Fox has posted a number of new clips teasing the upcoming season premiere of Fringe.
It seems like the focus of the first episode will be locating Olivia. The first episode of this arc – episode 19 of season 4 – Letters of Transit provided few clues as to where Olivia had ended up. If you’ll recall, Walter, Astrid, Peter, and William were all found together in one ambered location. For some reason, Walter felt he needed William’s hand, and he commented to Astrid, about what William “did to Olivia,” but we really lack further details.
With Peter and Olivia’s daughter, Etta, in tow, the small group now begins the search for their friend:
Which leads them to some additional exposited explanation of what the Observers are doing, and also vilifying them further:
Finally, they approach a community of scavengers who might have Olivia, but we’re not let to know if they find her there:
It’s not clear if finding Olivia is the climax of this episode or an early inciting event, but I’m fairly certain that we’ll have her unambered and healthy before the credits.
We’ve also got this quick promo, which be running on Fox primetime Thursday night. It’s odd because they usually keep these sort of weird in-canon promos only on the Internet.
It’s been previously confirmed that this season of the show will be more of a more serial story than past seasons. It’s only a half-season, as episode counts go, but it’ll be a single plot line uniting the 12 episodes, as the Fringe team finds a way to dislodge the Observers from our world. They’ve taken a (hopefully) one-way trip into the future to battle this nemesis, so I don’t think it’ll be a typical 40-minute case, and it’s unlikely any new plot lines will arise, as the writers know that the series ends with this shortened run, and they want to close all the threads.
I’m personally pretty excited for this story. It’s rare that a good genre series gets the ending it deserves. Frankly, I can count on one hand the number of true dénouements in genre television, and with the show runners describing the season arc as a “loveletter” to the fans, I’m expecting great things.
The premiere episode of the fifth season of Fringe airs today, September 28th, 2012 on Fox.
