Fringe is coming to an end this coming season, but it’s not doing so quietly. The show is going into Season 5 with a ton of fan anticipation, as it makes another huge shift – this time with the entire series and all the characters moving into the year 2036 and the Observer-conquered reality seen in Season 4’s “Letters of Transit.”

“I wish I could be there in person to thank each and every one of you personally for your unbelievable support of the series. Fringe is a show that I'm enormously proud to be associated with. The work that the cast and crew have done I think has been amazing, but your support is really the thing that has kept it alive. FOX has been unbelievable, going far beyond any expectations allowing the show to be on the air, and while it's something we're all proud of, it's a very rare thing, I think, in this day and age that a network will support a show that isn't a massive hit, and Fringe has always been true to its name, a little bit more of an outside the box series. The good thing about that for us is we can have these parties, or mixers, with every single viewer in attendance. Anyway, I wish I were there to celebrate what is going to be an incredible fifth season. Joel has come up with some remarkable stuff, and I think it's gonna be far and away the best season yet.”

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At FOX’s TCA (Television Critics Association) press day yesterday, the network’s president, Kevin Reilly, talked about how happy he was to give Fringe a proper ending, remarking, “We have a checkered history with genre at best, because we’re one of the only networks that has tried genre,” and adding with a smile, “I hope this puts to bed our ghost of Comic-Con!” That may reference a few shows, but let’s face it, it mostly references Firefly, whose poor treatement by FOX (under a different regime than Reilly or his colleagues, none of whom were there when Firefly aired) is still brought up by a rabid fandom.Later, as the official Fringe panel began, it kicked off with a message from co-creator/executive producer J.J. Abrams, who had the following to say about Fringe’s fanbase, critics and FOX:Like at Comic-Con, executive producer/showrunner J.H. Wyman was very tightlipped about what’s to come in Season 5, but did talk about the decision to move the show to the year 2036, set up in Season 4’s “Letters of Transit.” Said Wyman, “Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Pinkner and myself came up with Episode 19, and we were sort of in a tricky position because we had talked about this being a possibility. But we understood that the [ratings] numbers were what they were. We had faith that we were going to be renewed, but we wanted the concept to sort of say, well, how could we get this thing platformed and sort of do a backdoor pilot for what some of the ideas and thoughts we wanted to do for the fifth season.”Asked about the fact that he never got to play an alternate version of Peter, Joshua Jackson said he sometimes felt regretful, watching the work his costars were doing, but added that when it came to the technical aspect of doing a scene with yourself, “Actually having to sit for nine pages watching a person speak to air and then watching the person speak back to air… I could do without that process, just saying!”Anna Torv talked about how excited she was playing “Fauxlivia”, saying, “I loved it so much because when the Alternate Olivia came, we were two years in, and so I was just very adamant about the things I did not want to repeat, like what I wanted her to be and what Olivia wasn't. I made no secret of that. I loved it. I'm very sad that we said good bye to her.” Torv then paused and turned to Wyman, asking, “Have we?!” (No, Wyman didn’t reply!)The Fringe cast were only three days into production on Season 5 when they spoke at TCA, but when asked about how they’re feeling saying goodbye to the series, Jackson brought up Fringe’s panel at Comic-Con last week, saying, “To just bear witness to the passion and dedication that the fans of the show bring every single time we're there, it's just… I's such a unique experience that I've had certainly in the show and unlike anything else I've ever done before. I think the reflective portion will come later because we're just getting into it. But I, for one, am certainly trying to take the opportunity to enjoy my last TCA, potentially, and enjoy my last Comic Con and just drink this stuff in, because you don't get to do it very often.”Jackson said that the intent was, “To knock it out of the park this last year. That's the gift FOX gave us. I think each one of us, and the ones not here… We get put forward as the face of the show, but there's 65 people sitting on our set in Vancouver who are the connective tissue, the brawns to the brain over here, and all of us want to take the opportunity that was given to us by getting this sort of kind of iffy last year and really make it the kick ass finale that we've always said we wanted for the show.”When the cast were asked what they hoped to see happen for their characters, Torv noted they couldn’t quite answer that any logner, since Wyman had given them a pretty good idea on how the series was ending. Said Torv, “What that's done is it's made me kind of stop thinking of possibilities and focusing on what we've got.”Added Jackson, “Now that we know, we can actually all get together and just focus in on the thing that will be rather than spending a whole bunch of time trying to figure out what the thing will be. Like you said, I certainly feel like the benefit of that knowledge gives us all the opportunity to do, I hope, our best work. It gives us a chance to really go out strong.”Wyman talked about his goals for the final season, noting, “We’ve done so much work to sort of get people invested in the mythology,” but that he really wanted the focus to be on the core characters and their family dynamic.Said Wyman, “You know, we've done great things. We've done missteps. We've done everything, but at the root of it all, these people are what our viewers and our fans care about... I think this year, what I'm really after is to make sure that those relationships pay off, and those relationships are the highlight of what we're talking about. When you start to be too clever and go off on different things, you can hurt yourself because you're really not focusing on what's really important.”Wyman said he leaned on advice he got from Goldsman. “I think every writer should hear it. He said, ‘You know, being clever is not really an emotion.’ And it's true, you know. So I think that now, we've done so much work to bring up so many possibilities to have the end of these characters be beautiful and touching and just meaningful, but I really want to focus on those. So for me, it is a metaphor. I'm definitely drawing a metaphor for how difficult it is to have a family in this day and age, that it's very hard to find time for each other. It's very had to keep things together, and it takes an extreme amount of effort, and I want people to watch the program and say, ‘Yeah, I can identify with loving something more than anything and loving someone in my family, and I want them all to be okay.’ So I'm really sort of adamant about focusing on that arena specifically.”