Until the Last Word, Part 1 ~ A Long Road Ahead

1/11/2013

The end of Fringe is so close, just three more episodes. Thought I should finally get going on this, formerly known as The Neverending Fringe Post. I've been been playing around with it on and off since last January. Maybe I didn't want to admit that it was almost over, that season five was the final one. Maybe it's just that every single time I tried to edit, it just grew. It's been mystifying, daunting and frustrating. No matter. I am now taking the day, and every day until the finale on January 18, 2013 (finished a week early!), to finally try again. I took three weeks just to write a letter to John Noble, and again for Joshua Jackson, so I can't see that I will finish it before the end. I also wrote two letters (1, 2) to Joel Wyman, with a third to come the minute after the finale; I have it written up already. I could have been working on this, but thanking these wonderful people for four and a half incredible years was more important to me. I was also designing weapons, including one for the show, and contributing to Fringe projects. I haven't been wasting the time, but darn it if a deadline doesn't sneak up on you. Well then, it's about time I get back to it, so let's start at the beginning...

"How far would you go for someone you love?"

~Nicholas Boone in "Midnight," season 1, episode 18
That is the entire series summed up in one elegantly-worded question, posed to a character who has already gone as far as humanly possible and most assuredly will go further before the end. But I would like to expand a teensy bit on every season.

1 After a lifetime of estrangement, how do you begin to trust and forgive your only connection to home? And, holy crap, what is with the scary, creepy cases that seem to lead back to a main character and his former colleague? People turning to goo in the pilot?! Lost my lunch, but so intrigued.

2 Would you do whatever it takes to save the person you love most, to spare yourself the pain? Even if that endangered the entire world? Could you live with yourself if others used your discoveries for their own ends no matter the cost? How do you begin to make up for all the wrongs?

3 What makes you who you are? Are your memories your own? What if your life went in another direction? Would you be the same person if you could go back and make different choices? If someone took over your life, how do you begin to pick up the pieces?

4 How many lives does one person touch? How different would everyone you know and love be if you weren't there? Are you so important to someone that your bond could break through realities?

5 How do you save the world when the entire world has given up? How do you save the world when a big reason for going on is taken from you and it breaks you? Would you be destroyed by a need for vengeance or saved through love?

Welcome to Fringe, where these questions are readily asked and answered, an exceptional drama that skillfully infuses genuine emotion and mystery, along with welcome doses of fun and humor, into a science fiction backdrop brimming with boundless heart, imagination, humanity, personality, and intelligence...and food. That last makes plenty of sense if you watch. ;)

And so ends Part 1 of 11. It's incredibly hard to not spoil this superb show, because everything I want to tell you that makes it incredible would give away the biggest secrets, the ones that fans spent the last four and a half seasons savoring, the ones that were revealed after a wonderful journey of discovery. I'm sure there are spoilers in other posts I've done, but here I think I blacked them all out.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11

0 comments:

Leave your thoughts.