Once it reached its 100th episode, Fringe finally came to an end in January, and the show definitely had a very nice five year run before it gracefully bowed out.
The show enjoys a loyal cult following today, and you also get the feeling that down the road the show’s fanbase will keep getting bigger and stronger.
As Joshua Jackson, who played Peter Bishop, told CNN, “It is the passion of the fans that kept it going. Long, long past the time when it made economic sense, and certainly past the time where my cynical-actor-who’s-been-around-self looked at it and went, there’s no way this show is coming back.
“If it wasn’t for that passion, the shows would have died and it wouldn’t have the proper ending…It’s because of those experience and because of those fans that we were able to finish up the show on the right note.”
Now Entertainment Weekly confirms that there’s a fan companion book coming this month called September’s Notebook. (This is a reference to an Observer on the show, the bald guy with no eyebrows.) EW terms it “the ultimate companion book,” as well as a “uniquely designed, detail-rich tome that summarizes the saga and digs deep into the show’s mythology.”
September’s Notebook was written by Tara Bennett and Paul Terry, and they are also the authors of The Lost Encyclopedia. In addition, Bennett penned 24: The Official Companion Guide: Seasons 1 through 6, and Terry was also the editor of official magazines for Lost and Alias. So clearly these two know their terrain very well.
These kinds of show guides come out all the time, so for this one to get major coverage it’s clearly going to be something better than the usual fanboy volumes. Bennett told EW she heard from Jeff Pinker, the executive producer of Fringe who used to write for Lost, and he pitched the idea of a fan companion.”We talked about doing a ‘case file’ approach, but that felt so boring, so pedestrian for Fringe,” said Bennett. “Eventually, Paul and I pitched the idea of doing a book from an Observer’s point of view.”
Once Bennett and Terry decided to do the book, they got 85 gigabites of material from Bad Robot, JJ Abrams’s production company that produces Fringe. “We didn’t want to miss a single sketch of something that was bired beneath 79 sub-folders so we had to excavate that drive completely.”
So again, this sounds like an amazing book for Fringe fans, and I’m sure it covers everything you can possibly think of and more. One of my favorite fan anthologies ever is The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree, and it would be great if September’s Notebook becomes the TZ Companion for Fringe fans. Look for September’s Notebook on March 26 from Insight Editions.
