It's no secret that I love Fringe. I've written numerous features and posts celebrating the way in which it blends science fiction with nuanced emotional drama, positioning the fractured characters of the Bishops and Olivia Dunham as a makeshift family studying the mysteries of the universe... and the human heart.
Which might be why I was so monumentally disappointed with the Season Three finale ("The Day We Died"), which aired on Friday evening. After a season that was so tremendously emotional, which delivered a series of staggering performances from John Noble, Anna Torv, and Joshua Jackson in two separate, parallel universes, my expectations were extremely high indeed. But what I found with the future-set finale was that I didn't care about "these" versions of Olivia, Walter, and Peter and that the drama here felt entirely manufactured and without emotional weight, destroying the intense momentum established within the last few episodes.
It was clear from the start that the future timeline of 2016 Fringe was a mere detour on the road to the season finale (I had anticipated the Days of Future Past-style storyline earlier in the week), which erased all sense of narrative stakes from the story unfolding here: End of Dayers, the "death" of Olivia Dunham, the grief of Peter Bishop, all of it would be wiped clean before the final credits rolled.
And it's true: they were. While I didn't anticipate that Peter himself would be erased from the timeline (more on that in a...
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Read the full article at Televisionary (http://www.televisionarytv.com).
