Fringe / Season 1

My brother and I just finished the season 1 finale and he's loving it. However, I personally don't enjoy the filler episodes so much. I do understand that the producers need to fill a 20 episode season with more than just mythology episodes, but I have a hard time getting through some of them. Some of them don't really have anything to do with the bio-terrorist organization known as ZFT. I do enjoy when a filler-esque episode involves Olivia's cortexiphan abilities. Like when she starts seeing glimpses of the "other side" during an investigation.


Once Mr. Jones comes into the picture things get really interesting. The moment where Mr. Jones' posse of henchmen break him out of prison with a teleportation device is when I became a serious fan of the show. I had no idea Fringe was going to go in that direction. If teleportation is possible, who knows what else they can do. That's about when I started to theorize, much like I used to do with Lost when it was on the air.

It took awhile, but towards the end of the season Mr. Jones came back again and began constructing another device. He uses it right out on a public street no less, more showing off I'm sure. He opens a portal to another dimension with hopes of travelling through. As Walter Bishop explains, there are different dimensions where all of our different choices have been made. "There are two of everything" says the Observer in the finale episode. Just two worlds? Couldn't there potentially be an infinite amount? Or perhaps it is because Walter found a way to travel between the two back in the 80's before he was sent to St. Claires. Thus starting a link between these two worlds. Since then it's grown bigger and become more unstable. Fringe seems to take place right when the rift has become it's weakest. These terrorist activities and experiments are probably using advanced tech taken somehow from this alternate reality.

Finding out that Peter is from the alternate reality wasn't so much of a shock really, but at least they didn't try to make it a big surprise moment. Once you found out about the other reality then you can just put two and two together I think. Walter states a few times that Peter was sick when he was a child, while Peter has no recollection of that happening. Near the end of this season he talks about how he lost "something" dear to him. Of course in the finale you see that Peter has a grave stone in our reality, so Peter shouldn't be there. Who knows what implications this may have in our own reality.

Walter has come a long ways from who he was at the beginning of this season. 20 episodes can go a long ways. Even though he still is quite forgetful some of the time, he's much more aware of what's going on. Even if he wants to electrocute things for seemingly no reason once in awhile. That's just Walter being Walter I guess. Peter has grown quite a bit as well. He seems to trust and respect his father a hell of a lot more than when they started working together. I wonder if Walter will ever recover all his memories and the show will need to make a change to accomodate that to keep things interesting. I like Walter the way he is right now. When you see what he did to the children during the cortexiphan trails, he doesn't even seem like the same person. He's much more caring and even had trouble putting Olivia back in that water chamber every time after the first.

We finally got to meet William Bell, albeit extremely briefly. He gives her some important information while she's on the "other side". Hopefully this information proves useful in season 2 and onwards. She crossed dimensions without even using a fancy gadget like Mr. Jones was trying to use, looks like the drug trails worked. Unless William Bell used something to pull her over there, but I think it's more likely that he somehow activated her like he was doing to the other subjects. It'll be interesting to see where we go from here.

If you're a fan of the show, please comment below and let me know what you think of season 1, or the show in general. No spoilers for season 2 though, of course there are some people reading this in the future that haven't seen it yet. Thanks for reading.