Fringe season 3
Aug. 13th, 2014 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI'm getting increasingly frustrated with Fringe.
I like the characters, and the setup, but I keep feeling the writers care about the wrong parts, and like I can see a much better story wrapped up in the same stuff.
I'm not saying this to be arrogant about my own writing skills. It's just I keep feeling like they're leading us up to a grand emotional moment, and instead they swap it out for another, more boring, science fiction moment.
(Spoilers for the first three season, please don't spoil the last two.)
It's like the entire existence of William Bell. At the end of the first season I liked their reveal, the alternate world and why we hadn't found Bell before, but at the start of the second season I hung up for ages after the first episode because it became clear this was not a story where you'd ever get answers, and no amount of lampshading is going to make that okay by me. Instead of letting us watch that conversation, they skipped a bit, made Olivia forget it, and then keep pulling stuff out of nowhere about what was in it whenever they needed to budge the season along a bit. Bell isn't a character, he's an accelerator magnet. He exists to make the story go when nothing else they've bothered setting up will do so. Or to get it over any little hangups that otherwise logically could become an issue.
Season 3 gets worse. Like, Peter goes on a murder spree to collect data disks from robot assassin backsides. And right there I have a problem, because the kind of SF I care about, like in the background of precisely one episode so far, would have these shapeshifter assassins come here, get lives, fall in love, and care about the world they've been inserted into to the point of having doubts about which side they're on. But that never happens here. Neither do we get the DS9 moment where the metal blood clue we're looking for doesn't happen, where all the paranoia is just getting people to aim at their friends. Peter is somehow infallible. Nobody's split second decisions to fire are ever in error. They kill the shapeshifters, 100% of the shapeshifters, with absolutely no errors, even temporary. And this is not how people work. And this should not be how SF works. Because the shapeshifters explore no issues, they don't pull up the spectre of War on Terror paranoia and putting people on watch lists and how anyone could secretly be on any side and then show the terrible fallout of police overstepping their powers in response, they just do full paranoia, crank it up to 11, and make all violence perfectly justified. The enemy don't get to be people. They get to be target practice.
Peter conceals his actions for a while, as if perhaps he can imagine there being bad consequences for shooting five people. Just maybe. But when he finally reveals to Olivia what he's been doing, whoosh, William Bell to the rescue! Olivia stops existing for a few episodes and Bell takes her place mentally. And after? We never go back to it. Not only do we not get the data out of the disks, Olivia never even has a reaction. She doesn't react to Peter's breach of trust in not telling her and letting her run around professionally hunting the wrong people, she doesn't react to him killing people, she doesn't react.
Honestly I'm wondering if I missed any episodes. The our universe / their universe structure with irregular switches would make it super easy. But I recognise all the descriptions in the season cover, so I don't think I did. They just missed a whole huge thread of story.
And then at the end of season 3... okay, more context required: Two universes. Two Olivias, but only one Peter. Fauxlivia swapped with Olivia for a few weeks and they shagged. And that creeped me out, because everyone's reactions after were kind of like Peter cheated, but the correct word for sex by deception is not that. Peter thought she was someone else, so that made everything we saw them do together lack consent. Creepy. And I did not feel it was adequately addressed. Plus the part where he still had feelings for her, and that was an issue for Olivia? Well that's... okay, so, Peter's feelings don't have an off switch, that's nice, but what were his actual feelings anyway? Betrayed and creeped out? We saw Olivia have a reaction, but Peter?
So there's two Olivias, and Peter slept with both of them. Fauxlivia got pregnant, and due to creepy science fictiony episode of body horror and making pregnancy scary, the baby arrived well before the end of the season. And why does SF always do that? Not DS9, that did SF without the creepy, but mostly they don't bother having the baby story unless they're going to horror it. I wish they wouldn't. Being a woman isn't inherently horrific, thanks.
So in one universe Peter has Olivia, who he trusts, who always has his back, who wants a relationship with him. In the other universe Fauxlivia has Peter's son Henry, and some fuzzy feelings because she realised the guy she was tricking was actual a pretty great guy. And the writers set it up that Peter will have to choose which universe to save and which to destroy, and that which Olivia he chooses will decide that.
Great! Use of SF devices to intensify a real human emotional choice. Babymama who betrayed you, or good partner? Husband or father? There's a ton of emotional stories weaving through the season that are about being a good partner or a good parent. There's the one where two versions of the same apartment had one universe where they chose to be childless and the other with children. The writing clearly set it up as a choice, and the machine would clearly be the vector of choice.
Except, guess what?
They didn't do it.
We get to the end of season 3 and Peter, as far as we know on screen, never, even in the 15 years in the future flashforward, never ever found out he was a father. He had no choice to make. The flashforward episode wrecked what seemed like a whole season of careful foreshadowing. It fracked the dismount and gave us nothing, a load of SF hooey instead of an emotional choice.
Peter steps into the machine, and instead of seeing Olivia on one side and Fauxlivia with the baby on the other, he sees a singular future after having destroyed Walternate's universe, and in that future he discovers that neither universe can survive without the other so the 'choice' isn't a choice at all.
So he brings the two universes together for peace talks, refuses to destroy, chooses to create a bridge. It's great. Excellent conclusion. Exactly the conclusion the baby-or-partner choice would have needed too. Not least because the idea that choosing one utterly destroys the other is pretty stupid once you bring it back to real world relevance.
They just got there by... ignoring everything they'd been building. Throw it out, forget it, do something else instead.
Why?
So this is what I mean by there's a better show underneath. I don't understand their choices. They screw themselves over.
Also, at the end of season 3, they just had the price of Peter's choice to save both universes (both Father and Dad, both partner and babymother), be that everyone forgets him.
Everything up until this point had real enough emotional resonance. Walter's choices, SF though the vehicle might be, felt real enough: Because he lost his own son he stole another man's son, telling himself it was for his own good. Terrible choice, real feelings. Peter should have been set up with a real choice. But this last episode just... *boom* to all that. Everyone forgets him? That's... if he chose it knowing that would happen, then that's the suicide's logic: everyone's argue is about him, he is the center of the mess, therefore if he wasn't there the mess wouldn't be. So I hate it, but it could feel real.
Except he never consciously chose it, and everyone else is left in the exact same mess as they had been up until then.
Like, if this was an SF style universe reboot, if he decided the worlds would be better off, that the way to save everyone was to have neither partner nor child but to just have never been saved in the first place, then the universes could play through from that point. You could set that up. The only ethical way would be to wonderful life him back in, show how everything is worse without him, but the choice could be set up.
But instead all his consequences are standing there staring at each other, hating each other for things they should no longer be able to remember, since without Peter they had no motive to do them.
Whatever the hell that season just ended with, they blew up all emotional logic to do it.
And Peter made no choices
Olivia made no choices
Fauxlivia made no choices
... I could go on ...
Only the SF gimmick that the writers are pulling out of nowhere made any choices.
So what the hell was the point?
So I'm angry at that 'ending', because it was set up as something so much better, and now it doesn't even make sense.
I'm going to watch the rest of the box set, I already bought it, I know this about me, I will watch to the last episode.
I'm just... I give up on these writers knowing what they've done or having even vaguely the same definitions of good story as I do.
I like the characters, and the setup, but I keep feeling the writers care about the wrong parts, and like I can see a much better story wrapped up in the same stuff.
I'm not saying this to be arrogant about my own writing skills. It's just I keep feeling like they're leading us up to a grand emotional moment, and instead they swap it out for another, more boring, science fiction moment.
(Spoilers for the first three season, please don't spoil the last two.)
It's like the entire existence of William Bell. At the end of the first season I liked their reveal, the alternate world and why we hadn't found Bell before, but at the start of the second season I hung up for ages after the first episode because it became clear this was not a story where you'd ever get answers, and no amount of lampshading is going to make that okay by me. Instead of letting us watch that conversation, they skipped a bit, made Olivia forget it, and then keep pulling stuff out of nowhere about what was in it whenever they needed to budge the season along a bit. Bell isn't a character, he's an accelerator magnet. He exists to make the story go when nothing else they've bothered setting up will do so. Or to get it over any little hangups that otherwise logically could become an issue.
Season 3 gets worse. Like, Peter goes on a murder spree to collect data disks from robot assassin backsides. And right there I have a problem, because the kind of SF I care about, like in the background of precisely one episode so far, would have these shapeshifter assassins come here, get lives, fall in love, and care about the world they've been inserted into to the point of having doubts about which side they're on. But that never happens here. Neither do we get the DS9 moment where the metal blood clue we're looking for doesn't happen, where all the paranoia is just getting people to aim at their friends. Peter is somehow infallible. Nobody's split second decisions to fire are ever in error. They kill the shapeshifters, 100% of the shapeshifters, with absolutely no errors, even temporary. And this is not how people work. And this should not be how SF works. Because the shapeshifters explore no issues, they don't pull up the spectre of War on Terror paranoia and putting people on watch lists and how anyone could secretly be on any side and then show the terrible fallout of police overstepping their powers in response, they just do full paranoia, crank it up to 11, and make all violence perfectly justified. The enemy don't get to be people. They get to be target practice.
Peter conceals his actions for a while, as if perhaps he can imagine there being bad consequences for shooting five people. Just maybe. But when he finally reveals to Olivia what he's been doing, whoosh, William Bell to the rescue! Olivia stops existing for a few episodes and Bell takes her place mentally. And after? We never go back to it. Not only do we not get the data out of the disks, Olivia never even has a reaction. She doesn't react to Peter's breach of trust in not telling her and letting her run around professionally hunting the wrong people, she doesn't react to him killing people, she doesn't react.
Honestly I'm wondering if I missed any episodes. The our universe / their universe structure with irregular switches would make it super easy. But I recognise all the descriptions in the season cover, so I don't think I did. They just missed a whole huge thread of story.
And then at the end of season 3... okay, more context required: Two universes. Two Olivias, but only one Peter. Fauxlivia swapped with Olivia for a few weeks and they shagged. And that creeped me out, because everyone's reactions after were kind of like Peter cheated, but the correct word for sex by deception is not that. Peter thought she was someone else, so that made everything we saw them do together lack consent. Creepy. And I did not feel it was adequately addressed. Plus the part where he still had feelings for her, and that was an issue for Olivia? Well that's... okay, so, Peter's feelings don't have an off switch, that's nice, but what were his actual feelings anyway? Betrayed and creeped out? We saw Olivia have a reaction, but Peter?
So there's two Olivias, and Peter slept with both of them. Fauxlivia got pregnant, and due to creepy science fictiony episode of body horror and making pregnancy scary, the baby arrived well before the end of the season. And why does SF always do that? Not DS9, that did SF without the creepy, but mostly they don't bother having the baby story unless they're going to horror it. I wish they wouldn't. Being a woman isn't inherently horrific, thanks.
So in one universe Peter has Olivia, who he trusts, who always has his back, who wants a relationship with him. In the other universe Fauxlivia has Peter's son Henry, and some fuzzy feelings because she realised the guy she was tricking was actual a pretty great guy. And the writers set it up that Peter will have to choose which universe to save and which to destroy, and that which Olivia he chooses will decide that.
Great! Use of SF devices to intensify a real human emotional choice. Babymama who betrayed you, or good partner? Husband or father? There's a ton of emotional stories weaving through the season that are about being a good partner or a good parent. There's the one where two versions of the same apartment had one universe where they chose to be childless and the other with children. The writing clearly set it up as a choice, and the machine would clearly be the vector of choice.
Except, guess what?
They didn't do it.
We get to the end of season 3 and Peter, as far as we know on screen, never, even in the 15 years in the future flashforward, never ever found out he was a father. He had no choice to make. The flashforward episode wrecked what seemed like a whole season of careful foreshadowing. It fracked the dismount and gave us nothing, a load of SF hooey instead of an emotional choice.
Peter steps into the machine, and instead of seeing Olivia on one side and Fauxlivia with the baby on the other, he sees a singular future after having destroyed Walternate's universe, and in that future he discovers that neither universe can survive without the other so the 'choice' isn't a choice at all.
So he brings the two universes together for peace talks, refuses to destroy, chooses to create a bridge. It's great. Excellent conclusion. Exactly the conclusion the baby-or-partner choice would have needed too. Not least because the idea that choosing one utterly destroys the other is pretty stupid once you bring it back to real world relevance.
They just got there by... ignoring everything they'd been building. Throw it out, forget it, do something else instead.
Why?
So this is what I mean by there's a better show underneath. I don't understand their choices. They screw themselves over.
Also, at the end of season 3, they just had the price of Peter's choice to save both universes (both Father and Dad, both partner and babymother), be that everyone forgets him.
Everything up until this point had real enough emotional resonance. Walter's choices, SF though the vehicle might be, felt real enough: Because he lost his own son he stole another man's son, telling himself it was for his own good. Terrible choice, real feelings. Peter should have been set up with a real choice. But this last episode just... *boom* to all that. Everyone forgets him? That's... if he chose it knowing that would happen, then that's the suicide's logic: everyone's argue is about him, he is the center of the mess, therefore if he wasn't there the mess wouldn't be. So I hate it, but it could feel real.
Except he never consciously chose it, and everyone else is left in the exact same mess as they had been up until then.
Like, if this was an SF style universe reboot, if he decided the worlds would be better off, that the way to save everyone was to have neither partner nor child but to just have never been saved in the first place, then the universes could play through from that point. You could set that up. The only ethical way would be to wonderful life him back in, show how everything is worse without him, but the choice could be set up.
But instead all his consequences are standing there staring at each other, hating each other for things they should no longer be able to remember, since without Peter they had no motive to do them.
Whatever the hell that season just ended with, they blew up all emotional logic to do it.
And Peter made no choices
Olivia made no choices
Fauxlivia made no choices
... I could go on ...
Only the SF gimmick that the writers are pulling out of nowhere made any choices.
So what the hell was the point?
So I'm angry at that 'ending', because it was set up as something so much better, and now it doesn't even make sense.
I'm going to watch the rest of the box set, I already bought it, I know this about me, I will watch to the last episode.
I'm just... I give up on these writers knowing what they've done or having even vaguely the same definitions of good story as I do.