Fox has posted a promo video for the upcoming fifth and final season of Fringe.
It was certainly a strange bit of storytelling when Fringe showed us a seemingly disconnected flash-forward near the end of the fourth season.
Essentially a huge spoiler for the conclusion of the season, Letters of Transit depicted a strange future world in which the observers will have decided to simply take over the Earth, and a small band of resistance is all that stands between them and complete domination of man.
Despite that odd bit of disjointedness, the future of Fringe looks great, even while the future of their world is foreboding. The future world depicted in Letters of Transit is the setting for the final season, which will be a half-season in length and is slated to conclude the serial.
This promo video shows the new head of the Department of Defense – and thus the boss of Fringe Division – giving a notice to the populace about Native Edict 09/16, known as the ‘Cerebral Scan Protocol’.
The video offers a glimpse of how the observers will be using their super-advanced technology to control the people of their past. This fits with the themes of the series well, and should prove to be an entertaining fight for our protagonists.
Fringe producer J.H. Wyman recently revealed that the showrunners are approaching this final half-season more like a single long episode, rather than like a traditional season arc, simply because he sees the fifth season “as a 13-hour feature film type of thing, like a saga, because I feel that’s the best way to tell the end.”
Technically, 13 episodes of the show only add up to a little over 9 hours, yet that’s still a very long arc to work through. It will be interesting to see how the show runners pull everything together. I’ve been worried that the observer take-over would turn into one of those seemingly epic arcs that are resolved in only one or two episodes before determining how to bring everything back to ‘normal’ – if they find a way to travel back again to their own time, for example, I’ll be very disappointed with the writers.
The above-mentioned comments make it sound like that’s not the kind of plan they have, however, and whatever happens, I’m glad that the writers are getting the chance to end the series properly – thereby a disappointing conclusion to the fourth season.
Despite some production delays due to health issues for co-star John Nobel, Fringe is still on track to premiere its final season on September 28th, 2012.
