fringe: season finale

So, this last episode was… not as amazing or action-filled as the commercials made it seem. Walter has run off, and it’s up to Peter to find him, and meanwhile, Olivia and Charlie are looking for Jones, who is all slimy and wrapped in bandages, because of his self-induced radiation poisoning from when he teleported himself. Seems Jones has stolen a powercell from Nina Sharp’s robotic arm and is using it to power a computer monitor that opens a window into that alternate universe we keep going back to. And he keeps getting it wrong. First he brings through most of a semi—except for the back end—that crashes and kills the driver, and has no a single registered part on it. Weird. Then he opens a window on a soccer field that gets a kid chopped in half. Eew. Finally, he heads for this creepy old lake in the woods outside town. He wants to find William Bell and kill him for what he did / is involved in.

All this time, Olivia’s tracking him, and she gets the idea to map the strange events they’ve been tracking and the events they hear about that they haven’t been tracking. When the marks the places where Jones used his transporter, the random dots line up into something along the lines of shatter marks (which is really cool, if they run with the idea that the transporter and the windowmaker sort of shatter the world and let the other worlds through, otherwise, this is not necessary except to look cool). But there are still other sites—centered around that creepy lake. So they head off.

Meanwhile again, Peter finds Walter in the old beach house they used to visit when he was a kid, going all crazy and not able to remember what he’s supposed to find or where he put it. There’s a lot of scenes of Walter flipping out and Peter trying to get him calm, and finally, Peter remembers something from his childhood and the memory sparks Walter’s memory, and he digs up a device that will stop the windows—a sort of reality plug. And they head for the creepy lake, too.

So everyone’s at the lake. The goodies fight some, then Liv and Charlie head for Jones to stop him, and Peter goes to close the gateway—which he does rather anticlimactically as Jones is going through and right before Liv would have followed him. And that’s done in about three seconds, after this whole second half of the season was about getting there. Suck.

But the episode isn’t over yet! Liv goes to Manhattan to meet with Ms Sharp, and gets stood up. Walter goes to a grave and it turns out to be Peter’s grave, and I KNEW IT! That’s why there was all that talk about Peter being so sick and him not remembering it, or remembering anything about his earliest childhood! And that had better cause problems and drama later, because that’s the coolest part of this episode. And Liv goes down the elevator and skitters through a couple alternates, then it stops on a different floor than she asked for, which is all white and clean and futuristic looking, and an aide takes her to meet Spock. I mean, Leonard Nimoy, who is a remarkably cheerful William Bell, considering he’s supposedly hiding out in an alternate reality so Jones won’t kill him (or whatever weirdness there is that we don’t know about yet). And then I have to wait until Fall to see what happens.

It wasn’t a bad episode—it just seemed like it was sort of a let-down when I was watching it: it’s cooler-sounding when I line it all up like this.

And season-enders always make me grumpy.