[Warning: Turn back now if you want to remain completely unspoiled for Fringe’s upcoming season finale, and even the episodes leading up to it. I don’t have any heavy spoilers, nor do I even completely understand what I watched when I stumbled across the filming of a scene, but I did piece together enough clues to ruin a couple of the neat surprises of a very-explodey looking episode.]
Last week, while walking down Vancouver’ Granville Street, I saw an interesting piece of debris that seemed to have fallen off the landmark Orpheum Theater.
Since the actual theater’s sign was still in tact, hanging off the building where it always does, and a fluorescent-vested production assistant was guarding the exploded signage, my Fringe-sense started immediately tingling since the the Orpheum was used in last year’s season finale, when Olivia and company first jumped “Over There.”
If there were any further Fringe doubts, there was also a poster for “Rocket Poppeteers,” the viral component to Super 8. The sneaky, interconnected worlds of Bad Robot were definitely at hand.
So, I picked out a fedora, shaved my eyebrows, Observer-style, and went back to watch the Vancouver street transform into an alternate version of a devastated New York City street.
Later that night, NYPD cops cars blocked the entrance of the street. Fire trucks and paramedics also lined the street, which looked to have recently suffered a massive explosion. It wasn’t hard to piece together which New York this was.
Talking to someone working on the show, he was pretty excited about what they were doing with in the last four episodes. An average episode of Fringe is filmed in a seven-day cycle. For each of the final four eps, they’ve been given ten days, and presumably a bigger budget, if the fake disaster scene on Granville Street is any indication.
In about half-an-hour they burned a few giant candles that sent an ash flakes into the air, to simulate a recent explosion. The flakes actually looked like a snowfall in Spring, but the burning candles gave off a rank chemical smell that was enough to send onlookers away.
The finale, which will air in May, is titled “The Day We Died,” and if you’re interested in any more spoilers, you’ll have to figure them out yourself from this grainy cell phone photo:
