Game of Thrones 5x10: Mother's Mercy

It's season finale time. Who will live? Who will die? Who will care?

Stannis
It seems that the sacrifice has worked as things have started to thaw out, but it's not all good news for the sole-surviving Baratheon. Selyse has decided that she actually did care about Shireen, and has hanged herself in the woods. Also, all the sellswords buggered off in the middle of the night and stole all the horses. Then just when he thinks it can't get any worse, Melisandre rides out of camp (apparently the sellswords stole all but one of the horses). "Well, them's the breaks," thinks Stannis, and he decides that a prophecy's a prophecy, so he'll just march his remaining men to take Winterfell without horses, siege weapons, superior numbers, or food. It doesn't go well for him.

Two minutes after they arrive, Stannis' forces are overwhelmed by the Boltons' cavalry and annihilated. Stannis himself manages to limp away to the woods, and even show a little baddassitude by killing two Bolton pursuers at the same time. Unfortunately, he's wounded, alone, and probably won't be able to drag his ass back to Dragonstone. Even more unfortunately, Podrick spotted his army coming in, and Brienne is not at all happy to see him. She's still a little miffed that Stannis killed Renly, so she tracks him to the woods and asks him if he has any last words before she whips out Oathkeeper and takes a swing at his head. All he can think to say is "Go on, do your duty."

"I've had a really bad day."

Sansa
Most of the Bolton soldiers are out slaughtering Stannis' men, so Sansa figures it's the perfect time to escape. She picks the lock on her room and heads up the ruined tower to light the candle Brienne had smuggled in to her. Unfortunately, Brienne is busy likewise engaged in Stannis-related business, so she can't come and save her. Myranda catches her out of her room, tells her of all the horrible things Ramsay has in store for her, and aims an arrow at her chest. That's all Theon can stands, he can't stands no more, so he tosses Myranda over a railing to her death, and leaps with Sansa from the wall of Winterfell into a snow bank and the freedom of season 6. Or to their deaths. Probably freedom, though.

Although, it is a reaaaaaaly long way down.

Arya
Ser Meryn doesn't just like underage prostitutes, he likes beating them. Arya's not cool with that, so she poses as a young whore, stabs his eyes out, then slits his throat. Later, she returns a borrowed face to the hall of the Many-Faced God. Jaqen catches her, and as punishment he forces her to watch him drink poison. Which is an odd punishment, to be sure. As she weeps over his body, the girl who has been taunting her all season turns into Jaqen and tells her that dead Jaqen wasn't Jaqen at all, he was no one. Arya rips faces off dead Jaqen until she reaches one that looks like her, then she goes blind because to a girl who is still someone, the faces are as good as poison. It's very confusing.

A girl has no idea what's going on.

Jaime
It's time to sail back to King's Landing. Ellaria gives Myrcella an obviously poisoned kiss goodbye, Tyene gives Bronn an obviously erotic bite on the ear, then it's sailing time. Two minutes into the trip, while Jaime awkwardly tries to explain his love for his own sister, Myrcella tells her dad that she already knows and that she's glad he's her dad. Then she drops dead. Back on the dock, Ellaria wipes some blood from her nose, cleans the poison from her lips, then downs the antidote. Then, I assume she and the Sand Snakes flip the boat off, Dornish style, before they walk home.

That's two kings, a crown prince, a prince, and three princesses that Jaime's lost during his time in the Kingsguard. It may be time for a new vocation.

Daenerys
Jorah and Daario ride north to look for their queen, while Tyrion, Grey Worm, Missandei, and (surprise!) Varys stay behind to run the city. Daenerys herself is somewhere off in the mountains trying to convince Drogon to take her home. He's a sleepy dragon, though, so she goes for a walk and is quickly surrounded by a... er... whatever the hell they call a group of Dothraki. So, I guess she'll be hanging out with them again next season.

I hope she remembers how to ride a horse.

Cersei
Cersei's tired of getting smacked around, so she confesses some of her sins and is shown the Mother's mercy. Which entails getting her head shaved and then walking home naked while the townspeople wave their genitals in her direction and throw what appears to be barbecue sauce at her. When she gets back to the Red Keep, she's met by her uncle Kevan, Qyburn, and the latest member of the Kingsguard.

Ser Frankenmountain

Jon
With Aemon dead, the castle needs a new maester, so Sam asks Jon if he can take Gilly and Little Sam to Oldtown so he can train at the Citadel. Reluctantly, Jon agrees. Later, Ser Davos begs for whatever Jon can spare, but the Night's Watch is low on just about everything, so there's nothing to send. Melisandre shows up (because apparently Stannis' camp was a 20-minute horse ride from Castle Black), and looks sad while Jon and Davos ask her what happened to Stannis and Shireen, respectively. Still later, Olly bursts into the Lord Commander's office to tell him of a wildling who has news of his uncle Benjen. Instead, he finds Ser Alliser and about fifteen other brothers standing around a sign that reads "TRAITOR". Then the actual traitors pull out their daggers and one-by-one, stab Jon to death. Yes, he's really, super dead and he's not coming back. For serious.

I mean, that's not chocolate syrup beside him.

What I Liked
-Wounded, and alone, Stannis still manages to kill two dudes before he goes down. He hasn't really had the chance to whip out his sword since season two.
-Myranda's head makes a satisfying splat when it hits the ground. She was boring, and I'm glad she's gone.
-When he dies, Jon's pupils dilate. I'll assume it was a special effect and not just incredible facial acting by Kit Harington.

What I Hated
-Literally a minute after he says the sellswords left with all the horses, Stannis' commander tells him that Melisandre was seen riding out of camp. It's like the writers never went back over the script after they wrote it.
-Brienne looks away from the broken tower five seconds before Sansa lights the candle. A watched pot never boils, I guess.
-The kiss of death could not have been more obvious.

I guess they don't have Sicilians in Westeros.

-"You want a good girl, but you need a bad pussy." That's a line so bad it hurts me to read it.
-Everything with Cersei. There was nothing good about her scenes at all.
-"Shame... shame... shame... *ding*" I'm not sure what they were going for with that bit, but it really just made me laugh.

SHAME! SHAME! SHAME! SHAME! SHAME! SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!

-The weird body-double/cgi thing they did with naked Cersei. It made her head and neck look quite odd. Also, the merkin the body double was wearing was ridiculous.

Lena Headey and Lena Headonsomeoneelsesbodyey

-The walk of shame takes forever. It takes 4 minutes 45 seconds from the time she's stripped naked until the time the door closes behind her at the Red Keep. For comparison, it only takes 5:35 for the Boltons to wipe out Stannis' army, and that includes Brienne taking a swing at Stannis' head and Ramsay executing an injured soldier on the battlefield. It would be fine if it were at all interesting, but it's boring as all hell. To me, she got her comeuppance when she was arrested.
-When she's finished walking, she looks like Bruce Willis at the end of Die Hard. Is the ground in King's Landing made of glass or something?

Final Thoughts
Little Sam is clearly still a tiny baby, and Gilly had him in the middle of season three. Which means that everything that's happened since then has taken place over the course of about a year. It seems like an awful lot has happened in that time.

Poor Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson. He's still going to be on the show from time to time, but he's not going to be doing much in the way of acting if his character can't talk and you can't see his face.

They couldn't have telegraphed the fact that Olly was going to stab Jon more if they'd had him hold up a sign that said "I'm going to stab Jon". Seriously, anyone who was surprised by that wasn't paying attention. Of course, now we're left with the question of just who the hell would want to be the new Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. The last two were murdered by their own men, and by now there can't be more than 600 total brothers left to defend the wall against an army of tens of thousands of wights and walkers. The wildlings would've easily overwhelmed Castle Black without Stannis' intervention and they were no match for the army of the dead. At this point, they might as well seal all the tunnels and disband. Which would be fine by me, because if Jon really is permadead, there's no one left at Castle Black to give a crap about. Seriously, the men mutinied because Jon saved a bunch of wildlings who would've otherwise wound up as members of an enormous zombie army. Winter is coming, and the only people with any sense of what that actually means are dead. I'm rooting for the Others. At least they're not stupid.

Speaking of stupid, I'm not a Stannis the Mannis fan or whatever they're called, but I've gotta wonder how he went from greatest military general of his generation to getting completely wiped out in the space of a single season. Apparently, he went deaf as well, because half his army deserted in the middle of the night and took all the horses, and he didn't hear a thing. Which brings up something else that's sure to be ignored: There's now a substantial army of sellswords out there, riding around the North with no food and no way to get back home. They ought to begin pillaging the countryside fairly soon.

What the hell is Petyr going to do now? I know he's got the whole wheels within wheels thing going on, but Sansa's no longer at Winterfell and Stannis is no longer in any condition to capture it. Sure, he's Lord of Harrenhal and protector of the Vale, but that's not really worth too much. Even his brothel's been destroyed, so if he's got some grand plan in mind, it seems like it's probably not going that well.

Since Brienne doesn't know that Sansa escaped, when she goes back to look for the candle again, she'll see it's still lit and will break into Winterfell to try to save her. Or they'll coincidentally run into each other on the street. It's happened before.

Apparently Loras, Margaery and Tommen have gone off to live with Gendry, Osha, Rickon, Edmure Tully, the Greyjoys, the Brotherhood Without Banners, and Salladhor Saan in the land of forgotten characters.

I figure Myrcella's dead, Stannis is alive, Jon's dead but not for long, Theon and Sansa are just fine, Arya will be blind for three episodes, and Cersei will take the opportunity to grow out her bangs.

Overall, I didn't much care for this episode. Stannis, Jaime, and the brothers of the Night's Watch were stupid, Daenerys and company didn't do much of anything, and Cersei was incredibly boring. I had such high hopes for this season, but the writers didn't fare too well. When they straight up adapted the books, they did fine. But when they tried to merge plots and make up their own stuff, they failed miserably. With very little left in the (published) books for them to draw on, I'm not optimistic about what they'll do next year.

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.