Line #18 Fridge/Fringe


1	[[AC:FridgeBrilliance]]
2	* In the first season episode "Inner Child", Peter brings the bald child the Roadblock action figure from G.I. Joe. "Funny, I remember his scar being on the other side." [[spoiler:In the alternate universe where Peter grew up, it probably was.]]
3	* The First season episode "Bad Dreams" (S1, E17) shows the victim [[EveryoneIsJesusInPurgatory Risa Pears with three balloons on her stroller.]] Blue, red, and amber. After seeing the entire Fringe series up to season 4, you may realize that these colors can be tied to the color codes of the main universe, [[AlternateUniverse alternate universe]], and [[TimeTravel alternate timeline]] of both universes respectively. Perhaps {{foreshadowing}}?
4	* The entire episode of "Brown Betty" in ''{{Series/Fringe}}''. At first glance, this episode may appear to be funny and a bit out there (which makes sense seeing as the majority of the episode is a story that Walter is telling Ella while he is high). But if you penetrate the subtext his bizarre story is actually very close to home.
5	** What subtext? By the end, the subtext ''IS'' the text.
6	** In particular, Walter characterizing himself as "the Candy Man" reflects not only his sweet tooth and childish nature, but his desperate desire to "make the world taste good" by fixing it. This has particular relevance to [[spoiler: his abduction of Peter from the Other Side, which was his own attempt to right a tragedy but ended up having disastrous consequences.]]
7	* Episode 15 of season 2 (Jacksonville) starts with a man holding a cup of coffee, only for a colleague to ask where it came from, which might have seemed odd until you watch the episode (Making Angels) in season 4 where otherworld Astrid states that coffee is exceedingly rare on their side. It's interesting to think that the audience was given a quick preview of the alternate world and may not have even realised it.
8	* There's a brief moment in the Season 2 finale when we get a look at some of the comic books that are popular in the Alternate Universe, and we see that Denny O'Neill's ''"ComicBook/GreenLantern and ComicBook/GreenArrow"'' is called "'''''Red''''' ''Lantern and'' '''''Red''''' ''Arrow''" in this world. At first glance, the color swap appears to be a one-off joke. In RealLife, though, comic book writer Martin Nodell got the idea for Green Lantern after he went to a train station and saw an engineer [[LineOfSightName using a green lantern and a red lantern to signal to trains when to run and when to stop]]. [[TruthInTelevision So there was, in fact, a pretty good chance that the famous superhero could have ended up being called "Red Lantern" in our world too]].
9	** Of course it could also be suggestive of the darker world that is the alternate universe. A Red Ring's power is fuelled by rage rather than willpower and essentially makes the wearer a lethal warrior. Significantly, the rage must be rage motivated by personal loss, an allusion to the more dangerous world that the universe is,[[spoiler: just because Walter lost his son]]
10	* In season 3, [[spoiler: Olivia's only ally in her quest to return home is Henry, a ''cab driver''. So he's really just doing his job.]]
11	** After finding out that Nina Sharp and William Bell had a "complicated" relationship and after seeing Nina [[spoiler: kiss Broyles in the Season 2 premier, the argument Nina and Broyles have in "The Road Not Taken" comes across as less of a accusation of terrorism and more of a lover's spat.]]
12	** Fauxlivia's ruthlessness can be explained by the nature of her job. She was remarkably undisturbed in "Over There" when she and thousands of others (including her friends) were almost sealed in amber. Her job demands that some lives (including her own) must be sacrificed for the greater good. [[CrapsackWorld She does this sort of thing every day.]]
13	** Ella's strange lack of discomfort with the (fictional) murder of her mother and overall bizarreness of the world of Walter's story in "Brown Betty" is actually suggestive of the fact that one day, she'll make [[spoiler: a great Fringe Division agent, much as we see in "The Day We Died."]]
14	** The changes to the timeline [[spoiler: because of Peter's RetGone]] are made of this. There's a list on the WMG page with space reserved for speculation.
15	*** An example of this: without Peter, the cortexiphan trials collapsed inconclusively, leaving most unaffected and others in a Season-1-Cortexiphan-Child state. Why did they collapse? Because Olivia ran away. Why did she run instead of get help from Walter? Peter never convinced her to.
16	*** Walter also lost Peter at relatively the same time. "Subject 13" happened at roughly the same time Peter crossed over. During the episode, he's still dealing with the changes from crossing universes. If Peter died at Reiden Lake when Peter and Walter crossed over, then Subject 13 never happens because Walter is recovering from losing not one, but ''two'' Peters.
17	* One thing I realized about the alt-verse some time ago: Their Art/StatueOfLiberty is brown-gold, that, like the Red Lantern exampe above, could be easily mistaken as just a one-off quirkiness. But then again, our own Miss Liberty was that same color in its early days, only acquiring its verdigris crust over time. So, it's easy to assume that, since the alt-verse's technology is higher in a bunch of aspects, they had at the time some way to keep the statue's original coloring, or at least recover it at some point.
18	** It could possibly mean that the green Statue of Liberty was destroyed (through terrorism or a Fringe event), and the Statue was recently rebuilt.
19	* "Be a better man than your father" was foreshadowing the events of season 5, episode 4, [[spoiler:where Peter has to choose between trying to save his daughter and trying to save the world.]]
20	* Upon entering in Bell's safeplace, Walter stumbles upon a vinyl disc that Bell stole from him; said disc is Music/DavidBowie's ''Music/TheManWhoSoldTheWorld''. The lyrics for the TitleTrack of that particular album ([[MindScrew in one interpretation]]) talk about two men in a journey of self-discovery and what they found there, a perfect epitome of Bell's and Walter's friendship.
21	* The reason the Observers seemed relatively benevolent and allowed September to help out at first was that if the universe was destroyed, they'd be doomed too.
22	* Obviously detonating antimatter in the shipping lane wouldn't shut down their operation, because even if the opening in the future got blown to bits, as soon as it was fixed they could continue sending materials to that exact same point in time in the past.
23	* Remember that mystery guy on the zeppelin from Olivia's subconscious, and how Olivia said at the end of the episode ""...But, I think he's the man who's gonna kill me." Well, [[spoiler: the [[http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120519163740/fringe/images/3/33/Fringe_lsd_manx.jpg image on his shirt]] is the same image that appears on [[http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7e8zgudeC1r1qut1.jpg William Bell's nanites]] at the end of season 4, and Bell was indirectly responsible for killing Olivia then.]]
24	* At the end of Season 2, one of the first concrete details we get about American society in the AlternateUniverse is that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is depicted on the $20 bill. It seems like a logical choice, since he's a revered historical figure in our world as well, but it's also significant that he's replacing UsefulNotes/AndrewJackson, of all people. In the last few decades, there's been some controversy about the appropriateness of putting Jackson on official American currency because of his role in passing the Indian Removal Act, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Native Americans. Replacing ''his'' image with that of the most famous Civil Rights activist in American history is a convenient way to show that Fauxlivia and company live in a more progressive society than we do.
25
26
27	[[AC:FridgeHorror]]
28	* If you think the people of Edina are deformed now, wait until after a couple of generations of inbreeding...
29	* What have the observers done to humanity if things like Joy, Individuality, Imagination and Free Will are fringe sciences.
30	* Blue!Nina lost her arm trying to stop Walter from crossing universes and William Bell made her the replacement. She was "a mess" afterwards according to Sam. Learning to use that arm properly may have taken years. [[spoiler: Alternate Nina]] was crazy enough to agree to cutting off her own hand.
31	* [[spoiler: The Observers are from the future. An evolution of humanity. So where are all the women?]]
32	** The most recent episode suggests that [[spoiler: Observers are artificially grown and created]]. This might not only imply that they are a single-sex species now but it might even indicate that they are sexless.
33	* [[spoiler: The Observers may have never invaded their own universe in season 5. It's possible that they were created in the Red Universe, consider: In season 3's The Plateau scientists create a drug that allows vast intellect that eventually erodes emotion altogether and the Observers, while spending a decent amount of time in the Redverse, don't interfere there nearly as much as they do in the Blueverse - they don't want to mess with the events that will lead to them being created in the Redverse. at the end of season 5 Walter and Michael may very well be going to the future of the Redverse, not the Blue one. The Redverses future may have a different but similar version of the drug we see in The Plateau. ]]
34	* Edwin sacrifices his life to help the Fringe team to defeat the Observers so that his son River will have the possibility of a better world, right? Except that the plan all along was to stop the Observer invasion in the first place, preventing that timeline from ever coming into being. Edwin only really manages to prevent his son from ever existing.
35	** At that point though, no one even knows what the plan is. They've got one random bit of it, they know it's intended to get rid of the Observers, but they're missing most of the information and the context and all they tell people is "we have a plan to get rid of the Observers."
36	* When you think about what the people on board the container ships have signed up for ([[spoiler:they have mutated into new creatures to populate the new world]]) it really is quite horrible. [[spoiler:There is no indication that there is any animal life being created other than them for this new world, and so for them to survive as species, they will all need to have their own place on the new food chain. When they signed up, did they know that a lot of them will be eaten by other members of this cult?]]
37	* We first encounter Amber in the third episode, "The Ghost Network", in which [[VillainOfTheWeek Matthew Ziegler]] releases it on a commuter bus, killing eleven people. Later in the series, though, we learn that people trapped in Amber are actually in some sort of biological stasis ([[{{Handwave}} ...somehow]]) and can be revived, provided it's done more or less immediately after they're extracted -- meaning the Fringe team could have saved all those people if only they'd known. Indeed, you could even go so far as to say it wasn't actually Ziegler that killed those people -- the Fringe team themselves unknowingly did so when they extracted them from the Amber.
38
39	[[AC:FridgeTearJerker]]
40
41	* At the end of "Making Angels" we meet [[spoiler: Astrid's dad]] - an older man, overweight, unsteady on his feet, and with likely heart and diabetes issues. It's very likely that the two universes are going to match a bit more, very soon.
42
43	[[AC:FridgeLogic]]
44	* Episode 2 has a woman given a muscle paralyser before she died, which somehow halts the neural transmission in her eye so that Fringe can recreate the image of the last thing she saw. Excluding the fact that neurotransmission does not work that way, skeletal muscles have ''nicotinic'' receptors and the receptors in the retina are ''glutamate'' receptors.
45	* A Mad Scientist Of The Week put himself in a wheelchair by draining too much of his own spinal fluid, apparently to a point where his spinal cord began to die. But the fluid in question is properly called ''cerebro''spinal fluid, and it circulates freely between the spinal and cranial cavities: losing enough of it to damage the spinal cord should've damaged his ''brain'' as well, rendering him incapable of the work he did with Walter in the episode. Furthermore, when Walter extracts more fluid from the man, it ''does'' damage his brain... but many hours after his previous extraction, by which time his supply should've replenished itself naturally.
46	* I haven't finished the series yet, so maybe this is answered, but I can't help think that there's a couple of really big problems with the whole "Time Traveling Invaders from the Future" thing in season 5. Among other things...How it is possible for them to lose, when they know what will happen in advance, so it shouldn't be difficult to stop the rebels from ever gaining any ground because they should already know who the rebels are and what they plan to do, then go back and stop them before they do it. There's also the inherent problem with going back 600 years and wiping out massive chunks of your own ancestors to claim the world for your own. What exactly keeps you from not wiping your own future/present out in the process? Because I can only imagine how much you've changed the future by killing 50-90% of your ancestors.
47	** Given how it works out ([[spoiler:a ResetButton ending]]), it's seems there's something like the [[spoiler:Paradox Machine in Series/DoctorWho]] at work. We only catch [[CrypticBackgroundReference glimpses]] of their future and how it works, especially regarding their actual plans for the invasion, but them having that sort of technology makes sense given how even detonating anti-matter in the time tunnel couldn't shut down their operations.
48	** September actually said that they are from one future, one of the timelines branching off from now. The one they come from and the one they create by invading the past are probably not the same but existing parallel, so they don't know what will happen in this one.

Context Fridge / Fringe