Fringe's token fifth and final season is now four of thirteen episodes down, with the fourth having aired just last night. Here's a spoiler-filled dump of my thoughts so far.

Don't read on if you don't want to be spoilt as to what we've seen so far.

Though it's wonderful to have more Fringe to watch each week, this time-jumped final arc is still making barely any sense to me.

Some thoughts on this week's logical holes:

  • No way they escaped that blast radius in 25 seconds without being out of breath.
  • The Observers can evidently still transport wherever they want but, because this would really make them undefeatable, most of the time they take lifts — except now when it suits the plot.
  • We still don't know why they're keeping any humans around, and why they spent centuries "observing" first.
  • Was Etta physically attached to the baton — I don't think so.
  • Astrid never knew about that entire cold storage lab? In all those years? Never saw Walter keeping it? She never lost sight of him in four years.

And glossing over the parallel universe viewport was ridiculous. You could theoretically recruit the forces of an entire untouched world who are your friends and have experience in this kind of thing, not to mention advanced technology. Or at least you could find out whether the other universe is indeed untouched by the Observers. Or at least it would be really cool — the other universe was always the fan favourite of Fringe. I appreciate that they hung a lantern on the omission with Peter saying it would be pointless to go down that route, but this was actually just offensive since it so blatantly wouldn't be.

This is still more than anything a WW2 resistance story clone with characters and settings supplanted from a sci-fi show I used to watch. Only so many episodes left to go, and I still have no idea why the Observers are doing what they're doing, how they did it in the first place, why so many humans are being strung along, why the humans are kept around, and so on.

There's just no backstory to this season five tale and it's preventing me from investing in the plot at all.

Thank heavens for the character moments because that's all there is so far this season — these are important but they do not alone a great final season to a cult favourite TV series make. Hopefully still to come is an episode that lets us in on the motivations of the major players and the events that unravelled in the days and weeks of the initial invasion, something that I had been hoping for in an episode whose title alludes to a backstory.