'%20x='0'%20y='0'%20height='100%25'%20width='100%25'%20%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20xlink%3Ahref='data:image/jpg;base64,/9j/2wBDAAYEBQYFBAYGBQYHBwYIChAKCgkJChQODwwQFxQYGBcUFhYaHSUfGhsjHBYWICwgIyYnKSopGR8tMC0oMCUoKSj/2wBDAQcHBwoIChMKChMoGhYaKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCj/wgARCAAGAAoDASIAAhEBAxEB/8QAFgABAQEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYH/8QAFQEBAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQL/2gAMAwEAAhADEAAAAM6lyn//xAAhEAABAwMEAwAAAAAAAAAAAAACAQMEERITAAUGFBUWYv/aAAgBAQABPwBv13cuJyuvEmBiahm0puFRgyM8xIF9Duomt6HiXmJ+GJObazuWggJQUuX71//EABcRAQADAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEAAgP/2gAIAQIBAT8AM6k//8QAGBEAAgMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAECAxH/2gAIAQMBAT8Adsnh/9k='%3E%3C/image%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Over the course of 100 episodes, Fringe tells the story of two heroes caught in a war between science and conscience. FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) is assigned to a bizarre case involving unexplained phenomena.
She is soon partnered with the brilliant but unstable scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), recently released from a mental institution, and his estranged son Peter (Joshua Jackson), whose own origins hold earth-shattering consequences.
As the Fringe Division investigates everything from shapeshifters to parallel universes, they uncover a deeper conspiracy tied to a mysterious group known as the Observers, emotionless, time-traveling beings from a distant future.
These Observers, the next step in human evolution, have engineered their minds for pure logic at the expense of all emotion. In gaining intellectual supremacy, they lost what makes humans human.
Trending
Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers. Reader discretion is advised.
In the final arc, first hinted at in the visionary episode Letters of Transit, the Observers return to the past, our present, to claim Earth for themselves, having rendered their own future world uninhabitable.
They conquer 2015 with surgical efficiency, installing a totalitarian regime. Walter, always one step ahead, hides the Fringe team in amber for years, until they are discovered by Olivia and Peter’s adult daughter, Etta, in 2036.
Walter’s Sacrifice and the fall of the Observers
The battle that follows is not just to reclaim the planet, but to restore the fractured pieces of humanity itself: memory, identity, and emotion. Fringe ends not in triumph, but in sacrifice, with Walter stepping into the future to dismantle the Observers' timeline and give his son and the world a chance to begin again.
Walt discovers that he and September, a kind Observer and human-aligned, had come up with a plan to reverse what had happened in the previous 20 years, but Walt gets arrested and undergoes a violent mind probe that erases the plan from his mind.
Walter had imagined the manufacture of videotapes by means of which the Fringe team would be able to execute this evasive scheme, and most of season 5 involves Olivia and the gang slowly piecing together all the facets required in order to vanquish the Observers.
How the Fringe team defeated the Observers
While laying out his strategy, September uncovered the existence of his biological "son" - a young adult who was not born from regular reproduction, but through Observers' genetic experiments.
Unlike the majority of Observer children, however, September's son was considered an anomaly and destined for termination. He became a victim to human feelings, saving his son in the past secretly by keeping him in hiding, and where the Fringe team first sees the boy in season 1's Inner Child.
Nobody had any idea the child held at that time. Next, only the Fringe series finale revealed and demonstrated the actual importance of September's boy.
The Observer boy, now called Michael, plays a key role in Walter and September’s plan. Unlike other Observers, he combines superior intelligence with human emotion, an anomaly that threatens the very foundation of the Observer race.
Walter's ultimate plan was to send Michael ahead in time, to the precise date when experiments into intelligence-enhancement were started, and present Michael to those scientists as evidence that emotion did not have to be sacrificed in the quest for greater mental capacity.
In theory, this would never make the Observers feasible, and the 2015 invasion would never take place. Yet, this plan left several problems in Fringe's last shows.
In Fringe’s final episodes, it becomes clear that Michael, the Observer boy, cannot speak and would need a scientifically minded guardian to help future scientists understand his significance. However, he and his guardian cannot return to their own time, as doing so would create a paradox that could resurrect the Observers.
As the team fights to send Michael to the future, September is killed, and Walter takes his place, sacrificing himself. Their mission erases the Observers and removes Walter from the timeline, ending season 5 on a bittersweet note.
Walter’s journey and the meaning behind the white tulip
Fringe ends with Peter opening a letter from Walter containing a sketch of a white tulip, his expression filled with quiet understanding. While Walter leaves his son a final message, viewers are left with lingering questions about the finale’s mechanics.
The story shows how Walter’s plan resets the timeline, reuniting Peter with his family in a new 2015. Yet the final scene introduces a new mystery: the white tulip, clearly sent by Walter before his sacrifice, still exists, despite the Observer timeline being erased.
The show clarifies that only the events following the 2015 invasion are reset; everything before unfolds as it originally did. Since Walter and September had begun planning long before the Observers’ arrival, it is plausible the tulip was sent during that phase and thus survived the reset.
There is no detailed explanation for why the earlier timeline remains intact, except that changing it would erase the entire series. The show simply asks the audience to accept that this part of time remains untouched.
Legacy and the missing years
The white tulip itself carries symbolism and has caused some confusion. The drawing is meant to direct Peter to Walter’s lab in 2015, where he will find his father gone and a prerecorded message explaining everything. But the image's roots go back to season 2, episode 18, White Tulip.
In that episode, Walter tells a time-traveling scientist that he once sought a sign of forgiveness from the universe for taking Peter from the alternate world - a white tulip. The scientist, moved by Walter’s confession, sends him the tulip as a token of grace.
The reappearance of the tulip in the finale can be seen as Walter passing that same message to Peter, not to carry guilt over his father's sacrifice. It serves as quiet reassurance that saving Peter was the one truly noble act Walter ever committed.
Meanwhile, questions remain about who remembers what. For Olivia, Peter, and the rest, season 5 never happened; their lives remain unchanged after mid-season 4. They simply awaken to the news that Walter is gone. Walter and Michael, however, retain full memories of the dystopian timeline.
From their perspective, Walter returns in season 4, is ambered for 20 years, and then crosses into the 22nd century with Michael. To resolve the paradox of Walter existing in the future, the universe removes him from the 2015 timeline, the critical divergence point.
The series aired on Fox from September 9, 2008, to January 18, 2013, running for five seasons with a total of 100 episodes.
