Contributor: John Keegan
Written by J. H. Wyman and David Fury
Directed by Jeannot Szwarc
With the preliminaries over and done with between “Letters of Transit” and the fifth season premiere, the writers finally get down to the business of setting up the details of the final story arc. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, with some of the character beats overcoming the weaknesses of a rather tedious plot structure.
I’ll start with the main annoyance of the episode: the revelation that a good chunk of the season will likely be devoted to a glorified “fetch quest”, as the team races across the world to find Walter’s hidden Betamax tapes, each containing a segment of the backup plan for defeating the Observers. I’m not a huge fan of this type of story, even if I understand why it is so common. It takes a lot of the work out of constructing a long-form story if a clear set of objectives can be parsed out on the timeline.
That said, “Fringe” has done a nice job of handling similar concepts in the past. Remember when finding the buried pieces of the Machine was such an important plot element? It was never reduced to racing from location to location; instead, it largely happened in the background. The show’s budget, as well as the isolated nature of the “resistance”, makes this sort of approach unlikely in this case, but I hold out hope that something similar will be applied.
What works far better is the character exploration. The focus of this episode is the dynamic between mother and daughter, and how Olivia has to reconcile the young child that she remembers with the hardened resistance fighter that Etta has become. There’s still no hint as to what happened with Etta after she was taken by the Observers, but that wasn’t really the point of this story.
The team manages to get into Walter’s old lab at Harvard, which he partially “ambered” to protect the secrets of the resistance. In the midst of it all, they capture a Loyalist, one of the humans that has chosen to work for the Observers. The conflict between Olivia and Etta comes down to how this Loyalist is treated. Etta is more than willing to torture and kill the Loyalist once they get what they need from him, while Olivia feels that every other option should be explored.
Etta does get to let out her inner Jack Bauer, but since this is the first time we’ve seen this level of darkness out of her, the writers could only go so far. At the end of the day, Etta has been shown to be a decent person, even if she has been lying to the Observers and working with the resistance, and it would have been jarring to have her kill the Loyalist in the end. All things being equal, that is likely what might (and even should) have happened, but while the audience might accept Etta as damaged enough to torture, they wouldn’t necessarily accept her as a killer.
It’s also necessary for Olivia and Etta to bond after all this time, and if Etta had killed the Loyalist, it might have driven a wedge between them that would have been impossible to overcome within the space of 11 remaining episodes. On the other hand, they left the Loyalist’s future very open-ended, and one would have to wonder if he is going to return before all is said and done. And if he does, there is plenty of reason to question which side he would be on.
One other nagging item is the spotty nature of the Observers’ security. The Observers have vast mental powers that ought to make it nearly impossible for the team members to get anywhere without leaving a trace. Etta may be able to block the Observers, for whatever reason, but that wouldn’t protect the other team members from being noticed. The other security lapses could be dismissed as the result of their over-confidence, borne of those mental abilities, but it still seems a bit too easy for Peter and Etta to break into the Observer compound.
Still, on the whole, the good outweighs the bad. While it’s clear that some of the fans that preferred the procedural elements of the show are less than enthusiastic about the fifth season’s serialized nature, I think it’s the perfect way to place a capstone on the series. This actually feels like a race to the series’ conclusion, and that’s how it should be.
Writing: 2/2
Acting: 2/2
Direction: 2/2
Style: 2/4
Final Score: 8/10