5x06: Through The Looking Glass And What Walter Found There

[wendelah1]

Though the title is an allusion to Lewis Carroll's famous novel, apart from the obvious--both are about the adventures of the title characters after stepping into an alternate universe--the parallels end there. Alice finds her mirror universe by accident; Walter Bishop, with the help of "Donald," created his. Alice wanders around meeting the Red Queen and the White Queen and having madcap adventures; Walter is there on a serious mission. He's looking for something he has hidden there, something he needs to complete his plan to save the world.


Whatever we might have believed, whatever we might have wanted, it becomes increasingly clear during season five that for the writers, Fringe is a redemption story, specifically the fall from grace and the redemption of one man: Walter Bishop.

Writer: David Fury
Director: Jon Cassar
Originally aired: 09 Nov 12

Synopsis: Peter and Olivia mourn the loss of their daughter. Walter de-ambers tape eight and takes off on his own to find the next piece of the plan to save the universe. Astrid, Olivia, and Peter take off to find him. When Walter is discovered by the Loyalists, Peter's Observer Brain Hack starts paying dividends and aids in their escape.

Most Memorable Quote:
OBSERVER #2 (to Peter): I know what you have done. You have made a grave mistake. You do not realize what is happening to you.

Links:
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Comments

[sprocket]

The AV Club reviews really take episodes for what they are. Which is good,  because even on rewatch this is an episode with a lot of setup and legwork relative to plot and resolution. It's not helped by technical difficulties: this seson's dim lighting doesn't look all that great on my cheap desktop monitor.

Okay, Anna Torv and John Noble gets lots of opportunities to pull off a lot of really cool acting. So what I normally gloss over is that scenes with Joshua Jackson are subtly really good. Take a look at the last scene with Walter and Peter. All the words are right, but the delivery... brrr. That’s observer!Peter. The acting sells the things going on at the surface - Peter comforting Walter - while being just a little bit off the Peter we know from the last four seasons. I mean, what the heck, he calls Walter "dad". The last time he did that was, what, right before "The Man From the Other Side"? Oh, I'm sorry, the middle of Man, right before Walternate crossed over. My point being this is not a good sign for Walter and Peter.

...it becomes increasingly clear9 during season five that for the writers, Fringe is a redemption story, specifically the fall from grace and the redemption of one man: Walter Bishop.

I wonder about that. Walter is the last of the core trio to be introduced in the pilot, after Olivia and then Peter, so Fringe felt like Olivia's story to me. But if it's not, if she was supposed to be the outsider dragged into the subworld of wacky Fringe cases, that's... a little different.

In some ways the fifth season circles back to story elements not seen much since the first season. Some of that's probably bolted on, like using material from old cases in fifth season missions, but knowing the showrunners and writers knew they were budgeted to hit 100 episodes and no more, it might be worth paying attention to what elements were apparently so important to the story they wanted to tell they had to be shoved into the season.

The biggest element is the Observers. The "resistance" theme seems like another to-do item important to the showrunners and writers, though I wonder if it's quite the story they'd planned from the start, or if they'd had other ideas (ZFT, aynone?). The parent-child thing has been huge on Fringe all the way through the series, which may be why those elements of the fifth season feel very organic to me.

5x06 is about halfway through the thirteen episode season, the point where Fringe usually ramps up the season arc.It feels like there's still a lot of seup to get fom "Through the Looking Glass"to "An Enemy of Fate", especially since Fringe is running into the reboot problem again: as Peter explicitly notes, the case with the Observer child that Walter remembers may not be the same case he and Olivia worked on.