A few thoughts on the excellent season finale of "Fringe" are below. And if you're not of a mind to read my mind (via some wacky looking device that Walter made back in the day), read this interesting comparison of "Fringe" and "Dollhouse" by Nathan Alderman instead.

Sorry for the delay in posting, but I had to share a few thoughts about Tuesday's "Fringe" finale.

It was pretty swell, wasn't it?

Once again, John Noble as Walter Bishop was the best thing about the steadily improving Fox show, but there were a lot of other enjoyable elements: The quietly creepy atmosphere, the slowly building tension in the dual Walter/Olivia stories, the way those stories were skillfully woven together, the suitably tense lakeside encounter between Olivia, Peter and Mr. Jones.

Olivia's scenes with Nina Sharp were, well, sharply written, and I also enjoyed her scenes with her boss, Philip Broyles. The show still has a ways to go in fleshing out all these characters (well, except Walter), but it's certainly doing 100 times better than it was last fall in that arena. And that Walter-Observer scene? Delicious and somehow faintly sad at the same time.

The show has also been doing a fine job with the Peter-Walter relationship -- the moment between them in the pastry shop last week was brilliant. Instead of barbed banter, we just saw a quiet moment of a son's compassion for his father, who was overcome with regret and sadness.

Like the bar scene a few months ago between Olivia and Peter, it was a key moment in the emotional development of these characters, and a sign that "Fringe" is maturing into a show worth sticking with.

Sure, there are still plot shortcuts aplenty and coincidences by the dozen on this show, but when the pacing, the atmosphere and the characters are creating an interesting world, I'll give most of a lot of that stuff a pass.

Noble was so wonderful in his freakout scene at the beach house. And of course he still brings the comedy and the weirdness and the pathos and everything else. But the cool thing about "Fringe" is that now he's not the only reason to watch the show, which was more or less the case when the show began.

But back to Walter: John Noble must get an Emmy nomination this year. I demand it!

The best part of this interesting (and well-directed) finale were a few reveals that came near the end: Peter actually died back in the day. What?! Walter presumably grabbed a Peter 2.0 from some other reality, and nobody knows this but him (will we ever meet Peter's mom? Any version of her?)

William Bell, meanwhile, lives in another version of New York, one in which the Twin Towers still stand. I can't wait to see Leonard Nimoy and Noble mix it up next season.

I do hope that the show fixes what the incomparable Nathan Alderman, who wrote a great essay on comparing and contrasting "Fringe" and "Dollhouse," calls "Fringe's" central problem: Olivia is "as dull as a post." True. She's a staid combination of earnest and dull. Please, "Fringe," let her be funny. Let her be weird, just a little bit. Let her wear a color for God's sake.

I take issue with a couple of thing's in Alderman's otherwise excellent essay: I think Anna Torv is competent but not particularly charismatic. And if he's gonna say that Noble would win a "crazy-off" with "Dollhouse's" Alan Tudyk, well, them's fightin' words. 

Clearly, it would be a TIE.

Here are a few questions I was left with at the end of the "Fringe" finale:

• Is The Observer actually a version of Walter? There's more than one of everything, after all.
• Is The Observer somehow related to Walter? Is he another version of Peter? There's more than one of everything, after all.
• Is something Mr. Jones did the reason that Walter went insane and/or was committed? Or is Bell responsible for that?
• How much did you want to see what Walter's whale-shaped pancakes looked like?

A few quotes from a recent phone press conference with "Fringe" co-creator J.J. Abrams:

• "Obviously, it is not a brand new convention, the idea, especially science fiction, the idea of traveling through time and space.  But I would say that while Lost concerns itself more with traveling through time, I would say that 'Fringe' can serve itself more in traveling through space."
• "I would argue that in a way Season 2 is getting to know the enemy. Season 1 is identifying that there is an enemy and really getting to know each other. But I think that as the show progresses what you’ll see in the second season is that it's building to a very specific type of confrontation and I think that you’ll see that there will be a really interesting shift in the sort of fundamental paradigm of the show at the beginning of next season, in a very cool way."
• [On the show's frequent reliance on what even Abrams calls "massive chunks of exposition"]: "There is nothing more crazy than having that sort of massive chunk of exposition thrown at you at the beginning of the story. It is one of those things that I would love to avoid, and I think that sometimes the desire of either the producers, writers, network studio, wherever it comes from, to try and provide clarity, there is almost always the net result of confusing the hell out of people, like clarity looks like one thing on a script but is another thing ... And I feel like those kind of monologues of exposition don’t help anyone. I mean, although, by the way, I think Lance [Reddick] delivers them beautifully and he's a wonderful actor, but I think any actor tasked with catching an audience up deserves a drink at the end of the day."

My rating on the finale-o-meter: 8 out of 10.