This is it folks, the season finale of one of the better shows on network TV. Will our questions be answered? Will Walter and William Bell be reunited? Will Olivia’s powers be fully realized? Will Nina Sharp stay dead? Will Astrid get more screen time? And where the hell is David Robert Jones?

To compare last week’s rating of Fringe, just to give you an idea of it’s over popularity, the show was seen by 5.6 million households, or 9.2 million viewers. That makes it the 5th most watched show on Fox that week. How did it stack up to other networks? ABC’s Brother’s and Sisters and Castle posted better overall numbers, and Fringe would have still lingered around the 6th or 7th spot. NBC’s only better show was Law and Order: SVU but CBS had 16 shows doing better than 5.6 million households, including the oft ridiculed Two and a Half Men. CW didn’t have anything worth comparing.

So it’s a respectable show. Another reason it was picked up for a second season. So let’s get to it shall we?

In a New York ER, EMTs wheel in a woman with a gunshot wound and a cyborg arm. The Fed HQ receives word of her shooting, no witnesses as the doorman and guard are both dead. Charlie shows them the security footage, after they shoot Nina the camera goes black for four minutes. Out of the elevator comes two gunmen and another man with bandages on his face and a fedora, looking like the invisible man. They did something to Nina but as yet we don’t know what. They enhance what he said, “Take out the camera. We can do it here.” After running it through the voice check, a match comes up.

David Robert Jones.

Broyles suggests he’s wearing bandages because he might be trying to change his face. Olivia says they have to go after Bell, all the evidence points to Massive Dynamic’s funding of all the incidents. She starts laying into him how he can’t let up, William Bell is not above the law. Broyles cuts her off saying he was going to do just that and she needs to stop drilling after she strikes oil. A call comes in and Nina Sharp is out of surgery.

Peter asks Astrid where Walter is, she thought he was with Peter and goes to check the cafeteria. Peter makes a call to have someone else look elsewhere. Olivia asks if he’s mad at her after what she said to him in the pastry shop. They talk about what Walter and Olivia discussed about cortexifan. She apologizes, Astrid says no one can find him, Peter thinks he’s back at the hotel. Walter is walking through a cemetery and stops at a head stone, while being watched by the Observer.

Nina Sharp wakes up, checks her robot arm and it’s twitching and whirring. Broyles tells her it was Jones and that she was lucky she had Kevlar parts in her ribcage. He asks what Jones did to her arm, she says she needs to talk to Dunham. Jones and his men start setting up equipment in the middle of an intersection. Nina tells Dunham and Broyles that Bell is no terrorist. Jones worked for Mass.Dyn., one of their first employees, but was let go and felt spurned. It’s likely all the problems are a way of showing how special he thought it was. Also, he’s been calling Mass.Dyn. and Nina thinks he wants to kill Bell. Nina says she doesn’t know where Bell is, but if Dunham stops Jones, she’ll set up a meeting. Nina says Jones stole an energy cell from her arm, very powerful. Jones puts this cell into a piece of equipment and turns it on. The frequency picks up and people start covering their ears. The thing locks in on something and off in the distance there’s a distortion. It doesn’t hold together and succeeds in only zapping the back half of a moving 18-wheeler off. Jones says get the right coordinates.

Opening credits.

Walter and the Observer are on a beach. The Observer asks if Walter recognizes a coin, he does. Observer says it’s from another place and there is more than one of everything. But he’s said too much and can’t get involved. He shows Walter a house and asks him to remember what he has to find and there isn’t much time. Then he walks away. Walter goes to the house.

Broyles brings Nina to the lab, introduces her to Astrid and they ask questions about Walter. Peter shows up and they mention Jones, Astrid says Walter gets lost a lot. Nina makes a call and sets up a priority one grid search for him. Charlie and Olivia question witnesses of the truck accident. Nina gives Peter a security image of Walter getting off a train, Peter knows where it is, near a beach house. He says he’d rather go get Walter himself. Charlie gets information on the truck, there isn’t any. Driver died on impact, no prints in the system. The truck’s VIN and serial numbers don’t pull anything either. Truck doesn’t exist, was never made. Peter shows up at the beach house, looks at a dusty family photo and then finds Walter in a back room, fiddling with a coin. He tells Peter he’s looking for something. Olivia shows Nina the truck images, and she plays coy about Bell again and finally says he’s not in this world.

Providence, RI. Jones’ SUV pulls up to a soccer field. Dunham and Broyles try to explain to Agent Francis that Bell is in another reality, using the same déjà vu explanation, and that the truck came from wherever Jones was trying to get to, to find Bell. Just then all the agents’ phones ring.

Walter is riled up and tearing the house apart, Peter’s trying to calm him down. Walter seems to remember a room, Peter recounts a fond memory of pancakes and his dad, this jogs Walter’s memory. The FBI talks to the soccer players, there’s a stretcher and half a soccer ball. It’s the same shimmering window story and then Charlie shows Olivia a body under a tarp that’s been cut in half.

Olivia gets another agent to send her every file that has anything to do with biology, science, unexplained phenomenon, etc. She starts building a map tying them to David Jones. She tells Broyles she may have found a link. Walter finds a lock box and top of it is a coin like the one he’s got, the box is locked. Olivia shows Broyles and Dunham a map of all the weird incidents, some going back 20 years, no pattern. She then highlights where Jones used his device and suddenly those two spots become the center of two spiraling shapes on the map, epicenters of activity. Peter picks the lock and Walter takes out an object, then goes into a history of him and Bell. They’d take LSD, see other worlds, and convinced they weren’t hallucinations, tried to work out a way to get there. The tests on kids were to enhance their natural ability to see the other side, properly nurtured, they could eventually travel there. Walter says that he lost something, and that he’d try to go to the other side and get it back, but it’s not easy, you have to know the right place. Nina continues with Broyles and Dunham saying the Earth has soft spots in reality. Scientific advancement has hastened the decay of the natural fundamentals, creating more soft spots. Jones is trying to break through. Walter knows that things can also come through, so he built a patch and he knows where to use it, Reiden Lake. Olivia, Nina and Broyles map the earliest incidents to the same location.

Jones and his men begin setting up.

Peter and Walter drive through the woods, Walter tells him “his friend” only comes in dire situations. Peter sorts out that Walter’s friend is the Observer. Walter tells him to stop the car and he pulls out his patch device. He tells Peter when he was little he collected coins and that this coin was his favorite, Peter doesn’t remember. Then men in masks yank Peter and Walter out, but it’s the FBI with Charlie and Olivia. They hear a high pitched whine and see a light and race to where Jones and his men are trying to open another hole. An agent gets shot but they keep going. Peter takes the device from Walter, Olivia moves in. She shoots a couple of his men, but the portal opens. She shoots him as he walks toward the opening. He’s unphased and continues on. She gives chase and Peter runs up behind and turns on the patch, it gives off a light and sound as Jones is half way through the opening. The breech closes, cutting Jones in half.

Dunham is boxing up all the files, Broyles says Nina’s doing fine. He also says they’ve been ordered to stop investigating Bell by people you don’t question why. Astrid shows up to the lab looking for Walter. Peter says hi and finds a letter to him. The letter says he’s stepping out and not to worry, Peter isn’t worried. Walter is at the grave again with the coin. He puts it on the head stone, the stone says Peter Bishop 1978-1985.

Olivia gets a call from Nina setting up their meeting. On her way to NY, she almost gets into a wreck, which doesn’t seem important. She shows up at the place and waits, Nina doesn’t show. She calls her but they say she’s out of the country. She leaves and on the elevator ride down there’s a blue flash and the lights go off and on, and in between the elevator car is full of people, then it’s not. The lift door opens to a white hallway where a lady escorts her to a room. Newspaper saying Obama moving into White House and an oxygen tank are in the room. The door opens and in walks William Bell. She asks where she is, he says it’s complicated and we pan out from a window high above the New York skyline atop…

…the World Trade Center.

GRAVE.

David Robert Jones is going to need all three names to survive being cleft in twain by the Stargate. And Peter, a doppelganger from another Universe? His story is thus revealed. Walter’s Earth v.1 child was a mere seven years old when he died of yet unexplained circumstances. Maybe, Alpha Peter was part of the cortexifan testing and died, causing Walter to go mad in finding a way to pull in from the other side. Perhaps that’s why Peter drifts so much; he doesn’t feel he belongs here.

So the non-mystery of William Bell sends us off the first season. Olivia saw a Boston skyline burning and half the city under quarantine, but New York seems to have avoided a 9/11 attack in William Bell’s world.

I’m disappointed Jones was given such a weak exit. After surviving a teleportation that changed him into something that could smash concrete walls and survive a hail of bullets, he’s summarily cut down like a blade of grass and we know nothing more about it. Thread dangled. We’ll get exposition from Bell or even Walter, but don’t expect much. Jones was the season one Bad Wolf and you really have to not want someone to return if you’re willing to slice them in half.

So here’s the problem I have with this ending: There’s no malice. There’s no conflict. Everything wrapped up and we’re instead treated to an almost positive outlook. There’s a world in which the WTC attack didn’t happen. Jones is dead. Walter mourns his son and is able to let go. Olivia is about to get all her questions answered. So what’s left?

There are only two things I don’t have an answer for: Who was the Brenner that Walter and William talked about in the video, and who is the Observer? The prior may hold another big bad rival story line later. The latter may be trickier. We still don’t know if the boy from “Inner Child” is the Observer from another time/place or if the Observer is a race of beings. I can only assume that if there is the ability to open a hole into alternate universes, that there may be some that are nothing like ours, so much so that the Earth may not even contain human beings. And suddenly Boston is Sunnydale.

I was also hoping for a sacrifice. I don’t mean Meso-American knife to the chest to appease the gods type sacrifice, but maybe someone goes missing. Maybe Peter is sent back through the rift, or Walter, or Charlie. It might speak to the nature of our TV viewing desires to simultaneously want to be satisfied with the end but also destroyed at how they left it until next time. We got nearly everything answered and almost nothing left. What’s going to make us watch next season?

By fall it’ll be a sophomore show, and it better come out swinging.

Three and a half randomly chosen glyphs.