on an imaginary hero

“She still has her mother. She wasn’t experimented on as a child. She can laugh. She has real friends. She even wears a dress every once in a while.” – Olivia Dunham in Concentrate and Ask Again

This is a blog post I should never publish. There should be some lower limit to nerdiness, but I have been obsessed with Fringe for months.

(Spoilers follow.)

Fringe played on Fox from 2008 to 2013. It was originally supposed to end after the fourth season, but fan pressure produced a fifth season of ten episodes.  There’s a natural end with the end of the fourth season, but the fifth season has its own logic and fits as an alternate ending to the series.

There are a lot of alternatives in this series, which is part of its charm.  I once called it “The Garden of Forking Paths” for tv and I wasn’t wrong[*]. Part of the appeal for me is this idea of different endings, of variant lives. But at the end of the day, my interest centers on Olivia Dunham. It’s not that she’s an FBI agent. It’s not that they don’t sex her up (at least after the pilot and maybe the first third of the first season). I think what fascinates me is that Fringe shows the making of a superhero from a flawed human being.

Because, seriously, Olivia is fucked up.

What makes her a superhero is also what helps fuck her up in the first place and she is never quite ok, despite reaching a happy ending. This is a time for PTSD heroes.

She’s not my first. My first sympathy for this sort of hero showed with my choice of Batman as my favorite DC hero. I like Green Lantern’s power the best and that oath (“By Brightest Day or Darkest Night, No Evil Shall Escape My Sight . . . . .”).  Still I have always felt something very compelling about the Batman.  Here is a boy who sees his parents shot down in front of him, who grows up committed to fighting crime. He’s not all right. He can’t be. And everyone knows it.

Miller and Burton and Nolan and Arkham’s Asylum

Lots of people have interpreted Batman. He’s actually a pretty cheery dude in the original Detective Comics from the 1930’s. But that’s sort of DC’s original style. As we move into the end of the twentieth, the Batman is more treated as a disturbed guy, from the mildly neurotic version by Tim Burton, to the flat-out psychotic in the comics of Frank Miller and Grant Morrison. The latest iteration (Nolan) is less obviously unhinged than the Miler or Morrison Batmen, but probably a little more nuts than the Burton. In all cases, here is a man who has suffered immense trauma as a child, who grows up to be a functional, even exemplary, in some respects, adult, and is immensely damaged and fragile.

This is the template for Olivia Dunham.

Magic and How it Doesn’t Help

“Can you make him stop hitting me? Please?” – young Olive Dunham, Subject 13.

Her powers come from a magic potion, called Cortexiphan, but what makes her powerful is childhood trauma and how she’s coped with it. It’s a unique combination of love, terror, and control. Olivia is the abused child of a mother suffering domestic violence. And even when the abusive partner is out of the picture (because 10 year old Olivia has shot him[†]), everything is not ok.

Her mother dies. Let me tell you, that is no fun at all.

My mother died when I was 12 and I feel the repercussions of that event 50 years later. The worst about losing a parent for kids like me is the responsibility that descends way too soon.  Childhood ends with a parent’s death. But Olivia’s childhood has ended long before that with an abusive stepfather that no one is protecting her against. She is the one who protects her mother, however inadequately. There is no one who will save her. It is this knowledge and this isolation that makes her who she is and the superhero she will become.

 The Other Cortexiphan Subjects

They can’t cope. No, really. Presumably, there’s nothing in their lives that make them have to be as tough as Dunham, as resilient, and eventually as powerful. It’s not clear why it’s this way. I mean it doesn’t have to be after all, this is just a tv show. Still it’s clear that exposure to Cortextiphan had bad effects on the lives of all of the children in the tests, but only Dunham manages to come to control and survive the talent.

Becoming

“ I don’t know what’s happening to me, what I’m becoming. I’ve got this power inside me that terrifies me because I don’t understand it and I just, I just want it out.” – Olivia Dunham, Brave New World I

“You’ve had the power all along.” – Nina Sharp, Brave New World II

The immensely insecure, complexly uptight Olivia Dunham comes into her powers, becoming a much greater figure than her more normal alternate world counterpart. But it’s not easy for her. Nothing is ever easy for her.  And she doesn’t want this. She wants a simpler life. She doesn’t get it for a while.

By Brave New World II, Olivia can catch bullets and power the merging of universes. She’s a pawn in the great game William Bell is playing. She can thwart him, but everything hinges on her finally, finally believing in her own powers and taking that leap into the unknown (or at least unseen) with Peter. She has to trust and she has to act.

That act doesn’t quite wrap things up all by itself. Like September’s prophesy foretold, she has to die and is brought back by Walter to end Bell’s monomaniacal new Eden. That handy Cortexiphan makes it possible for her to come back and have the family she’d wanted and feared.

In season five, the game is reset.

Something new is going on in season five, which is about loss and reconciliation.

“Simone, you have a gift. You can see things other people can’t.  I don’t doubt that . . . . . It’s simply an anomaly. I know that because I’m an anomaly. I’ve moved things with my mind. I’ve lit things on fire. I’ve caught bullets midair. I’ve seen things that people only dream about. I’ve seen the seams between universes ripped apart; things that humans shouldn’t see. People make up explanations; assign meaning to things without knowing because it’s reassuring. It’s comforting. But I can’t do that, because I know too much.

It’s all just numbers“ – Olivia Dunham, The Human Kind

Olivia says this to Simone, the head of a group living on barter of industrial stuff in Litchfield. She’s at low ebb here. Peter has inserted the Invader tech into his head and is moving away from her. Etta’s not long dead.  What she has is her sense of duty and the will to keep doing regardless of what or how she feels. It’s the strength of the abused kid again, pushing her through the hardest stuff because there is no other way but forward. This is not all of her strength, but it’s the core of it.

Ending

The final season is all resolution, but to make it happen, Olive has to cross worlds and crush an Observer. But to do that she takes a final massive dose of Cortexiphan.  This is what power costs, but she also sees (shows us) the ends of some might-have-beens and closes off the alternate universe stories.

In theory, the drug is burned out after those last jumps, , but there’s enough left to make a final crucial move. Is this the Cortexiphan or is this the hero? She pulls the electromagnetic energy out of a city to crush Windmark. I say hero.

The end, what’s the end? The real end of the show is about sacrifice and love, though not romantic love. Olivia isn’t actually at the center of the story for season five, even though what she does is crucial to the final destruction (prevention) of the Observers.  What she has become is complete. She knows her own strengths. She has a place in the world that she’s made. She can stop.

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[*] ”The Garden of Forking Paths” is a Borges story about a novel that explores all the possible developments of a plot. It’s wonderful, and like any Borges, well worth reading.

[†] Olivia says that she shot him, but didn’t kill him in season two. In the season four universe reboot, she had killed him.