Fringe: S05 Ep01 - Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11

What happened?

It's 2036, and Etta continues the resistance against The Observers with Peter, Walter and Astrid. Their first course of action is to return to the point where Walter last heard from Olivia, and they realise she must have ambered herself when she was collecting a vital component of Walter's plan to win the war.

Whilst Olivia is found and removed from Amber, Walter is captured by The Observers and his scattered mind is probed and broken down before Peter and Olivia can rescue him; whatever plans he had are now seemingly lost and they may have to hope for an alternative scheme to present itself to save the world.

Thoughts

So this first episode of the new (and final) season kicked off where the episode Letters Of Transit left things before last season headed into its present day finale. We were thrust back into 2036, with Peter dreaming of the moment he was with his baby daughter when The Observers made their brutal assault on the planet. Great way to start the episode, that was for sure (and very important in helping us understand just how The Observers took control; turns out it was with overwhelming force). The end of last season seemingly resolved the matter of there being a parallel universe with the link to 'Over There' being severed, Olivia was apparently now free of Cortexiphan, and pregnant, so a little beat like Peter's dream filling us in on how The Observers took over it seems like there's little reason to 'go back' to the present day timeline since there's not a lot of exposition there to uncover.

Of course we have learned from Walter that he worked with September to devise plans to take back the planet from The Observer shortly after they arrived, but since Walter has already discussed what happened there seems little need to show it. Point I am making is that, with this season starting in the year 2036, whilst the door is still open for the next episode to go back to the 'present day' and pick up plot threads, there's actually very little point.

There are one or two things hanging around unanswered, mind. Like Walter, in Letters Of Transit, only took William Bell's hand because of what he had done. We don't know what heinous act that was, unless it was what we saw in the season finale and the things Belly did in his manipulation of Olivia. If we never hear anything else about it then we can assume that was Walter's motivation - so I suppose that base has been covered.

It didn't take long for this episode to get Olivia back into the show (unsurprising, she already spent the entirety of Letters Of Transit out of the picture so they couldn't very well let another episode go by without the leading lady!), which made up the first half of what turned out to be an episode of two rescues. First they rescued Olivia from the amber thieves, and then they had to rescue Walter from the clutches of The Observers. The upshot at the end of the episode was that the gang were all back together, albeit Walter was 'back' to his more mentally unstable self that we're used to seeing (I suppose that'll put Astrid back on carer duties!) and, more threateningly, Etta had been revealed as a double agent to The Observers so she is sure to be high on their hit list.

I liked Etta, even though she wasn't given very much to do this episode. I said it about her when she appeared in Letters Of Transit and I still stand by the idea that she has been very well cast, and puts on a great performance. Her capturing of mannerisms and expressions that echo Olivia are subtle yet perfectly on point. You can totally believe she is Olivia's daughter, 100%. The scene where Olivia and Etta first met was about as a touching as it could be, but the episode didn't really have the space to stretch out that reunion. Mother-daughter bonding will surely be developed over the course of the season.

If I had a complaint it's that the episode did feel a little rushed into having things to do. Fair enough it wanted to show some hustle to get Olivia back, but then needing to hurry once more to get Walter back meant there was scarcely chance for the characters to establish themselves and their reactions to this horrible new world. Save for Astrid playing some advanced word game, or the apparently unpleasant "eggsticks", we weren't given much of a feel for what life in 2036 is like. Credit to the production design with its graffitti and Observer posters lending this future dystopia a sharp Orwellian feel. All we know for certain is that The Observers' practice of leeching away oxygen from the atmosphere is going to have dire consequences for all mankind so time is not on their side.

The Observers themselves make for a bit of a strange adversary. I am not quite sure what their powers are, and what their limitations are. Evidently they can read minds, fair enough. But then I think of how September was able to predict what people would say before they said it, and happen to be at the right place and time to witness something strange occurring, and it was clear he was capable of a lot more prescience and awareness than just reading minds. And also the matter of them being able to appear and disappear (like how they showed up out of nowhere to capture Walter) wherever they want begs the question of just what kind of measures can our heroes put in place to stop them just finding them and appearing where they are in great numbers and putting their resistance to an end.

I realise that they clearly need the help of humans (enlisting them as part of their army, like Nazis enlisting Jews to run concentration camps) so they are not all-powerful beings - I'd just like to have their boundaries clarified. I want to know the enemy.

The Observers do also rock a very distinct resemblance to Agents from The Matrix with the way they are dressed, their robotic speech patterns and how they operate to enslave mankind. I also thought the scene where The Observer interrogated Walter, trying to break his mind, was very reminiscent of the scene where Agent Smith tried to break Morpheus in The Matrix (and in that movie Neo and the gang infiltrated a large building to rescue him, akin to Olivia and Peter this episode!); with the blood leaking out of Walter's nose and the way the scene played I believe Fringe was paralleling that entirely deliberately.

I can't say I was blown away by the episode, in all honesty. Writing about it, curiously enough, makes it seem slightly more interesting than how it all felt when watching it play out. The rescue operations lacked tension, the reunions lacked emotion and the confounding plot about Walter's memories having been broken up like a jigsaw and apparently unable to be put back together wasn't exactly a tangible mechanic to get on side with.

If I look at the episode as one that's just laying down a marker for where the season is going to go then it's done it's job. The gang are all back in one place. With Walter's original plan apparently lost then there's a clean slate for Olivia and Peter and Walter and Etta to re-gather their strategies and come up with a new scheme that we can be on board with on the ground floor. And there's still the matter of Broyles and Nina hanging around, waiting to be brought back into the fold. Not to mention September, too, who we don't yet know the fate of. So, lots to look forward to - it was just the execution here felt a bit flat.

I really liked the last scene, though. It was totally bizarre. Walter attracted by a strange decoration of compact discs to play an old 80s cover of 'Only You' (by Alison Moyet, I think it was) and then sit in a rusted yellow taxi, spotting a solitary yellow flower. Symbolically the suggestion was that the same way the little flower was growing in unlikely circumstances (an Observer did make a remark earlier on about how nothing can grow in dead earth) it meant hope could find a way. Walter, in the yellow taxi, half-dressed and mind broken, was like the delicate yellow flower: a small chance of hope, but hope none-the-less.

What was the best part?

Peter's dream sequence was hard to top. Nicely edited out of sequence and jarring enough to make an impact. I think it was also the element of Olivia and Peter actually at peace, happy, and not on their guard that made the devastating arrival of The Observers all the more shocking. Clearly Olivia and Peter thought they had saved the world - they, like the rest of the world, just didn't see it coming.

What do I think will happen next?

Viva la resistance! I have to now assume the 2036 timeline is going to be the dominant timeline and we're going to stick with Olivia, Peter, Walter and Etta as they formulate a new plan to try and overthrow their oppressors. I have no idea where that may take us yet, but I hold out hope that the talk of the 'first people' that was present in the earlier seasons may yet become a part of things and that Fringe has more twists and turns beyond a straight rebellion conflict against Fringe Division and The Observers.