Fringe 5x13: An Enemy of Fate

And so, we reach the end. Will Walter and Donald save the past by changing the future? Will Peter and Olivia get Etta back? Will anyone tell me what the heck was up with those ball bearings? The answers may surprise you.

Donald sits in December's apartment, trying to convince him to bring him a piece of tech he needs to complete the device. The old man's not having it, though. He doesn't want to cease to exist, and he believes that it's humanity's fate to be conquered and wiped out by the Observers. However, his time amongst the humans has softened him, and Donald's passion manages to convince him that he can change fate if he's willing to try.

Elsewhere, the rest of the team has preparations to make. Walter directs Anil over the phone as he and the resistance set up the giant electromagnet, and Peter talks with Broyles. Which is unfortunate, because Broyles has been compromised and Windmark uses his fancy future tech to read their conversation of the windshield of his car. Then he heads up to Phillip's office to have a chat... and he does not look happy.

But then, he never really looks happy.

Broyles shields his thoughts from Windmark, but as he drives to meet with the team at Harvard, he notices he's picked up a tail. Olivia implores him to tell her where he is so they can come and save him, but Phillip knows the plan is more important than any one man, and he tells her to "Just get it done" while he leads the Observers on a wild goose chase for as long as he can.

Walter rallies the troops. While Astrid and Olivia retrieve the piece of tech they need, Peter lasers some final components out of the amber. As well as a few other things he didn't expect to find: A weird syringe and a tape addressed directly to him.

Using futuristic mining lasers to retrieve 1970s technology seems like a terrible waste.

The syringe is an inoculation that will allow someone to travel through time without ill effects, and the tape is Walter's goodbye note to Peter. When he takes Michael into the future, it will create a paradox, and the universe will resolve that paradox by deleting Walter in 2015. Peter is understandably upset, but his father tells him that it's the only way. Doing this will give Peter his life and his family back, and what father wouldn't do that for his son?

When Astrid and Olivia arrive at December's apartment, they find the door ajar and two Loyalists searching the place.

Also, December is dead and hanging from a pipe.

Olivia kills one Loyalist and captures the other. She asks what happened to the piece of tech they need. It's not good news. Windmark has it, and he knows what it's for. His goons also catch up with Broyles. Now, Phillip's still relatively spry, but he's an old man, and he doesn't put up much of a fight.

Now they're in trouble. They can't open a wormhole, and they know they've been compromised. No one has any idea what to do, so Olivia asks Michael. He tells her to shut up. With everyone quiet, Astrid comes up with the idea of converting one of the Observers' shipping lanes into a wormhole they can use. Donald thinks it can work, and he can read the Observers' shipping schedule, so he knows exactly when and where the next shipment is coming through.

To prepare, they dig out every last bit of fringe tech that Walter has: face-sealing gas, face-melting gas, and anything else they can carry. Astrid even digs out one last surprise for Walter.

He thanks her by telling her how 'Astrid' is a lovely name.

At Observer HQ, Broyles is about to get the once over with a metaphorical lead pipe. But first, Windmark tells him about the first twelve Observers and how spending so much time amongst normal humans infected them with emotions. He's been feeling something too: Hate. Phillip assures him that the feeling is mutual, and the psychic torture begins.

Back at the lab, Donald and Walter are preparing to clear out. Donald has given himself the time-travel inoculation. Seeing Walter with Peter has finally explained what he and the boy mean to each other. He can't communicate with Michael in any normal way, but when he takes him into the future, at last his son will understand that he loves him.

It took him 20 years, but he finally figured out emotions.

Meanwhile, Broyles is starting to bleed out of his face holes. He's not alone, though, because Olivia and Peter dump everything they can into the building's ventilation system and soon everyone is bleeding out of their face holes. Except of course for the people whose face holes get sealed shut. Chinese medical parasites burst out of guts, giant viruses pour out of mouths, heads explode, and one Observer even fights off the imaginary, razor-sharp butterflies. It's unpleasant for all concerned. With minimal searching, they retrieve the cube they need to stabilize the shipping lane, and they even find time to pick up Phillip.

Fortunately, torture rooms aren't known for their ventilation.

Out on the street, the Observers are setting up, but Astrid gets a call from Olivia, and it's time for the shooting to start. Anil and the resistance drive in with the electromagnet and lay down covering fire while Donald recalibrates the wormhole. Everything goes according to plan until Windmark shows up and kidnaps Michael. Peter manages to grab on to him as he teleports away, so he doesn't get far, but without the thing in his head, Peter's no match for a fully armed and operational Observer. He stays standing just long enough for Astrid and Olivia to come running. Astrid manages to shoot Windmark's backup, but Olivia gets the same beating her husband took. Except she's not like her husband. She just had her brain shot full of cortexiphan.

And she is very unhappy.

Olivia sucks all of the energy out of the surrounding area and uses it to smash Windmark between two parked cars. He manages to teleport away, but a good chunk of his face still winds up mashed into a window. He may not be dead, but he's not in good shape.

Donald retrieves his son and heads for the wormhole, but before he can get there he takes a stray bullet in the back. With no other choice, Walter grabs Michael, says one last goodbye to Peter and heads to the future. Then everything is as it was.

Back in 2015, Peter and Olivia take Etta home from the park. The Observers do not invade, and the world does not go to hell. Instead, at home Peter finds a letter from Walter.

Inside, all he found was hope.

What I Liked
-Walter would trade his comm unit for an old-fashioned, tumour-inducing cell phone. The future is a dark place indeed if you can get good phone reception.
-When they dig out all of Walter's hidden fringe stuff, Peter gets a set of anti-gravity osmium bullets so when he shoots Observers they'll just float away.

"Because it's cool."

-Michael Kopsa was really good as the antagonist this season. He started off completely emotionless, but at the end, I really believed that all he could feel was hatred for humanity. It was a subtle hate, but it was there.

What I Hated
-As neat as it was to bring back all the old fringe stuff, some of it didn't work quite right. In fact, the osmium bullets only worked originally because the laws of the universe were breaking down, so they shouldn't have worked at all.

It was still cool, though.

-Ultimately, Walter and Donald's plan was not terribly well thought out. No one other than the two of them would have been able to execute it, and Donald made certain of that by pulling Michael out of the pocket universe. It doesn't seem like the writers had everything set out before the start of the season, which is strange because they knew exactly how many episodes they had left. It was more or less a completely new story, so they couldn't really go off on a Lost-like tangent, but overall, it's still disappointing to find that even when they know the show is going to end, TV writers can't properly plan things out in advance.
-If the Observers never exist, then September can't go back in time to accidentally distract Walternate and prevent him from finding a cure for Peter, so Walter wouldn't have shattered the universe, and nothing in the show would have happened. Time travel stories cause a lot of problems. Not the least of which is messing with tenses.

Final Thoughts
Fringe's ratings declined every season to the point where it was bringing in fewer than three million viewers per episode. Yet its fan base was loyal and its cast and crew believed in what they were doing enough to keep the show going for 100 episodes. That's more than Firefly, more than Farscape, more than the new Battlestar Galactica and Caprica combined. It's even more than Enterprise, and Fringe didn't have the benefit of the Star Trek licence to prop it up. Sure, it would've been nice to see it do more than barely cling to life for the last three years, but all things considered, it did really well for a sci-fi show.

The word of the day was CLOSE, and at least one meaning is fairly evident. There may be others, but it's a little self-indulgent to argue about them now.

The ending was a bit more action heavy than Fringe has generally been, but I think it's important to go out with a bang, and it gave them an excuse to get everyone together in one place, so it doesn't bother me. Besides, in the very end, the show finished the same way it started: With a happy family spending a day at the park.

This was by no means a perfect episode, nor was it even a perfect finale, however, as series enders go, I think I'm comfortable with it. They didn't answer every question, but after last season most of those questions were trapped in another timeline, so I've had time to make my peace with that, and they did manage to dole out a few answers over the course of season five. I'm not happy to see Fringe go, but I find that I'm not sad either.