Fringe – Season 5 Premiere – Recap and Review

Fringe returns for its final season with an emotional premiere “Transilience Thought Unifier Model.” Continuing exactly where Season 4 concluded, the focus of the premiere is on Walter (John Noble) as he delivers a stellar performance and new regular character, Etta (Georgina Haig) who proves to be a great addition to the cast.

Below is the recap and review of this episode:

Reminder

It’s a beautiful day at the park, as Olivia (Anna Torv) and Peter (Joshua Jackson) watch as their daughter Henrietta frolic in the distance. Suddenly, there’s chaos. Buildings disappear, and a pack of observers march in.  Fear starts to sink in to people’s eyes, as they start running for their lives. Olivia and Peter hurry to secure Henrietta but they are unfortunately separated.

Peter wakes up after dreaming about the day the world changed. It is now 2036, and Peter is united with her now teenage daughter. Continuing from where Season 4 left off, Peter, Astrid (Jasika Nicole) and Walter have just been released from amber by Peter’s daughter, Henrietta, who has continued her parents’ legacy to work as a Fringe agent. However, Olivia is still missing, and Etta and the team now try to locate her according to Walter’s last memory of where she was meant to be.

Rediscovery

Etta and the team head out and really explore for the first time the reality of the future. Picture George Orwell’s 1986. Heavily industrialized architecture, propaganda posters of the Observers, abandoned streets, and most notably the trees have all been eradicated and replaced by carbon dioxide producing machines. Apparently, the Observers cannot stand clean air.

Arriving at the scene where Olivia was meant to be, they discover cut out blocks of amber. Etta informs the team of the new business of amber gypsies, a black market for selling fossilized humans. Through monetary incentive and funnily enough, walnuts, which are apparently extremely valuable (better start stocking up now!), Peter manages to convince a vendor to disclose information about the whereabouts of Olivia, who apparently has been sold to a bookstore owner, Edward Markham, the bookstore owner who found Olivia attractive and made it known to her in Season 4 Episode 16. He uses Olivia as a table. (Nice touch.) Peter crashes into his apartment and everybody gathers to share a happy family reunion moment, but the mood is quickly shattered as Observers appear at the apartment, having been alerted by the gypsies. Finally bringing back classic psychedelic Fringe action sequences, a shootout ensues and everyone escapes except for Walter who surrenders to capture.

Peter and Etta finally free Olivia from amber, and Olivia tries to hold back her emotions as gracefully as possible as she wraps her head around the sight of her daughter. Etta similarly shows a struggle to articulate her emotions and they both melt into a heartwarming embrace. Olivia’s mind gets temporarily distracted as she realizes that Walter is missing. Olivia informs the group of the gadget that is meant to be the solution to save the world. The Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11. Well, that was a handful. In other words, a thought connector that is meant to help piece together and make sense of the fragments of messages September has left in Walter’s head.

Resistance

Meanwhile, Walter is locked in an interrogation chamber, and is questioned by the head of Observers, Captain Windmark (Michael Kopsa). Windmark tries to intercept Walter’s thoughts, but Walter puts up one hell of a fight as he blocks his thoughts in order for them to appear too convoluted to decipher. Windmark is surprised by his ability and states that he may not get the answers he wants now, but he will eventually. Walter’s efforts take a grave toll on him as his pupils and nose starts to bleed exponentially.  Windmark does manage to gather certain flashes of clues from Walter’s head, including the fact that Walter is devising a plan to rid of all the Observers, and that a girl is helping him.

Etta recruits the help of other resistant fighters to retrieve Walter, and guides Olivia and Peter to some kind of underground office. The resistant fighters agree to help, and use a very risky and unsustainable form of technology that has just been developed – a device that allows people to fake death. Etta leads the plan to infiltrate the compound by pretending that she has caught a group of dead resistance fighters, and they are brought inside to a morgue/holding room. Once secure, she resuscitates her team, and they continue to hack the air ventilation system as a distraction. Captain Windmark falls into the bait, allowing Peter, once again, to smash another door and retrieve a now drained and gaunt Walter. Etta and Olivia carry him through the hallways, and showcase great choreography and coordination as they operate and kill obstacles that come in their way.

Now that the complete original Fringe family is united, another challenge awaits, as it seems that Walter has lost all his memory of September’s messages. Etta claims that Walter’s thoughts have been destroyed as a result of his resistance to Windmark’s superhuman mind control powers, and that his brain won’t be able to heal anytime soon. Additionally, Captain Windmark retrieves security footage of the infiltration, and identifies Etta as the girl behind it all. "I found you, little girl", he says in a menacing tone.

Walter, disheartened and convinced he has failed the world, shuffles in the midst of a broken world, and seeks temporary peace and relaxation as he plays a CD in an abandoned car. We see a vibrant daisy against the background of dust and debris, a faint reminder of the past and a symbolization that the team will have to work from ground up again to recollect knowledge and devise a plan to save the future.

Re...view? (Zing!)

Fringe has done it again, interweaving beautiful sensitive emotions equally with powerful drama and a dose of Walter's lighthearted wisdom. I have to admit I have had my concerns with the casting of Etta, but she sure made me bite my words, as she really demonstrated the quiet and demure resilience  that Olivia represents. Their relationship as mother and daughter is believable, and she can crack out some good fight moves (convincingly). I do hope that Fringe does not spiral down into a conventional dystopian drama, because it is their surreal, sometimes ridiculous sci-fi concepts that make it Fringe - the moments that make you go "What in the world just happened?" and you have to watch it again to get it. There was only a small taste of that in this episode, and a lot of the other dystopian elements were either unoriginal or slightly too believable (What I mean about that is that it references certain historical regimes rather too closely, which doesn't allow enough for the imagination). What Fringe never fails to offer is well-thought out episode structure. Fringe's episodes have never carried out a predictable formula, which makes it hard for interested or accidental viewers to follow, a possible reason for its plummeting ratings over the years. However, it's style is arguably the key ingredient in sustaining a loyal fan base who are glued to all the potential curves, twists, and magic that's ahead.