There’s an undeniable appeal about “future” episodes in sci-fi. Done right, it’s a chance for a story to examine “big picture” issues and the long-term consequences of its actions. Who will live? Who will die? Do they win in the end? Did they accomplish what they set out to do? The “dark future” can be even more exciting — a future in which the heroes lost. Where is hope? How do they keep going when all is said and done?
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There have been so many iconic dark future stories — X-Men’s “Days of Future Past,” Dollhouse’s “Epitaph One,” arguably Batman’s “The Dark Knight Returns.” What makes a good dark future is that it comments on the series as a whole, defining stakes that can often be abstract and giving us a chance to think about who the characters are when the situation is turned on its head.
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Hillside meadows equestrian center. It’s these thoughts that propel me forward into Fringe’s final season. In a bold move, Fringe has jumped to the year 2036, where the Observers have revealed their intentions — in the 26th century, Earth is uninhabitable, so they came back in time to claim the planet and make it what they wanted, current inhabitants be damned. The Fringe team froze themselves in amber, then got rethawed in this time to try to set the world right again.
I really like dark futures — this isn’t even the first time Fringe has gone to that well; the third season finale “The Day We Died” jumps to a fraught future that never comes to be — but I have to admit I’m still waiting some on the emotional connection that makes the Observer future resonant. Fringe has always been a show that, at its best, ties its freak-of-the-week case into the characters’ emotional beats, and the show’s main storyline, about Walter breaking two worlds to save his son Peter, has spent plenty of time comprehensively exploring the scars left by their actions.
But jumping into the future without exploring how we got there has left me a little cold. We didn’t know the Observers were evil, per se, until the show jumped into the future and explained it. (We did know they were up to something, but they were never out-and-out malevolent until now.) The Fringe team wasn’t involved, as near as I can tell, in the global catastrophe — there’s not any ownership of the problem, and it’s more that the Fringe team is going to solve the Observer problem because, well, they’re the Fringe team and that’s the name of the show. The connections will be told through flashbacks throughout the course of the season, we’re told, but it’s hard to enjoy a show when you feel like you’re missing a piece.
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The new season plays into the show’s persistent themes — scientists hoping to fix the world but often making matters worse — but it hasn’t yet made that emotional connection to hook me. What do civilians think of their Observer overlords? Are there good things about the Observer occupation? Does the Fringe team feel in part responsible for what happened? Can the world ever go back to the way it was, or is it permanently scarred? Aboutjohn secords canon .abk conversion tools. If the Observers’ future was uninhabitable, why do they seem to be repeating the same mistakes? These are questions the show needs to think about if it wants to go out on the emotional highs of such classics as “White Tulip,” “Peter,” and “And Those We’ve Left Behind.”
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I don’t mean to completely downplay the new season — the reunion scenes have been very well done, the future is well sketched-out so far (egg sticks! blergh!), and the final scene of the season’s first episode, “Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11,” where a brain-addled Walter mournfully remembers the Earth that was and finds some small measure of hope, is among the most moving the show’s ever done. But especially after a fourth season finale that, to me, felt rushed, poorly written, and amounted to very little, I need a little more to go on here. I need this future to mean something; the show did it in one hour with “The Day We Died,” I definitely know they can do it in one season.