Fringe, Season 4
Mar. 4th, 2015 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnOkay... so... I have finished Season 4 and I have MANY FEELINGS about it.
My principal thought is that it reminds me of writing a fic -- only it reminds me of that part of writing the fic where I'm really excited about all these ideas I'm having, because they're really awesome ideas, and they're starting to gel but they are still a little all over the place, and the characters! Right then, the characters are basically vehicles to tell the story-- they get moved hither and yon as the plot demands. Usually my beta dings all of these things (I... think maybe everyone who's ever betaed for me has dinged me on this to a certain extent, though they may have phrased it differently? but in particular hiiiisprocket, you're awesome), and they get at least slightly better.
So, yeah. I felt like a lot of Season 4 didn't get betaed. And yet it had so many great things going on! The world without Peter! The alternate-AU universes getting flipped on their heads once again! Everything we thought we knew about our beloved characters being true and yet false at the same time! Olivia's memories going cracky! Lincoln showing up as a main character!
They've built up enough credit -- and the acting is stellar enough -- that I actually loved and was moved by quite a lot of it (NINA. WALTERNATE.) The best thing Season 4 did, I think, was the flipping of all the characters, so that they were the same characters we knew -- but -- completely different in the choices they'd made, and the people they were underneath thereby.
I have a theory, completely unsupported by any evidence (John Noble's acting is my cite!), that Walternate is John Noble's (or possibly Abrams') way of rolling his eyes at Peter Jackson making him do this horrible OOC Denethor in LOTR, because Season 3 Walternate IS basically Denethor: powerful and noble and proud and full of good intentions, but twisted by the events of his life into something horrifying.
And then. And then we got GOOD Denethor in S4. AU!Walternate rejects the choice to become the twisted amoral wreck that both blue!Walter (and AU!blue!Walter) and Walternate are. (I do think blue!Walter and Walternate are two sides of the same coin: two ways of getting twisted up into knots over events that would have twisted anyone.) And he retains the power and the pride and the nobility. This is what Denethor could have been: what Faramir chose to be in LOTR. I had no idea how much I wanted to see this until I was given it. For this alone it was worth watching S4.
Also: people working together, especially people who have to put aside differences and conflicts to do so because there's something greater they care about, is one of my Big Buttons, and that got pushed like whoa. And the universes being broken apart again forever, and rainbows and AUGH SADNESS I LOVED IT.
But... mostly, S4 was really rather all over the place, plotwise and (worse) thematically.
One of my big problems was with AU!blue!Lincoln. I am not sure whether this is an acting or a directing problem (after many, many talks withase about this matter, I think we've settled on both, but primarily Seth Gabel not being so good with acting introverted, because let's face it, Blair Brown hits Nina out of the park (NINA!) 100% of the time, even when she has crappy lines). AU!blue!Lincoln is cast originally in the position of the hotshot protégé, with Olivia as the wise mentor, and that is so cool! Women never (or hardly ever) get to be the wise mentors! He gets to make the super awesome deductions, and Olivia gets to train up her little padawan. I thought this was going to be great.
Unfortunately, we never get any characterization from Lincoln. At the end of Season 4, I... don't know anything about him or how he relates to anyone else on the show (except alt!Lincoln, that was pretty cool). I think Lincoln was... supposed to have a crush on Olivia? Which I would not even have picked up on except that I was looking so hard for anything that would give him any personality at all. (Oh, he had a couple of snarky bitter comments once Peter and Olivia got together. I loved those, as they were about the closest thing I got to a personality for Lincoln.) We never get any clue as to how he relates to the rest of the team. And so the whole thing kind of fizzled out into nothing.
They could have fixed this so easily! Well, okay, maybe not all that easily, given the acting constraints, but give Lincoln some kind of freaking thematic arc, please, and when I say "arc" I do not mean what we actually got, which is some kind of two-episode character arc where Lincoln decides based on two conversations that he... wants to make choices? Okay then!
No, give him a plot-related thematic arc. Own the mentor-hero dynamic. Make him a cortexiphan kid, even! Let his deductions be based on that, let him be *needed* in the alt!universe and not just go over there because... because he has a crush on red!Olivia too? Let us see that it's a wrenching choice for him, because he's got, y'know, family over here! But the right thing, because now they need a cortexiphan kid to fix things and Walternate has too many morals to do that to kids! Or something. I mean, give him something that actually makes a difference. Then tie it in to Olivia and let her be involved too -- both plotwise and emotionally. (If Lincoln is a cortexiphan kid, and she feels like she has to save him from the results of that... how cool a dynamic would that be, the way she got to save Charlie in S1! By the way: CHARLIE. It took me what, all of two episodes to learn more about Charlie and how he related to the rest of the team than I learned about Lincoln in the entire season? JUST SAYING. MISS YOU CHARLIE.)
(Also, I started playing a drinking game: take a drink every time Lincoln has a scene with lines and dramatically mentions ~his partner~, whether that be his previous partner -- who just by the way was MURDERED, in case you forgot it from when he mentioned it in the last scene he had -- or Olivia. Of course, LDS pregnant lady has to drink juice, but man. Lots of liquid being consumed here.)
Oh, also, this Thing where AU!blue!Olivia chooses to have the memories of orig!blue!Olivia because True Love, and I have completely rewritten this in my mind to make it not the utter tripe that I actually think it is. Because I don't think the choice is necessarily a wrong one -- okay, I do think it is a wrong one, but she was railroaded into it. And I think there is an interesting story there, of someone who was forced by external stimuli to be the sort of person who must choose that (which I think she was), and what it means for everyone else in her life who got shafted by that choice. But we didn't get that story, of course. And what I object to is that the narrative frames it as the right choice. Fortunately, there was so much else going on ("surprise! Here's some dystopia for you!") that I can kind of reframe it in my mind as "look, in the Extended Season in my brain there is a LOT more angst and relationship fail that has to be worked through by everyone, and her family is all like, WTF, and there is a whole lot more Nina involved (NINA!), and etc."
I was also somewhat mollified from my rage in Season 3 over "The fate of the universe depends on which Olivia Peter is with!!" (which I thought was incredibly stupid) by the bit where we find out that the different Olivias' kids make two different timelines, one of which is the one that is the "preferred" one... because I totally grew up with alternate-universe SF and hence have no trouble buying the "single point of departure being a particular kid" theory ... and oh, that's very interesting when I think about it, actually; blue!Olivia having the kid instead of red!Olivia means (somehow) the Observers take over! (We know this as a fact: when red!Olivia had the kid, 2036 looked rather different.) Interesting! So from this standpoint Olivia having the kid is the wrong choice, Olivia choosing her original Peter memories is the wrong choice. OK, now I feel a lot better about this, even if it wasn't intentional :)
Although now it occurs to me that Henry has been erased, which is, well, obviously there are all kinds of people erased from one universe to another, but bleah, because red!Olivia looked so happy with him. But I guess red!Olivia and blue!Lincoln will have lots of cute babies too, or something.
I also kinda love the part where we find out that William Bell was behind the whole collapse-the-universes plot, because it actually made sense character-wise (if not science-wise... I don't even know about this show's science... D still teases me about "the quantum entanglement of love" when he wants to make fun of me for watching this show...). It never made sense to me that Robert David Jones wanted to collapse the universes... because... uh... what...! But William Bell, high on cortexiphan? Yes, that's scarily plausibly something I can imagine his character wanting to do, even if it destroys everything that actually now exists. (Why did Robert David Jones go along with it? Well, did Bell lie to him? I could see that.)
(Aside: It's very strange to watch this right after Nimoy died. And sad, too, not least because Season 4 Nimoy is clearly much more tired than Season 3 Nimoy -- you can see he doesn't have much time left. :( )
My principal thought is that it reminds me of writing a fic -- only it reminds me of that part of writing the fic where I'm really excited about all these ideas I'm having, because they're really awesome ideas, and they're starting to gel but they are still a little all over the place, and the characters! Right then, the characters are basically vehicles to tell the story-- they get moved hither and yon as the plot demands. Usually my beta dings all of these things (I... think maybe everyone who's ever betaed for me has dinged me on this to a certain extent, though they may have phrased it differently? but in particular hiiii
sprocket, you're awesome), and they get at least slightly better.So, yeah. I felt like a lot of Season 4 didn't get betaed. And yet it had so many great things going on! The world without Peter! The alternate-AU universes getting flipped on their heads once again! Everything we thought we knew about our beloved characters being true and yet false at the same time! Olivia's memories going cracky! Lincoln showing up as a main character!
They've built up enough credit -- and the acting is stellar enough -- that I actually loved and was moved by quite a lot of it (NINA. WALTERNATE.) The best thing Season 4 did, I think, was the flipping of all the characters, so that they were the same characters we knew -- but -- completely different in the choices they'd made, and the people they were underneath thereby.
I have a theory, completely unsupported by any evidence (John Noble's acting is my cite!), that Walternate is John Noble's (or possibly Abrams') way of rolling his eyes at Peter Jackson making him do this horrible OOC Denethor in LOTR, because Season 3 Walternate IS basically Denethor: powerful and noble and proud and full of good intentions, but twisted by the events of his life into something horrifying.
And then. And then we got GOOD Denethor in S4. AU!Walternate rejects the choice to become the twisted amoral wreck that both blue!Walter (and AU!blue!Walter) and Walternate are. (I do think blue!Walter and Walternate are two sides of the same coin: two ways of getting twisted up into knots over events that would have twisted anyone.) And he retains the power and the pride and the nobility. This is what Denethor could have been: what Faramir chose to be in LOTR. I had no idea how much I wanted to see this until I was given it. For this alone it was worth watching S4.
Also: people working together, especially people who have to put aside differences and conflicts to do so because there's something greater they care about, is one of my Big Buttons, and that got pushed like whoa. And the universes being broken apart again forever, and rainbows and AUGH SADNESS I LOVED IT.
But... mostly, S4 was really rather all over the place, plotwise and (worse) thematically.
One of my big problems was with AU!blue!Lincoln. I am not sure whether this is an acting or a directing problem (after many, many talks with
ase about this matter, I think we've settled on both, but primarily Seth Gabel not being so good with acting introverted, because let's face it, Blair Brown hits Nina out of the park (NINA!) 100% of the time, even when she has crappy lines). AU!blue!Lincoln is cast originally in the position of the hotshot protégé, with Olivia as the wise mentor, and that is so cool! Women never (or hardly ever) get to be the wise mentors! He gets to make the super awesome deductions, and Olivia gets to train up her little padawan. I thought this was going to be great.Unfortunately, we never get any characterization from Lincoln. At the end of Season 4, I... don't know anything about him or how he relates to anyone else on the show (except alt!Lincoln, that was pretty cool). I think Lincoln was... supposed to have a crush on Olivia? Which I would not even have picked up on except that I was looking so hard for anything that would give him any personality at all. (Oh, he had a couple of snarky bitter comments once Peter and Olivia got together. I loved those, as they were about the closest thing I got to a personality for Lincoln.) We never get any clue as to how he relates to the rest of the team. And so the whole thing kind of fizzled out into nothing.
They could have fixed this so easily! Well, okay, maybe not all that easily, given the acting constraints, but give Lincoln some kind of freaking thematic arc, please, and when I say "arc" I do not mean what we actually got, which is some kind of two-episode character arc where Lincoln decides based on two conversations that he... wants to make choices? Okay then!
No, give him a plot-related thematic arc. Own the mentor-hero dynamic. Make him a cortexiphan kid, even! Let his deductions be based on that, let him be *needed* in the alt!universe and not just go over there because... because he has a crush on red!Olivia too? Let us see that it's a wrenching choice for him, because he's got, y'know, family over here! But the right thing, because now they need a cortexiphan kid to fix things and Walternate has too many morals to do that to kids! Or something. I mean, give him something that actually makes a difference. Then tie it in to Olivia and let her be involved too -- both plotwise and emotionally. (If Lincoln is a cortexiphan kid, and she feels like she has to save him from the results of that... how cool a dynamic would that be, the way she got to save Charlie in S1! By the way: CHARLIE. It took me what, all of two episodes to learn more about Charlie and how he related to the rest of the team than I learned about Lincoln in the entire season? JUST SAYING. MISS YOU CHARLIE.)
(Also, I started playing a drinking game: take a drink every time Lincoln has a scene with lines and dramatically mentions ~his partner~, whether that be his previous partner -- who just by the way was MURDERED, in case you forgot it from when he mentioned it in the last scene he had -- or Olivia. Of course, LDS pregnant lady has to drink juice, but man. Lots of liquid being consumed here.)
Oh, also, this Thing where AU!blue!Olivia chooses to have the memories of orig!blue!Olivia because True Love, and I have completely rewritten this in my mind to make it not the utter tripe that I actually think it is. Because I don't think the choice is necessarily a wrong one -- okay, I do think it is a wrong one, but she was railroaded into it. And I think there is an interesting story there, of someone who was forced by external stimuli to be the sort of person who must choose that (which I think she was), and what it means for everyone else in her life who got shafted by that choice. But we didn't get that story, of course. And what I object to is that the narrative frames it as the right choice. Fortunately, there was so much else going on ("surprise! Here's some dystopia for you!") that I can kind of reframe it in my mind as "look, in the Extended Season in my brain there is a LOT more angst and relationship fail that has to be worked through by everyone, and her family is all like, WTF, and there is a whole lot more Nina involved (NINA!), and etc."
I was also somewhat mollified from my rage in Season 3 over "The fate of the universe depends on which Olivia Peter is with!!" (which I thought was incredibly stupid) by the bit where we find out that the different Olivias' kids make two different timelines, one of which is the one that is the "preferred" one... because I totally grew up with alternate-universe SF and hence have no trouble buying the "single point of departure being a particular kid" theory ... and oh, that's very interesting when I think about it, actually; blue!Olivia having the kid instead of red!Olivia means (somehow) the Observers take over! (We know this as a fact: when red!Olivia had the kid, 2036 looked rather different.) Interesting! So from this standpoint Olivia having the kid is the wrong choice, Olivia choosing her original Peter memories is the wrong choice. OK, now I feel a lot better about this, even if it wasn't intentional :)
Although now it occurs to me that Henry has been erased, which is, well, obviously there are all kinds of people erased from one universe to another, but bleah, because red!Olivia looked so happy with him. But I guess red!Olivia and blue!Lincoln will have lots of cute babies too, or something.
I also kinda love the part where we find out that William Bell was behind the whole collapse-the-universes plot, because it actually made sense character-wise (if not science-wise... I don't even know about this show's science... D still teases me about "the quantum entanglement of love" when he wants to make fun of me for watching this show...). It never made sense to me that Robert David Jones wanted to collapse the universes... because... uh... what...! But William Bell, high on cortexiphan? Yes, that's scarily plausibly something I can imagine his character wanting to do, even if it destroys everything that actually now exists. (Why did Robert David Jones go along with it? Well, did Bell lie to him? I could see that.)
(Aside: It's very strange to watch this right after Nimoy died. And sad, too, not least because Season 4 Nimoy is clearly much more tired than Season 3 Nimoy -- you can see he doesn't have much time left. :( )
no subject
Date: 2015-03-05 02:14 pm (UTC)I love the analogy to unbetaed fic, but I think it's maybe a little bit wishful thinking. My ultimate conclusion was that S4 only feels like a swerve if you were watching the version of Fringe most fans were watching, rather than the version they were making. I think in general, TPTB created the version of S4 they wanted to create, that they had been intending to create from the start, and it just wasn't the show we had been hoping it would be. There are so many throughlines in Season 4 that start with earlier seasons and are followed through in logical ways... they're just problematic ways.
I really hate the 'wrong baby' throughline, but it's pretty consistent with how Fringe has treated parenthood from the beginning, if you think about it. I really hate the giving up your memories for true love throughline, but it's a way of looking at love that Fringe has returned to again and again.
But when the giving up her memories for true love storyline first happened and I was confronting it in the moment, I was one of the fans more inclined to be charitable to it, more willing to treat it as a complicated and dark story about the relationship between Olivia and Nina than it actually turned out to be, because I was still under the impression at the time that they were creating the show I'd thought I'd been watching from Season 1-3.
One of the next Fringe vids I want to make is a Nina Sharp Season 4 vid to the Mountain Goats "Genesis 30:3". Because the idea that Nina Sharp did what Olivia asked her to do, because of how she felt about Olivia. is really moving and beautiful, if it's presented as a difficult and possibly wrong choice, instead of as the narratively correct choice. And Blair Brown almost sells that in spite of the narrative. (How is the acting so good on this show? How were we lucky enough to get Anna Torv and John Noble and Blair Brown and Lance Reddick and Joshua Jackson getting to play off each other for five seasons?)
I do think Season 4 William Bell is my favorite version of the character, and aww... this makes me want to rewatch some William Bell episodes. (The death of Leonard Nimoy hasn't really hit me the way it's hit most of my friends, falling on the same day as my grandfather's death.)
Did the emails I forwarded to you include the essay where the author argues that Season 4 fundamentally doesn't work because they've invested three years of narrative capital in getting us to fall in love with particular versions of characters and then they try to use that narrative capital, but with different versions of the characters the audience doesn't care about? http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/monkeys-as-critics/posts/recap-fringe-making-angels
I don't really agree with it, because I think there's enough cleverness in the identity play of the contrast between S1-3 and S4 versions of the characters that they can benefit from some of the work of earlier seasons, but I think it's an interesting argument anyway.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-06 02:16 am (UTC)I don't necessarily think S4 feels like a swerve, exactly? (Partially this is because I came in knowing some of the things they were going to do, like the True Love Conquers All, which
In S4, whenever they tried to yank my chain it fell flat, because I felt like the characters were doing things because of the plot (which was itself a mishmash of ideas, not a coherent whole until the end of the season) and not that they were really acting like characters in their own right. Now, some of this, I am pretty sure, is because I watched less than half of S1 and not all of S2 -- I was following an episode guide, and I'm informed that some of the stuff I didn't bother to watch had some of the same problems. But -- S4 blue!Lincoln is all over the place in terms of characterization and even arc; it feels like they started him on one arc (the padawan arc) and midway through plopped him down in another arc (the choices/foil-with-red!Lincoln arc), which I can imagine was what they intended to do all along but which feels like inferior writing to me -- the sort of writing where Lincoln gets jerked around to advance the plot and Make Points. Oh, and the worst bit was when apparently there was this whole moving scene where he gave a token from his ~dead partner~ to Olivia which she forgot when she lost her memories, which we never saw and was totally retconned in for more drama. Did. Not. Work. I think I laughed. Especially when it turned out to be a Very Special Episode and he gave this oh-so-meaningful token to other guy at the end.
And Olivia: who is this Olivia who says that she's not scared, that she's gonna pick love because gosh darn it, it makes her happy? That's not any Olivia I've ever seen on my screen! That's not even the Olivia we see in S5, the Olivia who gave up on Etta to save the world. This Olivia is one who is saying what she is so that she can propel the plot forward, and it just feels fake. (To be clear, I am not talking about the choice itself to lose her memories, which, although I didn't like it much, is consistent with the Olivia who told Peter in S2(I think?) that he should come with her because LOVE, which still is my vote for the worst line in the entire show (even beating out the quantum entanglement of love and the First People predating dinosaurs). I'm talking about all the emotions surrounding it. She's not scared? Olivia, who wields her fear as a weapon? She's going to pick happiness and not even think about her family that we got to love in S1 and to a lesser extent (NINA) in S4? WHO ARE YOU, STRANGE PERSON?)
So -- yes, I agree with that article to a certain extent. I don't agree that there's no context for any of the character interactions (Nina and Walternate, as I said in the post, are two characters for which the context was handled really well and was essential to my powerful feelings about both characters and their plot elements) -- but I did feel like there was also a lot of sloppy writing that didn't give us context, or made it up on the fly and expected us to buy it, or springboarded from what we knew to... the middle of nowhere (here I am thinking about how it took what we knew about Olivia and how she relates to family in S1, and applied it to Nina, which score! good job show! and then Olivia was like, oh well, that doesn't matter, no reason not to give my memories away! and that... made no character sense in any kind of context with the rest of the show...) and... it didn't work so well.
I do suspect that maybe the writing has always been uneven (see also all the places where I rageflailed in S2-3) and it's just that the actors can make me forget that to a certain extent because they are so very good, and Seth Gabel just couldn't keep up, and he was a large enough part of S4 that it sort of affected the whole season.
Nimoy's death didn't hit me super hard, and I wonder how much Fringe had to do with that -- because it was so clear to me watching it (which I started to before the news of his death) that he was so very tired, and it almost felt like a relief. I do love S4 William Bell, though: now that's something that builds on what we knew before. Like, when he showed up, I thought, "OH. That makes PERFECT SENSE."
no subject
Date: 2015-03-08 02:41 am (UTC)*googles lyrics*
Unsolicited opinion: I would watch the heck out of that.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-08 02:40 am (UTC)So have... more words!
I really like the unbeta'd fic analogy, though I feel like some of the messiness is related to outside forces: budget cuts, the looming possibility of not getting renewed. Instead of drawing everything out forever, the showrunners and writers had to figure out how to close out the story. That may have pulled their attention from other stuff (like the fundamental shakiness of playing off the viewers' feelings about the old blueverse and redverse in what is essentially a third universe).
While I am not 100% sold on John Noble's acting choices having much to do with Peter Jackson, I totally approve of your headcanon.
The lack of awesome Lincoln plot arc remains strong here. See exchanges about possible sensible and crack-fuelled fixes. And your drinking game? Awesome. I want to play it with high end bridge mix and give myself a sugar coma.
The William Bell reveal felt like it came out of freaking nowhere in my opinion, and I wish there had been more hints earlier in the season. This goes back to me whining about the reboot: it's dirty pool to not mention important changes in the timeline until five minutes before your brilliant reveal. It worked better for me on the rewatch, when I can pretend bits of earlier episodes actually form a coherent idea pointing to Bell.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-09 01:34 pm (UTC)Yeah, the Bell reveal did rather come out of nowhere. I think I was just happy because it made coherent character sense, which a lot of things about the season didn't, so I was willing to overlook that... but... yeah.
(Also, re Season 5: PETER, WHAT ARE YOU DOING. I... had a chance to watch 5x05 in little bits and pieces yesterday. Also: oh Walter, that scene with Walter was incredibly moving, I feel like this is the redemption of blue!Walter that we saw in parallel with red!Walter in S4, and I just had ALL THE FEELINGS about Walter and Olivia.)
no subject
Date: 2015-03-10 04:34 am (UTC)Yes, this. And I think I mentioned this elsewhere, but John Noble in other stuff made me feel even more strongly about the script and directing choices in LotR.
Also, re Season 5: PETER, WHAT ARE YOU DOING.
NOT LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE I THINK. Anyone remember what happened the last time Peter decided the Batman vigilante model was the way to go? "Reciprocity" was not all that awesome. And oh yes, there was that time Walter broke two universes under similar circumstances.