Fringe Forums

The Pilot"

My, have the relationships between the characters evolved ! Olivia's first meeting with Peter : I know she's under stress, but she basically threatens him ! But I also remember thinking, the first time I saw this scene ( or one of the first times anyway ) that they were so antagonistic that they could end up together, in a Leia-Han kind of way; and look where we're now. Peter and Walter : even MORE antagonistic, to the point where Peter physically assaults Walter when he's taking a sample from Scott. "I love you dad" was very far ! I didn't remember Broyles was such a jerk back then. Maybe because he was written to be some kind of roadblock for Olivia, like Skinner was in earlier episodes of X-Files ? Nina warns Olivia "like she'd warn her own daughter". Now we know she wasn't threatening, as we were supposed to think, she really considered Olive as a mother figure would. The season 4 reboot didn't come from nowhere, did it ?

Other little surprise : Jacksonville is mentioned. Did the writers planed that far ahead Olivia's arc ? Did they just find the name cool and used it more than once ?

Was it ever explained who Steig worked for ? He's an ex-Massive Dynamic, so ZFT maybe ?

"The Arrival"

We still don't know who Mosley was. Not an Observer, he's got eyebrows ( real ones, or else it would have been mentioned ). Maybe he was working for the military guy from " Fracture", the one who thought the Observers were spies ? ( Good intuition, by the way ) It doesn't explain how he's acquired futuristic weaponry and tech, but that's my best guess now.

"The Equation"

The "other Walter" was puzzling, but "Black blotter" kinda answered that : Walter's return to Saint-Claire reactivated his fear of the man he was, the man Carla Warren died to stop, which sent him there. Are you currently rewatching Fringe, or do you plan to ? And if you do, are you discovering new things in hindsight ?

"Safe/Bound"

"Do you need the room ?" Walter is so cute when he's trying to play matchmaker ... keep it up, Walter, the effort will pay off !

Little question : how did ZFT know about Walter's teleporter, and that Olivia was a cortexi-kid ? I'm beginning to think William Bell told them, and he was a villain before the season 4 reboot ... Think about it : maybe he helped the team because Walternate threatened to destroy the blue universe ... and Bell needed both universes to create his "big bang" ... Is it possible he was already insane back then ?

Ella and Rachel ... hmmm ... wondered where they went in season 3 : season 4 explained that Rachel never divorced, but in season 3 ? Maybe Fauxlivia somehow sent them away to protect her cover ? Thoughts ?

"Ability"

So, Olivia "activated" when Peter came back ... Probably, in hindsight, a clue she was already feeling some attraction for him ( since, as Walter puts it, she's triggered by "love and fear" )

"Inner child"

More evidence of my previous theory : I guess the CIA guy who's trying to take Michael away is, like John Mosley and the colonel from "Fracture", part of an anti-Observer faction who may, or may not, know about the upcoming invasion, like Bell seemed to in "Brave new world"

I wonder what happened to the family Michael was sent to, since the one we met in "Black blotter" was obviously not the same one. Maybe something changed with the reboot ???

"Bad dreams"

Funny to think that the first alternate character played by Anna Torv wasn't even another Olivia, but Nick Lane !

Walter claims cortexiphan was Bell's idea and he was the one conducting the trials, which we now know isn't true : memory lapse ? evidence of a retcon by the writers ? pure and simple lie ? ( since the last scene clearly shows he was involved, I'll go with the latter )

"The Road not taken"

Is the other reality Olivia sees here the Red universe ? So many things don't add up : Broyles and the Fringe division members are still FBI, not military, the twin sisters experienced the same side-effects of cortexiphan than in the blue universe although the red universe doesn't have cortexiphan ... You could say the writers hadn't defined the finer details of the red universe at that point ( there should be zeppelins in the World trade center scene next episode, and there aren't ... ), but there's a way to reconcile everything : it hasn't been confirmed it was indeed the red universe, so we can consider it's a third, separate universe ( yellow universe ? ) Sure, the red universe seems to be the "closer" one, the easiest one to travel to, thanks to Walter's interference, but Olivia seemed to only experience visions, not physically "go" there, even if she's had some interaction with Broyles and Charlie ... by the way, what exactly happened was ill-defined : what do you think ? It seems she takes control of her double, but some details don't fit ... By the way, I hadn't noticed before William Bell's half-erased name on the door of Walter's lab ! Nice touch !

"Momentum deferred"

I still find the team galactically stupid at the end of the episode : they know "Charlie" was wrong or lying when he said he killed a shapeshifter, and they NEVER question his testimony and suspect him ? Olivia has a device to check the face of the shapeshifter ( which, by the way, never even remotely looked like Nina ) , and she blindly believes Charlie when he accuses Nina ? She never trusted Nina in that timeline, and trusted Charlie completely, but still, if there was a time to be extra paranoid and check everything, this was it ! I know the plot needed the shapeshifters to find Newton's head, but wasn't there any other way than making the Fringe division look like complete morons ?

"New day in the old town"

Hey, one the senators is the one who's later revealed to have been shapeshifted ! Hadn't noticed him the first time ...