All along, Fringe fans have been asking the question: How will Peter get home?
Friday's episode proved that we've been asking the wrong question the entire season. The truth is, Peter (Joshua Jackson) has been home the entire time. The question we should've been asking is: How will Peter get everyone to remember him?
In the Season 3 finale, Peter decided not to choose one universe over the other, essentially bridging the two in hopes they would work together to find a solution before they both ended up destroyed. Peter then mysteriously disappeared into thin air, with the Observers noting that he never existed. Well, he did, technically, but only until he died as a boy. His future was essentially erased from the minds of everyone he interacted with, which is why the producers insisted before the fourth season began that the last three seasons were not a wash.
Watching Peter struggle with how he could possibly get home was a season-long misdirection. It's as if the producers magically kept the audience so focused on the one hand that we didn't realize the other hand was pulling the wool over our eyes the whole time. The switcheroo also afforded the Peter-Olivia (Anna Torv) 'shippers a second chance to see them fall in love all over again. Sweet? Yes. Needed? Not necessarily.
It feels not unlike the final season of Lost, where the audience spent much of the year wondering what the alternate-timeline was in which Oceanic 815 did not crash on the island. We saw what life would be like had they landed safely in L.A. In truth, the audience was just watching the pre-purgatory, in which the survivors slowly came to accept that they inevitably died and waited for each other in the shiny church to finally move on to... the afterlife? Heaven?
Many of those Lost fans felt cheated, not having received overall series answers. Do you feel cheated now knowing you were asking the wrong question? Or did you enjoy the reveal? Sound off in the comments.
Fringe airs Fridays at 9/8c on Fox.
