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Fringe finale thoughts
I finished the series yesterday. I was, overall, happy with how things wrapped up, but it also left me with about five thousand unanswered questions. In an attempt to figure some of them out, I made the following flowchart:
It helped, a little. But some thoughts:
One of my biggest immediate questions about the end is how we can get there with no Observers. There are at least three key points in Peter's life influenced by September: interrupting Walternate when he created the cure for Peter's illness, saving Peter from drowning in Blueverse, and convincing Peter that it was okay to believe in Olivia's love for him in Amberverse. Take away any one of these things, and we change the outcome of the story drastically. I can accept that Peter himself being a paradox within the Amberverse somehow protected him from the effects of the first two, but not the third. We also have the problem of how Walter mailed the tulip and (presumably) got the video to Peter, which once again seems most likely to have been the work of September, who would not have existed to run that errand.
It also seems to me that Peter's absence from Amberverse causes a whole host of problems in terms of the events of the first three seasons. If Peter wasn't there, what was the impetus for Olivia and Walter to cross universes? How was the machine activated in Redverse if Henry never existed? The solution that seems neatest to me is that history was not altered, only the memories of people in both 'verses, and the Blueverse became the Amberverse in 2010, not 1985.
(As an aside: isn't the new Redverse also a different timeline from the original? The differences are much more subtle, of course; the main thing I see is a change in Walternate, who has not spent the last twenty years obsessed with getting revenge on the other universe for stealing his son. He seems less ruthless, more willing to compromise.)
The "history never changed, only people's memories of it" explanation also gives a possible reason why Peter was not completely erased: because those events did actually happen, he still existed in Olivia's memories, and to a lesser extent Walter's, and that was enough for Olivia (or the machine -- that's never made clear) to grab onto and pull him back into her 'verse. Maybe that solves the issue of Obserververse, too (it all still happened the way we saw it play out, but everyone's memories of events are changed), but that doesn't seem as neat to me, somehow.
Or maybe my problem is simply that I'm trying to apply simple logic and cause-and-effect to explain Fringe. ;) I'm willing to admit that might be the case. But I'd rather come up with a theory that works, if I can.
(Crosspost from Tumblr.)
It helped, a little. But some thoughts:
One of my biggest immediate questions about the end is how we can get there with no Observers. There are at least three key points in Peter's life influenced by September: interrupting Walternate when he created the cure for Peter's illness, saving Peter from drowning in Blueverse, and convincing Peter that it was okay to believe in Olivia's love for him in Amberverse. Take away any one of these things, and we change the outcome of the story drastically. I can accept that Peter himself being a paradox within the Amberverse somehow protected him from the effects of the first two, but not the third. We also have the problem of how Walter mailed the tulip and (presumably) got the video to Peter, which once again seems most likely to have been the work of September, who would not have existed to run that errand.
It also seems to me that Peter's absence from Amberverse causes a whole host of problems in terms of the events of the first three seasons. If Peter wasn't there, what was the impetus for Olivia and Walter to cross universes? How was the machine activated in Redverse if Henry never existed? The solution that seems neatest to me is that history was not altered, only the memories of people in both 'verses, and the Blueverse became the Amberverse in 2010, not 1985.
(As an aside: isn't the new Redverse also a different timeline from the original? The differences are much more subtle, of course; the main thing I see is a change in Walternate, who has not spent the last twenty years obsessed with getting revenge on the other universe for stealing his son. He seems less ruthless, more willing to compromise.)
The "history never changed, only people's memories of it" explanation also gives a possible reason why Peter was not completely erased: because those events did actually happen, he still existed in Olivia's memories, and to a lesser extent Walter's, and that was enough for Olivia (or the machine -- that's never made clear) to grab onto and pull him back into her 'verse. Maybe that solves the issue of Obserververse, too (it all still happened the way we saw it play out, but everyone's memories of events are changed), but that doesn't seem as neat to me, somehow.
Or maybe my problem is simply that I'm trying to apply simple logic and cause-and-effect to explain Fringe. ;) I'm willing to admit that might be the case. But I'd rather come up with a theory that works, if I can.
(Crosspost from Tumblr.)
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I need to remember this >.>;
....man I had half-forgotten amberverse. I so very did not care about it.
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I didn't mind amberverse too much, but I kept hoping that it would turn back into blueverse and it never did. At least Michael gave Walter back his memories of Peter toward the end -- that was one of the saddest things about it, for me, how Walter lost the time where he rebuilt his relationship with Peter and grew stronger. I suppose ultimately it's a good thing that blueverse was never restored, because if it had been, Peter would likely either be erased or in redverse when the Observers ceased to exist, and I was way too invested in Peter/Olivia to have been okay with that. >.>