Fringe Season 5 Review - HIDVDS.COM

Note: Full Spoilers for follow.

Let's take a moment to fully appreciate what Fringe was able to accomplish. It was a sci-fi show that survived five seasons on a major broadcast network. Regardless of what you may think about the quality of the show, that is a remarkable feat that deserves some attention. The show also earned the opportunity to end on its own terms instead of having a swift and merciless execution from the network execs, despite ratings that were really quite bad. Season 5 was a gift -- a gift to the cast, the producers, J.J. Abrams, and the drastically reduced pool of fans who remained with the show all the way through to the end. And like all good gifts, it was personalized. This last season was designed for the the type of diehard fan that stuck with Fringe through all the shifts in storylines and timelines and still came back for more. If you were cool with all the things Fringe had delivered in the past, then Season 5 was a treat. But if you were the kind of viewer who was hoping that Fringe's final season would right past wrongs and redeem the series, Season 5 probably wasn't quite the gift you were looking for.

One thing is for sure regardless of which side of the fence you fall on; this season was much, much better than Season 4. I can't even count how many people told me that they just gave up on Fringe during that season. But, where Season 4 was confused and aimless, Season 5 had more focus and most episodes made a clear addition to the final picture Fringe was painting for its swan song. "Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11" opened the season by jumping right into the world we saw in "Letters of Transit", and giving viewers a more refined picture of the Observer invasion. This episode also gave us more of Henrietta, who would become a key connection between this new world and the old characters. She played a bigger role in "In Absentia", which showed a stark difference between the hard-nosed Etta and her mother's softer,old tv show dvds, gentler approach to interrogating a Loyalist guard who ends up joining the Resistance due to Olivia's influence. The season had a solid start, but then things started to get a little shaky.

"The Recordist" was a sharp and sudden downturn in tone and pace. It felt like a story that dragged along and wasted concepts that seemed to have a lot of potential. A secret tribe of humans with an advanced information repository could have been a strong plot element that could have tons of uses in this season, but instead it was all just a plot device to find the rocks to power Walter's machine (which turned out to be useless in the end). This was an episode that really seemed like it didn't add anything valuable to the series lore, and we could have skipped the story entirely and not missed much. It was a forgettable episode, which seemed like a travesty in a truncated 13-episode season that was supposed to be all killer and no filler.

But Fringe found its footing again, and the middle of the season had a number of episodes that had more impact. Etta died, leaving the Bishop family to grieve and providing the Resistance a martyr. Peter dabbled with becoming an Observer for a while until Olivia helped him find himself again. Nina sacrificed herself in grand fashion, and we got a fantastic link back to a seemingly abandoned plot thread when Observer Kid/Michael reappeared and redefined what we thought the series was about.

It all culminated in a two-hour finale split in two episodes that were energetic, poignant, and meaningful. There were great callbacks to previous episodes -- December returned, the parallel universe came into play again, the team used the contents of the lab to infiltrate the Observer stronghold, and the famous white tulip reclaimed a prominent role in the story.

But the season still had a number of execution problems with managing all the new and old plot threads. Many plot elements were left hanging without solid resolution. Some examples: We never got expansion on the events that led to William Bell being ambered with the team. And what about those "stasis runes" that Jessica and William Bell used to trap September last season? Surely they would have come in handy during an Observer invasion? We spend many episodes building up Peter's Observer-fication, only to abandon the idea entirely. The same thing goes for Walter's transformation into his "bad" self. Then there are the paradox/timeline questions that so many viewers had in the finale. If there were never any Observers, then does that mean September never interfered with Walternate's cure of Peter, and Walter never went over to the other side to save him,top 20 dvd rentals? There are plenty of possible answers for this, but it's not addressed on-screen and what actually happened is up to fan conjecture. Some see this as a gaping plot hole, others are happy to fill in the blanks themselves.

If you're the type of viewer that wants all of these things neatly tied up, or if you want your stories to be tightly plotted, or if you like story build-up to be resolved concretely, then this season was probably not very satisfying for you.

But if those things don't matter to you, or if you were just more invested in the rich characters and their journey and finding out if they found the peace they deserved, or if you're okay with having ambiguous conclusions, then Season 5 was probably pretty damn good in your opinion. And really, at the end of the day, that's all that matters. Fringe may not have been a hit in the traditional sense, and certain story decisions may have alienated the masses. But this remarkable series did still find a devoted audience for the type of stories it wanted to tell, and that audience is quite happy. That's really all that any creators of fiction can hope for.