Grade: B-
A dark road, a string of cars with mechanical issues, & a plane falling from the sky lead our faithful Fringe team of Peter, Walter, & Olivia to Westfield but the weird occurrences don’t end there when our team finds out they can’t exactly leave. What is a nice little episode of strange occurrence is able to drop enough hints to our season storyline & what David Jones is up to make a very delightful trip in what seemed like a ho-hum town. As the season draws closer to an end & the fate of the series becomes more unclear there is no doubt that it is an almost impossible feat to really tie up the story set up in season 4 but more on that later.
The whole story of the episode centers around a town called Westfield & the effects it has on our Fringe team of Walter, Olivia, & Peter. What would be probably a routine stop for out team, especially in the former prime universe, we see them stop off at a diner so Walter can get some pie after leaving an event scene. We then have that stop turn into the town gone mad scene but instead of something like a quarantine for the city we find that our heroes just somehow cannot leave like some sort of horrible purgatory. The episode is able to work so well in this setting by continuing to blend events we’ve seen before early on in the series around the first & second seasons. In Westfield we are dealing with the ramifications of a location in both universes being layered over each other. We have seen this before, especially when this was happening throughout the prime universe & only Olivia could help to stop it by spotting the glimmer. People are being merged but now in a much slower & more maddening state through the inhabitants of the town.
With all the talk about fates it is nice to see that
Fringe is still able to pull off very well done episodic showings that have a hint toward the major arc but have their own decisive flow. In
”Welcome to Westfield” we see the series take the maddened unescapable town storyline, usually seen in zombie outbreak films, used in a very well done way that as well affects our team as well. No, in many ways it does not stand out as something spectacular but the episode pulls off its goal so well at creating a compelling episode
