Entertainment
16 Years Later, ‘Fringe’s Groundbreaking Reveal Is Still Sci-Fi at Its Best
In a way, Fringe is still enjoying the last laugh. Never a ratings flop for FOX but still criminally underrated during its five seasons, the 2008 drama’s visionary pedigree, innovative substance, eccentric humor, and one-in-a-million cast have secured its cult classic longevity. Showrunners Jeff Pinkner and J. H. Wyman reinforce their intricate mythology about parallel dimensions and doppelgängers with weighty thematic equivalents — identity, family, responsibility, love’s manifold consequences — while their nigh-seamless narrative framework keeps the most earnest sentiments from dissolving into saccharine triteness.
Fringe had already been solidifying its unique procedural-turned-serialized sensibilities by Season 2’s midway point. The second season’s sixteenth episode, “Peter,” marks a defining moment as figuratively seismic as the planet’s tectonic plates shifting under viewers’ rattling feet. For the first time, Fringe flourishes into one of televised sci-fi’s crowning achievements — in no small part because the episode’s driving crux exemplifies the genre’s enduring fusion of imaginative scope and achingly resonant heart.
‘Fringe’s “Peter” Episode Is the Sci-Fi Show’s Finest Hour
“Peter” deviates from Fringe‘s established format by unfolding as a flashback set within the contemporary framing device of Walter Bishop (John Noble) confessing his sins — specifically, the truth about his son Peter’s (Joshua Jackson) origins — to Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv). Even for a show increasingly comfortable with experimentation, the episode all but thrums with the sharpened texture and potent intentionality this freedom affords. Several long-standing mysteries receive rewarding payoffs, and the same newfound context informs future chain reactions.
“Peter” turns this half-culmination, half-prelude into an experience as disarmingly arresting as a blow to the solar plexus. Fringe‘s looming war emerges from the perfectly imperfect reality of human reaction; a grieving father tears asunder reality’s supposedly immutable boundaries. The kind of cosmic-level cost one would attribute to a supervillain’s experimental hubris — risking an entire universe — instead hails from a ruined, heartbroken man incapable of outmaneuvering his son’s fatal illness.
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What’s more, the Walter of 1985 doesn’t hatch some malevolent plan to kidnap “Walternate’s” son as if the two Peters are interchangeable replacements. That motivation is too simplistic for a series concerned with the mosaic of ways trauma, death, and isolation shape our already multidimensional psychologies. Rather, Walter intervenes as a compassionate, desperate, and completely irrational last resort, unable to witness the same irreversible tragedy befalling the only other Peter Bishop in existence.
Make no mistake — he weighs billions of innocent lives against one child. With all the simultaneous authority of a bereaved parent who can’t perceive a way forward and a scientist with a god complex, he chooses the latter’s survival, rejecting his colleagues’ warnings and all the detached tenets of his trade. And once he’s staring at the embodiment of an open wound, he also negates his white-knight promise to return Peter-2 to his loving home. Walter surrenders to temptation after temptation while trying to soothe his unbearable devastation. Interpreting an unconscionable act into something understandable — even sympathetic — is one of fiction’s strongest magic tricks in action.
John Noble’s Brilliant Performance in “Peter” Brings ‘Fringe’s Theoretical Ideas To Aching Life
One can’t wax rhapsodic about “Peter” without casting every known superlative in Noble’s direction. One might even risk hyperbole and call the actor’s entire Fringe run as faultlessly captivating. In this pivotal instance, his staggering performance shoulders the emotional core of what’s essentially a solo piece, a character study, and the axis upon which Fringe‘s future rests, with all the precise layering of pathos, intimacy, and restraint befitting such a Herculean task.
Even in Fringe-land, “Peter” provides a rare opportunity to compare the rhythms of present-day Walter with the past’s pre-quasi-lobotomized incarnation. The former is endearingly kooky to the point of almost harmless yet eternally guilt-ridden, longing for forgiveness while convinced he’s too irredeemable to deserve such mercy; the latter’s haunted by both the repercussions of his selfishness and, in his mind, failing to protect his child. No matter which timeline or dimension, all Walter Bishops contain the same capacity for active good, blithe negligence, disturbing arrogance, fragile vulnerability, and delayed clarity. It’s a suitably tragic irony that Walter inflicts similar heartbreak upon his parallel self, launches an interdimensional war, and ensures Peter’s fate as the multiverse’s sacrificial linchpin.
In the grand scheme of Fringe‘s one hundred episodes, “Peter” remains the series’ breakthrough masterstroke. If that wasn’t enough, this singular installment encapsulates the soaring power of sci-fi at its height by hewing to the genre’s unspoken rule of making the theoretical personal. Science function houses infinite ideas, but even the most ingenious concepts become a dime a dozen when they fail to root themselves in the familiar breadth and overwhelming gravitas of human experience. Fringe‘s dystopian universe-hopping is inseparable from the fact that Walter’s choice — one few people could summon enough strength to resist — emerges from raw familial love.
