6:02 AM (S03E20)
Airdate: 22 April 2011
Written by: David Wilcox, Josh Singer & Graham Roland
Directed by: Jeannot Szwarc
Running Time: 44 minutes
The old broadcast television paradigm, built upon the foundation of twenty or more episodes per season, afforded producers a degree of flexibility that has largely vanished in the modern streaming era. With that many hours to fill, showrunners could allow a season or series finale to breathe — stretching it across a single episode, a feature-length instalment, or, as was sometimes the case, an entire trilogy of episodes that built upon one another in escalating tension. In the case of the third season of Fringe, the writers opted for precisely this approach, constructing a three-part finale that began with the episode titled 6:02 AM, aired in April 2011. This first chapter of the trilogy was tasked with setting the board, establishing the stakes, and plunging both of the show's parallel universes into a crisis from which there would appear to be no easy escape.
The episode opens in the Redverse, where Walternate — the alternate universe's Secretary of Defence and Walter Bishop's more ruthless counterpart — has finally acquired the last ingredient needed for his grand design. A blood sample taken from Henry, the infant son of Fauxlivia and Peter, contains Peter's DNA, which proves sufficient to activate the doomsday machine. Walternate, in a moment that crystallises his character as both saviour and monster, activates the machine with full knowledge that doing so will save his own universe only at the catastrophic expense of the other. He is prepared to sacrifice his own son along with billions of innocent lives in the Prime universe, a decision that casts him as one of the most morally complex antagonists the series ever produced.
The first visible victims of this decision are two shepherds tending their flock in upstate New York, who are obliterated alongside hundreds of sheep when the first of many vortices begins to materialise. It is a striking, if brief, image — the pastoral tranquillity of rural New York torn apart by an invisible force — and it brings the Fringe Division to the scene. Meanwhile, strange behaviour from the doomsday machine housed within the Massive Dynamic facility leads the team to a grim conclusion: Walternate has activated the corresponding machine on his side, and the havoc that has plagued the Redverse for years is now beginning to tear the Prime universe apart in exactly the same fashion.
Nina Sharp and the resources of Massive Dynamic are marshalled in search of a solution, but the outlook is bleak. The supplies of amber — the substance used to seal breaches and quarantine compromised areas — are abysmally low, far from sufficient to contain the multiplying vortexes and anomalies that will soon spread. Nina expresses confidence that only the enigmatic Sam Weiss might hold the answers, but Olivia and Peter are unable to locate him. Peter, increasingly desperate, comes to the realisation that the only remaining alternative is himself. He enters the Massive Dynamic facility and attempts to deactivate the machine by making direct contact with it, but the machine rejects him outright, delivering a powerful surge that knocks him unconscious. Walter, ordinarily a man of science and scepticism, is driven to such desperation that he retreats to a chapel to pray for forgiveness. It is at this moment, with exquisite dramatic timing, that Sam Weiss finally appears and demands to be taken to see what is happening with the machine.
In the meantime, events in the Redverse do not unfold as Walternate had anticipated. The activated machine appears to have failed to halt the anomalies in his own world, raising the terrifying possibility that both universes will be destroyed rather than one being saved at the other's expense. This development visibly unsettles Fauxlivia, who leaves her son Henry in the care of Lincoln Lee and, after conferring with Walternate, travels to Liberty Island in an attempt to cross over to the Prime universe and retrieve Peter — the only person who might be able to stop the machine. Her mission ends in failure, and she is captured, adding yet another layer of futility to the unfolding catastrophe.
6:02 AM, written by David Wilcox, Josh Singer, and Graham Roland, is a solid, functional, but ultimately rather unremarkable episode that serves primarily as scaffolding for the grand finale to come. It reminds the audience of the odds and repositions the pieces on the board, but it does little to distinguish itself as a standalone hour of television. Veteran director Jeannot Szwarc, whose credits span decades of quality television, tries valiantly to inject a sense of dread and apocalyptic inevitability into the proceedings. Yet apart from the unfortunate shepherds in what amounts to a fairly routine cold opening, there is remarkably little visual display of the anomalies themselves. The destruction is conveyed largely through dialogue, readouts, and concerned expressions rather than through the kind of visceral imagery that might have elevated the episode's sense of catastrophe.
The episode's darkness stems mainly from the script's refusal to offer easy exits from the world's predicament. Peter inexplicably fails to stop the machine despite his apparent connection to it, and Fauxlivia's parallel effort to bring him to the other side similarly collapses. Both paths to salvation are cut off within the same hour, leaving the audience with the unsettling impression that there may be no path at all.
There is one rather lame attempt at levity to counterbalance the encroaching darkness — Olivia, now sharing Peter's home, discovers Walter's curious habit of cooking naked on Tuesdays. It is a moment that feels distinctly like filler, a brief comedic interlude inserted to prevent the episode from becoming unrelentingly grim, but it does little to advance the narrative or deepen the characters in any meaningful way.
6:02 AM holds a curious place in Fringe's broadcast history. It was the first episode to air after the show's renewal for a fourth season was announced, which ought to have been a cause for celebration among the creative team and fans alike. Somewhat ironically, however, it proved to be the episode with the lowest viewership the series had recorded up to that point — a harbinger of the ratings troubles that would plague Fringe through its final two seasons as it was shuffled to the Friday night "death slot" and struggled to maintain an audience. The episode thus stands as both a narrative turning point and a quiet milestone in the show's gradual decline, a competent but unmemorable piece that set the stage for a finale the series would never quite recover from, commercially at least.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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