We Have To Talk About The Fringe Finale

OK, I lied. I said that I was going to stop watching Fringe, but I have not stopped watching Fringe. I have only stopped writing about it. Not that I don't wish every week that I was able to quit this show.

Gay.

So, in shame and in secret I have submitted myself to increasingly outlandish plots while the show itself seems to have given up completely on even making sense anymore. At least at the beginning they pretended like there was some kind of real-world basis for Walter's experiments, but by the second to last episode they were just ripping off Stephen King's Firestarter and admitting as much (one line of dialog was "Stephen King invented the term, but the phenomenon existed long before that." No, it didn't.) It wasn't even a matter of jumping the shark so much as using telekenisis in a sensory deprivation chamber to move the shark UNDER YOU. Huh? Exactly.

Now, admittedly, the finale aired on Tuesday, so excuse me if I'm blowing your mind a day later than usual, but we still need to talk about this. Even if you don't watch the show, I think we would all be better off holding hands and sharing this together. Like a family. The way Walter and Peter Bishop are a family. So not really a family so much as a couple of poorly matched comic foils with horribly written dialog. Perfect.

After you, son:

OK, so, just to set this up a little bit: one of the main plotlines of the final two episodes concerns the multiverse, which admittedly, in a slightly different form, is a real theory within the physics community. The theory goes that there are infinite universes out there in which there are an infinite number of "Earths" and each of those "Earths" represents every conceivable variation on our own reality. Fair enough. There is a really fascinating discussion about this with physicist Brian Greene if you're interested. It's great. Go listen to it. Meet you back here in an hour.

Welcome back. So, on Fringe there seems to be just one other universe? Where everything is slightly different? (A black telephone, for example, is red in Fringe's parallel universe. It is raining in Fringe's parallel universe while here it is not raining. It's basically wherever Gwyneth Paltrow's hair went in Sliding Doors.) And the finale deals a lot with people being able to TRAVEL between the two universes. You know what? Fine. At this point, Fringe, if anyone is still watching you, you have earned this much. Why stop willfully suspending my disbelief (of which there is so much) now?

But then we get to the last few minutes of the finale. Agent Dunham will finally get to meet William Bell, a mysterious figure on the show played by proud new driveway owner Leonard Nimoy (who supposedly lives in the parallel universe? Forget it, Jake, it's FringeTown). This clip is a little long, just to give you a feel for it. Because you've got to feel it. And by it, of course, I mean:

Wait for it...

Yup. Best show on television, hands down. That's not insane and weird and tasteless at all. Just a regular, and completely necessary plot twist to cap off a great season.

I love how as she's driving over the bridge she looks at the New York skyline, just to remind the viewer that in this universe there is no World Trade Center. It's called foreshadowing, and it was used perfectly.

Seriously, though. You guys.