Fringe season 3: The Third Year Itch
May. 10th, 2011 08:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakAs threatened promised, my season overview now that it is over. Will also contain spoilers forAlias and Lost, and possibly Battlestar Galactica, though J.J. Abrams & fellow scribes had nothing to do with the last one.
First of all, the season pulled off some amazing things. It also contains some very frustrating failure, so prepare yourself for a mixed review. As I do most of the time, I'll start by what I didn't like, so I can end on a high note.
As has been said by many other people: the central problem is that this season lost sight of Olivia Dunam. Without providing less screentime for Anna Torv; on the contrary, it feels like much of the season was written to showcase what a good actress she can be. But Olivia, the character, got relegated to the back bench. She started out strong. I thought the initial storyline of the first six or so episodes, Our Olivia in the Redverse slowly regaining her identity while living the life of Their Olivia, eventually accomplishing her return to her univese, was really well done. Both for Olivia as a character and in terms of the overall narrative, since it accomplished the purpose of endearing the Redverse and its inhabitants (well, other than Alt!torturers) to the viewer, making its survival as important as the Blueverse (i.e. "ours"). (More about this later when I get to praise.) However, there was an early warning sign of the problem to come by the fact that what symbolized Olivia's sense of her real identity was a hallucination of Peter Bishop.
Now, I freely admit bias kicking in, but it's based on a certain experience. The third season of Alias started out strongly for Sydney Bristow, with a good mystery and a good storyline for her; she had just lost two years of her life, the world had changed around her, and then she discovered that evidently she had spent those years as an assassin named Julia Thorne. The "what happened to me, and why did I do what I did?" quest was a powerful emotional storyline. Alas, the eventual pay-off wasn't nearly as good, and Sydney spent most of the rest of the season occupied by her romantic angst about the now married Michael Vaughn, with the third party of a tedious love triangle (soon to be quadrangle) conveniently vilified. Even the dreaded term "soulmates" was spoken out loud. Since Alias was mostly The Arvin Sloane show for me, and season 3 had great stuff for Sloane, especially vis a vis his relationships with Jack Bristow and Sydney, I still enjoyed much of it. But Syd was the lead and the show really failed her that season, which probably makes it the weakest overall. (Much as I have mixed feelings about s5 for Arvin Sloane and Irina Derevko reasons, it did not fail Sydney there, on the contrary. One of the best examples of how to incorporate the pregnancy of a leading actress thematically and prove pregnancy, birth and being a mother does not have to "weaken" a female character at all. Sydney had a really good final season, and since she is the lead, s5 beats s3 in terms of overall narrative. Of course, s5 had Michael Vaughn absent most of the time which helped.) (They both pale when compared with the first two seasons and my moverall favourite season, season 4.)
Anyway, back to Fringe. Unfortunate memories of season 3 Sydney kicked in when Olivia's Peter hallucinations started, but I told myself, self, stay calm, it makes sense he'd be the symbol (even if it would make even more sense if it were Ella), plus they have to keep Joshua Jackson busy. However, what was happening simultanously in the Blueverse during early season 3 added to my discomfort. Alt!Olivia, for the most part, was played strictly as a villain, and I thought that was a big missed opportunity. She could have been presented as an antagonist who nonetheless had conflicted feelings about the new situation she was in. (Before you mention it, yes, that was to come once she was back home, but I'll get to that.) The nearly unharmed world she was in, as opposed to her own far more damaged universe. She could have gotten parallel scenes to Our Olivia's encounter with her Redverse mother by meeting Blueverse Rachel and Ella. Maybe even the dreaded stepfather. (Actually, that would have been entertaining since Redverse Olivia did not have any traumatic childhood memories of that guy and would have simply made mincemeat out of him.) Instead, she was basically treated by the story as any of the previous villains in season 2 and 1 had been, with a very few exceptions. What were those exceptions? Why, scenes with Peter. Not Astrid, not Ella, not Walter even - this was the man who wrecked her universe as well as the counterpart to her boss, the most demonized figure of her world, and we hardly got to see any of her emotional reaction to the reality of him! Now, the few humanizing touches while Redverse Olivia was in the Blueverse happened via Peter Bishop stirring up true love (tm) inside her.
Once each Olivia was back in her own universe, my discomfort increased. In the first half of the season, the Redverse episodes had always struck me as more compelling than the Blueverse episodes. Unfortunately, this still turned out to be true even with Our Olivia back in the Blueverse. Not least because now, instead of being driven by an agenda, Our Olivia was doomed to being a purely reactionary character. And what single event/relationship did she react to, what got explored about her emotional aftermath to having spent months living another life while someone else lived hers, of having lived in another world which now was no longer an anonymous threatening thing but contained friend and another version of her mother? Why, Alt!Olivia's sex with Peter Bishop.
I'm not saying she shouldn't have reacted to it, strongly. Olivia isn't trusting with her emotions, and so opening herself up and then discovering the man she was ready to make that leap of faith for couldn't tell her apart from her doppelganger and may have liked that version of her better really was a big deal. But the problem is that the show made it the only big deal about her whole situation. There was so much else that could have concerned her, that she could have tried to cope with, get a hold on, but instead, the narrative for Olivia had narrowed down to Olivia In Love. In order to offer some constructive criticism, here's what I'd have liked to have seen instead: Olivia, for whom the Redverse now is as real as her own verse, spends the rest of the season trying to find a way either to negotiate a truce or to stop the increasing damage to both verses. Olivia, not Peter in the finale, hits upon the solution that there is no either/or, that destroying one universe will destroy both, and that they HAVE to work together in order for both to survive. She could have done that and dealt with her damaged relationship with Peter at the same time. After all, having Scott in her mind did not narrow the narrative focus for her back in season 1.
Also a problem, though one that may yet be redeemed IF subsequent seasons show there was actually a point to it: the show throwing up two short term plot lines for shock value without offering anything like an emotional pay off or purpose to them. First Peter starting to assassinate hybrids. Speaking of unfortunate flashbacks, I had one to the way Alias tried to make Michael Vaughn into a darker character and tie him to the Rambaldi mythology once his narrative use as Sydney's handler was over as the SD-6 storyarc had wrapped up. This very rarely worked, and it most definitely did not work in season 3 when they tried to go for parallels with, of all the people, Jack Bristow. In the case of Peter and his sudden stint as an assassin, it felt like really bad fanfiction, not least because after having done that, he basically went back to his pre-asssassination stint characterisation. And when it finally looked like we'd get some emotional pay off in the form of Olivia finding out and responding to Peter's actions, the second pointless side arc kicked in. Well, pointless except to show that Anna Torv does a mean Leonard Nimoy, and that was great fun, but not only did it rob us of Olivia's reaction (and Olivia of the chance to respond to something about Peter that had nothing to do with their love life), it also again relegated Olivia the character to the sidelines. There wasn't even a genuine exploration of her subconscious. Nominally, yes, but we did not learn anything about Olivia there we didn't know already.
There might still be pay off for the William Bell episodes. After all, season 1 introduced the amber in a seeming one shot episode and it wasn't until we crossed over to the Redverse that we saw the reason for this. Perhaps this whole soul magnet thing is going to be important. (I suspect it might be how Peter Bishop will return to the narrative. Though actually I'd rather he wouldn't. No offense, Peter.) But so far, there wasn't one.
Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy myself watching, and now I finally get to the praise part of this season overview. The episode getting into animation, complete with Walter's comic book panel reaction in bubbles "How wonderful!" was just the type of creative insanity I adore. And it was a creative way of returning a killed off character. (If it had happened in season 2, I'd have had no problem at all, I suppose.) Broyles tripping on LSD was also precious, and I shall never get tired of the show's blatant advertising of ye olde lysergic.
When I said season 3 while doing wrong to Olivia as a character did right by Anna Torv as an actress, I wasn't paying paltry tribute. The Leonard Nimoy impression is the least of it. In the season opener, when Our Olivia is slowly becoming Their Olivia, you can tell it happening from the way her responses and body language subtly change. Same with Olivia later regaining her real memories and sense of identity. Conversely, much as Redverse Olivia in the Blueverse is reduced to an avarage villain most of the time, Anna Torv plays her differently from regular Olivia - it's in an impersonation - but not so blatantly differently when she's with other people that everyone comes across as dumb for not noticing immediately. Once Redverse Olivia is back in her own universe and gets to be a layered character and protagonist instead of villain again, she becomes very compelling in her own right, Even the dreaded pregnancy storyline is handled in a refreshing way, (so far) avoiding both storylines I was afraid of: Redverse Olivia neither dies giving birth, nor gets the "omg mother of my child!" factor played as something giving us yet another unwanted Abrams love triangle (in fact, Peter never finds out about the kid at all). Instead, Redverse Olivia's genre-typcial fast pregnancy is used to explore her relationships with her mother, teammates, Walternate and Blueverse Olivia's friend Henry the cabbie. And the show really uses the way Redverse Olivia interacts with her friends as one of the differences between Olivias. Which brings me to another strength of the season. The Fringe team in the Redverse is never treated as a villainous organization, not while Our Olivia is over there or later, but as heroic and trying to help as "our" Blueverse Fringe team is. Both the alt!versions of already familiar characters (Broyles and Charlie) and the new characters (Lincoln, whom we first meet in the Redverse and THEN in the Blueverse, as opposed to everyone else) are endearing.
And this is the great, great twist Fringe pulled off. The Redverse isn't the usual villainous Mirrorverse many a genre show employs since Star Trek did it. It's more like a canon AU. Also, and this reminds me in the way Lost introduced the Others as nameless, faceless (other than Ethan) villains only to turn around and make them real and several of them (notably Ben and Juliet) key characters for the rest of the show, something s2 already revealed, i.e. that the threats from s1, the behind the scenes antagonists menacing our universe, were actually responding to the Blueverse damaging theirs, was really brought home by spending much of season 3 there. John Noble was always superb as Walther Bishop (and hey, I quoted Oppenheimer's line (which in itself was a quote from the Mahabaratha) "I have become death, the destroyer of worlds" in an lj entry long before Walternate got to say it on the show!), and now pulled a superb double duty as both Walter and Walternate, making it always believable that they were the same man with a few different choices and resulting different circumstances. The show never shies away from the enormity of what Walter did, and it never completely demonizes Walternate. Someone at some future point should write a contrast and compare of how the love a parent has for a child is treated in Abrams and Abrams-related shows, because it's truly fascinating. Jack Bristow versus Michael Dawson versus Walther Bishhop (both versions). Jack is lucky in that the narrative he's in usually rewards him for performing all type sof ambiguous and sometimes really dark actions for his daughter, if not immediately than later along the line, whereas Michael is in a narrative that chooses to highlight the damage his determination to save his son at all costs does to other people instead, and Walter's storyline somehow unites both types of narrative. Something Abrams stories also love to play with is parents sacrificing their children. So of course the big test for Walter this season, given what started the damage to both universes, is whether he's able to allow Peter to sacrifice himself for the good of the many. Not that Walter, past guilt aside, is now presented as a white hat completely; the innate selfishness that's part of his scientific genius is still there (he's so thrilled to have William Bell temporarily back that he waves off concern for Olivia, for example). But the way his own damaged-ness allows him empathy he did not have originally (and that Walternate lacks) has also become a core character trait: it's what elevates his pep talk for Olivia in the last but one episode from standard "heroine has doubts, gets verbal affirmation" to a deeply touching scene for both characters, and it's what I suspect allows Olivia to forgive him.
In conclusion: if we go by precedents, I do hope what was true for both Alias season 4 and Lost season 4 happens, i.e. that the show is able to maintain the strengths and goes through creative renewal, discovering the weaknesses that plagued the third seasons. Because the strengths are really strong, and it makes the weaknesses so frustrating.
Or, to be perfectly blunt: the big question when writing each episode for season 4 should be for the writers: where is the Olivia of it? (If you recognize what I'm paraphrasing here, we share another fandom. *g*) And please, please, please, don't let the answer be: looking for Peter.
First of all, the season pulled off some amazing things. It also contains some very frustrating failure, so prepare yourself for a mixed review. As I do most of the time, I'll start by what I didn't like, so I can end on a high note.
As has been said by many other people: the central problem is that this season lost sight of Olivia Dunam. Without providing less screentime for Anna Torv; on the contrary, it feels like much of the season was written to showcase what a good actress she can be. But Olivia, the character, got relegated to the back bench. She started out strong. I thought the initial storyline of the first six or so episodes, Our Olivia in the Redverse slowly regaining her identity while living the life of Their Olivia, eventually accomplishing her return to her univese, was really well done. Both for Olivia as a character and in terms of the overall narrative, since it accomplished the purpose of endearing the Redverse and its inhabitants (well, other than Alt!torturers) to the viewer, making its survival as important as the Blueverse (i.e. "ours"). (More about this later when I get to praise.) However, there was an early warning sign of the problem to come by the fact that what symbolized Olivia's sense of her real identity was a hallucination of Peter Bishop.
Now, I freely admit bias kicking in, but it's based on a certain experience. The third season of Alias started out strongly for Sydney Bristow, with a good mystery and a good storyline for her; she had just lost two years of her life, the world had changed around her, and then she discovered that evidently she had spent those years as an assassin named Julia Thorne. The "what happened to me, and why did I do what I did?" quest was a powerful emotional storyline. Alas, the eventual pay-off wasn't nearly as good, and Sydney spent most of the rest of the season occupied by her romantic angst about the now married Michael Vaughn, with the third party of a tedious love triangle (soon to be quadrangle) conveniently vilified. Even the dreaded term "soulmates" was spoken out loud. Since Alias was mostly The Arvin Sloane show for me, and season 3 had great stuff for Sloane, especially vis a vis his relationships with Jack Bristow and Sydney, I still enjoyed much of it. But Syd was the lead and the show really failed her that season, which probably makes it the weakest overall. (Much as I have mixed feelings about s5 for Arvin Sloane and Irina Derevko reasons, it did not fail Sydney there, on the contrary. One of the best examples of how to incorporate the pregnancy of a leading actress thematically and prove pregnancy, birth and being a mother does not have to "weaken" a female character at all. Sydney had a really good final season, and since she is the lead, s5 beats s3 in terms of overall narrative. Of course, s5 had Michael Vaughn absent most of the time which helped.) (They both pale when compared with the first two seasons and my moverall favourite season, season 4.)
Anyway, back to Fringe. Unfortunate memories of season 3 Sydney kicked in when Olivia's Peter hallucinations started, but I told myself, self, stay calm, it makes sense he'd be the symbol (even if it would make even more sense if it were Ella), plus they have to keep Joshua Jackson busy. However, what was happening simultanously in the Blueverse during early season 3 added to my discomfort. Alt!Olivia, for the most part, was played strictly as a villain, and I thought that was a big missed opportunity. She could have been presented as an antagonist who nonetheless had conflicted feelings about the new situation she was in. (Before you mention it, yes, that was to come once she was back home, but I'll get to that.) The nearly unharmed world she was in, as opposed to her own far more damaged universe. She could have gotten parallel scenes to Our Olivia's encounter with her Redverse mother by meeting Blueverse Rachel and Ella. Maybe even the dreaded stepfather. (Actually, that would have been entertaining since Redverse Olivia did not have any traumatic childhood memories of that guy and would have simply made mincemeat out of him.) Instead, she was basically treated by the story as any of the previous villains in season 2 and 1 had been, with a very few exceptions. What were those exceptions? Why, scenes with Peter. Not Astrid, not Ella, not Walter even - this was the man who wrecked her universe as well as the counterpart to her boss, the most demonized figure of her world, and we hardly got to see any of her emotional reaction to the reality of him! Now, the few humanizing touches while Redverse Olivia was in the Blueverse happened via Peter Bishop stirring up true love (tm) inside her.
Once each Olivia was back in her own universe, my discomfort increased. In the first half of the season, the Redverse episodes had always struck me as more compelling than the Blueverse episodes. Unfortunately, this still turned out to be true even with Our Olivia back in the Blueverse. Not least because now, instead of being driven by an agenda, Our Olivia was doomed to being a purely reactionary character. And what single event/relationship did she react to, what got explored about her emotional aftermath to having spent months living another life while someone else lived hers, of having lived in another world which now was no longer an anonymous threatening thing but contained friend and another version of her mother? Why, Alt!Olivia's sex with Peter Bishop.
I'm not saying she shouldn't have reacted to it, strongly. Olivia isn't trusting with her emotions, and so opening herself up and then discovering the man she was ready to make that leap of faith for couldn't tell her apart from her doppelganger and may have liked that version of her better really was a big deal. But the problem is that the show made it the only big deal about her whole situation. There was so much else that could have concerned her, that she could have tried to cope with, get a hold on, but instead, the narrative for Olivia had narrowed down to Olivia In Love. In order to offer some constructive criticism, here's what I'd have liked to have seen instead: Olivia, for whom the Redverse now is as real as her own verse, spends the rest of the season trying to find a way either to negotiate a truce or to stop the increasing damage to both verses. Olivia, not Peter in the finale, hits upon the solution that there is no either/or, that destroying one universe will destroy both, and that they HAVE to work together in order for both to survive. She could have done that and dealt with her damaged relationship with Peter at the same time. After all, having Scott in her mind did not narrow the narrative focus for her back in season 1.
Also a problem, though one that may yet be redeemed IF subsequent seasons show there was actually a point to it: the show throwing up two short term plot lines for shock value without offering anything like an emotional pay off or purpose to them. First Peter starting to assassinate hybrids. Speaking of unfortunate flashbacks, I had one to the way Alias tried to make Michael Vaughn into a darker character and tie him to the Rambaldi mythology once his narrative use as Sydney's handler was over as the SD-6 storyarc had wrapped up. This very rarely worked, and it most definitely did not work in season 3 when they tried to go for parallels with, of all the people, Jack Bristow. In the case of Peter and his sudden stint as an assassin, it felt like really bad fanfiction, not least because after having done that, he basically went back to his pre-asssassination stint characterisation. And when it finally looked like we'd get some emotional pay off in the form of Olivia finding out and responding to Peter's actions, the second pointless side arc kicked in. Well, pointless except to show that Anna Torv does a mean Leonard Nimoy, and that was great fun, but not only did it rob us of Olivia's reaction (and Olivia of the chance to respond to something about Peter that had nothing to do with their love life), it also again relegated Olivia the character to the sidelines. There wasn't even a genuine exploration of her subconscious. Nominally, yes, but we did not learn anything about Olivia there we didn't know already.
There might still be pay off for the William Bell episodes. After all, season 1 introduced the amber in a seeming one shot episode and it wasn't until we crossed over to the Redverse that we saw the reason for this. Perhaps this whole soul magnet thing is going to be important. (I suspect it might be how Peter Bishop will return to the narrative. Though actually I'd rather he wouldn't. No offense, Peter.) But so far, there wasn't one.
Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy myself watching, and now I finally get to the praise part of this season overview. The episode getting into animation, complete with Walter's comic book panel reaction in bubbles "How wonderful!" was just the type of creative insanity I adore. And it was a creative way of returning a killed off character. (If it had happened in season 2, I'd have had no problem at all, I suppose.) Broyles tripping on LSD was also precious, and I shall never get tired of the show's blatant advertising of ye olde lysergic.
When I said season 3 while doing wrong to Olivia as a character did right by Anna Torv as an actress, I wasn't paying paltry tribute. The Leonard Nimoy impression is the least of it. In the season opener, when Our Olivia is slowly becoming Their Olivia, you can tell it happening from the way her responses and body language subtly change. Same with Olivia later regaining her real memories and sense of identity. Conversely, much as Redverse Olivia in the Blueverse is reduced to an avarage villain most of the time, Anna Torv plays her differently from regular Olivia - it's in an impersonation - but not so blatantly differently when she's with other people that everyone comes across as dumb for not noticing immediately. Once Redverse Olivia is back in her own universe and gets to be a layered character and protagonist instead of villain again, she becomes very compelling in her own right, Even the dreaded pregnancy storyline is handled in a refreshing way, (so far) avoiding both storylines I was afraid of: Redverse Olivia neither dies giving birth, nor gets the "omg mother of my child!" factor played as something giving us yet another unwanted Abrams love triangle (in fact, Peter never finds out about the kid at all). Instead, Redverse Olivia's genre-typcial fast pregnancy is used to explore her relationships with her mother, teammates, Walternate and Blueverse Olivia's friend Henry the cabbie. And the show really uses the way Redverse Olivia interacts with her friends as one of the differences between Olivias. Which brings me to another strength of the season. The Fringe team in the Redverse is never treated as a villainous organization, not while Our Olivia is over there or later, but as heroic and trying to help as "our" Blueverse Fringe team is. Both the alt!versions of already familiar characters (Broyles and Charlie) and the new characters (Lincoln, whom we first meet in the Redverse and THEN in the Blueverse, as opposed to everyone else) are endearing.
And this is the great, great twist Fringe pulled off. The Redverse isn't the usual villainous Mirrorverse many a genre show employs since Star Trek did it. It's more like a canon AU. Also, and this reminds me in the way Lost introduced the Others as nameless, faceless (other than Ethan) villains only to turn around and make them real and several of them (notably Ben and Juliet) key characters for the rest of the show, something s2 already revealed, i.e. that the threats from s1, the behind the scenes antagonists menacing our universe, were actually responding to the Blueverse damaging theirs, was really brought home by spending much of season 3 there. John Noble was always superb as Walther Bishop (and hey, I quoted Oppenheimer's line (which in itself was a quote from the Mahabaratha) "I have become death, the destroyer of worlds" in an lj entry long before Walternate got to say it on the show!), and now pulled a superb double duty as both Walter and Walternate, making it always believable that they were the same man with a few different choices and resulting different circumstances. The show never shies away from the enormity of what Walter did, and it never completely demonizes Walternate. Someone at some future point should write a contrast and compare of how the love a parent has for a child is treated in Abrams and Abrams-related shows, because it's truly fascinating. Jack Bristow versus Michael Dawson versus Walther Bishhop (both versions). Jack is lucky in that the narrative he's in usually rewards him for performing all type sof ambiguous and sometimes really dark actions for his daughter, if not immediately than later along the line, whereas Michael is in a narrative that chooses to highlight the damage his determination to save his son at all costs does to other people instead, and Walter's storyline somehow unites both types of narrative. Something Abrams stories also love to play with is parents sacrificing their children. So of course the big test for Walter this season, given what started the damage to both universes, is whether he's able to allow Peter to sacrifice himself for the good of the many. Not that Walter, past guilt aside, is now presented as a white hat completely; the innate selfishness that's part of his scientific genius is still there (he's so thrilled to have William Bell temporarily back that he waves off concern for Olivia, for example). But the way his own damaged-ness allows him empathy he did not have originally (and that Walternate lacks) has also become a core character trait: it's what elevates his pep talk for Olivia in the last but one episode from standard "heroine has doubts, gets verbal affirmation" to a deeply touching scene for both characters, and it's what I suspect allows Olivia to forgive him.
In conclusion: if we go by precedents, I do hope what was true for both Alias season 4 and Lost season 4 happens, i.e. that the show is able to maintain the strengths and goes through creative renewal, discovering the weaknesses that plagued the third seasons. Because the strengths are really strong, and it makes the weaknesses so frustrating.
Or, to be perfectly blunt: the big question when writing each episode for season 4 should be for the writers: where is the Olivia of it? (If you recognize what I'm paraphrasing here, we share another fandom. *g*) And please, please, please, don't let the answer be: looking for Peter.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-10 09:36 am (UTC)The only thing I would disagree with is the portrayal of Altlivia, because honestly? I don't think she was ever shown to be the Bad Guy, really. There were several times when it was obvious how much she struggled with being Over Here. I love that scene with Peter when she asks him ~hypothetically~ what he'd do if saving his universe came down to him alone (paraphrasing, but something like that).
I always felt like Our Olivia is a leader, while Altlivia isn't, at least not yet. She's very much a soldier who does what she's ordered to do, and I do think she's the kind of character who'd push down on her doubts and do what she's been taught is right. Her journey in this season is amazing to me, because in the end she does break free of that - taking control and becoming more like Our Olivia in the process.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-10 10:38 am (UTC)Quite. He was basically Olivia's and Walter's companion, to use a Whoverse comparison. Also the stolen princess and the damsel in fairy tale terms. Making him action!hero so did not work for me.
Altlivia: she was shown to kill that courier without looking for alternatives, and I don't remember much hesitation or regret about the deaths of the plot of the week, but maybe I'm misremembering. It's been a while, as this is the first season I saw in real time. I do agree, though, that essentially Altlivia is a soldier carrying out orders as she was trained to at this point, which I think is tied in a way to her having had the more functional life (in terms of personal relationships; obviously the Redverse as a whole is a far more endangered place). Whereas by the end of the season she's come to a point where Our Olivia was already when the show started in terms of being willing to question and to challenge her boss if she thinks what he's doing is wrong.
Both Olivias interacting is something I really hope for in season 4, because I've come to love them both dearly, and they should make a formidable team. (No matter how tricky that is to film...)
no subject
Date: 2011-05-10 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-11 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-11 04:29 am (UTC)Yes indeed. Like I said in the post, it's not that the show hasn't done this before. Season 1 was still pretty shaky in terms of quality, but they let Olivia deal with the fallout of the entire Scott thing without making Olivia all about this, on the contrary. We saw her focused on solving mysteries, establishing relationships with Walter, Peter and Astrid, and dealing with the Scott betrayal/death/post mortem presence.
Oh, early Peter was definitely more interesting than early Vaughn when both were placed in supporting roles instead of being presented as heroic!destined!love interests. Incidentally, I just discovered the actors agree with us, too. Quotes from Joshua Jackson and John Noble from a post finale published article:
JACKSON: [Romance] is inevitable when you have a man and a woman in leading roles on a TV show, but I do feel it was a distraction from the central story of the show. (...) But what’s central to the show is the communal fate of our core characters, not the individual strands that link them. The ‘broken family’ dynamic we hammered out in season one, that to me is where the show lives best (...). I feel the romantic portion of this show is now over so we can spend more time being Fringe again.
“The romantic element needed to be done,” says Noble. “But where we leave off, we can go any number of ways, and I like that we’re moving on.”
In conclusion, writers, do listen and get back to Olivia(s) being awesome and playing out the family theme, not the Destined!Lovers theme.