The bald-headed, fedora-wearing Observers have been one of the longstanding unresolved mysteries on ‘Fringe’. We know little bits and pieces about them (they exist outside of linear time, and appear during significant events in human history), but who are they, really? The promo ads for Friday’s episode promised answers to this question. Did it deliver, or was this just a big tease?
Episode ‘The End of All Things’ picks up with Olivia kidnapped and thrown in a room with also-captive Nina Sharp. Meanwhile, Nina is also being questioned elsewhere by the FBI about Olivia’s disappearance. Clearly, one of these Ninas must be a fake, presumably a shape-shifter.
We find that David Robert Jones is behind the abduction. He tortures Nina in order to get an emotional reaction out of Olivia, so as to trigger her Cortexiphan powers. What he ultimately wants her to do with those powers isn’t quite clear, but he starts out by demanding that she mentally activate that light-box we saw a couple seasons ago. The problem is that, since Olivia has acquired the memories from Peter’s timeline, she has lost most of her own memories and her personal connection with Nina. While she feels bad watching the woman being tortured, the stakes aren’t high enough to make her powers kick in.
Back at the Fringe lab, Peter, Walter and Astrid panic about Olivia’s disappearance. Suddenly, the Observer known as “September” pops up in the middle of the lab from out of nowhere, still bleeding from his gunshot wound (that we don’t know how he got). All he manages to tell Peter is “She needs you” before falling unconscious. Walter does his best to stabilize the man.
Peter decides that the only way to get answers is to travel inside the Observer’s mind, as we’ve seen characters do at various points in the show previously. He makes Walter sync the two of them up. Within September’s consciousness, Peter appears to stand in a windowed observation deck seemingly in the middle of space, from which he gets a clear view of the Big Bang. September explains that the Observers are human scientists from a far-distant future, whose technology has allowed them the mastery of time. They can travel to any point in history to personally observe important events, but have a code that prohibits interference.
September’s own unintended interference resulted in Walter not finding the cure for his son’s illness, which in turn set off a chain of events that led to the war between alternate universes. September has attempted to fix his mistake, but doing so has had its own consequences. He gives Peter a glimpse of the son he fathered with “the wrong Olivia.” By wiping Peter from the timeline, September also erased the boy, named Henry. He isn’t sure how Peter reappeared in the current timeline. Clearly, Peter is of such critical importance to history that he couldn’t be erased. He urges Peter to “Go home,” then claims that someone is coming for him and severs the connection. When Peter wakes up, the Observer’s body simply vanishes from the lab.
In Olivia’s holding room, we discover that the captive Nina is really the faker. She’s working with Jones. When it’s clear that their torture act isn’t going to work, she suggests that they bring in a victim that Olivia will have more of an emotional attachment to. So, Jones kidnaps Peter and threatens to torture him next.
That does the trick, more so than Jones anticipated. Olivia goes all ‘Carrie’ on him and causes the electricity in the building to overload, frying Jones’ henchman torturer. Jones and Nina open a portal to hop back over to the alternate universe. Before he can step through, Olivia finds a gun and shoots him in the neck. Jones doesn’t seem too phased by this. He explains something about the benefits of having been disassembled and reassembled at the molecular level, then escapes through the portal and closes it behind him.
In the final scene, Olivia’s happy reunion with Peter is short-lived when he tells her that he can’t be with her. He needs to find his own real Olivia, and to restore this one’s memories back to her. Olivia is distraught by this. She believes that she is his real Olivia, but he seems to be set in his decision. Peter has clearly never paid much attention to the lyrics to “Love the One You’re With.” I guess he’s not a CSN fan.
‘The End of All Things’ is obviously a hugely important mythology episode for the show, and it’s pretty satisfying overall. I don’t think that the explanation about the Observers is really all that mind-blowing a revelation, however. That was pretty much what I suspected all along. We’re still left with some unanswered questions, such as who shot September. I assume that will come back around later in the season.
Broyles raises an interesting point about Nina. If she had been cloned by a shape-shifter, the original one would have been killed in the process. Since both are still alive, this leads me to assume that the evil Nina was simply the doppelganger from the alternate universe. (“Simply,” I say. Ha!) I’d really like to know what her end-game with Jones is. Unfortunately, it’s going to be a while before I can find out. The show is taking a break for the next four weeks before a final run of episodes starting at the end of March.
