently a possible future version of humanity that travels outside of time.  He then sets about explaining everything that has occurred over the last two season of Fringe.  He then tells Peter that he has to go home in order to save Olivia.  Suddenly September’s universe starts to crumble.  Peter is thrown out of September’s mind and September dies.  His body disappears off of the table in Walter’s lab.  Astrid, who has very little to do in this episode picks up a tray.

              Peter is more fully determined to save Olivia and get back to his timeline.  He is now convinced that this reality more than ever is not his own. 

            Peter goes to his actual apartment only to be caught by men who work for Jones. 

            Olivia wakes up and sees Peter strapped to a gurney and this is the emotional stress she needs. The light board illumines fiercely and the entire building begins to shake.  Olivia burns the henchman left behind to safeguard Jones’s escape and frees Peter.  But we are not treated to a happy reunion kiss.  Peter tells he that he is now more than determined to get back to his own reality.

            It begins to rain, a metaphoric cleansing rain to signal the end of the episode.  But this is a contradiction because nothing is fine and good.   This is not a happy ending.  Nothing has been resolved.  Peter is convinced that this reality is not his and that he is going home.  The music swells, and he walks out of the frame and the credits roll.

            The screenwriting elements used in the episode are fairly standard boilerplate, a lot of swelling strings on the soundtrack as a well as quick editing to heighten the tension.  Unlike last week’s episode, which used parallelism to juxtapose the story lines, this week was very straightforward with a lot of telling by the characters through monologues.