"I didn't realize how much I missed swivel chairs."

Ok, Fringe's season finale kind of blew my mind.  I postponed writing this blog post because I was thinking I'd watch the episode again to get a better understanding of what happened, but I didn't.  So bear with me.  This episode was really great, but it was also super-confusing.  WATCH THE EPISODE RIGHT NOW.  My meager review/summary will not do it justice.

So in the last episode, Peter got hooked into the machine and somehow popped into the future, inhabiting/shadowing his older self.  The year is 2026 in our universe.  Some kind of crazy attack is going on in NYC when Peter arrives there, but he makes it out Ok.  He winds up in a hospital and seems to be his normal 2026 self - he doesn't think he's Peter from 2011.  Once he's released, he meets up with Olivia, who he's happily married to (YAY!!) and Ella, Olivia's niece, who apparently works with the Fringe Division.  Wormholes apparently pop up all over the place in 2026, so the Fringe Division is a prominent, police-like force.  It's basically the same deal as the other universe now.

Then we see some creepers setting up a bomb in an opera house or something.  They're apparently members of a terrorist group called the End Of Dayers, and they try to accelerate the arrival of the apocalypse.  (Why?)  When the Fringe Division investigates, they realize they need Walter to examine the bomb.  It turns out, though, that he's in jail.  Once the whole "universe disintegrating" thing became common knowledge, Walter, who caused it all, was thrown behind bars.  Peter goes to visit him in a really good scene that reminded me of Fringe's pilot when Walter was in the mental hospital. 

Same beard, different day.

Peter visits Broyles, who's now a senator with one freaky blue eye, to get him to let Walter out of jail for a while to help with the investigation.  He reluctantly complies.  Walter goes to his old lab and chills in his swivel chair.  When Olivia comes by, they have an emotional reunion. And oh yeah, guess what?   OLIVIA CAN CONTROL HER TELEKINESIS ABILITIES OMG!!!!!!!!  So legit!!!!!!!!

Then we see that Walternate is in our universe and is the head of that terrorist organization.  He's trying to destroy our world as an act of revenge... since we destroyed his.  That's right, the other universe is gone in 2026.  The Fringe Division somehow knows that Walternate is chillin here and that he was stuck here when his world was destroyed.  The day the machine was activated was "the day we died" (yay title in the episode's dialogue!) since it destroyed the other universe and the two universes are so closely tied together that ours can't exist without theirs.  That's why our universe is falling apart now. 

Olivia and Peter are in their fancy house cooking dinner (I think it was steak in a can... haha).  There's a cute kid-drawn picture of Peter, Olivia, and a little kid.  Their young neighbor drew it for them, and in the neighbor's mind, the kid in the picture is Peter and Olivia's future kid that the neighbor is going to babysit.  Even though Peter and Olivia have been married for a while, they haven't had kids since Olivia thinks it's wrong to bring kids into a dying world.  This was a really emotional, well performed/written scene that brought up lots of questions about what it would be like to live a normal life when you're basically doomed to die at any moment.

But at least they're together, right?  :)

Back to the science: I guess the canister has some sort of radiation or something that the Fringe Division can track, so they trace it to some campsite.  (I don't know, just go with it.)  Olivia and Peter show up there, and someone gives Peter a key that he stows away without telling anyone.  He then ventures off alone to his old cabin/house thing from earlier episodes and uses the key to get in.  He sees Walternate there, and they talk for a while.  Walternate is obviously very bitter about the destruction of his world, and Peter apologizes a bunch and talks about yin/yang and stuff like that.  He tries to convince him that destroying our universe won't solve anything.  But Walternate is still continuing his plans and tells peter that he's going to destroy our universe, but not all at once... he's going to take away someone Peter cares about.  Peter tries to arrest him, but he's apparently a hologram.

A bomb goes off in Central Park near some amber covering a wormhole, and Olivia is nearby or something and gets knocked down.  She calls in the bombing.  And as soon as she's done, a bullet hits her right in the forehead and she's dead.

He killed his own daughter-in-law!!!!!!  PUNK.

Peter gives a eulogy at her funeral, but we can't hear it.  Her body is sent to sea and burned at the same time.  Everyone leaves.  When Peter gets home, he sees the picture on the fridge and starts crying.  Nooo!  :(  This whole scene was super emotional.  This was followed by another interesting scene between Walter and Ella.  Ella can't remember anything from "before things were bad" and holds Walter accountable for taking a normal world away from her.

Here's where things start to get weird.  Walter realized that he used the Central Park wormhole to send the pieces of the machine back in time, making him and his peeps the "First People."  Peter asks him to just not send the pieces back, and Walter says he can't (IDK why).  But Walter says that Peter can make a different choice in the past.  He needs to figure out how to make 2011 Peter's consciousness come to the future to see the consequences of using the machine, and somehow that'll fix things... but Peter's already using the machine in 2011!   Confused yet?  You will be soon.

So we jump back to 2011.  Peter is in the machine.  Walter is afraid that extracting him from the machine too early will hurt him.  On the other side, Walternate sees that our machine is hurting his world, so he sends for Fauxlivia to stop it all.  He thinks that she has similar abilities to Olivia.  When she gets there, she figures out that our universe outsmarted them and calls Walternate out on stuff.  Our Olivia rushes up to Peter.  He comes to, is happy that Olivia is alive, and goes into another machine trance and the two universes merge, at least in that room, and Peter disappears because apparently he doesn't exist anymore.   But without Peter existing, Walter would have never traveled to the other side to save/take him and rip open the universes in the first place!  And if that never happened, there wouldn't be any reason for the two universe peeps to all be together at Liberty Island.  Heck, without Peter to work the machine, there's no way they would get there at all!  And what does that mean about his/Fauxlivia's baby?  Does he not exist anymore, either?  And what are the Observers doing there?  Ugh, so many unanswered questions!

So yeah.  Thorough confusion.  Mind blown. 

Overall, this episode was really, really great.  I was impressed as always by the acting in the episode.  The character-building scenes were very emotional and realistic, due to good acting and writing.  I was confused about a lot of stuff in the episode, especially about why Walter couldn't choose to not put the machine pieces in the wormhole.  But overall, it was good confusion.

Season 3 of Fringe was AMAZING.  All the two-universe stuff was so awesome!  Acting and writing were pretty consistently great.  So many great plot twists!  Remember when Fauxlivia hooked up with Peter?  And when she ended up pregnant with his baby and beat up all those people in that creepy warehouse while she was 100% pregnant and in labor?  So great!  And when Peter and Olivia finally reconciled and got together?  Yay!  And all the cool/gross science stuff?  Always a plus.  And Walter's antics?  So hilarious!  Great job, Fringe!

I'm super pumped for season 4!  I need some answers ASAP!