Giant Freakin Robot

Fringe may be dead and gone and buried in the ground, but that’s doesn’t mean you can’t visit the cemetery and put flowers on the grave from time to time. The fifth and final season just wrapped up a little more than a week ago, and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has already set a date for the Blu-ray and DVD release. On May 7th, you’ll be able to get your grubby little mitts on Fringe: The Complete Fifth and Final Season and cry yourself silly watching it on repeat.

Goodbye, Fringe, it’s been fun.

Back-to-back episodes marked the conclusion of the fifth and final season of Fox’s embattled sci-fi police procedural. Despite near rabid fanaticism from fans, not to mention widespread critical love, the show never posted big ratings, and has seemingly been fighting for survival forever. Last season, when the network moved the show to a Friday-night time slot—widely regarded as a desolate wasteland where TV shows go to die—it became painfully apparent that Fringe was not long for this world. Many of us were surprised, if not shocked, when Fox re-upped for a fifth, albeit truncated, season. Watch the end of season four and you get the distinct impression that the producers weren’t certain they would get the chance to wrap things up.

Over the course of any television series, there are bound to be some hiccups and missteps. Even a relatively short-lived show, like Fringe—set to wrap up a five-season run this Friday, January 18th—has one twist that the cast and crew just don’t much care for. In this case it was the decision, at the end of the third season, to blink Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) out of existence.

Among other things, Joshua Jackson has spent the last five seasons running around on Fox’s Fringe, solving outlandish mysteries, battling invaders from the future, and occasionally being blinked out of existence. However, Jackson almost appeared in another Abrams project, a little thing called Star Trek.

Is this the face of a starship captain or a paranormal investigator?