Fringe: The Finale Has Arrived

I for one will miss the Fringe family as the show ends tomorrow night (Friday, January 18th) with a two-hour episode. We have been through a lot with David, Olivia, and Walter, including multiple universes, multiple Walters, and future take-overs of Earth, not to mention all the creepy story lines filling up the space between these major arcs. 

I think it all comes back to the basics of each character.  As with any family, one needs to understand their start and their motives.  Fox provides a nice Fringe 101 profile of each character, which I provide again below.

Peter Bishop:  As the neglected son of a real-life mad scientist, Peter set out to make himself as different from his father as he could. A college drop-out, but also intuitive mathematician, Peter is a jack-of-all-trades who has held every imaginable job from bouncer to biochemical engineer. Against his better judgment, Peter now finds himself following in his father's dangerous footsteps - while assisting a government agency that holds a file containing information about his own possible criminal activity.

Olivia Dunham:  FBI agent Olivia has assembled a task force to investigate The Pattern - a mysterious sequence of unexplained phenomena suggestive of someone or something performing experiments on the world. With the help of mad genius Walter Bishop and his estranged son Peter, she aims to bring high-tech criminals to justice, while defusing previously unimaginable threats to national security. 

Walter Bishop:  Once hailed as one of the most brilliant scientific minds of his generation, Walter's groundbreaking work with lab partner William Bell propelled him into an undisclosed relationship with the U.S. government to advance its most scientifically innovative - and ethically questionable - research projects. Now, Walter supplies the scientific genius and technological wizardry needed to explore The Pattern - a series of events that often trace back to Walter's own scientific explorations. Sadly, his shattered memory can only tell him fragments of the real story. 

These three characters - father and son, husband and wife - combined to create compelling stories each week that allowed them to grow from these important roots yet also continually entangled them in their past (and the family was larger than this, but certainly centered on these three).  The amazing story and special effects surrounding them never changes them fundamentally and, even when they started in different universes, fused their pasts into a new whole.  Was it difficult to follow?  Absolutely.  Was it frustrating at times?  Certainly.  But was it worth the ride?  Yes.  And I hope it will be around for a long time while others discover it.  

Fringe never won any major awards from what I can remember, but when you see and hear its fan base you know it earned something greater.  Revisit the Fringe cast's meeting with fans this past summer at the San Diego Comic Con and you will see what I mean.