Home Featured TV Shows All TV Shows Movie Reviews Book Reviews Articles Frequently Asked Questions About Us

Fringe: Five-Twenty-Ten

“The world’s not going to save itself.”

The legend of Faust tells of a man who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge, experience, and power. All the pleasure that brings him is not enough, though. In Marlowe’s version, Faustus attempts to re-negotiate his contract, screaming “I’ll burn my books!” as he is dragged in to hell. Faced with the spiritual knowledge of his own eternal damnation, Faustus realizes that his intellectual knowledge was not a fair trade, and for the first time understands that the simplest fact—of divine love and salvation—passed him by all those years ago.

Walter and Peter have both faced a Faustian dilemma this season. With his brain-bits restored, Walter has more intellectual horsepower, but less moral control: he has become increasingly Walternative. (That’s my new adjective, and I like it.) Unlike Faust, Walter knows the simplest fact—Peter’s love for him and his love for Peter—but he does not know if it is enough to keep him from returning to his old self. And so he is faced with a choice: less brain-power means less chance the revolution will succeed, but it also means he can win his own personal revolution, avoiding the personal tyranny of calculated coldness that he has come to hate about himself.

While it seems clear that Walter either will or already did (by the end of the episode) choose love over knowledge, Peter’s choice took him in another direction. With the tech inserted, Peter has become increasingly Observeter. (That’s my new noun, and I like it less.) As the episode progressed, his speech became increasingly stilted, his delivery more wooden, his head-tilts more creepy. He came clean to Olivia not because he realized that honesty is necessary to maintain a strong marriage, but because he no longer cared about his marriage. He is too calculated and cold.

And he is so cold, so distant, that he doesn’t know—or doesn’t care—that he has become that way. Faustus had enough moral awareness left that he knew the cost of what he’d given up, and so did Walter all those years ago, when he had parts of his brain removed to avoid becoming completely cold. But Peter might have crossed over the line of possibility in this episode: does he have the moral awareness to realize the emotional vitality he has left behind? Would he even care if someone reminded him that he had finally betrayed his mother’s desire, and become a worse man than his father?

Peter has sold his soul for knowledge, and he wants to use that knowledge for vengeance. That sad irony is that it seems to be necessary to defeat the Observers. The opening scene of Peter seeing the likely events (in blue) and their actualization (in regular colors) showed just how powerful his new power is. And it contrasted with the following scene, in which Team Fringe debated uncertainties, possibilities, and the vagaries of memory in the lab. Our heroes can’t win without Peter’s tech, but I’m not sure they can really win—really save themselves as well as the world—with it. He may be too far gone.

(It is not a coincidence that the glowy cylinder made its first Fringe appearance in “The Arrival,” which was when we began to learn the truth about Peter’s “death” in childhood; now he is dying a different sort of death.)

The final minutes of the episode were among the strongest in Fringe’s history. The Bowie song is about a “man who sold the world,” though—is that the same thing as a man who sells his soul? Fringe says yes: both Walter and Peter must choose between the greater world, which needs a revolution, and their personal worlds of family and loved ones. Walter came face to face with a man who might sell his soul (and everyone’s) for more knowledge, and he choose love over intellect. Peter, however, can no longer come face to face with himself: he is too distant from his humanity for that. Instead, we’re forced to confront, through a see-through blackboard that symbolizes the distance between Peter and everyone else, that sometimes a man must save the whole world, at the price of his soul.

Too Much LSD:

• Astrid: “That’s from the movie Marathon Man.”

• Nice to see Nina again, in her snazzy gray wig.

• Fun shout-out to the first Fringe episode, huh?

• When I am an ambiguous hero/villain, I too shall have a see-through big board.

Four out of four glowy cylinders. Because Fringe is firing on all of them. (See what I did there?)

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

7 comments:

  1. Wow Josie

    Your review ALREADY out ? Incredible.

    SOB ! I was, as usual, so enthralled in the watching that the Faustian parallel did not cross my mind, event though I recently mentioned a French Faustian movies on a Billie article, DUHHH This is what happens when I fully plunge into an amazing 42 minutes of TV : living it, not thinking it. (yes, I did a massive amount of living past summer)

    "Walternative", I like it too, a lot.

    "Observeter" : ObservePete ??P
    There is a tiny bit of hope for peter, he did say the truth to Olivia at the end.

    Wow, great review Josie. No wonder I'm such a fan !

    Did anyone had a (first movie) Matrix vibe when they showed us next (aw crap in 3) week(s)' episode? Wagner ???!!!??! Really !!! Wow !

    Very, very strong season. This show will be terribly missed next year.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A ps

    The cabinet at the end, with all the pieces of the puzzle (of the plan)....

    OH ! How will it end ???

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is the most exhilarating season for me. I can wait to see how everything will turn out! Thanks Josie..

    ReplyDelete
  4. PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT :


    I wanted to write this a long time ago, so therefore I'm copying and pasting my comment from another page on this (amazing) (1) site :

    "The alarm sound in Fringe, this season and in the Parallel Universe in the 3rd and 4th season is actually taken from the red alert sound from Space 1999, 2nd season. Do not argue with me, LOL, 'cos I have an amazing memory for sounds (and voices and faces)."


    (1) stop rolling your eyes when I praise these pages, they are worth it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
    Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

    -Mark 8:36-37 (KJV)

    What's the right choice? To sell your soul, and save the world? Or sell the world to save your soul? I'm not sure I know.

    I'm not sure I want to know.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I want to kiss whoever is making the song choices for this season. First Yaz/Yazoo and now Bowie. Musical heaven.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thank you Josie for that. Somehow i always come out of your reviews with angles i hadn't considered. I can't get over how good the show is right now. It was a blessing and a curse to have this be the last season.

    ReplyDelete

We love comments! We moderate because of spam and trolls, but don't let that stop you! It’s never too late to comment on an old show, but please don’t spoil future episodes for newbies.