BIG READ: FRINGE Wraps in Vancouver

After five seasons — four of them filmed in Vancouver — American TV series Fringe wrapped filming this morning at The Bridge Studios. Almost all of its fifth and final season takes place in the dystopian future of 2036 with our amber-preserved Fringe family leading the resistance against Observer overlords. Local and visiting fans spotted Anna Torv’s Olivia Dunham, Joshua Jackson’s Peter Bishop, John Noble’s Dr. Walter Bishop and other members of the former Fringe Division all over Vancouver this summer, fall and winter  — from Stanley Park to UBC to Pacific Central Station to the Burrard Bridge to Victory Square to the West End to the Olympic Village to Hasting West to Robson Street to the Vancouver Art Gallery to Granville Street to Hornby Street to Gastown to Chinatown to Coal Harbour to the Vancouver Public Libary to the Cambie Bridge to Oceanic Plaza. Each a public location where people were welcome to watch. That’s one of the reasons why Fringe will be so missed in this city.

Fringe’s fifth season opened in Stanley Park with a utopian scene of Joshua Jackson’s Peter Bishop and Anna Torv’s Olivia Dunham (aka POlivia) out for a family picnic with their daughter Etta in 2016. A family picnic that was interrupted by Observageddon, the Observer invasion from the future, and the abduction of little Etta.

That same day, Fringe crew went from utopian to dystopian, filming scenes of the Observer-ruled world twenty-odd years later when Loyalist soldiers and collaberating citizens dressed in 1940s garb help keep a desperate population in order. Amber-preserved POlivia reunited with grownup Etta as well as Walter and Jasika Nicole’s Astrid and the original Fringe team joined the Resistance.

But Walter Bishop was captured by Michael Kopsa’s Captain Windmark, the final season’s Big Bad, and his mind wiped of his plan to defeat the Observers. In the second episode, the Fringe team broke into Walter’s old lab on the Observer-occupied Harvard University campus, played by the University of British Columbia, hoping to find information to reconstruct Walter’s plan.

After infiltrating Pacific Central Station dressed as a New Jersey Monorail station to retrieve part of Walter’s plan in the fourth episode, the group met up with Lance Reddick’s 20-years-older Philip Broyles under the Burrard Bridge. It proved an emotional respite before the Observers cornered the Fringe team in an abandoned building played by the Terminal City Ironworks complex in east Vancouver. There Captain Windmark shot Georgina Haig’s Etta. She had a chance to say goodbye to the parents she’d known for a mere handful of episodes before blowing up herself and the building.

Dead Etta became a poster girl for the Resistance and drove her father Peter to torture an Observer and carve out the Observer tech to put in his own head in the fifth episode.

Unfortunately this week’s shoots were all private as Fringe crew either blew up stuff overnight on Port Metro Vancouver land near the old BC Sugar building or worked in studio. But that means the secret of how Fringe ends remains largely intact.