Mark Watches ‘Fringe’: S02E08 – August

In the eighth episode of the second season of Fringe, an Observer–not THE Observer–kidnaps a young woman in order to save her life. As the Fringe team races to find out why, they learn more about the world of the Observers. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Fringe.

So, let’s first talk about how these reviews are going to go down, since this is new ground for all of us here on Mark Watches.

What’s instantly unique about this experiment is that for once, I am not completely in the dark as to what’s going on. I wanted to try watching a show in real-time and my recent obsession with Fringe seemed to be a good fit. Unlike everything else I’ve done, there’s really only one type of spoiler:

Do not speak about anything that has not publicly aired.

Man, that is so easy, right? So, for the sake of this blog, WE WILL BE DISCUSSING ANY AND ALL EPISODES THAT HAVE PUBLICLY AIRED. This means that if you have not caught up and seen Fringe up to Episode 9 of Season Three, “Marionette,” then there will be the possibility that you will get spoiled by these reviews. I thought about keeping them in the context of only the episodes that had aired up to that point, but it’s just far too difficult, especially because I don’t want to be responsible for accidentally spoiling anyone. THAT WOULD BE IRONIC, RIGHT?

I’m just going to randomly pick some episodes that I enjoyed before we begin our liveblogging/reviewing next week when Fringe starts up again. Sound good?

I chose to do “August” for a few reasons. When I first started watching the show, it contained a lot of the tropes I have come to appreciate from J.J. Abrams: a mesh of high-science and entertainment, slow-building mysteries, and general weirdness. J.J. generally helms projects that are also willing to tack on an emotional element to all the sci-fi goodness so that there’s a reason beyond being a nerd to watch a particular show or movie. Granted, this show is now in the hands of some talented showrunners and writers and I don’t think J.J. has much to do with it anymore. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) But one of the most intriguing elements added early on was that of the Observer: a strange, bald, eyebrow-less man who knows everything, has seen everything, and who has intervened to help Walter get his son. Because the nature of the Observer was so strange (and so exciting), I wasn’t surprised that Fringe was so unwilling to give away anything but the smallest bit of information of who the Observer was or what he was doing in every single episode. (True fact: I always look for him and generally only spot him about one third of the time. Drat.)

I think this is a huge reason why “August” is such a fantastic episode to me, so crucial to this show’s unfolding mythology. Not only is it emotionally important, but we get a huge chunk of info on the Observer. Mainly, that the Observer is not alone: there are at least four of them, each named after a different month (August, July, and December in this episode, with July and December only named in the credits, and the main Observer we’ve known this whole time being unnamed), each of who is tasked to simply observe history and show up at the most significant times.

When we see the Observer at the opening of this episode, we of course assume it’s the only one we’ve ever seen. That isn’t the case, as it becomes quickly apparent this actor is not the same as usual. After we watch him watch a young woman, Christine Hollis, he also does something the Observer would never do: he intervenes. He kidnaps her and we get to see that strange Observer tool: a powerful pulse weapon.

Are our brains mush? Not quite yet, but we’re getting there.

This episode unfolds a mind-numbing plot, but also makes sure to take time to deal with both Walter and Olivia, who are affected in various ways by this case. For Walter, this is a much more personal issue, as the Observer was the one who struck a deal with him, as we learned in “There’s More Than One of Everything.” While this motivates him to do things in secret of the rest of the team, Olivia is affected because this episode, in a way, highlights her loneliness. At the beginning of “August,” she’s seen with her niece, Ella, as they are about to embark on a day at a local amusement park. The call comes in and she’s got to go to work. The look on Ella’s face says that this has happened before, that she’s come to expect it. I love watching Ella and Olivia interact because there’s such a great chemistry between them, leading us to think she’d make a fantastic mother if things had worked out that way. But with her position in the Fringe Division, we know that’s simply not going to happen.

But really, I find that I love the episodes that feature heavily on Walter, and this episode revolves so much on his quirky joy and the tragic past that motivates him to seek answers to this case outside of his team. Even so, it’s not that the team is able to figure much out. They find the notebook that the Observer left behind, but he may as well have written absolutely gibberish instead of the complex code that Astrid finds. Even when they discover that Brandon, our favorite lab nerd, has also been researching this set of symbols, it doesn’t seem to lead them any closer to the Observer. It does provide them with some context, though, as Brandon shares a baffling and shocking theory through photographs: the Observer, in some shape or another, has been appearing throughout history. They were always spread out, occurring during significant historical, technological, or political events. Except now the Observer is being…well, observed with a frightening increase in frequency.

It might be easy to simply say that the frequency has been increasing because the Fringe team and Massive Dynamic is paying attention, or because we now know there are at least four of them. But when the three other Observers meet to discuss what August has done, I got the sense that we were building up to something terrible. Not just in this episode, but in general for the entire series. The thing is, we’ve been seeing them with much more frequency as well. Are we about to witness an even that is significant to all history? (Sidenote: I still don’t think we’ve seen this moment and I’ll use the final lines of “Marionette” as proof. I think it’s still coming.)

August’s mistake is his intervention. We learn that the Observers are merely there to observe. I am not sure why and it’s not revealed to (it still hasn’t), but we know that what August has done has created an irregularity. That’s when we discover why what he did was so awful: Christine was meant to die on a flight that has just taken off, meaning she will be alive in a world where she should be dead. An Observer has interfered and they must correct his intervention.

Why they don’t do it themselves is an interesting thought to me. I haven’t quite figured out why they contact someone who is a professional hitman. But this all suggests that disruptions in time are incredibly serious. (It isn’t until “Peter” later in season two that we learn just how terribly serious this all is. In the alternate universe, Walternate was supposed to find the cure to Peter’s disease. The boy was supposed to survive in the alternate world. But when the main Observer disrupts things, it opens up the loophole that allows Walter to enter the parallel universe in order to bring Peter back here.)

Parallel to all this happening, the Fringe team manages to put together that Christine was essentially saved from death when August kidnapped her. This makes Olivia wonder: is it possible that August was watching her for her entire life? In turn, Peter wonders aloud why she was so special to the Observers that they had to save her. It’s interesting that they operate throughout the episode as if the Observers all worked together on this one. When we see them just after this in the dinner, the three Observers are visibly upset with August, who insists that he has “seen” that she is special. This is not the case, the others say, and they have taken steps to “correct” history.

Walter, on the other hand, has been using the guise of a strawberry milkshake (NO SERIOUSLY, I LOVE THIS MAN) to find a way to sneak out of the lab in order to meet with August. In this episode, I didn’t quite get the answers I expected from Walter meeting an Observer, but that’s also because the dynamic has switched: this time, the Observer is looking to help Walter, instead of the other way around.

What Walter suggests here, though, is what changes history. If the Observer cannot determine why Christine Hollis is significant, perhaps he should make her so. I don’t know if there ever was or will be another moment like this. When we learn the truth about Peter, the Observers have always said that Peter was important, that he needed to stay alive. Here, though, an Observer is MAKING someone important.

August sets into motion a tragic consequence of his conversation with Walter. By ostensibly calling the cops and bring Peter and Olivia to the hotel where he is keeping Christine, he orders his own death. The main Observer comes to take him away after the scene erupts in violence and the man sent to “correct” Christine actually shoots August. Why was Christine so significant? Because she is the first person responsible for the death of an Observer. August made his own “prophecy” come true at the expense of his life.

UGH TOO SAD.

But you know what’s even sadder? In the final scene, after nothing in this case seems to wrap up well and the Fringe team is left just as confused as ever, Olivia finally gets to join Ella on a day at that amusement park, to take a ride on the rollercoaster as she promised. It didn’t take me long over the course of the show’s run to become attached to Olivia, but the final scene of “August” pretty cements that for life. We know that Olivia’s life has been wrecked by pain and loss, that she’s been taken advantage of and has little reason to trust most people. Yet we also know she’s got an unending capacity for compassion and love. A lot of people complain that Olivia (and Anna Torv, for that matter) are not expressive enough. I say to those people that they’re simply not paying attention to her character. See her face light up as she descends that first hill on the coaster? That’s about as expressive as one can get.

Of course, the camera pans down to two Observers, one of them December. “It is a shame things are about to get so hard for her,” December says. And at that time, we had no idea how right he was.

THOUGHTS

• I have a lot of thoughts for this episode, so let’s first start off with this: This episode made me crave a strawberry milkshake so badly.
• I judge people solely on whether they enjoy Astrid or not. She gets more screentime in “Brown Betty” and in the parallel universe, but I’m waiting patiently for an Astrid-centric episode. Because I love her until the end of time.
• Honestly, I could never have guessed what the “arrangement” was between the Observer and Walter from what this show gave me, even looking at it in hindsight. That’s what makes “Peter” one of the best episodes of the entire series.
• An interesting thought: It wasn’t until I started writing this review that I realized how much my opinion of Massive Dynamic changed over the course of this show. Remember when it was an evil, scary corporation? By season three, I’d completely abandoned those thoughts. However, when I first watched “August,” I still suspected something else was up.
• I’m not a fan of the “random-girl-is-kidnapped-and-tied-up” trope. This episode works, but it’s still kind of creepy to me whenever I see it. Hasn’t it happened at least once on like every drama ever?
• “Peter” made me fall DEEPLY, DEEPLY in love with Walter, but I just want to take a moment to say that this show could have taken him into a super awful route of comedic relief, but instead has made him one of the most compelling characters on all of television. It helps that his past is so fucking tragic, but this episode is one of my absolute favorite ones in terms of Walter’s story, especially since, at the end of it, he still wants that strawberry milkshake.
• AUGUST STOPPED A BULLET WITH HIS HAND. Fuck, guys. What else can the Observers do?
• Christine Hollis is pretty much a 2-D character throughout this, isn’t she?
• Just like I said in my Doctor Who reviews, I love when fiction re-contextualizes history. So OF COURSE I loved the scene of seeing the Observer throughout history.
• Why are the Observers named after months? Does that mean there are twelve of them? What is the main Observer’s name?
• That is the worst fake newspaper from 1884. Sorry, I had to say it.

Ok, how do you feel about doing “Jacksonville” next? TOTALLY A GOOD IDEA, RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT.