Fringe 4.22: "Brave New World Part 2"
May. 11th, 2012 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieWhile I'm definitely glad we got a fifth season, I could easily have lived with this as a series finale. It gave us a last glimpse of things I loved (Olivia's powers! Olivia and Peter's special gifts working in concert!), wrapped up Peter and Olivia's DESTINY rather well, and even the cliffhanger at the end is less a cliffhanger than an acknowledgement of where the story will go, because presumably the warning September gave Walter was about the events in "Letters of Transit."
ALSO NINA GOT TO BE AWESOME AND ONSCREEN FOR A GOOD PORTION OF THE EPISODE! And she got a new job! I would think she'd be more interested in running Massive Dynamic, but anyway. I'm also a little weirded out by Fringe Division getting actual government support, but maybe that's just a holdover from my X-Files days. (Oh, man. So in S5, will she be working with them all the time? BECAUSE I WOULD LOVE THAT.)
The only thing I didn't care for was Bell in general. His motivation seemed a little pasted on. Yeah, there's precedent for his whole "I will replace God!" shtick; not only was there something about Bell and Walter playing god way back when ("Jacksonville," perhaps?), but I vaguely remember in "White Tulip," maybe, Walter saying exactly what Bell parroted back to him about how he thought God couldn't be cruel enough to take Peter from him, so he's done with God. And I liked the reasoning behind it: if "God made us in his image," then we have the potential to be gods, and of course Bell would decide it's humanity's destiny to be gods. But Bell, WHY does your version of godhood involve werecupines? Whyyyyy? His sudden "humans are savage and my new world won't have them!" revelation also contradicts all his earlier ramblings about potential. And then he made another about-face when Olivia and Peter showed up. "Hey, humans aren't so bad! Go have sex!" Just...what? It felt kind of like they said, "We need an apocalypse; here's a convenient one."
But aside from that, it was a wonderful episode. I loved Olivia's new, albeit temporary, powers! SHE CAN STOP BULLETS EVEN THE OBSERVERS CAN'T STOP. And she can DESTROY UNIVERSES! I also really, really loved that her and Peter's unique gifts worked so well together at the end; that was my favorite part of last year's finale as well. They need each other (and feeeeelings) to save the world! That's a much better illustration of their DESTINY than September babbling on to Peter about it. Also, them jumping off the helicopter and diving headlong into another universe was an amazing shot.
I'm sad that they implied Olivia's powers are over now that she's used up all the Cortexiphan in her system. Did they (I can't remember if it was Walter or Nina who said this) mean just her new powers were gone, or can she no longer cross universes? Because I would be very sad if she can't visit Redverse! Oooh, now that Bell's been neutralized (for now), can they build the bridge again? Pretty please?
Anyway. KUDOS to the writers for fulfilling September's warning that all the timelines involved Olivia dying. But he never said she wouldn't be resurrected! LEMON CAKE EXPERIMENT TO THE RESCUE! That was awesome. I figured after last week that Olivia would be injured and would heal herself, but I never thought she would actually die. Nor that Walter would be Mr. X from "LSD." (I mean...I guess he was? Even though he wasn't wearing an X?) Walter was just awesome in that scene. At that point, I figured Olivia would actually shoot herself rather than let herself be used as Bell's power source (and then there would be a Lemon Cake Rescue), but Walter doing it...I liked that. I guess I just liked him being decisive, maybe. Too bad he couldn't shoot Bell too.
(P.S. How did Walter get to be such a good shot?)
Random other things:
Astrid lived, yay! I was worried!
I probably should've expected that Jessica would be a baddie, but she caught me completely by surprise. HOW CREEPY were her eyes in the postmortem questioning? Whoa.
Speaking of which, GOOD ONE, SHOW, on bringing back the Massive Dynamic system used to question John Scott in the freaking pilot! I've forgotten how Olivia and Peter learned about in in the original timeline, though.
Awwwww, Olivia's capacity for feeeeeelings made her the perfect Cortexiphan candidate!
Awwww, I love the new generation doing Walter's lab work!
Olivia's memory was all over the place in this one. She can't remember anything about the Amber timeline, even after Peter came back, but she can remember meeting September in the opera house? And in Blueverse, she couldn't remember the Cortexiphan trials, but now she does? What? The PTB should compile some index cards with what Olivia should actually remember on them.
How did Nina know how much Cortexiphan Bluelivia had in her system in order to say that Amberlivia('s body) now has the same amount?
I feel bad, but Walter slapping Peter to get him to focus on getting the bullet out of Olivia's head was actually sort of funny.
The "stasis runes" came out of NOWHERE. I'm annoyed that the Observers keep getting less and less powerful. Was there any precedent for these things earlier in the show?
General Broyles!
To no one's surprise, Olivia is pregnant! Awwww. Ohhh, Anna Torv's gonna have to wear the fake belly next year, isn't she? Poor woman. Maybe they'll fast forward a few months.
In sum: I'm happy with it. It did what I wanted it to do, and I'm not going to go crazy this summer like I did last summer. Yay!
ALSO NINA GOT TO BE AWESOME AND ONSCREEN FOR A GOOD PORTION OF THE EPISODE! And she got a new job! I would think she'd be more interested in running Massive Dynamic, but anyway. I'm also a little weirded out by Fringe Division getting actual government support, but maybe that's just a holdover from my X-Files days. (Oh, man. So in S5, will she be working with them all the time? BECAUSE I WOULD LOVE THAT.)
The only thing I didn't care for was Bell in general. His motivation seemed a little pasted on. Yeah, there's precedent for his whole "I will replace God!" shtick; not only was there something about Bell and Walter playing god way back when ("Jacksonville," perhaps?), but I vaguely remember in "White Tulip," maybe, Walter saying exactly what Bell parroted back to him about how he thought God couldn't be cruel enough to take Peter from him, so he's done with God. And I liked the reasoning behind it: if "God made us in his image," then we have the potential to be gods, and of course Bell would decide it's humanity's destiny to be gods. But Bell, WHY does your version of godhood involve werecupines? Whyyyyy? His sudden "humans are savage and my new world won't have them!" revelation also contradicts all his earlier ramblings about potential. And then he made another about-face when Olivia and Peter showed up. "Hey, humans aren't so bad! Go have sex!" Just...what? It felt kind of like they said, "We need an apocalypse; here's a convenient one."
But aside from that, it was a wonderful episode. I loved Olivia's new, albeit temporary, powers! SHE CAN STOP BULLETS EVEN THE OBSERVERS CAN'T STOP. And she can DESTROY UNIVERSES! I also really, really loved that her and Peter's unique gifts worked so well together at the end; that was my favorite part of last year's finale as well. They need each other (and feeeeelings) to save the world! That's a much better illustration of their DESTINY than September babbling on to Peter about it. Also, them jumping off the helicopter and diving headlong into another universe was an amazing shot.
I'm sad that they implied Olivia's powers are over now that she's used up all the Cortexiphan in her system. Did they (I can't remember if it was Walter or Nina who said this) mean just her new powers were gone, or can she no longer cross universes? Because I would be very sad if she can't visit Redverse! Oooh, now that Bell's been neutralized (for now), can they build the bridge again? Pretty please?
Anyway. KUDOS to the writers for fulfilling September's warning that all the timelines involved Olivia dying. But he never said she wouldn't be resurrected! LEMON CAKE EXPERIMENT TO THE RESCUE! That was awesome. I figured after last week that Olivia would be injured and would heal herself, but I never thought she would actually die. Nor that Walter would be Mr. X from "LSD." (I mean...I guess he was? Even though he wasn't wearing an X?) Walter was just awesome in that scene. At that point, I figured Olivia would actually shoot herself rather than let herself be used as Bell's power source (and then there would be a Lemon Cake Rescue), but Walter doing it...I liked that. I guess I just liked him being decisive, maybe. Too bad he couldn't shoot Bell too.
(P.S. How did Walter get to be such a good shot?)
Random other things:
Astrid lived, yay! I was worried!
I probably should've expected that Jessica would be a baddie, but she caught me completely by surprise. HOW CREEPY were her eyes in the postmortem questioning? Whoa.
Speaking of which, GOOD ONE, SHOW, on bringing back the Massive Dynamic system used to question John Scott in the freaking pilot! I've forgotten how Olivia and Peter learned about in in the original timeline, though.
Awwwww, Olivia's capacity for feeeeeelings made her the perfect Cortexiphan candidate!
Awwww, I love the new generation doing Walter's lab work!
Olivia's memory was all over the place in this one. She can't remember anything about the Amber timeline, even after Peter came back, but she can remember meeting September in the opera house? And in Blueverse, she couldn't remember the Cortexiphan trials, but now she does? What? The PTB should compile some index cards with what Olivia should actually remember on them.
How did Nina know how much Cortexiphan Bluelivia had in her system in order to say that Amberlivia('s body) now has the same amount?
I feel bad, but Walter slapping Peter to get him to focus on getting the bullet out of Olivia's head was actually sort of funny.
The "stasis runes" came out of NOWHERE. I'm annoyed that the Observers keep getting less and less powerful. Was there any precedent for these things earlier in the show?
General Broyles!
To no one's surprise, Olivia is pregnant! Awwww. Ohhh, Anna Torv's gonna have to wear the fake belly next year, isn't she? Poor woman. Maybe they'll fast forward a few months.
In sum: I'm happy with it. It did what I wanted it to do, and I'm not going to go crazy this summer like I did last summer. Yay!