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sprocketRewatching "Over There" makes me wonder, how many times can you say Fringe rebooted? As a 2 hour introduction to the other side's characters and motivations, "Over There" is kinda sorta a reboot. (It's also kinda sorta a final consequence of the show getting away from its procedural-with-mytharc initial conception. The blueverse protags are the Case of the Week, but that little irony is almost utterly buried under the Peter-chasing A-plot, with associated infodumps, gunfights, and the literal setting people on fire. Though it starts as casefic, it's rapidly subsumed into the almost cinematic A-plot.)
The Day We Died sets up the S4 reboot, with some previously discussed consequences. "Letters of Transit" / "Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11" isn't exactly a reboot, except for the way a 25 year time-jump is arguably a reboot. "An Enemy of Fate" could also be a reboot, since it resets the timeline, but it was the series finale.
So what is up with this?
I'm going to suggest that whatever Fringe thought it wanted to do, it assembled a wonderful serial storytelling team with notable weaknesses at crafting a Case of the Week. Their storytelling is also prone to... flexibility. Sometimes good (altverse arc going gangbusters? Let it run!) and sometimes less so (three versions of What Happened In 1985, culminating in Peter/Olivia Are Destined? Ewwww). Oops.
For now, I'm mostly ignoring outside pressures, but feel free to bring up ratings, studio notes, budgets, etc, in comments.
The challenge of balancing a weekly standalone with a weekly installment of a serial is nontrivial. Especially in the face of unexpected developments: Peter is maybe the least convincing conman ever, but John Noble and Joshua Jackson deliver a wonderful Peter-Walter relationship; John Noble knocked Walter's characterization out of the park; someone said, "let's have Anna Torv play Olivia and the other Olivia," and things seem to have snowballed from there. Not to mention that the writers really struggled with the procedural format, and for Reasons, if the show ever wanted to bring Mark Valley back, well, that didn't pan out.
So much of the storytelling methods in Fringe come back to feelings. Fear, love, hope, loss, friendship, anger, wonder. Fringe is not so great with any story that demands rigorous logic, but it makes up for that by hitting viewers with our illogical emotions. However, very early in its run, Fringe made a few storytelling promises it was then stuck fulfilling. Certain guns not just put on the mantlepiece, in case they were needed, but highlighted in Day-Glo paints and neon that then had to be shot off to wrap the mytharc.
What was on that very early to-do list?
- Peter's kidnapping
- William Bell / Massive Dynamic
- The Observers
- The Pattern
How'd that work out?
- Peter's kidnapping was the meat and potatoes of S2, and some of S3, as it eventually opened the alternate universe to viewers.
- The William Bell arc(s) sometimes worked, and sometimes did not (cough "Brave New World" cough).
- The Observers I will rant about later.
- The Pattern, arguably, went really well, as it morphed into ZFT and the S1 season finale. It went so well it reappears in S4, with mixed results.
One of my formative experiences with serial storytelling was Babylon 5, and one of my formative experiences of a creator interacting with the online community was J. Michael Straczynski. I will quote something JMS posted after pulling off War Without End, a two-part S3 episode which fulfilled certain narrative promises from S1, while also setting up S3, S4, and S5 guns. It's long, but bear with me, it's meta-provoking:
The curious thing...the interesting thing...is that in just about everything I've ever written, yes, I generally follow where I want to go, end up where I want to end up, but once I get *into* it, once the characters come alive on the page, I inevitably find better ways of doing things, stronger and more muscular paths to the story, more interesting side roads.
Also, this original story was worked out in 1986/87; that's nearly ten years ago. In those ten years, I've become -- or like to think I've become -- a better writer, learned more, written more, picked up some new tools I didn't have then. So you have a situation where the writer in 1996 looks at the writer in 1986 and says, "No, listen...there's a better way. Yes, we'll still get to Disneyland on time, you'll still have plenty of time to ride the haunted mansion...but if we go *this* way, we can stop off and also see Knotts Berry Farm, and the Winchester Mystery Mansion, and maybe even Hearst Castle on the way."
The destination is still the same..but I've found a *lot* more interesting ways of getting there. Which, after all, is what an outline is for: a safe home base that allows you to wander off, knowing that you can always return to it if you get lost.
Looking at the first half of S1, there's almost zero Olivia origin story. Was that deliberate? Did the showrunners and writers decide Walter and Peter, Massive Dynamic, and the John Scott arc were enough mytharc to get up and running? Or, did Olivia get a revamp as the first reactions came in?
What I do believe is that the multiverse arc went over so well that the writers ran with it, right into some storytelling walls. At some point you have to figure out how to get back on the road to Disneyland, or in Fringe's case, the Observer arc.
Fringe often tries to tell me Peter and the Observers are the biggest most important arc, by putting the observers in the pilot, and in the background of every episode after the pilot, as well as using an Observer MotW to convince Peter to stick around in "The Arrival", and by putting "Inner Child" front and center in S1, and stepping away from the S2 altverse build long enough for "August". It also keeps the Observers in every version of the universes and timeline, sometimes with momentum-killing redirections (as in "The End of All Things"). The trouble is, Fringe found its drumbeat when it told stories about feelings, and the Observer arc is about largely emotionless white guys.
In the attempt to get back to this perceived core story, more organic story elements get warped. What is with Peter being Machine Guy, Olivia is the character with canon superpowers. And why give me the altverse's nascent Lincoln-Charlie anti-Walternate conspiracy if you're going to reboot in less than five episodes? Mid- and late-S3 had a lot of elements that could have been played out in a non-rebooted S4, and either weren't reasserted in S4, or couldn't be followed up on in the new paradigm.
Speaking of arcs that failed to launch, either because of reboots or storytelling drift, there's the William Bell arc, or rather, the truncated hot mess that pops out of nowhere in Brave New World. If you squint, the groundwork is there: BNW invokes the Biblical themes Fringe flirted with for the 0.02 seconds Amy Jessup almost was part of the Fringe team; the over-reaching of technology is called out in the ZFT manifesto, and in one of Nina Sharp's early S4 speeches; the madness of scientists, as seen in Walter's actions, and Brandon Fayettte's, and a number of MotW eps. It's really disappointing that the show never resigned itself to the downsides of casting a well-known septuagenarian as Bell: namely, limited availability. Much of the Bell BNW arc could have been carried by secondary Massive Dynamic characters - yep, this would be my appeal for all the Nina - had the show been willing to move past its completely understandable Leonard Nimoy fanboying. It's also a reasonable play on Fringe's core parent-childobsession themes, this time in the form of legacies and inheritances: the things we leave behind. You can still get to Disneyworld! Just, in the interests of time, you might need to consider hitting the Getty instead of Hearst Castle.
(I have some guesses about the original outline of the Bell arc, based on the last four episodes of the fourth season, but it's tl;dr unless other people have plot speculation cravings.)
One of the few good things about S5's sad sad dystopia with all the sad feelings (nope, still not over 5x04, or some Michael-Olivia parallels the show didn't acknowledge to my satisfaction), is that the writers and showrunners had received a very clear message they were getting just enough space to wrap the mytharc, and so the fifth season has very little going on which is not in service of that goal. It's a little messy and contrived at times - betamax tapes, seriously, bless - but the emotionless white guys wind up cursed with all these feelings, and the actors make us all cry buckets in the finale. It's interesting to see what happens when a show lets go of appealing to a casual audience and cuts loose with all-mytharc-almost-all-the-time.
Speaking of side-trips, the wonderful evolution of Olivia's arc also was not planned quite the way it happened. That's my working hypothesis for why the focus tips from Olivia to Peter in S3, and might play into the S4 reboot. It's also why blueverse Lincoln's S4 arc is off balance, for me: again, organic elements overtake an intended arc. (For better or worse, Peter comes off as the peacemaker and caretaker, a role that seems to be a storytelling challenge for TV. Peter is not Action Guy, unless you've touched a hair on Olivia's head. Or Etta's, but let's not get into grief-stricken Bishop life decisions, m'kay?) It's probably another contributing factor to the hot mess that is S4, structurally speaking. We know S4 is about home = family because the show hits us over the head with this repeatedly, but it makes some storytelling decisions that undercuts the integrity of the characters in its attempt to make its point. Bluntly, the fourth season took some storytelling risks that didn't always succeed.
There were a bunch of interesting and sometimes gutsy storytelling decisions, as the show experimented with sticking to the story the showrunners wanted to tell against adapting to unexpected weaknesses - and strengths - uncovered during the evolution of Fringe. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But clearly I care enough to poke at the multiseason structure for about 1500 words - without even getting into All The Olivia Feelings! - so it did something right, reboots and course changes and all.
The Day We Died sets up the S4 reboot, with some previously discussed consequences. "Letters of Transit" / "Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11" isn't exactly a reboot, except for the way a 25 year time-jump is arguably a reboot. "An Enemy of Fate" could also be a reboot, since it resets the timeline, but it was the series finale.
So what is up with this?
I'm going to suggest that whatever Fringe thought it wanted to do, it assembled a wonderful serial storytelling team with notable weaknesses at crafting a Case of the Week. Their storytelling is also prone to... flexibility. Sometimes good (altverse arc going gangbusters? Let it run!) and sometimes less so (three versions of What Happened In 1985, culminating in Peter/Olivia Are Destined? Ewwww). Oops.
For now, I'm mostly ignoring outside pressures, but feel free to bring up ratings, studio notes, budgets, etc, in comments.
The challenge of balancing a weekly standalone with a weekly installment of a serial is nontrivial. Especially in the face of unexpected developments: Peter is maybe the least convincing conman ever, but John Noble and Joshua Jackson deliver a wonderful Peter-Walter relationship; John Noble knocked Walter's characterization out of the park; someone said, "let's have Anna Torv play Olivia and the other Olivia," and things seem to have snowballed from there. Not to mention that the writers really struggled with the procedural format, and for Reasons, if the show ever wanted to bring Mark Valley back, well, that didn't pan out.
So much of the storytelling methods in Fringe come back to feelings. Fear, love, hope, loss, friendship, anger, wonder. Fringe is not so great with any story that demands rigorous logic, but it makes up for that by hitting viewers with our illogical emotions. However, very early in its run, Fringe made a few storytelling promises it was then stuck fulfilling. Certain guns not just put on the mantlepiece, in case they were needed, but highlighted in Day-Glo paints and neon that then had to be shot off to wrap the mytharc.
What was on that very early to-do list?
- Peter's kidnapping
- William Bell / Massive Dynamic
- The Observers
- The Pattern
How'd that work out?
- Peter's kidnapping was the meat and potatoes of S2, and some of S3, as it eventually opened the alternate universe to viewers.
- The William Bell arc(s) sometimes worked, and sometimes did not (cough "Brave New World" cough).
- The Observers I will rant about later.
- The Pattern, arguably, went really well, as it morphed into ZFT and the S1 season finale. It went so well it reappears in S4, with mixed results.
One of my formative experiences with serial storytelling was Babylon 5, and one of my formative experiences of a creator interacting with the online community was J. Michael Straczynski. I will quote something JMS posted after pulling off War Without End, a two-part S3 episode which fulfilled certain narrative promises from S1, while also setting up S3, S4, and S5 guns. It's long, but bear with me, it's meta-provoking:
The curious thing...the interesting thing...is that in just about everything I've ever written, yes, I generally follow where I want to go, end up where I want to end up, but once I get *into* it, once the characters come alive on the page, I inevitably find better ways of doing things, stronger and more muscular paths to the story, more interesting side roads.
Also, this original story was worked out in 1986/87; that's nearly ten years ago. In those ten years, I've become -- or like to think I've become -- a better writer, learned more, written more, picked up some new tools I didn't have then. So you have a situation where the writer in 1996 looks at the writer in 1986 and says, "No, listen...there's a better way. Yes, we'll still get to Disneyland on time, you'll still have plenty of time to ride the haunted mansion...but if we go *this* way, we can stop off and also see Knotts Berry Farm, and the Winchester Mystery Mansion, and maybe even Hearst Castle on the way."
The destination is still the same..but I've found a *lot* more interesting ways of getting there. Which, after all, is what an outline is for: a safe home base that allows you to wander off, knowing that you can always return to it if you get lost.
Looking at the first half of S1, there's almost zero Olivia origin story. Was that deliberate? Did the showrunners and writers decide Walter and Peter, Massive Dynamic, and the John Scott arc were enough mytharc to get up and running? Or, did Olivia get a revamp as the first reactions came in?
What I do believe is that the multiverse arc went over so well that the writers ran with it, right into some storytelling walls. At some point you have to figure out how to get back on the road to Disneyland, or in Fringe's case, the Observer arc.
Fringe often tries to tell me Peter and the Observers are the biggest most important arc, by putting the observers in the pilot, and in the background of every episode after the pilot, as well as using an Observer MotW to convince Peter to stick around in "The Arrival", and by putting "Inner Child" front and center in S1, and stepping away from the S2 altverse build long enough for "August". It also keeps the Observers in every version of the universes and timeline, sometimes with momentum-killing redirections (as in "The End of All Things"). The trouble is, Fringe found its drumbeat when it told stories about feelings, and the Observer arc is about largely emotionless white guys.
In the attempt to get back to this perceived core story, more organic story elements get warped. What is with Peter being Machine Guy, Olivia is the character with canon superpowers. And why give me the altverse's nascent Lincoln-Charlie anti-Walternate conspiracy if you're going to reboot in less than five episodes? Mid- and late-S3 had a lot of elements that could have been played out in a non-rebooted S4, and either weren't reasserted in S4, or couldn't be followed up on in the new paradigm.
Speaking of arcs that failed to launch, either because of reboots or storytelling drift, there's the William Bell arc, or rather, the truncated hot mess that pops out of nowhere in Brave New World. If you squint, the groundwork is there: BNW invokes the Biblical themes Fringe flirted with for the 0.02 seconds Amy Jessup almost was part of the Fringe team; the over-reaching of technology is called out in the ZFT manifesto, and in one of Nina Sharp's early S4 speeches; the madness of scientists, as seen in Walter's actions, and Brandon Fayettte's, and a number of MotW eps. It's really disappointing that the show never resigned itself to the downsides of casting a well-known septuagenarian as Bell: namely, limited availability. Much of the Bell BNW arc could have been carried by secondary Massive Dynamic characters - yep, this would be my appeal for all the Nina - had the show been willing to move past its completely understandable Leonard Nimoy fanboying. It's also a reasonable play on Fringe's core parent-child
(I have some guesses about the original outline of the Bell arc, based on the last four episodes of the fourth season, but it's tl;dr unless other people have plot speculation cravings.)
One of the few good things about S5's sad sad dystopia with all the sad feelings (nope, still not over 5x04, or some Michael-Olivia parallels the show didn't acknowledge to my satisfaction), is that the writers and showrunners had received a very clear message they were getting just enough space to wrap the mytharc, and so the fifth season has very little going on which is not in service of that goal. It's a little messy and contrived at times - betamax tapes, seriously, bless - but the emotionless white guys wind up cursed with all these feelings, and the actors make us all cry buckets in the finale. It's interesting to see what happens when a show lets go of appealing to a casual audience and cuts loose with all-mytharc-almost-all-the-time.
Speaking of side-trips, the wonderful evolution of Olivia's arc also was not planned quite the way it happened. That's my working hypothesis for why the focus tips from Olivia to Peter in S3, and might play into the S4 reboot. It's also why blueverse Lincoln's S4 arc is off balance, for me: again, organic elements overtake an intended arc. (For better or worse, Peter comes off as the peacemaker and caretaker, a role that seems to be a storytelling challenge for TV. Peter is not Action Guy, unless you've touched a hair on Olivia's head. Or Etta's, but let's not get into grief-stricken Bishop life decisions, m'kay?) It's probably another contributing factor to the hot mess that is S4, structurally speaking. We know S4 is about home = family because the show hits us over the head with this repeatedly, but it makes some storytelling decisions that undercuts the integrity of the characters in its attempt to make its point. Bluntly, the fourth season took some storytelling risks that didn't always succeed.
There were a bunch of interesting and sometimes gutsy storytelling decisions, as the show experimented with sticking to the story the showrunners wanted to tell against adapting to unexpected weaknesses - and strengths - uncovered during the evolution of Fringe. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But clearly I care enough to poke at the multiseason structure for about 1500 words - without even getting into All The Olivia Feelings! - so it did something right, reboots and course changes and all.