Fringe – Transilience Thought Unifier Model 11 – In Absentia
In this review, I will be covering the last two episodes of Fringe. The first episode is “Transilience Thought Unifier Model -11.†This is the first episode of the fifth and final season of Fringe. Our beloved Fringe is going to end after the season. Fortunately we do get an appropriate ending and don’t just get cut off by having our legs chopped off underneath us. As most of you know Fringe, is probably my favorite current running show on TV. I have always spoken highly of it and encourage everyone to watch it, and at this point I do so again. If you have not watched Fringe, I suggest that you do so from the beginning all the way right up to the end.
This season starts out in the year 2036 where Peter, Astrid, Walter, and Etta set out to find Olivia after they (Peter, Astra and Walter) were all removed by Etta from amber. Peter also learns that Etta is his and Olivia’s daughter all grown up. There is a little bit of trouble locating Olivia, as it turns out the black market was hijacking amber bodies and selling them. After finding her and getting her out of the amber, they discover that she holds the key to finding the plans for a weapon to defeat the observers.
While recovering Olivia’s body so that she could be removed from the amber, Walter is captured by the observers, and his brain is thoroughly probed to the point that the memories – that are now needed, that were stored scrambled in his head – these memories were lost after Walter’s mind was damage by the observer’s telepathic probe. It was a little unclear if this was a side effect of the tool or if it was done intentionally by the observer; either way the net result was the same, the information is no longer there.
They soon find out that the information stored in Walter’s mind was placed in there scrambled, and a special device could be used to pull it out unscrambled. Unfortunately when they locate the device, it doesn’t work because, as they learn, the memories were lost when Walter’s mind was damaged by the telepathic probe.
Episode two of season five “In Absentia†continues with the entire gang back at the hideout and Walter using the device on himself in an attempt to locate the information or to get some of it back. Without any luck, Olivia notes that Walter always puts everything in writing, and they seek to figure out if he had left another record of the information that they hadn’t thought about. The main problem with this idea is that Walter’s workspace is at Harvard, and Harvard is now the observer’s home base.
Fortunately for them, Walter, while tripping on acid at Harvard, learned there were underground passages connecting a lot of the buildings and some other areas outside of campus. They use these underground tunnels to get into Harvard and locate his offices. Once they have gotten in and located his office, they find that Walter has in fact ambered some recording equipment. They suspected he was recording the evidence that they need to learn how to destroy the observers, which they had since found out , that was what was stored in his head.
This is where the story splits into two pieces. The first part is Olivia at odds with her daughter as her daughter has turned cruel and hard and by the environment which she lives in. Olivia catches her torturing a security guard. In the end Olivia’s daughter would turn soft and release the guard, stating the reason is they had seen something in Olivia’s eyes that made her believe they could now win.
At same time, Walter’s working on a device using his laser disk player that was in his office to cut the recorded VHS tape out of the amber. Once this VHS tape was cut out, it revealed that they in fact were on the correct path, that there were several other tapes with lots of information that needed to be recovered and followed exactly to eliminate the observers.
The show still has me sitting on the edge of my seat each week, and I’m puzzled why it hasn’t been more popular or had better ratings. My thought is that because it’s so involved so complex that as we lose viewers. It’s quite impossible to replace them with new ones because you can’t just walk into the middle of Fringe. You’re going to need some of the backstory, and you’re going to need some of the information from those stories in order to make sense of it all. Sad truth!
There are only 11 episodes left, and as much as I’m looking forward to all 11 of them, I’m also saddened by the fact that there are only five remaining. Fringe is one of the very few shows left that is extremely high sci-fi, and although it is based solely on Earth, lots of time travel, strange devices, and living on the fringe is always entertaining. My thoughts were that the Fringe show had always replaced X-Files, and with this extreme success that X-Files had, I was surprised to see how poorly in the ratings Fringe had done. Given the past success of X-Files here’s hoping for the next evolution.
