'Fringe' Recap - 'Anomaly XB-6783746'

 

My own tolerance varies from week to week, along with my tolerance for the season-long scavenger hunt that apparently will end…exactly where most of us thought it might. Even if one didn’t make the leap of “Donald”=“September” (and I’ll confess I didn’t, because that sure didn’t sound like him on the video in “Through The Looking Glass And What Walter Found There”), one had to assume our fedora’d friend would play into the endgame in some fashion. He arrived on the scene in, appropriately, “The Arrival”, and has lurked on the fringes (an unfortunate pun that’s also an accurate description) of the show ever since. His curiosity with the events at Reiden Lake kicked off the “story” of “Fringe”, so it’s only appropriate that the story of the show end with him somehow involved there as well.

 

But what to make of the extremely follicled Donald in Walter’s vision/memory? It’s certainly a surprising image, and one that sends the mind racing towards possibilities of what it might mean. But September, and The Observers as a whole, have been a cipher for so long in the show’s run that giving him backstory now feels like too little, too late. It’s one thing to have a central mystery upon which the endgame rests. It’s another to make that mystery so opaque that any attempt to solve it will yield inconsolable frustration. If you’ve been dying for answers…well, it seems like you’re about to get a ton. If you gave up caring long ago…well, you’re about to get a lot of answers you probably didn’t need. Mileage will vary, as the saying goes.

 

Seeing September look like a modern-day man living in a modestly appointed suburban home is certainly shocking. I assume “Donald” is the name he had before…well, whatever turned the Observers into the Observers. Tonight’s final montage hinted that September saying, “The boy is important….he has to life” was directed not at Peter but in fact Michael. I don’t feel terrifically good about that assumption, since Windmark called Michael not a boy but a “chromosomal mistake”. But it seems like a fair assumption all the same, whether or not Michael is actually Donald’s child or just a young person to whom Donald became attached. What I think we’re meant to take away is that Donald/September hid Michael in our timeline after observing Walter’s love for Peter. He saw a kindred spirit, one that would also do anything for a sick child. Perhaps Michael himself was sick, and an early recipient of what would eventually become Observer technology, and was partially but not completely cured in a society that soon craved “perfection”. So, “Gattica”, but with a lot more swanky hats, I guess.

 

I need a drink.

 

If this is indeed the case, then the massive jump to 2036 has more thematic resonance than previously assumed. My issues with the post-apocalyptic scenario have always stemmed from emotional applicability: So long as the jump served an emotional, not narrative, arc, then it would work as a whole. For a while, Etta seemed like that emotional link. Once severed, the point of this period seemed somewhat lost. If Donald’s original sin links up with Walter’s original sin, then “Fringe” as a whole becomes about the destructive power of playing God, with The Observers the result of hundreds of years of hubris undoing man’s natural evolution. Up is down, black is white, and humans are turning into lizards. But not the “V” kind. I don’t think. I certainly hope not, as much as that might mean Elizabeth Mitchell would show up in the finale.

 

If that resonance is indeed achieved, that’s great. But it feels like the show is shoving it in rather than gradually unveiling it. Again, this comes down to taste. But let’s move away from the Observer mythology and look at this same suddenness in terms of Nina Sharpe’s suicide. Neither Nina nor Broyles have been well-served this season, to say the least. In fact, Nina has been served rather poorly since Peter stepped into the Doomsday Device. Her backstory got changed as a result of the new timeline, and for a while she was actually an evil doppelganger pretending to be new Nina. This season, she’s been all but absent, stuck occasionally helping a daughter figure who now has memories of a different timeline. Following her arc has been exhausting to the point of making me not care, which means that I in turn didn’t care much for Nina’s noble end tonight.

 

That’s to take nothing away from Blair Brown’s performance in that last scene, which I thought matched her best work on the show. But Nina as a character has been non-existent this season, brought in only when the plot needed her to fetch something for The Walter/Donald Super Complicated Plan-O-Matic. Nina was never supposed to be the driving engine of the show, but she did offer unique insights into the other characters along the way. She was professionally involved with the cofounders of Massive Dynamic (in addition to being romantically involved with William Bell), and served as mentor/aide/occasionally enemy to the younger generation of the show. Much like the metaphysical bridge Peter created inside the Doomsday Device, Nina served as a bridge between many aspects of the show. Removing her from the show removed not only that bridge between those aspects, but also the bridge between that character and the audience as well.

 

I’ve focused almost exclusively on the last fifteen minutes because….essentially nothing happened in the first forty-five. “Anomaly XB-6783746” was not unlike “The Recordist” in that it somehow stalled the momentum of a show that should have no choice but putting the narrative pedal to the metal. Far too long was spent on methodically getting Michael to communicate anything to anyone, all while Windmark demonstrated an equally laid-back attitude towards finding the mole inside The Ministry of Science. Everything unfolded at a semi-leisurely pace that belied the placement of this episode within the larger structure of the season/series. “Fringe” knew how it wanted to end this episode, but was far less sure about how to fill the time leading up to that ending.