Season Analysis: With all the destruction, crossing over, rebooting, and combination of universes, it is hard to keep track of which characters to identify with and how to do so, which is not to say that Fringe is still not just as fascinating as it has always been.

“Welcome to Westfield”

Fringe, like many sci-fi shows, started off more or less as a freak-of-the-week series, but it became its best when it fully developed its more serial side.  Interestingly enough, though, some of the best episodes of Fringe have been the one-off episodes that break from the present serialized plotline, e.g., “Peter,” “Subject 13.”  While those episodes did break from the show’s normal setting, they were still quite important in how they related to the whole series – “Peter” revealing how Peter was brought over as a boy from the other side, “Subject 13” revealing what happened to young Olivia during the Cortexiphan trials.  Initially, it seemed that “Welcome to Westfield” was going to be a perfectly enjoyable one-off Fringe episode that would work well on its own but would not really relate to the series as a whole.  Olivia, Peter, and Walter enter a town from which there is no escape – essentially a living, breathing Twilight Zone episode.  The appearances of extra pupils and extra sets of teeth on some of the townspeople were fascinating examples of eldritch horror.  And while it was not clear initially how “Welcome to Westfield” would fit into the larger plot of Fringe, the confusion of memories from the townspeople’s versions of themselves from the other universe did fit in nicely thematically in terms of the show’s interest in identity insofar as what makes people who they really are.  Ultimately, this episode did prove to be rather important in the overall developments of Season 4, as Westfield prompted this current Olivia to have the memories of Olivia from the first three seasons, and the destruction of Westfield turned out to be a test by David Robert Jones for bringing together and destroying the two universes.  A show that originally needed to become serialized to become truly good now needs to mix its serialization up a bit to remain good and keep itself moving forward.