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Fringe up to 3x22
I haven't been online much lately - mostly I've been writing (24,000 words on my novel since last Tuesday, OMFG WTF) and doing RL stuff: working on my gardening and spring landscaping projects, and such. Hello, Internet! How are you?
And also, we've been watching Fringe - we are finally caught up with all three seasons, so under the cut are rambly ramblings about all three seasons. It's a mix of squee and not-squee; I guess I'll separate it accordingly. Giant spoilers abound, of course!
First, the squee:
- WAAAAALTER. It took me awhile to get into the show because I had some trouble connecting to the characters; I found myself relating to minor characters (Astrid, Charlie, Broyles) and unable to empathize with the main ones. But they grew on me by leaps and bounds over the course of late season one/season two, and by now - I am just so incredibly taken with how the show's writers have developed Walter's story of choices and destinies and redemption and failure. The thing is, I am an absolute sucker for redemption stories, but only under certain (rather picky) circumstances, and it's something I've gotten a great deal pickier about, over the last decade or so. And I have a giant everlasting love for "road not taken" stories. And Walter's arc hits all those buttons to a huge degree. I love that we've gotten to see how both Walters started out in essentially the same place and then all these little changes, all these small and large decisions cascaded on top of each other and led to the two of them becoming such different people.
- I love that Olivia is the main character, that it's very much her show, and that they give Anna Torv wonderful, wonderful material to work with - which she is entirely capable of pulling off. I've becoming increasingly impressed with her depth and range as an actress, especially when she was playing two Olivias and then, even better, playing two Olivias pretending to be each other - and yet, even leaving aside the hair, it was perfectly obvious which Olivia was which, just by looking at their facial expressions. You got the same thing when she was playing Bell-in-Olivia: you could tell when Olivia came to the surface because her face would change. It's fantastic. It took me awhile to connect with her as a character (with any of the main characters, as noted above), but even in the beginning, I was just delighted that the show was so obviously built around her, and that they were pretty good about keeping it that way. I do wish they hadn't let her sister and niece go by the wayside in season three, but I'm hoping they'll get back to that in season four.
- Walter and Peter's relationship was another slow build with me, but I have fallen so hard for them. I'm still a little bit on the fence about Peter as a character, actually - of the main triad, I don't like him nearly as much as I do Walter and Olivia. But he and Walter - oh. ♥ Their slow reconnection has been pushing my buttons really hard, in part because it's been such a slow and subtle build, and so much of it is subtext rather than anything overt (which is what I really wish they'd manage to do with the Peter/Olivia relationship, but that's discussed in the not-squee section below). I love how they pay attention to the little things, like Peter calling Walter "dad" for the first and only time, and what a big deal that was. Actually, of all the character relationships on the show, I think this is the one that I could natter about at great length (just as Walter, of the various characters, is the one whose arc I want to dissect and pick apart and squee about) - there is just something about it that makes my id go "zing!" I am a big fat sucker for nontraditional, hard-to-quantify relationships of all sorts, and I think that's one of the things that makes them work so well for me - that they have nothing even resembling a traditional father-son relationship, and what they do have is so incredibly broken, even before the bombshell that Walter is not actually his biological father. And yet there is no denying the fact that they love each other; you can even see that when Peter's on the outs with him, that it goes both ways. The contrast, too, between Walter who'd do anything for the son who isn't even his (and yet is), and Walternate (I LOVE THAT WORD) who's his biological father but is willing to let Peter die, and Peter knows this and - it rips out your heart and stomps on it, and yet it makes my heart crack open in a good way too? Their little "you're my real dad" moment in the futureverse-that-won't-be - OH OH OH, I've been waiting three seasons for that, yes I have.
... right now I'm trying to hold onto that moment and not think too hard about the fact that they've essentially just erased three seasons of character development. I'm actually trying not to think too hard about the finale in general, because there is so much about the Peterless timeline that just doesn't work (if Peter doesn't exist, then how did the rift between the universes come to be? how can the characters be anything like the same people?) and while I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high about getting it back completely, I hope to hell that they don't plan to abandon it and go in a totally different direction. On the other hand, even if they're never going to put Peter back, we did get a very satisfying arc with them over the last three seasons. If this is the end, then I really liked where the characters had gotten to, vis-a-vis each other, when they ended it.
- The writing is smart and sharp and funny - this show is simply fun to watch, full of clever bits and laugh-out-loud bits. The LSD episode ... I LAUGHED SO HARD. The giant floating titles! And the way they do them differently (and the different intro credits!) on the flashback episodes! It's a wonderfully fun, inventive show. The science sucks - I thought about mentioning this under not-squee and decided not to because I don't think it's really detracting from the show all that much for me (but oh, the science is SO BAD) ... but the show makes up for it in watchability, which is what matters for me. I am very easy that way.
- Maybe this also falls under the "Walter" category, but I really like the show's handling of mental illness where Walter is concerned. It's true that it happened in a melodramatic, this-could-only-happen-on-TV kind of way, but I really like the fact that it's an ever-present thing in his life: that he struggles with little day-to-day tasks, that he needs a caretaker, that he's aware of his limitations and is learning to work within them. I'm also completely fascinated by the turnabout from the standard TV trope of "mental illness makes you dangerous/evil", because in Walter's case it's precisely the opposite - the evil(ish) one is Walternate, with a sane, whole, completely functional brain, whereas "our" Walter is a better person. But it's not really done in a way that evokes unpleasant connotations of "simple-minded = good-hearted", either. It's complicated and messy, and it's something that Walter has to struggle with every day, and I really like that.
Okay, and now, the not-squee:
- My big pet peeve for Fringe, I guess, is that most of the problems I had with Lost are still present and visible in this show, too. It's like JJ Abrams can only tell one story, and it's a very entertaining story, but there are these big giant holes in it where it either misses my emotional kinks by a country mile, or shoots straight over into DO NOT WANT territory. I am not even saying these are objectively bad things about the show! It's just that there are certain things I want my entertainment to provide for me, or more accurately, things I don't want in a show I'm emotionally engaged with. Lost and Fringe both fail me in the same kinds of ways, I guess is what I'm saying.
And my biggest issue is that both shows hammer for all they're worth on the whole idea that TRUE LOVE TRUMPS ALL - that the most important relationship in your life is your lover, the only thing that even comes close to it is the parent-child bond (usually expressed as parents doing psychotic and obsessive things for their children), and all else fades into the background. It drives me up the wall and it's had the unfortunate side effect of turning me off the Peter/Olivia relationship like whoa, to the point where I find myself wanting to go "la la la la" and do something else whenever they're interacting with each other onscreen. It's frustrating, because there are things about the relationship that I like, and I like both characters. Honestly, I wish to goodness that they'd skipped a season or two of UST and love triangles and Walter's matchmaking, and just gone straight to that casual domesticity that they have in the futureverse, or in the penultimate episode where they wake up together and she's wandering around the house encountering Walter's random nakedness. That's the sort of thing I can totally get behind.
But I am SO FRAKKING **DONE** with the heavy-handed MEANT FOR EACH OTHER! and I ONLY CAME BACK FOR YOU! and the way that none of their relationships with other people are developed in any detail because it's all about WHAT THEY MEAN TO EACH OTHER - well, except for Walter & Peter; I'll get to that in a minute; but even Olivia's connection with her sister and niece basically vanished once they started ramping up the love triangle. Actually, I went back and rewatched the season one premiere recently (it's always kind of awesome to go back and see the earliest incarnations of the characters in any show, after seeing the rest of it) and that prioritizing of romance over everything else is already there even in the premiere. Why does Olivia blackmail Peter into helping her? It's to save her lover. AARGH.
... Yes, I have issues. XD And I know it. I've actually put some thought into trying to figure out what it is, specifically, about the Olivia/Peter relationship that is hitting my squicks, because some romances do and others don't, and it doesn't even seem to be entirely a function of how foregrounded they are, though, admittedly, the more central a romance is to the plot, the more of an uphill road it has with me. I don't have a problem with lovers putting each other first, necessarily (one of my favorite moments in Firefly, actually, is the torture episode where Zoe is forced to choose between her husband or her captain, and chooses Wash in a heartbeat). But there is just something about the way that JJ Abrams' shows balance the "romance" vs. "everything else" equation that does not work for me. At all.
But the saving grace is that, unlike Lost, this show actually does put some work into nurturing other relationships than its romantic ones. There's the Walter-Peter relationship, and the Astrid-Walter friendship, and Olivia and her family, and alt!Olivia with her team. I do feel as if, aside from Walter and Peter (whose strained relationship is plot-necessary), all these other relationships are often given more lip service than actual time-in-show; I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the way that, in three seasons, the show has done so little fleshing out of the other characters - I think one reason why I have so little feeling for Lincoln as a character is that, in a full season, we've seen absolutely nothing of his life, and don't even get me started on poor Astrid and her neglect. It's not even that I necessarily want to see the supporting characters get their own episodes, because I think one of the reasons why this show avoids some of Lost's traps (while clearly being written from a similar set of paradigms) is because its central cast is so small: the show has to give us bits and pieces of, say, the Walter-Astrid friendship because there are a very limited number of characters to interact with each other, whereas Lost fumbled the ball on everything BUT the romances because they never seemed to have the same two characters in the same place for more than an episode or two. And the fact that they went ahead and worked to develop the romances on Lost while not developing the other relationships said worlds about where their priorities were - it's not that they were deliberately sidelining friendship and community, it's just that they didn't really care about it. I have a feeling that we'd be seeing the same thing on Fringe - especially after seeing how Olivia's family disappeared this season - if they didn't have a very small number of characters who have a lot of scenes together because they work together. So it's not really that I want to see other characters move up to equivalent prominence with the main ones; it's just that I want some hints about who they are and what they do outside work - a window into them as people. We got that a little bit with Charlie and Broyles, early on, and I think that's why I connected to them. But the show has kinda dropped the ball on everyone else.
Anyway, the big exception to the above is Walter and Peter, and while it is true that they kinda have to be given a lot of screen time for plot reasons, not to mention falling into Lost's other broad category of character relationships (parents gone crazy to protect a child), I still have enough love for the way the show has handled them that it makes me willing to forgive a lot.
I am, however, trying not to think too hard about the fact that the show just completely undid that. I haven't heard anything about Joshua Jackson being off the show next season, so I do think we'll get Peter in some form or other, but I have an awful fear that the last three seasons of Walter and Peter slowly learning to reconnect with each other is gone, gone, gone - and with it, an awful lot of my emotional investment in the show. I hope not?
OH DEAR I HAVE RAMBLED A LOT ABOUT THIS. And I'm not even done with the other unpleasant Lost-ish things that I can see glimmers of in Fringe. Like, say, pregnant women being strapped to tables and experimented on. I know it's endemic to sci-fi in general, but Lost was one of the worst offenders, and oh, I hate that plot. HATE HATE HATE. I was NOT HAPPY to get an entire episode of it in Fringe. (Er, come to think of it, didn't they just erase Peter Jr. too?)
And I am increasingly getting a "plot spinning out of control" feeling. As became increasingly clear with Lost, I don't think this is all going to tie up into a neat, satisfying package at the end. I think they're going to keep piling on implausibilities and new plot threads until it's a hideous Gordian plot-knot and nothing makes any sense at all, and then it's going to all fall apart at the end. I hope that it will fall apart entertainingly, but the more seemingly random stuff they throw into the mix, that's about all I'm hoping for at this point.
I think there were other things, but I seem to have forgotten them. *g* Also, I've been writing this for an hour and a half, and it's gotten ridiculously long, so perhaps I will shut up. My Thoughts On Fringe: let me show you them!
ETA: Also, here's a bit of irony for you ... I often find myself in new fandoms looking for fanworks and vids and squee about under-loved female characters or canon pairings that no one seems to love. And now with Fringe, there appears to be a whole lot of Olivia and Olivia/Peter stuff out there, which is ... excellent, I suppose, but not at all what I want, because the only thing I really want in this fandom is fic and vids and such about Walter, or Walter & Peter. Life is funny, innit.
I don't think Fringe in general is going to be something I'm particularly fannish about - there's too much PLOT for me to want to dip my toe in the fan waters much, and besides, Highlander has still got me very firmly by the id. But surely there must be some Walter or team vids out there somewhere ...
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/342699.html with
comments.
And also, we've been watching Fringe - we are finally caught up with all three seasons, so under the cut are rambly ramblings about all three seasons. It's a mix of squee and not-squee; I guess I'll separate it accordingly. Giant spoilers abound, of course!
First, the squee:
- WAAAAALTER. It took me awhile to get into the show because I had some trouble connecting to the characters; I found myself relating to minor characters (Astrid, Charlie, Broyles) and unable to empathize with the main ones. But they grew on me by leaps and bounds over the course of late season one/season two, and by now - I am just so incredibly taken with how the show's writers have developed Walter's story of choices and destinies and redemption and failure. The thing is, I am an absolute sucker for redemption stories, but only under certain (rather picky) circumstances, and it's something I've gotten a great deal pickier about, over the last decade or so. And I have a giant everlasting love for "road not taken" stories. And Walter's arc hits all those buttons to a huge degree. I love that we've gotten to see how both Walters started out in essentially the same place and then all these little changes, all these small and large decisions cascaded on top of each other and led to the two of them becoming such different people.
- I love that Olivia is the main character, that it's very much her show, and that they give Anna Torv wonderful, wonderful material to work with - which she is entirely capable of pulling off. I've becoming increasingly impressed with her depth and range as an actress, especially when she was playing two Olivias and then, even better, playing two Olivias pretending to be each other - and yet, even leaving aside the hair, it was perfectly obvious which Olivia was which, just by looking at their facial expressions. You got the same thing when she was playing Bell-in-Olivia: you could tell when Olivia came to the surface because her face would change. It's fantastic. It took me awhile to connect with her as a character (with any of the main characters, as noted above), but even in the beginning, I was just delighted that the show was so obviously built around her, and that they were pretty good about keeping it that way. I do wish they hadn't let her sister and niece go by the wayside in season three, but I'm hoping they'll get back to that in season four.
- Walter and Peter's relationship was another slow build with me, but I have fallen so hard for them. I'm still a little bit on the fence about Peter as a character, actually - of the main triad, I don't like him nearly as much as I do Walter and Olivia. But he and Walter - oh. ♥ Their slow reconnection has been pushing my buttons really hard, in part because it's been such a slow and subtle build, and so much of it is subtext rather than anything overt (which is what I really wish they'd manage to do with the Peter/Olivia relationship, but that's discussed in the not-squee section below). I love how they pay attention to the little things, like Peter calling Walter "dad" for the first and only time, and what a big deal that was. Actually, of all the character relationships on the show, I think this is the one that I could natter about at great length (just as Walter, of the various characters, is the one whose arc I want to dissect and pick apart and squee about) - there is just something about it that makes my id go "zing!" I am a big fat sucker for nontraditional, hard-to-quantify relationships of all sorts, and I think that's one of the things that makes them work so well for me - that they have nothing even resembling a traditional father-son relationship, and what they do have is so incredibly broken, even before the bombshell that Walter is not actually his biological father. And yet there is no denying the fact that they love each other; you can even see that when Peter's on the outs with him, that it goes both ways. The contrast, too, between Walter who'd do anything for the son who isn't even his (and yet is), and Walternate (I LOVE THAT WORD) who's his biological father but is willing to let Peter die, and Peter knows this and - it rips out your heart and stomps on it, and yet it makes my heart crack open in a good way too? Their little "you're my real dad" moment in the futureverse-that-won't-be - OH OH OH, I've been waiting three seasons for that, yes I have.
... right now I'm trying to hold onto that moment and not think too hard about the fact that they've essentially just erased three seasons of character development. I'm actually trying not to think too hard about the finale in general, because there is so much about the Peterless timeline that just doesn't work (if Peter doesn't exist, then how did the rift between the universes come to be? how can the characters be anything like the same people?) and while I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high about getting it back completely, I hope to hell that they don't plan to abandon it and go in a totally different direction. On the other hand, even if they're never going to put Peter back, we did get a very satisfying arc with them over the last three seasons. If this is the end, then I really liked where the characters had gotten to, vis-a-vis each other, when they ended it.
- The writing is smart and sharp and funny - this show is simply fun to watch, full of clever bits and laugh-out-loud bits. The LSD episode ... I LAUGHED SO HARD. The giant floating titles! And the way they do them differently (and the different intro credits!) on the flashback episodes! It's a wonderfully fun, inventive show. The science sucks - I thought about mentioning this under not-squee and decided not to because I don't think it's really detracting from the show all that much for me (but oh, the science is SO BAD) ... but the show makes up for it in watchability, which is what matters for me. I am very easy that way.
- Maybe this also falls under the "Walter" category, but I really like the show's handling of mental illness where Walter is concerned. It's true that it happened in a melodramatic, this-could-only-happen-on-TV kind of way, but I really like the fact that it's an ever-present thing in his life: that he struggles with little day-to-day tasks, that he needs a caretaker, that he's aware of his limitations and is learning to work within them. I'm also completely fascinated by the turnabout from the standard TV trope of "mental illness makes you dangerous/evil", because in Walter's case it's precisely the opposite - the evil(ish) one is Walternate, with a sane, whole, completely functional brain, whereas "our" Walter is a better person. But it's not really done in a way that evokes unpleasant connotations of "simple-minded = good-hearted", either. It's complicated and messy, and it's something that Walter has to struggle with every day, and I really like that.
Okay, and now, the not-squee:
- My big pet peeve for Fringe, I guess, is that most of the problems I had with Lost are still present and visible in this show, too. It's like JJ Abrams can only tell one story, and it's a very entertaining story, but there are these big giant holes in it where it either misses my emotional kinks by a country mile, or shoots straight over into DO NOT WANT territory. I am not even saying these are objectively bad things about the show! It's just that there are certain things I want my entertainment to provide for me, or more accurately, things I don't want in a show I'm emotionally engaged with. Lost and Fringe both fail me in the same kinds of ways, I guess is what I'm saying.
And my biggest issue is that both shows hammer for all they're worth on the whole idea that TRUE LOVE TRUMPS ALL - that the most important relationship in your life is your lover, the only thing that even comes close to it is the parent-child bond (usually expressed as parents doing psychotic and obsessive things for their children), and all else fades into the background. It drives me up the wall and it's had the unfortunate side effect of turning me off the Peter/Olivia relationship like whoa, to the point where I find myself wanting to go "la la la la" and do something else whenever they're interacting with each other onscreen. It's frustrating, because there are things about the relationship that I like, and I like both characters. Honestly, I wish to goodness that they'd skipped a season or two of UST and love triangles and Walter's matchmaking, and just gone straight to that casual domesticity that they have in the futureverse, or in the penultimate episode where they wake up together and she's wandering around the house encountering Walter's random nakedness. That's the sort of thing I can totally get behind.
But I am SO FRAKKING **DONE** with the heavy-handed MEANT FOR EACH OTHER! and I ONLY CAME BACK FOR YOU! and the way that none of their relationships with other people are developed in any detail because it's all about WHAT THEY MEAN TO EACH OTHER - well, except for Walter & Peter; I'll get to that in a minute; but even Olivia's connection with her sister and niece basically vanished once they started ramping up the love triangle. Actually, I went back and rewatched the season one premiere recently (it's always kind of awesome to go back and see the earliest incarnations of the characters in any show, after seeing the rest of it) and that prioritizing of romance over everything else is already there even in the premiere. Why does Olivia blackmail Peter into helping her? It's to save her lover. AARGH.
... Yes, I have issues. XD And I know it. I've actually put some thought into trying to figure out what it is, specifically, about the Olivia/Peter relationship that is hitting my squicks, because some romances do and others don't, and it doesn't even seem to be entirely a function of how foregrounded they are, though, admittedly, the more central a romance is to the plot, the more of an uphill road it has with me. I don't have a problem with lovers putting each other first, necessarily (one of my favorite moments in Firefly, actually, is the torture episode where Zoe is forced to choose between her husband or her captain, and chooses Wash in a heartbeat). But there is just something about the way that JJ Abrams' shows balance the "romance" vs. "everything else" equation that does not work for me. At all.
But the saving grace is that, unlike Lost, this show actually does put some work into nurturing other relationships than its romantic ones. There's the Walter-Peter relationship, and the Astrid-Walter friendship, and Olivia and her family, and alt!Olivia with her team. I do feel as if, aside from Walter and Peter (whose strained relationship is plot-necessary), all these other relationships are often given more lip service than actual time-in-show; I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the way that, in three seasons, the show has done so little fleshing out of the other characters - I think one reason why I have so little feeling for Lincoln as a character is that, in a full season, we've seen absolutely nothing of his life, and don't even get me started on poor Astrid and her neglect. It's not even that I necessarily want to see the supporting characters get their own episodes, because I think one of the reasons why this show avoids some of Lost's traps (while clearly being written from a similar set of paradigms) is because its central cast is so small: the show has to give us bits and pieces of, say, the Walter-Astrid friendship because there are a very limited number of characters to interact with each other, whereas Lost fumbled the ball on everything BUT the romances because they never seemed to have the same two characters in the same place for more than an episode or two. And the fact that they went ahead and worked to develop the romances on Lost while not developing the other relationships said worlds about where their priorities were - it's not that they were deliberately sidelining friendship and community, it's just that they didn't really care about it. I have a feeling that we'd be seeing the same thing on Fringe - especially after seeing how Olivia's family disappeared this season - if they didn't have a very small number of characters who have a lot of scenes together because they work together. So it's not really that I want to see other characters move up to equivalent prominence with the main ones; it's just that I want some hints about who they are and what they do outside work - a window into them as people. We got that a little bit with Charlie and Broyles, early on, and I think that's why I connected to them. But the show has kinda dropped the ball on everyone else.
Anyway, the big exception to the above is Walter and Peter, and while it is true that they kinda have to be given a lot of screen time for plot reasons, not to mention falling into Lost's other broad category of character relationships (parents gone crazy to protect a child), I still have enough love for the way the show has handled them that it makes me willing to forgive a lot.
I am, however, trying not to think too hard about the fact that the show just completely undid that. I haven't heard anything about Joshua Jackson being off the show next season, so I do think we'll get Peter in some form or other, but I have an awful fear that the last three seasons of Walter and Peter slowly learning to reconnect with each other is gone, gone, gone - and with it, an awful lot of my emotional investment in the show. I hope not?
OH DEAR I HAVE RAMBLED A LOT ABOUT THIS. And I'm not even done with the other unpleasant Lost-ish things that I can see glimmers of in Fringe. Like, say, pregnant women being strapped to tables and experimented on. I know it's endemic to sci-fi in general, but Lost was one of the worst offenders, and oh, I hate that plot. HATE HATE HATE. I was NOT HAPPY to get an entire episode of it in Fringe. (Er, come to think of it, didn't they just erase Peter Jr. too?)
And I am increasingly getting a "plot spinning out of control" feeling. As became increasingly clear with Lost, I don't think this is all going to tie up into a neat, satisfying package at the end. I think they're going to keep piling on implausibilities and new plot threads until it's a hideous Gordian plot-knot and nothing makes any sense at all, and then it's going to all fall apart at the end. I hope that it will fall apart entertainingly, but the more seemingly random stuff they throw into the mix, that's about all I'm hoping for at this point.
I think there were other things, but I seem to have forgotten them. *g* Also, I've been writing this for an hour and a half, and it's gotten ridiculously long, so perhaps I will shut up. My Thoughts On Fringe: let me show you them!
ETA: Also, here's a bit of irony for you ... I often find myself in new fandoms looking for fanworks and vids and squee about under-loved female characters or canon pairings that no one seems to love. And now with Fringe, there appears to be a whole lot of Olivia and Olivia/Peter stuff out there, which is ... excellent, I suppose, but not at all what I want, because the only thing I really want in this fandom is fic and vids and such about Walter, or Walter & Peter. Life is funny, innit.
I don't think Fringe in general is going to be something I'm particularly fannish about - there's too much PLOT for me to want to dip my toe in the fan waters much, and besides, Highlander has still got me very firmly by the id. But surely there must be some Walter or team vids out there somewhere ...
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/342699.html with