Fringe and Why A Rewatch is Absolutely Necessary

I’m a big fan of rewatches of my favorite television series, particularly after a show has finished production and the series is complete.  I love the idea of seeing how characters have changed and grown over the years, what trials they’ve been through, what obstacles they have overcome.  Storylines too  can expand over the course of a series, and very little delights me more than catching subtle callbacks to episodes from seasons ago.  Rewatches let you appreciate the planning, the continuity, the story, and the characters even more.

That being said, I have never felt as compelled to do a rewatch as I have for the series Fringe.  I missed out on the original airing and completed the series just over a month ago at the request of a friend.  For me, it started out slow but by mid-season two I was deep into it, discovering how many layers Fringe could provide, how extensive the worldbuilding went.  By the end, I realized that as attentive to the story as I was, there was still so much I must have missed.  There were things I couldn’t possibly have known were important until they finally became so seasons later, and I immediately needed to see all that build up in action.

From season one there were clues, a hidden message in the opening sequence, a character hidden in every episode, relevant words spelled out in glyphs (the iconic images between commercial breaks).  And the dialogue, little slips made by Walter to hint towards Peter’s past and the series’ future, recurring themes of fatherly love, parallels, callbacks, and foreshadowing.  It’s been like a puzzle, piecing together all the clues and meanings to understand the series as a whole.

Anyone who has seen the full show knows that season 5 is drastically different in narrative focus and appears to take you away from everything you’ve really known about the Fringe world.  What was once a happy present timeline becomes a dark future for the characters, what was once preparing for a mysterious war becomes fighting one, and the stakes are higher, the obstacles bigger.  But season five is less about changing it up than it is a culmination of storylines, universes, timelines, and the lives of the characters.

And that’s why I believe a rewatch is necessary to truly appreciate all that the Fringe writers accomplished – it’s impossible to see the value of the whole without accounting for all the pieces.

Now for Ben Wyatt’s (Parks and Recreation) opinion on the subject: