The Day We Died (S03E22)
Airdate: 6 May 2011
Written by: J. H. Wyman, Jeff Pinkner and Akiva Goldsman
Directed by: Joe Chappelle
Running Time: 43 minutes
The producers of Fringe made what appeared, at the close of its third season, to be a bold and audacious experiment—a prolonged three-part arc that would construct what seemed to be an entirely new timeline, one whose final instalment, titled The Day We Died, wraps up proceedings with yet another head-scratching cliffhanger that left viewers questioning not merely the direction of the series but the very ontological status of its central character. This was narrative ambition on a scale that broadcast television rarely countenanced, and whether it ultimately succeeded or merely bewildered depended largely on one's tolerance for the show's increasingly baroque mythology and its willingness to dismantle its own foundations with reckless abandon.
The previous episode had also concluded with what appeared to be a cliffhanger of considerable magnitude—Peter Bishop entered the mysterious doomsday machine, only to awaken fifteen years in the future of the Prime universe. The beginning of this new episode, however, reveals that this was not time travel in the conventional sense at all. The script, credited to J. H. Wyman, Jeff Pinkner and Akiva Goldsman, has merely depicted the near-apocalyptic aftermath of what the preceding two episodes had hinted at—the consequences of Peter's fateful decision to enter the machine and the catastrophic chain of events that followed. What audiences had been led to believe was a leap forward in time was, in fact, a vision, a glimpse of a possible future that Peter must now somehow unwrite.
The plot is set in May 2026, and what we see is the Prime universe actually resembling the Redverse—the parallel world that had been gradually disintegrating throughout the season. Anomalities continue to pop up all over the world, tearing holes in the fabric of reality, and the Fringe Division has been transformed into a paramilitary force tasked with stitching up interdimensional tears with amber, the same substance that had been employed so extensively in the Redverse. The visual and thematic reversal is striking—Prime has become the dying world, the one that must desperately patch itself together whilst awaiting an inevitable collapse. Things are, however, further complicated by the existence of a terrorist group called the End-of-Dayers, an apocalyptic cult led by a man named Moreau (Brad Dourif), who are deliberately causing anomalies with the intention of accelerating what they regard as the inevitable and complete destruction of the universe. Dourif, an actor whose career has been defined by portrayals of the psychologically fractured and the dangerously charismatic, brings a suitably unhinged quality to the role, though his screen time is frustratingly limited.
Both Peter and Olivia are working within Fringe, having been a married couple for a considerable period, and they work alongside Astrid and Olivia's now-grown niece Ella Dunham (Ella Meade). Their former superior Broyles has ascended to the position of United States Senator, a promotion that speaks to the increasingly political dimensions of the Fringe Division's operations in a world where reality itself has become a matter of governmental concern. What is conspicuously missing from this ensemble is Walter, who has become the most reviled man in the world, held responsible for setting in motion the chain of events that destroyed one universe and now threatens to do the same to another. Walter has been sentenced to prison for his acts, and the effects of his advanced age are compounded by the fact that he has been held in conditions that deny him sunlight—his punishment is not merely incarceration but a slow, deliberate withering, a physical diminishment that mirrors the moral decay he has long acknowledged.
The End-of-Dayers open up a new wormhole near a theatre, and Fringe Division finds a strange-looking container near the site. Since its technology cannot be understood, Broyles reluctantly allows Walter to be brought out of prison to assist with the investigation. Peter discovers that one of the devices is leaving a radioactive trace towards the Bishops' old country home near Reiden Lake—a location freighted with enormous personal and narrative significance throughout the series. Peter arrives there to find Walternate, his alternate-universe father, who is revealed to have arrived in the Prime universe shortly before the complete destruction of the Redverse. Having witnessed everything and everyone he loved consumed by annihilation, Walternate has been transformed into a figure of bitter, vengeful fury, determined to ensure that the Prime universe suffers the same fate. The End-of-Dayers, it transpires, actually work for him. Walternate tells Peter that his vengeance will be complete and that he intends to hurt everyone slowly, including his own son—a declaration of fillicidal malice that carries a genuine emotional weight, particularly given the series' long and complex exploration of the father-son dynamics across both universes.
The End-of-Dayers' setting up of an anomaly in Central Park is revealed to be an ambush, just as Walternate's conversation with Peter near Reiden Lake is exposed as a hologram—a technological deception that recalls the series' longstanding fascination with the indistinguishability of the real and the manufactured. The real Walternate arrives at Central Park and shoots Olivia in the head, killing her. It is a moment of shocking brutality, delivered with the swiftness and clinical efficiency that the series had occasionally employed to devastating effect, and it leaves Peter devastated, his world reduced to grief and the ashes of a future he cannot accept.
Peter is shown tearfully making his farewell to Olivia at a nighttime funeral, and everything seems lost—the emotional nadir of an episode that has systematically stripped away hope. But Walter, whilst studying the Central Park wormhole, realises that it was used to send objects backwards in time, including the doomsday device, to 250 million years in the past. He is now convinced that the "First People" and their elaborate mythology, which had been woven throughout the season as an ancient mystery, were actually created by Walter and Peter themselves in 2026—a temporal paradox that retroactively explains the series' own mythology as a closed loop of cause and effect. Walter convinces Peter that he must travel back in time, make different choices and attempt to erase the damage that their actions have done to the world. It is a desperate gambit, one that rests on the assumption that the future can be rewritten and that the suffering depicted in this episode can be rendered as if it had never occurred.
Soon afterwards, Peter wakes up in 2011 in the machine, and also realises that he has somehow merged two rooms from two universes, with two machines and two versions of Walter. He has created a bridge—a space where both universes coexist, linked through the machine's power—and tells both Walter and Walternate that they must work together to stop the catastrophe and heal both worlds. It is a moment of reconciliation that the series has been building towards across three seasons, and it carries a genuine emotional resonance. Peter then mysteriously disappears, but Walter and Walternate agree to adhere to his advice. The last scene shows the Observers gathered around the Statue of Liberty, noting with their characteristic detachment that Peter has served his purpose and can now be erased—not only from existence but from everyone's memory. It is a chilling conclusion, one that renders the entire three-season arc of Peter's character potentially meaningless, and it leaves the audience in a state of profound uncertainty about what the series will look like when it returns.
The Day We Died is not among the best Fringe episodes, but it is considerably better than the previous two instalments in this three-part arc, and it demonstrates what the series' best quality has consistently been—its adaptability and the willingness of its producers to try new things. Set in what looks, and is ultimately depicted as, another possible timeline, it employs another set of heavily stylised grey-coloured opening credits, just as those set in the Redverse and in the 1980s had differed from the regular sequence. But at the end of the series' third season, it looks very much as though Fringe is closing this chapter by offering something perfectly new—perhaps even a fourth timeline in which Peter does not exist. The audacity of this proposition is remarkable, even if its execution leaves something to be desired.
When The Day We Died originally aired, Fringe had already been renewed for a fourth season. Yet it had not been renewed when the episode was written, and the producers, acutely aware that they might be crafting a series finale, required the scriptwriters to engage in some creative ambiguity, allowing the episode to function as a series finale if needed. This dual purpose—the need to provide closure whilst simultaneously setting up future storylines—accounts for some of the episode's structural awkwardness, particularly in its final act, where the narrative shifts from apocalyptic drama to temporal mechanics with a speed that threatens to leave the audience behind.
Concerns about the series' future were, in retrospect, quite justified, because The Day We Died actually had worse ratings than the previous two episodes. The shedding of viewership was in many ways the result of the series beginning to look too much like Lost, with its increasingly complex mythology and narratives that required constant attention and a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of preceding events. Whilst Fringe maintained its grip on dedicated fans, it was becoming increasingly obvious that this was a series that could truly work only in the binge-heavy era of streaming, where viewers could consume episodes in rapid succession and keep the intricate details fresh in their minds. The 20-plus episode per season format of broadcast television was, in a very real sense, suffocating the creativity that the show's writers so clearly possessed—the demand for a full season's worth of episodes meant that mythology was stretched thin, padded with standalone instalments that did little to advance the overarching narrative, and the result was a programme that could alienate casual viewers whilst rewarding only those who had committed to watching every single instalment.
The killing of Olivia, which would have been one of the most shocking moments on television a year or two earlier, is here greeted as something quite ordinary, its emotional impact tempered by the knowledge that this occurred in just one of many alternate timelines—something that experienced viewers would sense long before the final twist. The series had, by this point, so thoroughly established the multiplicity of timelines and the permeability of death that the demise of its female lead could not carry the weight it might have done in earlier seasons. This is, perhaps, the inevitable consequence of a show that has made alternative realities its central conceit—when anything can be undone, nothing truly matters, and the emotional stakes are inevitably diminished.
The references to Lost are made further clear by the nighttime Viking-style funeral given to Olivia, which bears a very striking resemblance to the funeral of Colleen, one of the Others, depicted in that series' episode The Cost of Living. Both funerals are staged with a solemnity that borders on the ceremonial, both employ the visual language of fire and darkness to create an atmosphere of grief and finality, and both serve as moments of pause within narratives that are otherwise hurtling towards catastrophe. The visual echo is unmistakable, and it serves as a reminder that Fringe, like Lost before it, was a series that understood the power of ritualised mourning as both narrative device and emotional punctuation.
Yet for all its ambition, The Day We Died suffers from the same affliction that had begun to plague the series as a whole—a sense that its narrative complexity had begun to outstrip its ability to deliver satisfying emotional payoffs. The episode is dense with plot, packed with revelations and reversals, but it moves at such a pace that the audience is rarely given the opportunity to sit with the emotional consequences of what transpires. Olivia's death, Walternate's betrayal, Walter's imprisonment—each of these could sustain an episode on its own, but compressed into a single forty-three-minute instalment, they become a catalogue of dramatic events rather than a coherent emotional journey. The result is an episode that is impressive in its scope and audacious in its conception, but which ultimately feels more like a narrative mechanism than a fully realised piece of dramatic storytelling.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
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