Series / Fringe

Anyone up for a root beer float?

"We create technology. How it is used is not our concern."

— Nina Sharp

Fringe is a FOX Science Fiction TV series created by J. J. Abrams and his compatriots Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. Other Abrams coworkers from Lost and Alias are involved as well.

Conceptually, Fringe is not unlike The X-Files, with the primary threat being Mad Scientist terrorists instead of an Alien Invasion. In practice, it is like The X-Files meets CSI. Like Abrams' other shows, it has a slowly developing Myth Arc involving an Alternate Universe, mysterious "Observers," an Action Girl, and crazy, off-the-wall happenings right from the get-go. It's quite a Mind Screw.

Tie-in media includes:

• Fringe (2008-2009)
• Fringe: Tales from the Fringe (2010-2011)
• Beyond The Fringe (2011-2012)
• Fringe: September's Notebook (2013)
• Fringe: The Zodiac Paradox (2013)
• Fringe: The Burning Man (2013)
• Fringe: Sins of the Father (2013)

WARNING: This page contains a large number of unmarked spoilers. Tropers new to Fringe, proceed at your own risk. ^note Seriously, don't spoil yourself.

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Tropes include:

Tropes A-E

• Aborted Arc:
  • Agent Amy Jessup was brought in during the Season 2 opening and looked to be bringing in some religious interpretations to the Fringe cases. She appeared in two episodes, then was dropped without a word of explanation.
  • During Season 1, Peter was being shadowed by a heavy called Big Eddie, but Peter's shady past was never pursued past the middle of the season.
  • While Olivia's abusive stepfather was alluded to a few times and even appeared in a Season 3 flashback episode, the idea of him stalking Olivia in the present was dropped after Season 1. (Amber!Olivia says that she killed him, but doesn't go into any other details.)
  • At the very end of Season 3's "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide", Olivia claims that the mysterious man in the blimp is the person who's going to kill her. Take a wild guess where that went.
    • This is up to interpretation, though; many people believe that the man in the X shirt was a subconscious representation of William Bell, who led her to her death in season four.
    • This doesn't need any interpretation. The 'X' symbol on the shirt of the man in the blimp in 3x19 is identical to 'X' signature left on the nanites by William Bell in 4x21. He is unambiguously who "Mr. X" in the blimp refers to.
  • Towards the end of Season 1, Olivia's sister Rachel announces that her estranged husband is suing for divorce and for custody of their daughter Ella. Olivia asks Broyles if he can recommend his divorce lawyer. We hear nothing more of this plot after this, and we also don't see much of Rachel and Ella, who had been prominent characters.
• Above Good and Evil: In the episode Amber 31422, the other Walter Bishop, the inventor of the titular substance, says to Broyles: "Nature doesn't recognize good and evil, Philip. Nature only recognizes balance and imbalance. I intend to restore balance to our world. Whatever it takes."
• Absence of Evidence: Discussed in "The Consultant". Fauxlivia is trying to find the one responsible for Lincoln's murder and can't find any evidence. Walter refers to "the dog that didn't bark". It falls a little flat since there is no Sherlock Holmes in the Alternate Universe.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Subverted in "Unleashed" as they are specifically referred to as "storm drains" several times, and only as "sewers" peripherally.
• Accidental Misnaming:
  • Walter can never remember Astrid's name. The things he's called her thus far include such gems as Astral, Asterisk, Australis, Asteroid, Ostrich, and Ashram.
    Walter: "Astral!"
    Astrid: "My name is ASTRID."
    Walter: "...Projection! Astral projection!"
  • Subverted in "What Lies Below" (2x12) when he says Ash, but it turns out it's his "Eureka!" Moment.
  • It looks like he's finally about to get her name right in "Brown Betty" when he's about to name her character in the story he's telling... but at the last second he names her Esther Figglesworth. Astrid's look of pure exasperation is priceless.
  • He does get it right in "The Road Not Taken" (1x19) - so naturally she wasn't there to hear it (he was alone in the lab at the time).
    Walter: "Oh Astrid, I've found it."
  • He also remembers in "Snakehead" (2x09), when he's worried sick that he got her followed by gang members. She's not around then, either.
  • And, as of "The Box," we're back:
    Walter: Aspirin, we need to go to the market!
  • He finally gets it right, to her face, in "Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep?", to her surprise. To both of their surprise, actually. Walter suggests it's because he's on a different blend of drugs at the time.
  • In response to Walter calling her Astro for the hundredth time, she calls him Wallie (3x19). The look on Walter's face is amazingly hilarious.
  • He gets it right again in "The Last Sam Weiss" - but only after being struck by lightning twice.
  • As of 4x02, it looks like Lincoln is gonna join the party too.
    Walter: Kennedy, help me!
    • Wrong President.
  • "Really? Claire? That doesn't even start with an A!"
  • In "Making Angels" (4x11), Walter gets Alternate Universe Astrid's name right.
  • He gets it right in the season finale, at the conclusion of a total tearjerker moment:
    Walter: It's a beautiful name.
    Astrid: What is?
    Walter: Astrid.
  • It's implied by the mid-point of the Second or Third season that Walter knows exactly what Astrid's name is, as he often gets it right during emotional moments, but chooses to continue misnaming her, possibly simply because it annoys her.
• Action Girl:
  • Olivia Dunham. "Bound" will dispel any doubts on this count.
  • Altlivia definitely qualifies.
  • Henrietta Bishop takes after her parents.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Peter mentions the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Olivia. This version starred Leonard Nimoy, who plays William Bell.
  • Walter's research on LSD-induced hallucinations that can grant the subject clairvoyance is similar to the plot of the book (and later film) Altered States. The film version starred Blair Brown, who plays Nina Sharp.
  • Among William Bell's books in the episode "Concentrate and Ask Again" is a copy of a book by Dr. Spock. Another Leonard Nimoy reference.
  • Peter and Olivia meet with a conspiracy theorist who believes himself to be Spock from Star Trek: The Original Series. You should already know who played Spock. Additionally, the conspiracy theorist is played by Clint Howard who also appeared as a guest star in one of the first Star Trek episodes. More of a Director Allusion, but the story that he tells is somewhat similar to the plot line of Star Trek (2009). However, this was probably intentional as the episode aired in the opening week of the film, and therefore was used to promote it in the process.
  • The episode "Stowaway" involves a woman named Grey who is suicidal after losing her family. The climax of the episode involves a train bombing. Who was she played by? Amanda Greystone.
  • The Season 4 finale featured another character played by Rebecca Mader who near death starting talking like a child. Albeit this time Mader's character's mind reverted to a child's after death, not prior to it.
  • Walter is fixated on the death of his son to the point of insanity. Rather like John Noble's character in The Lord of the Rings.
  • In the fourth season, when David Robert Jones is arrested, they briefly note that they called the Scotland Yard because of his accent. Jared Harris has faced the Scotland Yard before.
  • Joe Flanigan being killed by a lifeforce vampire in his Season 4 appearance can't be a coincidence.
  • This isn't the first time Brad Dourif tries bringing the end of mankind.
  • Henry Higgins alludes to a troubled backstory in his first appearance, while empathizing with Olivia. Andre Royo is famous for his portrayal of a drug addict in The Wire.
• Alas, Poor Villain: More sympathetic villains who cause their own deaths typically get this reaction, in episodes like "Dream Logic", "One Night In October", "Wallflower" and "Making Angels".
• Aliens in Cardiff: The series takes place almost entirely in Boston, which isn't really know for much other than, well, the band, its famous New England clam chowder, and beans. Yet bio-terrorists, mad scientists, powerful corporations, alternate universe inhabitants, and invaders from the future all really seem to dig the place for one reason or another. It's actually Walter Bishop's fault entirely. Before, it was nothing more than the city he lived and worked in. But after he tried to save Peter and shattered the membrane between universes, he inadvertently turned nearly the entire state into a Hellmouth with Boston as the epicenter, with the laws of entropy dictating it as a Weirdness Magnet.
• All for Nothing: Peter's plan to devastate the Observer's supply chain from the future in "An Origin Story" accomplishes absolutely nothing.
• All Germans Are Nazis: "The Bishop Revival" featured a very stereotypical German (round glasses, hairstyle, clothing, accent) who is revealed to be an original Nazi. And guess what he was doing? Trying to create a virus for eugenics, of course! The same episode reveals Walter and Peter's German background, which has to be something of an aversion in that while their ancestor was a Nazi scientist, he actually worked as an Allied spy, subverting the war effort behind the lines.
• All Theories Are True: The entire premise of the show.
• Almost Kiss: Peter and Olivia have one of these in "Jacksonville" (2x16).
• Alone with the Psycho: Olivia ends up alone with a Villain of the Week with cancerous touch.
• Alternate Universe: A huge part of the show's central mythology.
  • And if you thought that was bad, now we have an established Alternate History since the start of Season 4. In both universes.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: Walternate.
• Always Close: In "Enemy of My Enemy", 4x09, Olivia tries to chase Jones through to the Other Side in her SUV. Peter warns her about the risk of a Portal Cut, and she barely stops her car in time because of it. The entire front of the engine is cut off, and moments later, that would've included her as well.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Father: Peter visibly cringes whenever his father makes an embarrassing non-sequitur.
• Ambiguously Human: The Observers, at first. It's eventually revealed that they are human, or at least, they once were.
• Amnesiac Dissonance: Walter. Even he admits that going crazy was honestly the best thing that ever happened to him, since it stopped him from going down a path he knows he wouldn't have come back from.
  • When Walter is temporarily reconnected to the missing parts of his brain, we see him immediately become cold, detached, and assertive, and show nothing but utter contempt to anyone who gets in his way.
  • It seems like after Windmark mind whammyed Walter that he was back to his old self, but in "Through The Looking Glass and What Walter Found There," Walter realizes that integrating the missing parts of his brain is changing him back into his more ruthless self. And he's deathly afraid of what he might do.
• Anachronism Stew: In "Brown Betty", Walter tells Olivia's niece a story in the style of Film Noir - with clothes, hairstyles and interior based on the 1940s - oh, and computers, mobile phones and quantum lasers. In his defence, Walter was hopped up on drugs at the time. Not to mention the fact that he's completely crazy anyway. It was just a fairy tale story for Olivia's niece, so it's probably a good thing to really just relax.
• Anachronic Order: September's appearances don't occur in the order that he experiences them.
• Analogy Backfire: "Nothing grows on scorched Earth." Clearly Captain Windmark has never been to Australia.
• And I Must Scream: Happens a lot.
  • Peter's flyover of the Alternate New York includes the tidbit that people in the Madison Square Garden quarantine zone have just recently been declared legally dead. Quarantine encases a large area in an amber-like substance.
  • In "Amber 31422", Walternate mentions the likely theory that those trapped in Amber are in suspended animation. It's later revealed that this is correct - and they are stuck thinking the last thought in their heads when the amber engulfed them.
  • They guy from 1x02 uses a muscle paralyser to prevent his victims from moving while he removes their pituitary glands.
  • Olivia in "Entrada". They were going to remove her organs. While she was awake and completely conscious. They even drew guidelines so she knew exactly what they were going to do.
  • Milo Stanfield in "The Plateau" becomes so intelligent his thoughts can no longer be interpreted by other human beings, and he will only be able to communicate with a machine for the rest of his life.
  • Simon Foster's fate. He's got a mouth but screaming is rather difficult without lungs or a body.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Sanford Harris's death.
• Animal Motifs: The Observers are often likened to lizards.
• Animal Wrongs Group: In "Unleashed", these guys let the monster-of-the-week out. They chose poorly.
• Anti-Hero: The more we find out about Walter Bishop's past, the more it seems like putting him in the asylum was the right choice.
• Anti-Villain:
  • Doctor Nayak. An addict with a Jekyll and Hyde split personality, he wasn't even fully conscious of what he was doing, and his look of horror as he becomes aware of what his darker half has been doing is truly heartbreaking.
  • Alistair Peck, a man who was willing to go to any lengths to perfect time travel to save his fiance from her tragic death.
  • Alan Ruck plays a scientist who stumbles across a possible cure for his paraplegic son, and becomes so desperate to perfect it that he kills several other crippled people that he used for test subjects.
  • Dana Gray. A woman who watched her family murdered before her eyes, and normally would've been killed herself, but because of bizarre events ended up unable to die. She only wanted to end that.
  • Eugene from Wallflower.
  • Ultimately, Walternate.
    • Well, technically a different Walternate, he didn't get memories restored. Though its never really explored just how different the second version of the Alternate Universe is from its first incarnation.
  • Raymond and Kate from "And Those We Left Behind". Kate wasn't even aware her proofs where being used, and her husband Raymond had no concept of the consequences his actions had. All he wanted was to get his Kate back, before her early-onset Alzheimer's destroyed her mind.
• Apocalypse How: Class X-4. The entire Alternate Universe is destroyed, and as a consequence the inextricably linked Primary Universe is also doomed. Luckily, Mental Time Travel fixed it.
• Applied Phlebotinum: What do people who've taken Coretexiphan do? What don't they do? Cortexiphan has been described as making those taking it better able to tap into their inner powers, which, being that every human is unique, is different for every person.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Peter frequently lampshades whatever weirdness is going on in the current episode. However, by halfway through the first series, he stops being actively skeptical and instead simply points the weirdness out.
  • In "Unearthed", Walter gets into a heated argument with a priest over whether "possessions" are a real (but misinterpreted) phenomenon or nothing more than superstition. The man of science and the man of faith are on precisely the opposite sides you'd expect, though Walter points out that the Bible itself contains numerous instances of such phenomena occuring.
• Arc Numbers: Like other shows by J. J. Abrams, there are numbers that often reoccur:
  • Examples of the number 47 appearing:
    • In "Pilot" (1x1), there are 147 passengers on Flight 627.
    • In "In Which We Meet Mr. Jones" (1x7), Loeb mentions something on page 47 of the document he’s looking at.
    • In "Safe" (1x10), the flight with the veterans on it is said to have landed 47 minutes ago.
    • In "The Transformation" (1x13), there are 147 passengers on Flight 718.
    • In "Ability" (1x14), the bomb is located on the 47th floor of the building. The bomb also consists of 47 lights.
    • In "Inner Child" (1x15), the clue the child writes for Olivia is “547 Marlborough.”
    • In "Fracture" (2x3), Walter says that he “stopped counting at 47 needle-marks” when asked how many were present on a corpse.
    • In "Momentum Deferred" (2x4), it is revealed that the shapeshifters’ blood is 47% mercury.
    • In "Johari Window" (2x12), 47 people were born in Edina between 1990 and 2000.
    • In "Jacksonville" (2x15), Broyles says that the list of buildings that might disappear has been narrowed down to 147.
    • In "Brown Betty" (2x20), Peter says that there are 147 pins in the map in his kitchen. Another one is that Nina Sharp's private parking space is No. 47.
    • In "Over There, Part 2" (2x23), the Alternate Universe Fringe team locates Olivia when her “Show Me” passes an auto-checkpoint in Sector 47.
    • In "6:02 EST" (3x20), the electromagnetic spike occurs at 5:47 A.M.
    • In "The Day We Died" (3x22), the Bad Future takes place when Peter is 47 years old.
    • In "Novation" (4x5), the shapeshifter gets the typewriter that communicates with the Other Side out of a storage locker marked 47.
    • In "And Those We've Left Behind" (4x6), the time chamber Raymond Green created can't last for more than 47 minutes each time.
    • In "Enemy of My Enemy" (4x9), Mr. Jones says that he has made 47 shapeshifters so far.
    • In "Making Angels" (4x11), the suspect of the week carries TSA badge 0047.
  • The number seven itself appears to have some great importance:
    • Walter was institutionalized for seventeen years.
    • Peter died when he was seven years old.
    • Peter has been arrested seven times.
    • Peter and Olivia first met when Peter was seven years old.
    • There were thirty-seven children in the Cortexiphan trials.
  • 6:02 AM EST, the time when the Machine activates and destroys both universes, and the title of the episode in which it takes place.
    • One commercial consisted entirely of the text "6:02 AM" with no context, weeks before the finale.
    • The titular Box that kills people with ultrasonic noise and is a component in the Machine activates in a subway at 6:02
• Arc Symbol: The White Tulip.
• Arc Words:
  • "The Pattern"
  • "The First People"
  • "Be a better man than your father."
• Archnemesis Dad: Walternate to Peter in Season 3, especially in the season finale's Bad Future.
• Artistic License – Biology: Walter describes a clearly single celled organism as a Virus. He even answers in the affirmative when asked if it is a single cell. Viruses are less than a cell, being simply genetic material in a protein sheath. As such it would not be able to move under its own power.
• Artistic License – Military: A truly inexplicable one: S 1 E 4 "The Arrival" has Colonel Jacobson, who investigated a similar incident at Quantico in 1987. In his house, you see a picture of him in his younger days wearing a junior enlisted Navy uniform instead of a Marine officer's uniform. He shows a picture from the incident: a master sergeant who was guarding the base at the time. The master sergeant is wearing the uniform that the Army (NOT the Marine Corps) adopted in 2005, even though the uniform that the entire military used in 1987 is readily available in props departments.
• Ascetic Aesthetic: Massive Dynamic is in love with this style.
• Asshole Victim: The two kids who get killed by Gus at the beginning of "Alone In the World" are bullies who were planning on beating up the Woobie. A somewhat disturbing example since little to no sympathy is extended to them by any of the cast members, despite the fact that they're still just 12-year-olds.
• The Atoner: Walter becomes this by the end of the series. Essentially, everything that happens is a direct or indirect result of his breaching the gap between the two universes. In the series finale, he sacrifices himself to take Michael into 2167 to ensure the Observers never exist - at least, not as the cold, calculating robot-like people they've been known as - effectively fixing the universe, at least to some extent.
• Autopsy Snack Time:
  • Walter often eats while examining corpses or other Squick-inducing things.
  • An unfortunate mortician refuses to answer the phone during his lunch break in "Alone In The World", as a consequence missing a warning call and catching a face full of deadly spores from the corpse he was eating next to.
• Awesome by Analysis: Used by the Villain of the Week in "The Plateau" to cause Disaster Dominoes to kill people.
• Awful Truth: Peter is not Walter's son. Walter abducted him from the other side after his son died.
• Back for the Dead: Several of the Cortexiphan patients from season one. None of them last long in the alternate universe.
• Back for the Finale: Fauxlivia, Lincoln, and December.
• Backup Twin: A (sort of) in-universe example when Walter takes Peter from the alternate universe after his Peter dies.
• Badass Bookworm: Peter Bishop.
• Badass Bystander: The one security guard who takes on a shapeshifter in Momentum Deferred, after getting shot in the gut.
• Badass Family: The Bishops, as well as Astrid, Nina and Broyles.
• Badass Longcoat: Peter, again. Not to forget Olivia. Captain Windmark is a villainous example.
• Bad Future: More than one.
  • "The Day we Died"
  • "Letters of Transit"
  • All of season 5.
• Bait-and-Switch: Walter requests a spoon and a scalpel when the team learns they will need to pass a retinal scanner, implying he is about to cut out their captive's eye. Cut to Walter working with a severed eye... from a pig.
• Bald of Authority: Philip Broyles.
• Bald of Evil: The Observers.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Elizabeth Bishop was overjoyed upon seeing Peter alive again and seemed more unwilling to give up her "son" than Walter was, leading him to eventually decide to give up trying to return Peter back to the Alternate Universe. Unfortunately, because Elizabeth was left as the one responsible for maintaining The Masquerade around Peter, she turned to alcohol to cope with the stress, leading her to be Driven to Suicide.
• Bed Trick:
  • Fauxlivia does this to Peter. Well, sort of.
  • The Villain of the Week in "A Short Story About Love" attempts this.
• Becoming the Mask: "Do Shapeshifters Dream Of Electric Sheep" reveals that this can happen to shapeshifters.
  • Happened to Peter, who eventually forgot about his childhood in the alternate universe.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Poor Astrid, at least at first.
  Astrid: I went to Quantico for this?
• Berserk Button:
  • Walter gets very angry when Peter's life is put in jeopardy as a direct result of already losing him once.
  • Holding a knife to Peter Bishop in an attempt to activate Olivia's Cortexiphan enhanced abilities works spectacularly. Just be careful that she doesn't fry you like crispy bacon in the process.
• Best of All Possible Worlds: Played with after Peter is erased from history. While many things have changed, the bad things and the good things changed are sprinkled evenly across both universes, and no Reset Button seems forthcoming.
• Big Bad:
  • David Robert Jones in Seasons 1 and 4 with William Bell as The Man Behind the Man in the latter.
  • Walternate in Seasons 2 and 3.
  • Captain Windmark in Season 5.
• Big Blackout: As a result of Olivia using her cortexiphan powers to throw a car at Windmark.
• Big "NO!": Peter does this when Walter shoots Olivia in "Brave New World".
• Bio Data: A couple of times, notably in the first season when ZFT would leave a "calling card" in the DNA of their genetically engineered weapons.
  • A similar calling card was later discovered on the Nazi toxin in Season 2, in this case, the image of the seahorse, a clue that Walter Bishop's father's research had been used to create the toxin.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • In "Welcome to Westfield" (4x12). While Olivia, Peter, Walter, and the remaining survivors are able to get out safely, there is absolutely nothing left of the town (not even any other potential survivors).
  • "A Short Story About Love." Olivia remembers Peter, Peter realises that he was home all along and the episode ends in an Orbital Kiss. But Olivia will no longer remember her mother-daughter relationship with Nina Sharp.
  • "Letters of Transit." The Observers have taken over the world, Walter Took a Level in Jerkass, Nina is in a wheelchair, Broyles looks like he's aged a hundred years,the team have been in amber for 20 years, William Bell might need to borrow Nina's arm if he ever gets out of the amber because Walter chopped his off, Simon sacrificed himself to save Peter, Etta grew up without her parents, it looks like Olivia is dead... but Etta is reunited with her family, Olivia and the Bishops apparently bested Jones and they have a plan to stop the Observers. It's not much, but it's something.
  • "Worlds Apart." To stop Jones from ripping apart two universes, they need to close the bridge. Closing the bridge will stop the other world from healing. But there's peace between their worlds now. And Lincoln is staying in the other universe with Fauxlivia.
  • "Brave New World", verging on Downer Ending. They've stopped Bell, saved Olivia and there is now another Baby Bishop on the way. Oh... and the Observers are going to take over the world.
  • The series finale, "An Enemy of Fate." Time is reset, so the Observer invasion and dictatorship never happens. But September/Donald dies in the fight to make sure it happens, and in his place Walter takes young Michael to 2167 - whence he will never come back, or else he would trigger a time paradox.
• Black-Tie Infiltration: One episode involves one by Olivia and a man who, because of experiments performed on him as a child, can read minds, attending such an event in order to snuff out the Villain of the Week before they can commit more assassinations.
• The Blank:
  • Turns lethal when a string of victims' facial features start rapidly growing over, causing death by suffocation. Even a tracheotomy can't save them, as the growing tissue quickly seals any such air holes as fast as they are made.
  • A relatively tamer version appears in a hallucination in "Dream Logic" (2x05).
  • In the series finale, the Fringe team uses the entire arsenal of toxins and weapons they've collected over the years to Storm the Castle. The camera lingers meaningfully on an Observer who's face has been rendered blank.
• Blessed with Suck / Cursed with Awesome:
  • Joseph Meagar in episode 5 is able to generate powerful electric fields - but not to control them, which leads to him accidentally killing his boss and shorting out his mother's pacemaker.
  • Another character is able to predict deaths - leaving his head full of almost ceaseless nightmarish visions.
    • A girl named Emily has the same ability. Only her ability eventually kills her. She sees her own death in her visions.
  • The Cortexiphan subjects. All of them.
    • Nick Lane is a reverse empath. His feelings are projected to those around him. He has absolutely no control over this ability, and since he's suicidally depressed and extremely alienated from society, the results aren't pretty. The first time he tried to kill himself, his sister did it first.
    • James Heath. He leaves half a dozen Cortexiphan subjects as corpses in his wake, inflicting upon them his terminal cancer in exchange for their perfect health. However the effect is temporary and the symptoms quickly come back with a vengeance.
    • The guy from "Concentrate and Ask Again" who cannot stop himself from reading other peoples minds and gets terrible headaches when he does. He's basically a hermit.
    • The guy who got nervous on a date and ended creating a magnetic field that ripped the filling out of his date's teeth.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Observers. The best understanding of their motives is that they strive towards "balance," but aside from that they are fairly inscrutable. The episode "The Firefly" shows their interesting morals: one of them stops a robbery in order to save a shopgirl who's having an asthma attack, whose inhaler he then steals. He then steals a car in order to crash it into a police car holding the shopgirl, triggering another asthmatic attack and forcing Walter to choose between letting Peter go in order to save the shopgirl, when he has been led to believe that Peter going after the Observer will either kill him or cause him to be abducted back to the other universe. He lets Peter chase after the Observer, but all the Observer does is use a sort of air gun to knock Peter over. Later, Peter takes aspirin with some milk, not realizing that Walter had mixed in a brain mapping serum into it, which in combination with the aspirin nearly poisons him, only saved because he was young and healthy and Walter was able to direct Olivia to administering a shot that saves Peter. And Walter thinks all of this was to save his life by showing him the flaw in the brain mapping serum. However, the real reason for the Observer's actions: to test whether Walter would be willing to sacrifice his son if need be, which it turns out he is.
• Body Horror: The majority of the Fringe Events Of The Week involve this.
  • You know how guys cross their legs in sympathy after watching someone take it to the nads? That's what the pregnancy scene is like for women.
  • "Ability" (1x14) revolves around a chemical that seals your orifices shut.
  • In fact, the entire show thrives on Body Horror. Virtually all the Bodies Of The Week have to do with being killed, incapacitated, etc. in weird and squicky ways.
  • The pilot leaves no doubts about it, when he see a man's jaw melt off, followed by an agent being infected with a disease that renders his skin transparent.
  • Alistair Peck...ewww.
  • "Jacksonville", anyone? Even Astrid couldn't take it.
  • "Marionette" had double doses — the first from the people having their organs removed, the second from the puppet body.
  • The entire town of Edina is revealed to be this, animals included, as radiation has severely deformed them. Luckily they have a device that makes them appear perfectly normal, as long as they stay in the towns boundaries.
• Body Snatcher: William Bell co-opting our Olivia's body ought to count even if it's instigated by him, not sure which of the subtropes fit best though. We'll just have to wait and see...
• Bottle Episode: 2x13, “What Lies Below.”
• Bollywood Nerd: Dr Nayak.
• Boom, Headshot!:
  • Walternate shoots Olivia in the head in the Bad Future of "The Day We Died".
  • Walter shoots Olivia in the head to foil Bell's plans to collapse the two universes. Thanks to her Healing Factor, she gets better.
  • Olivia kills a captor intending to sell her to Loyalists by blasting her bullet necklace into his head with an improvised booby trap.
• Bound and Gagged: 02x08 "August" features a character, Christine Hollis, kidnapped by an Observer who binds and gags her at a motel for most of the episode.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • In "Brown Betty" 2x20 Story-world Walter is responsible for inventing: Hugs, Bubble Gum, Rainbows, Flannel Pajamas and... Singing Corpses
  • The title sequence for one of the Bad Futures includes water and hope among the list of fringe science topics.
• Break the Cutie:
  • Episode five's Joseph Meagar. He starts off the typical, moderately repressed guy living with his nagging mother, working in a job he dislikes and has a mostly harmless little crush on a girl he barely has the nerve to speak to. Cue the electrical superpowers and his new Walking Techbane status. He inadvertently kills half a dozen people (the girl he likes included) with an elevator, gets fired for being late (you know, right after the elevator incident), possibly kills his boss by getting a machine to malfunction and mutilate his arm, then comes home to tell his abrasive mother what happened... only to short circuit her pacemaker. All on accident. And that's before the bad guys kidnap him and he finds himself Strapped to an Operating Table.
  • The entirety of the series seems to be devoted to breaking Olivia Dunham. She gets through a godawful childhood (involving illegal drug trials, a monstrous stepfather, and what sounds like a Promotion to Parent). She manages to find a job that she enjoys and falls in love with her partner. Partner is injured. She goes to incredible lengths to save said partner. She finds out that he's a traitor and he dies in her arms. In the first episode. Turns out that John Scott isn't a traitor but death is awfully permanent these days so no happy ending. She falls in love with Peter. He leaves. She goes to another universe to save him. She gets left behind. After enduring torture, Mind Rape and the prospect of a gruesome death, she barely manages to get back home. She spends the beginning of "Marionette" with the most adorable smile on her face. When she sees Peter, she does the whole shy teenager glance thing and just seems so happy to back. And then she finds about Peter and Fauxlivia. The smile is gone. She's been Strapped to an Operating Table how many times? Plus she went through a car windshield and was temporarily declared brain-dead. And then there are the seizures she's had while in the lab. Oh... and her friend ended up being killed and replaced by a shape shifter who eventually tried to kill her. It's like watching someone dangle a bone in front of a puppy and then kick it for good measure.
  • Peter Bishops back story reveals this. He was a perfectly normal kid until an alternate version of his father kidnapped him and took him over to our universe, where his 'parents' used gaslighting to convince him that he belonged there. His mistrust of them is so bad at one point that he literally tries to kill himself just to get back to his world. Then when he was about 16 or 17, his father got sent to a mental institution, and a few years after that he left to travel Europe, and promptly got the call that his mother had killed herself. By the time we meet him he is a very cynical man, but flashback episodes reveal him to be a very sweet and caring kid.
• Break the Haughty:
  • Over time, you realize this is what St. Claire's did to Walter. Then you learn that he asked for it, at least partly, because he was afraid of what he was becoming. Given what Walternate is like, this can only be a good thing.
  • Peter in the first episode... a bit of a Jerkass. Peter in Season 4... dear God, someone give the man a hug.
  • Fauxlivia. Smug, bitchy alternate in first appearance. In "The Consultant"? She gets drunk on ex-boyfriend's alcohol because her partner died.
• Breather Episode: Brown Betty.
• Brick Joke: In "The Same Old Story", Walter is delighted by his car-seat warmer. In "The No-Brainer", several episodes later, whilst investigating a suspicious death at a car dealership.
  Walter: I wonder if they sell cars here with the seats that warm your ass?
• Brief Accent Imitation: Pretty much the entire cast in "Brown Betty" puts on a noir-ish New York accent to keep with the theme of the episode. Most of them are hilarious.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Peter. Occasionally he demonstrates that he's just as intelligent as Walter, if he wants to be.
  Astrid: You know you sound like Walter?
• Brought Down to Normal: Olivia at the end of season 4.
  • Possibly. It is shown in season 5 that her abilities can still be activated if she is dosed again. And according to Walter, all the extra Cortexiphan should have been metabolised out of her system by the time she manages to pull of the SUV slam on Windmark.
• Brown Note:
  • "The Equation" features a flashing light pattern that can temporarily paralyze people.
  • In Season 3's "The Box", a sound coming from a box somehow turns people catatonic, and even blows up their heads if they had something like dental ceramic crowns on teeth. Temporary or permanent deafness makes a person immune to the effect. The Suspension of Disbelief called for here may call for an unusual level of willingness.
  • "6995 kHz" in turn has an amnesia-inducing signal piggybacked onto a numbers station's broadcast.
  • In "Concentrate and Ask Again", Simon Phillip's already suffers severe headaches from hearing a regular person's thoughts. Walter's thought pattern is so erratic and disjointed, it's even worse!
• Bullet Catch:
  • The Observers can do this pretty much whenever the hell they want to.
  • Olivia in the fourth season finale.
• Bystander Syndrome: Peter is prone to having this mindset from time to time. He gets over it.
• California Doubling:
  • New York variant, while some of the establishing shots are filmed in Boston, the rest of it is filmed around New York City. Note how all the license plates that don't belong to characters are New York ones not Massachusetts.
  • Soon to become Boston Doubling, as production has moved to Vancouver for Season 2. Most notably the other sides Fringe Division HQ is the highly recognisable Vancouver Public Library.
• Call-Back:
  • In the first episode, Walter laments the quality of the butterscotch pudding at the institution. When he returns to speak with a friend there, the friend is eating said pudding.
  • "In Absentia" has a very dark Call-Back to the first episode. Etta calls Gale "sweetheart".
  • Season 5 is full of re-uses of many of the old Fringe experiments the team had to confront in Season 1. In the finale, "An Enemy of Fate," Peter and Olivia attack an Observer facility with the face-sealing gas, the brain liquefier, death by nonexistent blade-winged butterflies, and more.
  • In "White Tulip", Walter struggles to write a letter to Peter, explaining why Walter abducted him from his timeline. The episode vividly uses the image of a white tulip as a sign of God's forgiveness. The image comes up a few more times in the series, most notably in its finale: after Walter takes Michael on a one-way trip to 2167 to halt the creation of the Observers (resetting both Universes in the process), Peter receives a letter, from his father, that features only a drawing of a white tulip.
• Calling Your Bathroom Breaks:
  • Walter every now and then.
  • Hilariously, Olivia does this after snogging Peter.
• Came Back Wrong: In "Marionette" the Villain of the Week cryptically says "I looked into her eyes, and it wasn't her. This is presumably because the girl that he revived appeared to be completely brain-dead.
• Car Fu: In the finale, a Cortexiphan fueled Olivia throws a car at Windmark's head. It's super effective.
• Chameleon Camouflage: Eugene Bryant in the episode "Wallflower" has this ability, since he's been genetically modified to shift his pigment around like an octopus.
• Character Development:
  • At the start of the series, Peter is a nomadic, selfish, sarcastic Con Man and something of a Jerkass. After falling for Olivia, making peace with Walter and hefty amounts of everything going to hell, he's willing to risk his own life to save the people he loves and the two universes.
  • Walter was a brilliant but arrogant scientist with no regard for ethics whatsoever. He broke a universe trying to save one person and even slipped into Omnicidal Maniac territory for a while. By season four, he flatly refuses to play God again and he's willing to shoot Olivia in the head if it means saving the lives of billions of people.
• Chekhov's Gun: It's very common to see an item mentioned/shown in passing in one episode only for it to be used as a central plot device just a few episodes later.
  • "Over There part 1" demonstrates how vortexes are closed on the B-Side: a gas that generates into a rock-solid amber-like substance - the very same substance which appeared in the series' third episode ("The Ghost Network").
  • "Over There Part 2" has a near-textbook example. In the beginning of the episode, William Bell stalls some agents with small talk about his plans to improve the next model of their handguns. At the end of the episode, he demonstrates the new model.
  • Subverted with the tracking device Walter implants in himself at the end of "Snakehead". Frequently referred to. Never used. Instead, first time Walter is kidnapped, they find that the kidnappers removed the chip first.
  • The bell that William Bell leaves Nina in his will turns out to be the activator for the "soul magnet" he planted in Olivia, allowing his life force to possess her.
  • Walter's regenerating lemon cake in the Season Four finale.
  • All of Season One serves as this for the Alternate History/Universe of Season Four.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Sam Weiss is introduced in early Season 2 as a sort of Trickster Mentor for Olivia (at least, as far as physical recovery goes). In Season 3, we discover that he's from a long line of people with knowledge of the First People and the Doomsday Machine.
  • In a dark way, the Observers. They were around for four seasons, innocuously appearing at the fringe events and one of them, September, even got close to the team. They seemed to only be watching out for the wellbeing of the universe, but in season 5 its revealed that this was all just preparations for a mass invasion of the past.
  • The empath kid from "Inner Child" in Season 1, is an important part of the plan in Season 5.
• Chekhov M.I.A.: William Bell.
• Chekhov's Skill: Olivia's eidetic memory for numbers.
• Chemistry Can Do Anything
• The Chessmaster:
  • Milo Stanfield in "The Plateau".
  • Captain Windmark in Season 5.
• Churchgoing Villain: Wyatt Toomy and Reverend Marcus in "The Abducted".
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: More often than not, Walter is right.
• Coca-Pepsi, Inc.: The alternate universe has Shexxon, presumably the result of a merger between Shell and Exxon.
• Coin Walk Flexing: In one episode, Peter does a knuckle roll with a coin and then makes it disappear while talking to Walter, with Walter being impressed with Peter's skill.
• Cold-Blooded Torture:
  • David Robert Jones tortures Olivia's adoptive mother, Nina, in an effort to trigger her Cortexiphan abilities. It's actually an act. He is merely pretending to torture Nina's double.
  • Captain Windmark is able to read people's minds. If they try to resist, he can make the process extremely painful.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The opening credits often change colors from the traditional blue to red, grey, and/or amber, depending on the episode - see Special Edition Title below.
  • Olivia wears black underwear and Fauxlivia wears white underwear (oddly subverting both Light Is Good and Dark Is Evil).
    • Although this is less clearly a subversion as you get to know Fauxlivia. Fauxlivia generally seems to be happier and more open at least up until she goes rogue at the end of season 3. By contrst, regular Olivia has some real darkness in her past and after she got screwed over by her dead boyfriend isn't what you'd call open. Our Olivia is a damaged, beaten down person working for the good guys. Fauxlivia is a good person working for the bad guys.
  • Olivia often wears clothes with a monochromatic colour scheme. It's later revealed that Recruits are typically drawn to these colours, as a side effect of their time being treated with Cortexiphan as children, leaving them with a subconscious desire to blend in.
  • Most obviously Olivia has blond hair, and Fauxlivia has red hair. This ends up getting used to their advantage, as both women dye their hair at different points to masquerade as their counterparts.
  • One of the transition shots used when switching between universes it to show a shot of our green Statue of Liberty, and then transition to the alternate universe's bronze Statue of Liberty.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Olivia.
  • Peter.
• Con Man: Peter.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Lovingly subverted with Olivia in "Olivia." Dressed in a hospital gown, she jumps into a cab and rants and raves to the driver about secret government conspiracies, doubles, kidnappings, and 'experiments'. We of course know it's all true - but think about it from Henry's perspective:

  Olivia: Don't placate me because you think that I'm-

  Henry: What? Crazy? And what would you think if I jacked your cab in a hospital gown with a gun, screaming a conspiracy, telling you I'm being chased by the government and folks are trying to make me believe I'm a tattooed version of myself?

• Contamination Situation:
  • "What Lies Below": Peter contracts a pathogen at a crime scene.
  • In an episode in season one, Charlie becomes an incubator for a supernatural creature.
  • Lincoln accidentally gets infected with whatever it is that turns people into giant mutant porcupines. He's pretty annoyed.
• Contemplative Boss: Walternate in his office.
• Continuity Nod: Tons and tons. The show keeps excellent track of its internal continuity.
  • Walter mentions in a few episodes that one of his favorite bands is the nonexistent "Violet Sedan Chair." In the episode "Firefly," we meet Walter's musical idol - the keyboardist from Violet Sedan Chair.
  • In the first season, it's mentioned that kids treated with Cortexiphan tended to try and blend in, and wore monochrome colors. In the fourth season, Olivia tracks down a Cortexiphan test subject, and we get a shot of his wardrobe, filled with black, white, and grey outfits.
  • In the season 2 finale, we see Fringe agent Lincoln Lee checking for dimensional instability with a combination spray and handlight. In the fourth season, Astrid uses the same device for the same purpose, with Walter in the background bitching about how the other-universe agents who gave it to them did a poor job of writing the manual.
• Cool Big Sis: Olivia, to Rachel. Though it's Rachel who's the one to fuss over and worry about her sister (for increasingly good reason).
• Cops Need the Vigilante: The pilot brings us Peter Bishop walking into an interrogation room after Agent Dunham walks out so that he can torture information out of a suspect.
• Cosmic Retcon: The Season 4 premiere shows that much of the show's history has changed as a result of Peter's retroactive disappearance. Walter has refused to leave the lab since Olivia sprung him from St Claire's, and Lincoln Lee doesn't remember meeting the team in "Passenger". It was also implied that the John Scott arc of season 1 didn't happen, and that the nature of Walter and Walternate's conflict is very different.
• Crapsack World: The alternate universe is a strange case: It is much more advanced technologically and medically (they had modern cell phones in the mid-80s). The society itself is also implied to be slightly better-off, or at least less destitute financially. On the flip side, Fringe events have destroyed numerous cities. New York itself is covered with blotches of quarantine zones. In some parts the air is actually dangerous to breathe. There are numerous epidemics in progress, some of which involve diseases that exist in our universe but hit theirs much harder and others that don't even exist in ours. Real coffee is hard to find. Wallabies and sheep are extinct alongside numerous other species. The government is implied to be more authoritarian even without the involvement of Walternate. There are no rainbows, and there's no such thing as Batman or Sherlock Holmes.
  • Becomes a World Half Full when the bridge begins to heal the damage done and lost areas start getting reclaimed.
  • The future as of "Letters of Transit". Not only are the Observers preventing things like free will, private thought, education, travel and more or less destroying any form of human culture, they are pumping carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. Forget things like coffee and eggs... people are going to start dying at forty.
• Create Your Own Villain: Walter abducts Walternate's child, leaving Walternate a drunken mess wallowing in grief. Then Walter starts the Cortexiphan trials in an effort to send Peter back, in the process giving Olivia the ability to cross between universes... which she uses to accidentally tip Walternate off to where Peter is. Walternate then dedicates his life to getting his son back and destroying Walter's universe to save his own.
• Creepy Child: The child in "Inner Child."
• Crazy Consumption:
  • Walter has a severe sweet tooth, and relies on Congruent Memory to help him recall projects he worked on long ago, triggering it by eating the same foods. This has occasionally led to him buying (or having Peter or Astrid buy) multiple brands of a single item trying to find the one that tastes the most like some discontinued brand.
  • The Observers: One of them dumps a shaker of pepper and bowl of jalapenos onto a sandwich before eating it. They have almost no sense of taste and have to compensate by massively overspicing their food.
• Crazy Enough to Work:
  • Walter. This man cured a virus that wiped out the mammoths with horseradish.
  • William Bell. Planned his little Body Surf months in advance.
  • Peter has his moments. He used the amount of adrenalin in a woman's brain to calculate where she had been killed.
• Curse Cut Short
  Walter: Well, tell her what I said. Ask her why she destroyed files. Go on, ask her!
  Nina: Maybe you can ask Walter if he remembers what group the boy was in. I mean, that may help.
  Astrid: Of course. Walter, did you hear that?
  Walter: Yes. Her voice goes right into my inner ear and rattled around like razor blades. Of course I heard it. Tell her to go-
  Astrid: He said that he is not sure, but thank you for the suggestion.
  Walter: I did not say that!
• Cyberpunk: The series itself is not an example (barring the idea of technology run amok). However, Charlie Francis' monologue near the end of the first episode touches a lot of the themes of Cyberpunk.
  • Most of what happens in our universe is more correctly Biopunk than Cyberpunk, although they are closely related. It's more to do with doing weird crap to people and DNA and whatnot, rather than the more computer/machine-focused themes of Cyberpunk.
  • The alternative universe is genuinely very cyberpunk. From the human/machine hybrids, to the repressive government, the world ripping itself apart, the plague killing all the plants and the utterly crazy technologies, it pretty much does tick all the boxes. Look at the drawing of the machine to cross universes powered by Peter... it's right out of Deus Ex for God's sake.
  • The setting and mood of Letters of Transit is very Cyberpunk, even if it doesn't follow the usual Cyberpunk tropes.
  • The setting of the entire 5th Season, so far, is pretty solidly cyberpunk, as have been the show's other forays into the future, such as the Season 3 Finale.
• Cyberpunk Is Techno: Not techno per se but the music in the Observer Nightclub in Letters of Transit, which is brimming with Cyberpunk elements, has an Industrial and Electronic Body Music vibe to it.
• Damsel in Distress:
  • In most episodes, Peter is either filling this or doing something badass. Sometimes both.
  • Olivia needs rescuing a few times but it never diminishes her Action Girl status. In 2x01 she (understandably) spent the entire episode completely freaked out in a hospital bed and was almost strangled by a shapeshifter. When asked if she was okay she lets everyone know that she's back by responding with "Go get that bitch". She needs rescuing again in "Entrada" when she's Strapped to an Operating Table and in "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide" when she's trapped in her own mind.
• Damsel out of Distress: Olivia Dunham. There are a few exceptions where someone else has to help rescue her, but in any case, anyone who kidnaps her is in for a lot more than they bargained for, and she usually escapes using nothing more than her wits and whatever tools and weapons she finds lying around. Specific examples:
  • "The End of All Things". Olivia is kidnapped by David Robert Jones, who's trying to activate her Cortexiphan superpowers as part of his Evil Plan. Meanwhile, Peter and rest of The Team try to find a way to get her back. She ends up manipulating Jones into kidnapping Peter so he can serve as the emotional "battery" for the activation, but instead of merely turning on some light bulbs as he wants she electrocutes one of his henchmen and frees them both.
  • Olivia finds herself trapped in her apartment with a killer and phones Peter for help...then proceeds to beat the killer near senseless with a heavy object, before yelling at him "You stay DOWN!", Wisely, the killer takes the advice and it's all over bar the shouting by the time Peter leads The Cavalry to the rescue.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • Walter crossed several ethical boundaries in the name of Science before he was admitted St. Claire's Psychiatric Institution, including experimenting on children. Also, stealing a parallel universe version of his own son.
  • When Olivia was just a toddler William Bell and Walter performed psychologically scarring experiments on her during their trial of Cortexiphan, and when she was 9, her stepfather would regularly beat her mother. After one such occurrence, Olivia shot her stepfather twice and almost killed him. Ever since, he has sent her a birthday card just so that she knows he's still out there, and she regrets not killing him. Then, when she was still a teenager, her mother died. Then we come to the show...
  • Peter himself.
• Darker and Edgier: The fifth and final season gives us a really Bad Future overrun by vicious Observers, Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique and sinister biological weapons used by the heroes, the brutal, unceremonious death of Etta Bishop, Walter being terrified of turning back into the man he used to be (with hints of him showing through), Observer!Peter slowly losing his humanity, and Nina Sharp shooting herself in the head.
• Darkest Hour: As of "The Day We Died", Well...in 2026, at least.
• Dark Reprise: "Henrietta", in "The Bullet That Saved The World" when Windmark shoots Ettaand in "An Origin Story" while the Observer that Peter killed drips blood on the floor.
• Data Crystal: Data Cubes in "The Recordist" (5x03)
• Daydream Surprise:
  • "The Same Old Story" gives us a pretty freaky daydream of Olivia's involving an Ambiguously Evil Broyles and horrific pregnancy.
  • Given Olivia's tendency to slip in and out of realities, this tends to happen to her a lot.
• A Day in the Limelight: "Northwest Passage" (2x21) focuses mainly on Peter trying to solve a Fringe case on his own in Washington State. And "Everything in Its Right Place" (4x17) revolves around our universe's Lincoln Lee assisting the other side's Fringe team.
• Dead All Along: Peter Bishop. See Replacement Goldfish.
• Dead Alternate Counterpart: Inverted and arguably its most important plot point: it is in fact the "main" universe's Peter who dies as a kid. This sets the plot in motion as his father, Walter, goes on a journey to the alternate universe to steal back his sick yet not dead son from his alternate self and cure him like he should have done.
• Deadly Nosebleed: Congratulations, you're on an episode of Fringe! (Which does nothing for your life expectancy in the first place.) You get a nose bleed. Option 1, you're a walking radioactive bomb about to explode the heads of everyone (including yourself) in the immediate vicinity. Option 2, you're a about to turn into a giant were-porcupine and brutally rip apart everyone in the immediate vicinity. Option 3, you're infected with a thousand year old disease that wiped out the Mammoths. It will first drive you insane and then kill you. Worst case scenario, you're the harbinger of the Apocalypse. Best case scenario, you're being tortured by an Observer via Mind Rape. Don't get a nose bleed on Fringe.
• Deadpan Snarker: Peter.

  Peter: Yeah, 'cause bootlegging smack in the basement is the picture of normalcy.

• Death in the Clouds: The pilot episode has an airplane land with everyone on board dead from a biological weapon. They then have to figure out how the weapon got on board, why, where it came from, and is there more of it.
• A Death in the Limelight:
  • The alternate universe Broyles gets several focus scenes in the back-to-back episodes "The Abducted" and "Entrada", before being killed at the climax of "Entrada".
  • The two Lincoln Lees finally get an episode. Red!Lincoln gets shot.
  • Nina Sharp plays a prominent role in "Anomaly XB-6783746". And shoots herself in the head.
• Death Seeker: Dana Gray in "Stowaway"
• Demoted to Extra: While they had fairly important roles in Season 1, Nina Sharp and Broyles have been featured less and less as the series has gone on.
  • In Nina's case, this gets reversed significantly in Season 4.
• Didn't Think This Through: Characters seem to have a giant blindspot for their friends being replaced by impersonators:
  • Pretty much everyone notices Fauxlivia was acting odd. After a mission to an alternate universe. Where they know there is an alternate version of her. Also shapeshifters who can look like anyone. Not a single red flag.
  • Similarly, no one checking to make sure Charlie... was Charlie after he was replaced by a shapeshifter. When they knew they were fighting a shapeshifter.
• Different States of America: The alternate United States has quite a few differences from our own.
  • Texas is split into two states, the Dakotas and Carolinas are both merged, Virginia is still one entity and is called the District of Virginia, Oklahoma and Kansas are merged into a state called Midland, Michigan is missing its upper peninsula (implying it belongs to Canada), Washington is called Southern British Columbia, Louisiana is still a territory, Nevada is called Independent Nevada, and most strikingly, California is missing most of its coastline. Additionally, a brief shot of the American flag showed 48 stars, implying Hawaii and Alaska aren't states.
  • In New York City, Manhattan is spelled "Manhatan", Antoni Gaudi's Grand Hotel was built in 1908, the Twin Towers are still standing, Lady Liberty still has her original copper color, and the city is home to San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid or at least a duplicate of it.
  • The Pentagon and the White House were the targets of the 9/11 attacks. A newspaper shows the Obamas preparing to move into the newly rebuilt White House, which now has a glass roof.
  • Martin Luther King Jr. is on the twenty-dollar bill instead of Andrew Jackson, Richard Nixon is on 1983 Dollar Coin, and one conversation reveals Millard Fillmore appears on some banknote as well.
  • There are three major political parties, the FBI was dismantled over a decade before the series begins and Fringe Division is a branch of the Department of Defense, whose headquarters are located on Liberty Island.
  • John F. Kennedy was never assassinated and serves as the American ambassador to the U.N., though is planning to retire soon.
  • America apparently fought a war in Aruba at some point. A homeless veteran of the conflict is seen asking for money.
• Different World, Different Movies: The alternate universe has many examples of this.
  • Many DC Comics properties are slightly different - Green Lantern and Green Arrow are Red Lantern and Red Arrow, Jonah Hex is a member of Justice League International instead of Guy Gardner, Superman died in Crisis on Infinite Earths instead of Supergirl and, apparently, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and The Death of Superman have switched their main stars, becoming The Man of Steel Returns and The Death of Batman.
    • Batman clearly isn't all that popular in the Alternate Universe. Mantis is his replacement.
  • Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in Back to the Future, obviously based on the fact that Stoltz was the original choice to play Marty in Real Life.
  • At one point, Broadway is shown, complete with a poster for the musical Dogs.
• Digital De-Aging: Used on John Noble in the flashback episodes "Peter" and "Subject 13", where Walter is meant to be 23 years younger.
• Disability Immunity: The Brown Note device in "The Box" fails to kill one of the men sent to retrieve it because he's deaf. Peter temporarily deafens himself to gain the same immunity.
• Disaster Dominoes: The villain of "The Plateau" can kill you with a pen. He doesn't have to use it as a weapon, either. He just leaves it on top of a mailbox and then you get hit by a bus.
• Dismantled MacGuffin:
  • Walter's teleportation device hidden in several different safety deposit boxes in Season 1.
  • The First People's Doomsday Device (actually a machine created by Walter and sent back from the future) buried across both universes in Season 3.
• Disposable Vagrant
• Disposing of a Body: A shapeshifter throws the corpse of Charlie into a furnace after taking his form.
• Dissonant Serenity
  • Common with Walter since he's the Cloud Cuckoo Lander and Bunny-Ears Lawyer.
  • In the final scene of episode 3:20, after a Journey to the Center of the Mind allows Olivia to recover from a Grand Theft Me, Olivia's in a cheerful mood and having breakfast with Peter, when he asks her about the mysterious man who attacked her in her dream, she says "I don't know, but I think he's the man who's going to kill me." without breaking her smile. Then takes a bite of toast. Then roll credits.
• Distant Finale: "Letters of Transit". Probably. Aired in a middle of storyline and ended with cliffhanger, to confuse you some more.
  • And so far, every episode of Season 5.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?
  • Walter's conversation with his former patient/experimentee in "Momentum Deferred":
    Walter: (regretfully)You were young and I took advantage of you.
  • In the same vein, Walter being asked if he can figure out the meaning of a complex formula in "Earthling":
    Walter: (excitedly) Yes! I can dominate her!
  • Walter in "Jacksonville" talking about an experiment he and William Bell performed, and Peter makes a comment:
    Peter: First times are always sloppy.
    Walter: It wasn't our first time.
  • In "Marionette": Olivia's slow breakdown over the course of the episode seems a lot like someone's reaction to being raped. She even describes how Fauxlivia has made her unable to live in her house, wear her clothes, or be with the man she loves.

• Dodge the Bullet
  • Averted in one episode. A mook tries to shoot Peter from behind at point blank range. Peter spins around in what looks like a Krav Maga move, redirecting the barrel so the bullet misses him, and grabs the gun out of his hand.
  • Peter also just barely dodges what would have been an accidental head shot from Olivia (she had... let's call it PTSD.)
• Don't Tell Mama: Walter to Olivia when she sees Peter is from the other side. "Please don't tell him."
• Doomsday Device: The Machine, also known as The Vacuum, has the capacity to destroy universes. Or save them.
• Double Standard: Broyles and Olivia are both The Stoic, but for some reason a lot of critics and fans figured that Broyles was supposed to be that way (which he is), but Anna Torv was just a bad actress. Then we met Alternate Olivia and everyone realized no, she's not.
  • Not to mention in 3x17, when we see Anna Torv doing a damn-near perfect emulation of the voice (at least as much as a woman can) and mannerisms of William Bell.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Fauxlivia, pretending to be Olivia, seduces and keeps having sex with Peter for two months, until Olivia returns from the Alternate Universe. Peter thought he was having sex with Olivia, who he was just developing feelings for before the switch happened. This is called a Bed Trick in this wiki but legally is considered rape by fraud. Everyone, including Peter, at least initially acts like it's his fault and like Olivia is the one who's been violated in this situation, as if Fauxlivia "robbed" her of Peter. (In fact, Olivia herself, before she starts blaming Peter, is all "I understand - anything could have happened between me and her boyfriend, if he hadn't been out of town." Apparently nobody on the writing team realized that Olivia's situation would have been very different ^note She would have consented to have sex with the boyfriend knowing who she was having sex with., and that Olivia having sex with Fauxlivia's boyfriend without clueing him in would make her a rapist as well.)
• Double Standard: Rape, Sci-Fi: In the episode "Do Shapeshifters Dream Of Electric Sheep?" the audience is clearly meant to be sympathetic with a shapeshifter who has been living undercover with a wife and son for the last 5 years, developing genuine feelings for them in the process. However, the son is 7 years old, so the implication is that the original man whom the shapeshifter murdered to steal his face and identity was already married to the wife, and the shapeshifter has just been committing rape by deception for years.
• Dismantled MacGuffin: Walternate's Doomsday Device.
• Did They or Didn't They?: Completely out of the blue, Nina Sharp kisses Agent Broyles in the Season Two premier. This is never explained or even referred to again...although some of their meetings suddenly take on a whole new light.
• Disposable Sex Worker: A serial killer who needs pineal gland extract to survive targets prostitutes. Sounds familiar.
• Drinking on Duty
  Peter: Do you have anything stronger for my coffee?
  Olivia: Yeah. Bottom draw in the cabinet behind you.
  Peter: And here I was, halfway kidding.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • The killer in "One Night In October", when he sees the happy memories of his double from the other side.
  • In the altered timeline of Season 4, William Bell killed himself in a deliberate car crash after he was diagnosed with lymphoma. However, it turns out he was Faking the Dead.
  • Nina Sharp kills herself to avoid interrogation at the hands of Windmark.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Poor, poor Charlie Francis. Also Altlee. Considering that fact he survived nearly being blown up because the writers liked him, but gets fatally shot by a shapeshifter just so that his double can take his place in the altverse. No nanite bath for that?
• Drowning My Sorrows:
  • Becoming a pretty standard evening for Olivia.
    • When Peter and Olivia are together and things are going good they at least move from hard liquor to wine.
  • In "A New Day in Old Town," Peter and Broyles do this when they think Olivia is brain-dead and won't make it.
  • In "The Day We Died", future Peter does this after the death and funeral of his wife Olivia.
  • Walternate is prone to this.
  • Elizabeth did this to deal with the fact that they kidnapped Peter and have to lie to him.
• Drugs Are Good:
  • Various cases are solved with the assistance of narcotics, Olivia Dunham spends much of the pilot on homemade LSD in a sensory deprivation tank, Walter is constantly using psychotropics (on himself and others), and one of his former test subjects, while decidedly loopy as a result of her LSD-induced trances, is entirely happy and expresses her gratitude to Walter years later - with a kiss.
  • Which gives you Ad of Win situations when it cuts to the commercials... this show is brought to you by.. The Council for a Drug Free America.
  • Oddly, the only drug that's given any sort of negative implications is marijuana. Though that's not the drug's fault, it's just the only drug Walter uses a crutch when depressed. Drowning My Sorrows would be too normal for Walter.
    • Actually, given that Walter is usually on 15 times of psychotropics at any one time, one could argue that marijuana likely doesn't affect him anymore, being tame in comparison to what he's usually on! Walter smokes marijuana when he's too depressed to actually get high properly!
  • Which also leads to perhaps one of the very first scenes ever on Network television of someone using a bong—although we don't see the actual action, we hear the distinctive sound and see Walter put the bong down and exhale. In season 3, there's also a scene in which Walter and a security guard (played by Jorge Garcia) pass a bong back and forth while discussing such important subjects as Walter's newly invented cupcake flavor, baconberry.
  • Walter shares a joint with the usually serious COO of Massive Dynamic, Nina Sharp. It's okay. They've got prescriptions.
  • Episode 3x19 is called "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide". That's LSD, kids. And as of now, Astrid is the only member of the central cast who hasn't been under the influence of drugs onscreen at some point.
  • Walter's take:
  Walter: Why can't we get into Harvard.
  Etta: It's been taken over by Observers, Walter.
  Walter: Well, that's not a problem for someone who's done acid.
• The Dulcinea Effect: A rare female example. Olivia gets pretty upset any time a woman is in danger. We see this from the get-go with the sexual assault cases in her backstory.
• Dull Surprise: The security guard in Season 2 episode 'Earthling' looks and sounds rather nonplussed for having just seen video footage of a walking shadow-man.
• Dysfunction Junction: There's Walter, a Mad Scientist (this isn't a hyperbole, he was previously locked up in a mental institution) with Dark and Troubled Past (he experimented on kids, okay). Then there's his estranged son Peter who despite having an IQ of 190 dropped out of high school and ended up living a nomadic life, which is still largely shrouded in mystery. And then there's Olivia whose FBI partner and lover is killed in the pilot, and to make matters worse she seems to have started to hallucinate him and even receive emails from him. And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse it turns out that she was experimented on as a child by Walter Bishop and William Bell (although she has no memory of this). Then she's trapped in an alternate universe, tortured by what seems to be light deprivation before being brainwashed into thinking she's the other Olivia, before finally making it home... only to find out that Peter has been dating the other Olivia the whole time, apparently thinking it was her.. Astrid seems to be pretty normal, though some fans think she's hiding something. Broyles is still pretty mysterious, although he is known to be divorced.
  • Astrid is so non-dysfunctional that after her alternate self has her difficult to live with father die and takes an unscheduled trip to see Astrid Prime, A.P claims that her version was difficult to live with as well. She then goes home to a lovingly cooked meal from her pleasant father, exchanging hugs and "I love you."
• Earn Your Happy Ending
• Easter Egg:
  • The eye catches of each episode are a substitution cypher.
  • Every episode includes a visual clue to the next one. It may be a bit of graffiti, a sign on a shop, or a prop. Most are not recognizable before the subsequent episode is viewed, although some reference the upcoming episode's name.
  • An Observer can be seen in every episode, If they aren't already a plot element of the episode, they'll be walking past or standing still in the background of a scene.
  • "The Road Not Taken" (1x19): Walter was seen drinking a Slusho.
  • ""Momentum Deferred" (2x04)": The shape-changing soldier from another universe disguised as Charlie is also seen with a Slusho.
  • As are two Observers in "Peter".
  • A set of alternate universe DC Comics covers adorn Peter's apartment in "Over There:Part II."
• Elevator Failure: In "Power Hungry", an elevator fails so spectacularly it is actually powered into the ground.
• 11th-Hour Superpower:
  • Olivia's Healing Factor in Season 4.
  • Olivia getting her telekinetic Cortexiphan powers back in the Grand Finale.
• Empathic Healer: James Heath, though he initially used his power to transfer his illness to others.
• Enigmatic Minion: Nina Sharp, in the first two seasons.
• Enemy Mine: Episode 4x9 titled "Enemy of My Enemy," where Fringe teams from both universes join forces to defeat David Robert Jones, with Peter and Walternate as key allies in the work.
• Equivalent Exchange: Travel between the alternate universes works off this princple. Anything that travels from one world to the other has to be replaced by something of equal mass e.g. the car Walter and William send over is replaced by one from the other side. The only exception to this appears to be Olivia's ability to travel between the worlds via Cortexiphan.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • When Alt-Brandon suggests to Walternate that they should administer Cortexiphan to children, Walternate refuses vehemently. "There are lines I simply cannot cross."
    • This goes out the window when Walternate crosses the Despair Event Horizon in "The Day We Died".
  • Captain Windmark, who in his spare time enjoys Mind Rape and crushing the resistance, finds the orifice sealing toxin that the Bishops use to raid Penn Station barbaric.
• Everybody Must Get Stoned: "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide" with Astrid (as always) playing the role of Only Sane Man. Peter and Broyles are completely out of it, Walter is a little giddy but otherwise unaffected and Bellivia is totally fine.
• Everyone Loves Blondes: Peter does. Though he thinks Olivia makes a very sexy redhead.
• Evil Makeover: For Fringe Division's alternate universe counterparts i.e. darker hair, scars, form-fitting spandex and leather and /or suits.
• Evilutionary Biologist: The Amber-verse ZFT cult contains many willing subjects thereof.
• Evolving Credits: A subtle yet potent example. Episodes taking place in an earlier era have Retraux titles and examples of fringe science that actually became mainstream, ones in the alternate universe are red instead of blue, ones taking place in the future propose fringe science theories even more absurd than normal, and ones in the Bad Future swaps the theories for basic human rights.
• Expendable Alternate Universe: Averted. People from the alternate universe aren't treated as less important than those from our universe, leading to major dilemmas when all the characters believe that only one of the two universes can survive. It's finally revealed that the reason the universes can be crossed at all is because they are linked - the destruction of one would cause the other to follow. Peter links the universes together in a way that stabilizes them, and the characters from either side need to learn to work together and trust each other.
• Expository Hairstyle Change:
  • Fauxlivia always wears bangs, even when she's trying to impersonate Olivia. Olivia only wears bangs when she's been brainwashed into thinking she's Fauxlivia, which is also when she is wearing her hair brown.
    • Bangs is the common name for the hairstyle Fringe
  • Astrid and Peter in "The Day We Died". Not only is Peter's hair longer in the future but it's exactly the same as his fathers'.
• Express Delivery
• Expy: The Observers/Invaders seem to borrow from the Grey Gentlemen in Momo.
  • They are human in appearance (though all of them are male, bald and dressed in monochrome suits with hats), but aren't actually human.
  • They go by strange codenames.
  • They have undermined human society, and are stealing the lifetime of humans in order to sustain themselves (the Grey Men quite literally turn spare time into cigarettes which they need to smoke; while the Invaders plan to transform the Earth atmosphere in a way that it enables them to live, while human life expectancy gets cut in half).
• Extinct in the Future: In the Alternate Universe, sheep and wallabies died out sometime around 2001, along with presumably many other species.
• Extra-Long Episode: Inverted version: the first-season episodes all lasted 50 minutes without commercials (rather than the standard 42-43 minutes), and the series switched to a standard episode run time from the second season onwards.
• Eye Catch: They form a code, too.
• Eye Remember: Episode 2 uses a photon camera to do this on a victim who was given a muscle paralyser before hand. This doesn't really make all that much sense if you know anything about neurotransmission.
• Eye Scream:
  • In "Marionette" the bad guy removes a man's eyes while he's awake. When the Fringe team finds the victim, he's wandering around with his eyelids pinned back so we can see the empty, gaping eye sockets.
  • Also in "Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep?" where Walter spends quite a while poking around in the eyesocket of a disabled shapeshifter.
  • Walter tries to perform a lobotomy on himself, which of course includes him shoving a spike into his eye socket.
  • "Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11" features Walter being tortured by an Observer. Bleeding out the eyes is one of the side effects.
  • In "In Absentia," the team needs an ocular scan from a captured security guard, who they can't move. Walter uses a scalpel and a spoon, messes up the first eye, and demands another. The guard is okay, though. Walter imprinted his retinal pattern on a pig's eye.

Tropes F-J

• Failed a Spot Check: Even after becoming aware of The Observer, occasionally he will show up in such close proximity to the Fringe Team, you wonder how they possibly can't notice him?!
• Failed Attempt at Drama: David Robert Jones in Season 4's alternate timeline is always slightly annoyed when his grand entrances are undercut by Olivia or Peter mentioning that they've already met (and killed) him before.
• Fake Memories:
  • Olivia is injected with her alternate's memories in a ploy to make her believe she is her alternate. Sadly, it works.
  • Strangely, "The Plateau" shows us that the alt-memory conditioning is breaking down.
  • And it's completely gone as of "Amber 31422" thanks to Walternate.
  • Although based on that ridiculously accurate shot Olivia makes to the middle of a bad guy's neck in "Concentrate and Ask Again", she seems to have retained Fauxlivia's shooting skills.
• Faking the Dead: William Bell, in Season 4's alternate timeline.
• Fantastic Drug: The killer in "Dream Logic" gets high on people's dreams.
• Fantasy Landmark Equivalent: The series has two key differences with the Statue of Liberty in the Alternate Universe visited from the Season 1 Finale onward. Firstly: it's still shiny and coppery, having never developed the patina that it did in our timeline. Secondly: the island apparently serves as the headquarters of the Department of Defense in the Alternate Universe.
• Fatal Flaw: Walter's hubris. After having pieces of his brain removed prior to the events of the series, it's less of a concern than it was in his Dark and Troubled Past, but it comes back into play briefly in Season 5 when the pieces of his brain are restored and he starts falling back into bad habits.
• Fictional Document
  • The manifesto "ZFT", which stands for Zerstörung durch Fortschritte der Technologie, or Destruction through the Advancement of Technology. Apparently written by William Bell and Walter Bishop, it apparently is the manifesto of the group behind The Pattern.
  • ZFT has a counterpart in the Alternate Universe, where it's published under Walter Bishop's name with a ''Dianetics''-like cover. However the text is very different: this version of the ZFT does not mention a parallel universe (ours) or its inhabitants. Rather than a manifesto, it's a cover-up for the real reason behind "The Pattern."
• Firefly of Doom:
  • From the episode "The Firefly". Three months after Walter saved Peter and brought him home, Peter caught a firefly. Because he caught it, a little girl couldn't catch it, and stayed out later than she would have. Her father got worried, was late for work because he was looking for her. It started to rain, and he skidded through a red light on his way to work and hit someone on the crosswalk. That someone was the son of the keyboardist in Walter's favorite band, and the little girl is implied to have been the asthmatic woman from the jewelry store.
  • When Walter figures all of this out, he finally realizes exactly how much damage he's caused. He doesn't take it well. But that was the whole ''point'': making him realize it all on a personal level, and testing whether or not he was willing to let Peter die to prevent further damage.
• 555: Used in "Snakehead" (2x09), after Walter gets lost. He tearfully tells a woman that he knows Peter's number has "three fives" and some other numbers, but he can't remember the order.
• Flatline Plotline: Newton uses one.
• Fleeting Demographic Rule: ABC aired Strange World back in 1999. It had a very similar premise and was canceled after 3 episodes. Strange World itself suffered from the Fleeting Demographic Rule, as it aired during the run of (and shared an executive producer with) the X-Files.
• "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome: In "The Plateau", a medical group developed a treatment to make a man with an IQ of 56 into a supergenius. Eventually, he got smart enough to predict the future, and when the researchers tried to reverse the effects, he started killing people with physics and psychology. Subverted in that by the time they captured him, they couldn't reverse the treatment.
• Foreshadowing: People from the parallel universe had a slightly different shadow in one episode (can't recall which), as seen when opening a door. This includes Peter.
  • In the season 2 finale's alternate red title sequence, most of the Fringe science concepts that appear in the background are the same, or at least similar to the normal opening sequence. But if you look closely, you'll see that something called "First People" appears in the first few seconds.
  • Some of The Observer's lines can be interpreted as Foreshadowing.
    • "There is more than one of everything.": Referring probably to the other universe and the fact that there are SEVERAL Obsevers.
    • "It must be difficult being a father": He said this to Peter in "The Firefly", possibly referring to Walter, but he could also mean Peter, who would later be revealed to have inpregnated Fauxlivia.
  • In the fifteenth episode of Season 1 (five from the finale), Peter shows a kid one of his old G. I. Joe action figures, and comments, "You know, it's funny, I always remember his scar being on the other side." That's because Peter comes from the alternate universe, where the scar probably was on the other side.
  • It takes until the fourth episode, "The Arrival", before the Fringe team notice The Observer. However, the audience have noticed him briefly appearing in the background of every episode preceeding that.
• Foregone Conclusion: "Subject 13". It is truly heartbreaking to see Walter's earnest attempts to return Peter to his rightful universe and Walternate's frantic search for his missing son knowing that both of them are going to fail.
  • Ending to the Walter's story, suggested by Ella in "Brown Betty" at first looks like Deus ex Machina, created by little girl who is not good in literature technique and wanted happy ending at any cost. However, it resembles the ending of season 3 - turns out Peter doesn't have to choose who live and who die after all.
• Foreseeing My Death: Emily in "Forced Perspective".
• Forgotten First Meeting: Peter met Olivia as a kid, but seems to have amnesia about this ever happening even though he is Olivia's boyfriend now. It is heavily implied by other Cortexiphan kids that the memory loss may have in fact been intentional on Walter and Bell's parts in an effort to cover up the drug trials.
• For the Evulz: ZFT's apparent motive. That and showing off to the rest of the Mad Scientist community.
• For Want Of A Nail: The Alternate Universe is full of very slight differences (and a few large glaring differences, like the Zeppelins from Another World) to our own. For example: Cary Grant played Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, Martin Luther King Jr. is on the $20 and ID Cards are called "Show Me"s.
  • And the flashback episode has two of the Observers coming out of a movie theatre having just seen Back to the Future, starring Eric Stoltz, the actor originally chosen for the part because Michael J. Fox was having troubles negotiating out of his television contract. Apparently in the Alternate Universe, he never successfully cleared up his schedule.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The Observers who appear in the background of each episode, unless they're central to the events of that week's plot.
• Freudian Slip: Walter gets a really good one in in "Grey Matters".

  Walter: Our mental patients. Mr. Slater, Mrs. Crampton, and Mr. Condom.

  Astrid: Gordon.

• From Bad to Worse: Season 5. We start off with a really Bad Future, then Walter gets kidnapped, tortured and forgets crucial parts of the plan. Then Etta Bishop dies. Then Peter starts using Observer tech with undesirable side effects.
• Gaia's Lament: The Alternate Universe was suffering from this due to reality breaking down. With the activation of the bridge, it seems to be getting better.
  • Letters in Transit reveals that Earth was fully and irrevocably rendered uninhabitable by the year 2607, prompting the Observers to travel back in time to look for the most suitable point in history to begin again.
• Gambit Roulette: One episode had an FBI agent who was infected with a life-threatening parasite which was cured at the very last second. Turns out he apparently infected himself, and the entire episode was a plan to get his wife to overhear a secret discovered by other FBI agents while they were trying to save him. But if even a single thing in the episode had gone differently - including the fact that an attempt to catch a suspect had been botched - then the plan would not have worked. Note that if the heroes were even five minutes too late, the plotter would have been dead, and if they had gotten the necessary information just a few minutes prior, the wife would not have been in the room. Well, if you consider that the goal was to free David Robert Jones, who seems to have had the fanatical devotion of ZFT, there may have been some deliberate coordination going on. But it still was a rather crazy plan.
  • The Plateau opens with a man assassinating a woman by balancing a ballpoint pen on top of a mailbox. How? The pen gets knocked down by a splash from a car going through a puddle. A man notices the pen fall, and moves to pick it up. A cyclist swerves to avoid the man and ends up crashing. The crash distracts a bus driver, and he fails to notice a red light coming up. The intended victim started crossing the street when the Walk sign lit up, and she gets hit by the bus. Just as planned.
• Genre Shift: Starts off as essentially a Cop Show with a little mad science thrown in, shifted towards a more science fiction heavy, "save the worlds" thing and is finishing on a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits fighting oppression in a Bad Future note.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Walter has to give Peter one of these in the final episode of Season 4. In all fairness, he had a fairly legitimate reason to Freak Out.
• A God Am I:
  • In "Peter", we see past Walter invoke this about his decision to cross into the parallel universe.
  Walter: There is only room for one God in this lab and it's not yours!
  • William Bell and David Robert Jones both have God complexes.
  Bell: *to Walter* Even if you deny it now, you've always been playing God. I am.
• Gone to the Future: Walter's ultimate fate in the Grand Finale.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: "White Tulip" has the Fringe team investigating time traveler Walter Peck over and over as he jumps back to the same event that puts them on his trail in the first place. Walter breaks the loop by telling Peck how to jump back to his desired destination.
• Gut Punch: The Bullet That Saved The World. Etta's death.
• Hallucinations: After sharing consciousness with him shortly before he died, Olivia saw visions of John Scott for much of the first season.
  • During the third season, Olivia's subconsciousness generates visions of Peter to combat her False Memories.
• Happier Home Movie: The end of "An Origin Story."
• Happily Married: Peter and Olivia, until Etta was taken, and then restored in the finale. Also, as of the penultimate hour, this is apparently what happened to Lincoln and Alt-Livia.
• He Didn't Make It: How Lincoln is told that his Alternate died.
• Healing Factor: One of the possible abilities granted to children treated with Cortexiphan. It even allows Olivia to survive a gunshot to the head.
• Here There Were Dragons: Walter and Bell theorized that the abilities that developed in the children they experimented on were once a part of normal physiology until they disappeared at some point. Walter suspects aliens.
  • Further hinted at in the "First People" theory which appears among the phrases in the alt-intro and in "6995 kHz".
• Heroes Unlimited: The alternate Fringe Division.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Walter's backup plan for stopping the hybrid monster? Poisoning himself so it would die if it ate him.
  • Nicholas Boone, who had his spinal fluid drained just to make sure his wife would be able to be cured, even though he knew it would give him a stroke.
  • While helping Olivia escape from Walternate, Colonel Broyles is killed and chopped up by his own colleagues.
  • William Bell using his unstable atoms to power Our Heroes' trip back to the prime universe.
  • Joshua Rose setting it up so that he would be trapped in Amber, getting Fringe Division to close the case so that his identical twin brother that he'd previously rescued from the Amber could go back to his life.
  • Etta Bishop.
  • Nina Sharp's Heroic Suicide.
  • In the finale, Walter does this without actually dying onscreen - he goes to 2067 with Michael, ensuring the Observer invasion never happens, but he can never return to 2015.
• Hollywood Cyborg: Nina Sharp.
• Hollywood Science: And deliberately so.
• Homicide Machines: One episode involved a guy who created powerful EM fields when he was under stress. For some reason this caused a printer to turn malevolent just long enough to kill his boss.
• Hope Spot: There's this one glorious moment in the Series Finale when you think that Donald can take Walter's place in the year 2167 and maybe, just this once, the Bishop family will all live together happily ever after. Donald gets shot and Walter still has to go.
• Hospitality for Heroes: A bartender in the alternate universe refuses to let Agent Broyles pay for his drink. This is because he recognizes Broyles as one of the law enforcement officials who helped deal with a major disaster (a gigantic vortex) years before; he tells Broyles that his money is no good there, because the world needs more heroes like him.
• Hostage for MacGuffin: Thomas Henry Newton secures his escape in "Grey Matters" by poisoning Walter and letting Olivia choose between capturing Newton and saving Walter.
• Humanity Is Infectious: Despite only having vestigial limbic systems, the Observer research team and Windmark start to feel emotion. Windmark more or less mentions this trope word for word.
• I Choose to Stay:
  • When the bridge between both universes is being closed, our side's Lincoln Lee chooses to stay in the alternate universe.
  • Peter decides to stay in his adopted universe rather than the one he was born in.
• I Did What I Had to Do
  • Appears to be William Bell's justification for experimenting on children who ended up, in some cases, exploding, becoming suicidally depressed over their condition, and having their lives ruined by a ceaseless array of nightmarish visions. As of "Over There" part 1, this was key to getting to the alternate universe as part of the attempt to save Peter and prevent The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Also the justification the colonel gave for detonating the subjects of Project Tin Man in "Fracture" (S2 E03).
• I Know You Know I Know:
  • The bad guy in "The Plateau" can use math to predict and manipulate the future. When Charlie and Olivia realize what it means for their investigation, they call Astrid and ask her if it's possible to compute whether he'll predict between their two choices. She says it's a mathematical impossibility, an infinite loop, and basically gives this trope. He can predict what they'll do since he knows that they know that he'll know he can predict them knowing that he can predict them, etc. Olivia just says "screw it" and decides to go to the hotel. Answer Cut to the bad guy standing in front of a window with a hotel sign visible next to it.
  • Subverted in the same episode in a rather clever way - the bad guy relies on Olivia following a particular protocol to keep the dominos of his plan falling - he thinks he knows she knows he knows. She of course DOESN'T know - being from the other universe, she's unfamiliar with the protocol.
• Idiot Ball:
  • Peter, third season. He's known Olivia for over two years now, he's realized Olivia is acting differently, he's surrounded by body-double-imposters from the Other Side, and yet he doesn't realize that the woman he's now sleeping with is Fauxlivia. This is made even worse by the fact that Peter was once a conman and claims to have a knack for reading people. Pull yourself together, Bishop. Peter did notice a lot of details being very off, but he kept rationalizing over them because of his love for Olivia (the one he knew). Peter notes in the pilot that he can't really read Olivia, meaning it'd be harder for him to figure out that it wasn't actually her.
  • The fact that the Fringe group repeatedly gets tricked by alternates is just sad. Almost as bad is Charlie being replaced by his double, when they KNEW that Charlie was fighting a shapeshifter hand-to-hand no one ever bothered to check and make sure he's the correct person. The fact they repeat it with Fauxlivia is just painful. And they fell for the shapeshifter switch yet again!
  • In the second season episode Reciprocity, Shapeshifters are being taken out by Walternate, and their names are showing up on files in Fauxlivia's computer files. Once this happened the first time, they didn't think to simply search those files for names of highly placed people, instead doing random blood screening while more and more potential sources of information are being wiped out.
  • Peter (and later Olivia) in Season 4, if they knew that there were differences in the altered timeline, why didn't they immediately cross-reference all their alternate case-files? Especially with Olivia's photographic memory, they may have been able solve any number of cases that only one timeline had accomplished. This even bites them in the ass, when their knowledge of the cortexiphan children may have helped them catch Jones.
• If I Do Not Return: Peter to Astrid when he decides to enter the Machine.

  Astrid: Are you sure you don't want me to call Olivia?

  Peter: If it doesn't work, she's going to find out soon enough. Just tell her that-

  Astrid: Whatever it is? You'll tell her yourself.

• I Just Want to Be Normal:
  • This, as well as I Just Want to Be Beautiful, is the motive of the dark secret in the Town with a Dark Secret episode "Johari Window".
  • "Baby Boy Brian" AKA Eugene underwent experiments that made him invisible and also put off a fatal condition. He spent his episode stealing other people's pigment to make himself visible again, never mind the fact that it would kill him
• Inappropriate Hunger: Walter brings up a sudden appetite at almost every grisly crime scene or autopsy.
• I'm Not Afraid of You: Olivia does this during the Journey to the Center of the Mind.
• Impostor-Exposing Test: The cyborg shapeshifters have mercury for blood. Blood screening is standard procedure when shapeshifters are at large.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Fauxlivia has an incredible knack for shooting people right between the eyes. Becomes a plot point in the Season 3 premiere, when Olivia pulls off an absolutely insane shot to a gas gauge with a handgun from a car moving at full speed. It means the brainwashing is working.
  • Olivia seems to have retained her newfound marksmanship skills even though the brainwashing isn't permanent. What this means is unclear. Later episodes have shown that she remembers all her time over there (she gives frequent guidance on how Fringe Division does things as events warrant it), she's just clear now that she's not Fauxlivia, although she remembers being her. So that's okay, then. Probably.
  • Although Olivia was frequently capable of pulling of Pretty Little Headshots before, so it's not like she wasn't a decent marksman already? Not at Olympic level like Fauxlivia, but still pretty good!
• Incurable Cough of Death: Young Peter's mysterious terminal ailment. See also Soap Opera Disease.
• Informed Ability: Peter's genius-level intelligence, most of the time. It doesn't help that he's often standing next to Walter, who makes pretty much everyone else seem stupid by comparison.
  • Then again, Peter is able to keep up with Walter and understand what he's saying, which is no small feat. We also get to see him stretching his intellectual muscles in Northwest Passage (when he's on his own) and in early season 4, when Walter refuses to help.
• Inn Between the Worlds: Building where the machine is stored. From one end it is our universe, from other - it is alternate. From window you see clear sky, from another - clouds and zeppelins.
• Insane Equals Violent: Averted in Walter's case. He was much more morally dubious when he was fully sane, but after his mental breakdown he becomes a harmless old man. Further exemplified in how Walternate is sane, yet is much more willing to take violent, drastic measures.
• In-Series Nickname: Walternate. And now... Fauxlivia
• Insistent Terminology: Alternate Charlie has arachnids under his skin. They're NOT worms.
• In Spite of a Nail: In season 4 Peter's death in the 1980s has resulted in almost the same present day for the remaining main characters, with minor backstory changes and Alt!Broyles still alive.
• In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: The Observers all share a very distinctive appearance. They also appear to be a One-Gender Race; we have to see any female Observers (that we know of).
• Interdimensional Travel Device: Several different versions, including: Walter's portal, which causes both universes to begin collapsing; William Bell's technique by which he pulled Olivia into the AU (usually only works on hybrid Super Soldiers who are designed to survive the crossing; it worked on Olivia because of her Cortexiphan-enhanced physiology); and the natural way, which is achieved by groups of Cortexiphan Kids being guided by Walter (and of the three, is clearly the least dangerous, to dimensions and dimension-crossers, but not without its kinks).
  • The Alternate Universe might also possesses rod-like interdimensional travel devices invented by Walternate, but they were part of a deception that fooled Alt!livia. It's not established for certain if the devices actually work or not; or if the one that Alt!livia forced Brandonate to give her just happened to be a dud.
• Interrogating the Dead: Mentioned in the pilot. Done in "In Which We Meet Mr. Jones" (1x7), and again in "Brave New World: Part 2" (4x22).
• Interservice Rivalry: Fringe Division with the CIA.
• Intoxication Ensues: Walter (frequently).
  • Hilariously, Walter's fine during "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide". It's Peter and Broyles (!) who are as high as kites.
• In Which a Trope Is Described: "In Which We Meet Mr. Jones" (1x7).
• Ironic Echo: Naturally, in a show about parallel universes, this trope pops up a lot. Examples include:
  • When Broyles is trying to convince Walter to help them deal with the machine in "The Box," he says that the government made similar arguments to Robert Oppenheimer (the scientist who led the Manhattan Project), and asks "how do you think he slept after his little invention had killed hundreds of thousands in a fraction of a second?" In "6:02 AM," just before turning on the machine, Walternate also compares himself to Oppenheimer - and talks about the nightmares he had after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Irony: Most events in The Pattern in the first two seasons were ZFT testing grounds for various Weird Science super-weapons meant to protect this universe's inhabitants from an incoming war against a fantastical enemy from beyond. The whole set-up was done under the belief that they were to be used against Walternate's Universe when their two sides inevitably went to war against each other. With the exception of the cortexiphan kids using their Psychic Powers to cross over into the other universe, none of the various experiments that caused the Fringe events come into play when the two worlds inevitably collide. However, they do come back in Season Five when the Fringe Team use them against The Observers. While William Bell was right that they would be needed, he was off on who they were going to be used on.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: In the pilot, Peter uses a coffee mug to repeatedly smash the fingers of a suspect in order to get information.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: The pilot, "Lysergic Acid Diethylemide" and "The End of All Things".
• Just Think of the Potential!: Massive Dynamic employees are guilty of this more often than not.
• Just Before the End: Bad Future from episode "The Day We Died". If "Hope" is listed among mad science topics, you know it's bad.

Tropes K-O

• Karma Houdini:
  • Tyler Carson in "Of Human Action". He murders several cops, injures multiple innocent people and displays all the hallmarks of a budding sociopath, but since he's only 15, he won't face any jail time. Ultimately subverted . They all think he gets away but at the end of the episode, he ends up being drugged unconscious and hidden somewhere in the depths of Massive Dynamic with the other seven Tylers.
  Peter: Kid goes on a killing-spree and all they're gonna do is make him talk it out with a bunch of shrinks...
  • Nick Lane works with David Robert Jones in his efforts to destroy the universe, Jones having tricked him into thinking he is defending the world from the alternate universe. Even after learning the truth behind Jones's intentions, he betrays the Fringe team and forces them to close the bridge between worlds, at great cost to the other side. He's never seen again after using his power to escape captivity.
  • William Bell ultimately gets away with trying to destroy two universes, since his fate of being trapped eternally in amber is undone in the Grand Finale. Unless Fringe Division catch up with him later.
• Karmic Death: In the first season finale, David Robert Jones repeatedly attempts to open a portal to a parallel universe, at one point resulting in a young soccer player being Portal Cut. At the end of the episode, Peter uses one of his father's gizmos to plug the dimensional hole as Jones is trying to escape through it—Splinch!
  • Olivia's first season Bad Boss, audibly saying he's going to get rid of a pyrokinetic about to have a terminal overload incident where she can see him.
• The Ketchup Test: Walter tastes cremated remains and determines they are wood ash.
• Kick The Son Of A Bitch: No one was really upset when one of the people treated with Cortexiphan roasted Sanford Harris like a Christmas ham. Or when Walter verbally castrated Olivia's stepfather. Or when Fauxlivia floored alternate Brandon during her Heel–Face Turn.
• Killer Rabbit: Killer butterflies that cut! (Cutterflies?) A different kind of Butterfly of Doom...
• Lampshade Hanging: Amongst others:

  Walter: That makes as much sense as anything else we've done.

  Astrid: That makes no sense at all!

  Walter: My point exactly.

• Larynx Dissonance: Anna Torv mimics the voice of William Bell when he possesses Olivia.
• Laser Cutter: Walter and Astrid use one to excise videotapes containing a plan to defeat the Observers from amber.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: An apparent side-effect of surviving the memory-transfer process used by the antagonist in "One Night In October" to take people's happy memories.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:No advertisements, reviews, or discussions of Fringe bother to hide that there's an alternate universe involved. Mostly because it'd be impossible to explain otherwise by Season 3.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: Peter and Fauxlivia.
  • Sort of subverted at the end of season 4 when Olivia is revealed to be pregnant shortly after expressing a desire for a house with a nursery.
• Leitmotif: An ominous flute-theme usually plays when The Observers are featured.
• Limited Wardrobe:
  • Olivia wears almost entirely grey, white, and black. Turns out she, and others, were trained to.
  • Nina wears black (unless she's riding). Her alternate wears red.
• Linked List Clue Methodology: Season 5.
• Literal Change of Heart: In the "Brown Betty" episode.
• Little "No":
  • Peter's response when Etta dies.
  • Nina's reaction to finding out that, despite everything that he had done, William Bell still loved her.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Peter to Walter. This is made even more poignant in series 4, where we get to see how reclusive and afraid Walter is without Peter in his life.
• Living Memory: After Olivia enters John Scott's subconscious via a Mental Fusion. In season 3, brainwashed Olivia has Peter show up towards the end of "The Plateau" and introduce himself as one of these.
  • This happens again in season 4, when Walter keeps catching glimpses of Peter after he has been erased from the timeline.
• Lobotomy: Walter Bishop tries to self-lobotomize because he believes his visions of Peter mean that he's losing his mind.
• Loss of Identity: What Walternate forces on our universe's Olivia in the third season premiere.
• Lost Superweapon: Newton seems to be tracking down the pieces of one.
• Love Dodecahedron: Well... Peter is in love with Olivia who liked John at first but he died and she liked Peter back but she doesn't remember him as of season 4 and now has a thing for Lincoln who is quite smitten back but is friends with Peter who seems to ship them as well for some reason but Olivia remembered Peter again and now Lincoln is broken hearted and in the alternate time line Peter thought that Fauxlivia was Olivia and spent seven episodes enamoured with her but she was dating Frank but Alternate Lincoln liked her too and seemed to be fond of our Olivia as well when Walternate mind raped her into thinking she was Fauxlivia but in the amber timeline Fauxlivia has broken up with Frank and Lincoln was her "shoulder to cry on" but then he died but the other Lincoln said he'd stay and help and Seth Gabel ships them and... I think that's it.
• Love Transcends Spacetime:
  • Peter and Olivia. They've been separated by universes. Peter has been erased from existence. Olivia has been shot in the future. They've crossed between universes, rewritten time lines and changed the future. Damn straight it transcends spacetime.
  • blue!Lincoln crosses into a dying universe for Fauxlivia.
  • Most of the other examples in the series are Deconstructed, the elderly couple from "6B" who miss their other halves so much that they nearly break the universes, Alistair Peck and his time travel device and the man from "And Those We've Left Behind" who tries to make a bubble in time so that he can stay with his wife in the past before she can get early onset Alzheimer's and accidentally ends up creating dangerous time loops.
• Love Is a Weakness: In one episode, Newton poisons Walter and when cornered by Olivia, looking to bring Newton into custody, he reveals a three-step antidote process to counteract the poison, but he'll only agree to give Olivia the correct order for administering the antidote if she lets him go. Having to choose between arresting her target or saving her colleague and friend, she chooses to save Walter. As promised, Newton upholds his end of the bargain and Walter is saved, but before he makes his break, he tells Olivia, "Now I know how weak you are."
• Love Makes You Crazy: August's love for Christine leads to him performing some very un-Observerish behavior, namely, deciding to forgo just watching and actually interfering with the course of history by saving Christine's life.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: September/Donald reveals that he is Michael's father in The Boy Must Live.
• Mad Mathematician: One of Walter's fellow patients at the St. Clair's asylum. The poor guy was made that way and ended up killing his wife.
• Mad Scientist:
  • Walter Bishop, who's moved towards the 'endearingly confused and absent-minded' end of the spectrum rather than the 'really insane' side after leaving the asylum. He's also The Worm Guy and the Omnidisciplinary Scientist.
    Dr. Bishop: The only thing better than a cow is a human. Unless you need milk, then you really need a cow.
  • Walter tends to shift from one end of the spectrum to another many times per episode. Rather than being inconsistent writing, this tends to make most anything involving Walter absolutely terrifying and remind you that the guy who spent 20 minutes talking about French toast is probably the most dangerous person in the whole show.
    • The audience is reminded forcibly in Letters of Transit where he has the excised parts of his brain restored, and promptly starts outwitting Observers.
  • William Bell, his ex-partner, might be on the 'take over the world' side after he parlayed his research with Bishop into a massive company with a nebulously-defined "specialty" (a billboard for the company says "What do we do? What don't we do?"). Turns out Bell isn't really so mad after all. In fact, he's one of the good guys (as far as we know).
    • Played damn straight in Season 4.
  • Many, many minor characters.
  • Walternate is perfectly sane. But he is quite pissed off with Walter.
• Mad Scientist Laboratory: The Harvard laboratory is the most prominent one but you've got dozens of others.
• Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: An uncommon male example in Peter Bishop. While he's far from the naïf, it's an interesting play on the trope.
• Made of Iron:
  • Olivia takes a lot of punishment in "Bound" and keeps on fighting.
  • To a lesser extent, the shapeshifters.
• Magic from Technology: In 2x12 ("Johari Window"), wherein a whole town of mutants appear normal via a sustained elctromagnetic pulse, Walter claims that an old friend once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
• Manly Tears: Both Peter and Walter have done this a few times.
• Married in the Future:
  • Peter Bishop spends a week in the future, where he is married to his long-time Love Interest Olivia Dunham. It does not end well for Olivia, unfortunately. Come to think of it, it doesn't end well for anyone.
  • In the penultimate hour, when Olivia makes one last trip to the red-verse after being ambered for over 20 years and not aging, she reunites with Bolivia and Lincoln, who have aged normally and are now middle-aged, married, and have a son, going by their wedding rings and the family picture glimpsed on Bolivia's desk.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": "6:02 am" has a few of these casually strewn about the place. It's that kind of episode.
• Maybe Ever After:
  • It's left ambiguous whether or not Lincoln and Fauxlivia get together but he's smitten and she doesn't seem opposed to him permanently crossing into her universe.
    • When Olivia crosses over in the series finale, they're shown to be married with a son.
• Meaningful Name: Joseph Meeger, who is a meager Extreme Doormat until he gains supernatural abilities... and even then, he suffers from Power Incontinence.
• Mechanistic Alien Culture: The Observers who are future descendants of humanity hint at this with their uniformity, odd behavior, Creepy Monotone speech, and severely dulled sense of taste in contrast to their subtle perceptions of the flow of time, play this and most of the original MIB Mythos, see above pretty straight (that is, up until the episode "Letters of Transit"). It's possible the Scientific Team September, August, et al were a part of was some kind of "scientific caste" in Observer society; the behavior of the "Overseer" Observers in the possible version of the year 2036 in the episode "Letters of Transit" were much more carnal and human-like, and did not seem to use the same Creepy Monotone (though one or more of those traits might be due to prolonged exposure to modern/20 Minutes into the Future human behavior).
  • There appear to be no female Observers (at least none have been seen so far), and how or if they reproduce has never been addressed. They are also Ditto Posthumans, being extremely uniform, even when they appear in large numbers. They all seem to wear variations on a suit and a decades-out-of-style hat; this also includes when they appear in large numbers; the episodes set in the future make it clear that all Observers dress like this, not just the members of September's Scientific Team.
    • In The Boy Must Live, we are shown that Observers are grown in tanks (making them all test tube babies and possibly clones) and are released upon reaching physical maturity. Michael was discovered as an anomaly while still in the pre-adolescent stage of physical development, hence why his physical appearance is that of a child.
• Medium Blending: When Walter and Peter go into Olivia's mind, the world switches from live action to a rotoscoped, cel-shaded cartoon as soon as they meet William Bell. Apparently they couldn't get Leonard Nimoy to appear in person so they had to come up with something to use him in the episode. He was unwilling to go back on his retirement (announced following completion of the Fringe S2 finale), but he was prepared to do the voicework, hence the animation.
• MegaCorp: Massive Dynamic: What don't we do?
• Memory Gambit: Walter pulls one in season 5 to prevent the Observers from finding out the plan to defeat them.
• The Men in Black: The Observer seems to play this very close to the classic understanding of the MIB image.
• Mental Time Travel: In the 3rd season finale, the mind of Peter's younger self is pulled into the Bad Future to prevent it by showing what will happen if he uses the machine to destroy the alternate universe.
• Merged Reality: Peter uses the Vacuum to tear holes in both universes and merge them, after witnessing the Bad Future that comes from destroying a universe.
• Mind over Matter: It's said that Olivia has this from being experimented on as a child.
  • And she does have telekinesis as proven in last two episodes of season 3.
• Mind Rape: Walternate does this to Olivia. Even Alt!Broyles has a bit of a What the Hell, Hero? moment.
  • The Observers can do this (particularly the Invaders in the Bad Future shown in "Letters of Transit" and Season 5).
• Mind Screw: '' "Death. I saw death. All of it. And it was '''me'''. And yes, there were drugs involved.
  • Makes a lot more sense when you realise that Broyles came face to face with His own dead body.
• Mirror Match: Olivia vs. Olivia in "Over There, Part 2".
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The freakish beast from "Unleashed". Some of the iconic images used to promote the show also have features of this trope.
• Modesty Bedsheet
• The Mole: John Scott, who was working with Steigman prior to the events of the pilot. And not to mention Agent Loeb. And as it turns out Sanford Harris. And now the alternate universe soldier posing as Charlie. Again with Alternate-Olivia sneaking into our universe. And then Amberverse Col. Broyles working for Amber-Jones This show loves this trope.
• Morality Chain:
  • Brought up in "One Night in October", when a forensic psychologist is brought to the other universe to profile his Serial Killer Evil Twin, and it turns out that the key difference between the two is that the psychologist, as a child, had met a woman who taught him to manage his destructive urges, while his counterpart never did. After the evil twin steals his memories of the woman, there's concern as to whether he'll go evil without them. Broyles says that while they'll keep an eye on him, he believes some people make a mark on others that cannot be erased.
  • Deconstructed in "Five Twenty Ten". Walter is adamant that Peter's love and support will prevent him from turning into his old self. Nina expresses her doubts and tells Walter how her love for William Bell wasn't enough to stop him from Playing God. Walter dismisses her (rather cruelly) but she turns out to be right. In the end, Michael helps Walter by giving him his memories from the other timeline and by giving him a little reality check.
• Motherly Scientist
  • Doctor Penrose is a dark, Gender Flipped version. He helps his "son" murder women in a particularly nightmare inducing way so that his son won't end up dying of Rapid Aging.
  Killer: He... he should have let me die a long time ago. I was an experiment. Someone... someone paid him. The man I call my father. He should have let me die. That was his mistake. But he was blinded because he loved me. He loved me...
• The Mountains of Illinois: The show tries to pass off Vancouver as Boston. They do not resemble each other.
• Mundane Utility: Walter becomes the sole owner of Massive Dynamic in Season 3, and mostly uses the opportunity to steal things from their offices every time he visits since they are technically "his".
• Murder by Cremation: Charlie is killed off-screen by a shape-shifter and disposed of in a hospital incinerator.
• Musical Episode: "Brown Betty" is a detective story Walter tells Ella while Olivia is looking for a disappeared Peter. In it, Olivia is a hard-boiled pulpish detective, Walter is a Mad Scientist Marty Stu though not so much, as it is revealed and the setting is an Anachronism Stew of 30's atmosphere and modern/future technology. This trope is played with when Rachel first starts singing, and Walter's voice comes out. This doesn't happen when other characters start singing however.
• Mushroom Samba: "Lysergic Acid Diethylemide" and "Black Blotter".
• My God, What Have I Done?: This, followed immediately by Driven to Suicide, is the reaction of a Serial Killer after he essentially acquires empathy/conscience from his alternate universe counterpart.
• Mysterious Past: Much of Walter's life before he was admitted St. Claire's is still shrouded in mystery. This also applies to Peter, who has a pretty sketchy background.
• Mythology Gag: Take a shot every time one shows up in "Brown Betty". You'll be dead in less than half an hour.
• Mysterious Watcher: The Observer. Played with during his first featured episode when the camera pulls out at the end of the ep to reveal him watching, as per usual for the trope, then Peter comes out of nowhere with a haymaker to the Observer's jaw and demands to know who he is and what's going on. He's appeared in every ep so far, doubling as an Easter Egg. He has also appeared in other Fox programs, including NFL games, NBA games, and American Idol.
• Mystical Pregnancy: Fauxlivia's pregnancy is accelerated via some terrifying medical experiments, courtesy of Walternate.
• Naked People Are Funny: Walter. Walter, Walter, Walter. Examples include Olivia finding out about his "cooking naked on Tuesdays" habit in "6:02 AM" - the hilarious way.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: The Occupation in season five is a extreme case. Master Race who considers themselves above others? Check. Society divided between the "lower" humans and the humans who serve a Master Race, (The Observers)? Check. "lower" humans live in ghettos in subhuman living conditions without access to a proper education, food or medicine? Check. Heavy worshipping of the aforementioned Master Race? Check. La Résistance is formed? Check. Constant witch hunts and heavy militarism? Check.
  • The uniform of the Loyalists also heavily resembles the Wehrmacht.
  • The imagery is really taken up to eleven in "The Boy Must Live" (which, coincidentally, is the eleventh episode of the final season.) In the final ten minutes, the Observers set up roadblock checkpoints, drive up and down the street in Humvees, and soldiers are marching through the train station in search of Michael.
• Neck Snap:
  • David Robert Jones kills his lawyer this way as part of his escape plan.
  • Spinal fluid vampire lady, Valerie Boone, Valerie Boone. (She turned March into June).
  • Peter does this to an Observer in 5x06. That's when we know that his abilities are kicking in.
• The Needs of the Many:
  • Much of Walter's character development is centered around this trope.
  • The justification for using Amber. Hundreds of people trapped in a continue loop of fear... but the universe won't rip itself apart.
• Nerdgasm: Brandon has one, with a combination of Properly Paranoid when researching Observer sightings.
• Neutral Female: Played With in "Brave New World, part 1". David Robert Jones sneaks up on Peter, dislocates his shoulder and proceeds to beat the crap out of him with a crowbar. Olivia is on the roof of another building, watching helplessly until the cortexiphan kicks in. She possesses Peter and then goes all Xbox kinetic on his ass.
• Never Recycle A Room: Walter the Mad Scientist returns to his lab in the basement of a Harvard building after 17 years and just has to just dust the place down before getting back to work; not only has the space been left unused, but all his equipment is still there. Considering what he was working on leaving it alone might be the smartest thing a university has ever done. Walternate's lab wasn't recycled either.
  • The site in Jacksonville where William Bell and Walter conducted their experiments on Olivia. Handwaved by Bell buying it and then keeping it shut down.
  • Alistair Peck's lab.
• Never Trust a Trailer: "Brown Betty" was advertised as a quirky, lighthearted Musical Episode. It really isn't. There's also only one real musical number.
  • And the trailer for the German premiere of this episode flanderized the noir aspect by being Deliberately Monochrome and utilizing "old movie"-style fonts. (Both also not to be found in the episode itself.)
• Next Sunday A.D.: Presumably, given several references to President Obama, it's this as opposed to 20 Minutes into the Future.
  • Given that the Fringe division and everything it does is kept a secret from the public, it's possible that it's happening right now and you just don't know about it.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Nice job saving Other Peter's life, Walter. Too bad that now we have two universes ready to collapse.
  • Also, the Bad Future in the season 3 finale.
    • Congratulations everyone for locking Walter away in prison! Sure, you want to punish him for accidentally causing the near-destruction of the world, but did it ever occur to you, that you might have just locked away the one person capable of potentially fixing the problem?
  • Nice job observing Walternate, Observer. You should be fired.
    • Though the Observer does admit he's prone to getting involved when he shouldn't and accidentally reveals too much.
  • "Subject 13" reveals that a young Olivia accidentally crossed over and alerted Walternate to the existence of the Primary Universe.
  • In "The Bishop Revival", Walter and Peter have a falling out when he reveals that about ten years earlier he had sold some of Walter's prized books. Turns out the books were smuggled out of Nazi Germany by Walter's father and contained a formula for a programmable bioweapon, which is now being used against people.
    • Then subverted, as it turns out the person who bought the books is just an artist, leaving them unsure who managed to perfectly replicate the formula? The ending implies that culprit was Older Than They Look and broke into Walter's lab, decades earlier.
• The Nicknamer: Walter refers to William Bell as "Belly", his parallel universe doppleganger as "Walternate" and Astrid as... basically any name beginning with the letter A.
  • In the latter case, one interpretation is that he pretends to forget Astrid's name simply to screw with her, as he seems to consistently get it right when she's not around!
• Nightmare Fetishist: Walter gets fired up rather than horrified by the grotesqueries they confront.
  • Ella is strangely nonplussed by the weird and freaky as well, which might foreshadow her becoming a Fringe agent in the future.
  • Also Doctor Mona Foster. Her response to being told that bugs ate their way out of a person is keen interest. She also has a crush on Scarlie because of the arachnids that live under his skin.
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: In Season 4, a girl named Emily has visions of how people die,she carries a drawing pad with her so she can quick draw them out before she forgets them.
  • In "The Ghost Network", Roy also would sketch down images of pattern-related events as they were happening in real-time.
• 90% of Your Brain: "Ability" averted this but replaced it with a similar concept. The trope was later invoked in the commercial for "Of Human Action", though not the episode itself. Further explained that at the special abilities that characterise the Cortexiphan patients used to exist throughout humanity but faded out all a sudden. Walter suspects it was aliens who caused the loss of abilities.
• No-One Could Have Survived That: A woman falls from a building in episode 3x17 and walks away. Later we find out she was murdered eighteen months ago and escaped from the morgue.
• No-Paper Future: The other universe is apparently like this, to the extent that the presence of a ballpoint pen at a crime scene is the most exotic thing about it. The clue leads them to a research center where mentally-handicapped patients have difficulty using computers and tend to write with pens instead.
• Noir Episode: "Brown Betty" (2x20), also doubles as a Musical Episode.
• Noodle Implements: Astrid does not want to know what Walter intends to do with a porn magazine and a portrait of George W. Bush.
  • It's Walter. Given his politics he probably wanted to make a collage.
• Noodle Incident: Whatever case landed Alt-Charlie with arachnid eggs infesting his body.
  • Presumably the same case that left "our" version of the character with them, only they couldn't synthesise a cure, only a control measure.
  • Basically anything Walter says that he's worked on for the Government. They had him doing some weird stuff.
  • One from the Alternate Universe. In "Fractures" we see a homeless man on the street, who's apparently an "Aruba War" veteran.
• No, You:
  • From "Ability"
  Olivia: I was hoping you'd have one of your weird connections.
  Peter: Weird connections?
  Olivia: They're always a little weird.
  Peter: Well, you're always a little weird.
  • Also in "Enemy of My Enemy"
  Fauxlivia: I've just got kinda a hunch that this other Lincoln is telling us the truth.
  Lincoln: It must be because he has such a trustworthy face.
  Fauxlivia: *laugh* See, I think he's kinda funny looking.
  Lincoln: You're funny looking.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging:
  • Peter to Olivia and Walter towards the end of second season.
  • Olivia to Peter at the start of "Marionette."
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Sanford Harris deliberately uses his administrative leverage to hinder Olivia's work, as revenge for a past conviction on sexual harassment charges and especially because he's The Mole. "I have lots of red tape."
• Oceanic Airlines: The show has an ad for Oceanic.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Olivia using one of Bell's phosphorous grenade prototypes in "Over There, Part 2". And, presumably, her fight with Fauxlivia that immediately followed it where Fauxlivia managed to take her place.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Nina Sharp's expression in "Peter" after her arm starts flickering screams this trope.
  • The Observer in "Letters of Transit." Causally observing the device Walter made... and then realising what it is.
  • Milo Stanfield in "The Plateau" when Olivia doesn't die as he had predicted.
    Well that wasn't supposed to happen...
• Ominous Hair Loss: Peter starts to lose his hair, along with his humanity, when he puts Observer tech into his brain.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: When Olivia sees something from "the other side", it flickers and shimmers visually. Usually it's indication of a serious problem. In this case, it is the audience seeing what Olivia sees.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Walter specializes in neurology, genetic manipulation, amateur surgery, and basement time/space machines. And pharmacology
  Walter: Excellent! Let's make some LSD!
• Once an Episode:
  • The Observer, the cow.
  • Played with in Brown Betty. Several Observers show up in that episode at the same time as generic Mooks, as well as a polka-dot cow in Bizarro!Walter's lab.
  • All episodes also contain a link to the next episode, for example the Beacon from "The Arrival" is shown on a sign in The Ghost Network.
• Once a Season:
  • Every season features a visit to Edward Markham, Peter's Mysterious Informant and Information Broker of choice.
  • Air disasters. Each season involves an air disaster of varying degrees of horror. The exception is the fifth season, but the first season has two to make up for it.
  • Olivia will cross between universes. Usually, but not always, reserved for the season finales.
• One Degree of Separation: It turns out that Olivia was one of the children that Walter Bishop and William Bell experimented on.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. There are several Josephs in the first season, and a minor character in season 4 is named Olivia.
• Orbital Kiss: Peter and Olivia at the end of "A Short Story About Love."
• Orifice Evacuation: In "Bound" an immunologist is killed by a slug which escapes through his mouth.
• Other Me Annoys Me
• Outliving One's Offspring: Most of the events of the series occur because scientist father Walter Bishop watched his only son die of a childhood illness and couldn't bring himself to let it happen again in the parallel universe.
  • And again in the 5th season, Peter and Olivia have to live through their 3 year old daughter Etta disappearing right in front of their eyes. Peter reacts by searching for nonstop, scouring the country for her. Olivia on the other hand is so terrified that they will find her body that she absolves herself to the fact her child has died.
    • After reuniting with Henrietta in the bad future, the family have a few days of togetherness, before Etta is shot and killed by Windmark. They find her just as she's dying.
• Our Vampires Are Different: They suck spinal fluid, not blood. And they go clubbing!
• Out of Order: "Unearthed", which aired during the run of Season 2, was clearly supposed to be a Season 1 episode, as Charlie Francis is still alive, which caused many fans to pause the episode and stare blankly at the screen for a few moments wondering what had happened. On streaming services, the episode was moved to the end of Season 1 to avoid viewer confusion, which opens a whole new can of worms since Olivia is supposed to be in the other universe at that point in the story.
• Outlaw Couple: Olivia and Peter in Season 5.

Tropes P-T

• Papa Bear: Walter would go to any length to save his son.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: In "The Bishop Revival", when Walter discovers the killer is perverting his father's research and attempting to eliminate all those not of the "Master-race", he reprogams the killer's toxin to instead target them instead.
• Peggy Sue: In "White Tulip," the Mystery of the Week is a scientist who is attempting this to bring back his fiancee, who died in a car accident several months prior. A vast deconstruction, of course.
• People Puppets: In "Of Human Action", Tyler Carson has this power. He uses it brutally, forcing a policewoman to kill herself and her fellow officers, and has a man cut his own fingers off for trying to escape. Trying to resist causes lesions on your brain, but he can be incapacitated for a very short time with a special device that blanks his brainwaves.
• Pensieve Flashback: Olivia going into the tank to view John Scott's memories. Played with in that John is able to interact with Olivia (even though Walter says this is not possible).
• Perma-Stubble: Peter.
• Personal Effects Reveal: Fauxlivia goes through Lincoln Lee's locker and finds two pictures of the two of them together.
• Pet the Dog: The ordinarily stoic and humorless Broyles has a moment at the beginning and ending of "Earthling."
  • Fauxlivia has one of these moments every time she's with her son.
• Phone-Trace Race: Done in "Stowaway" in a failed effort to track a Death Seeker on a train with a bomb.
• Planning with Props: Walter explains to Broyles how he intends to attenuate the fringe disturbances caused by the two doomsday machines by using a glass pane, magnets and iron filings.
• Playing with Fire:
  • "The Road Not Taken" is about a woman who has acquired pyrokinetic powers.
  • And according to Walter, at one point Olivia got scared during the experiments done to her as a child and "started a fire with her mind."
• Playing with Syringes: The entire series runs on this trope.
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up:
  • Fauxlivia gets pregnant with Peter's child, but is found to have a genetic condition that will likely kill them both upon birth. So Walternate arranges for the pregnancy to be accelerated, beating the disease to the punch.
  • Walter, Olivia, Peter and Astrid are all trapped in amber for 20 years between Seasons 4 and 5. That way they can all remain the same age while Peter and Olivia's daughter Etta becomes old enough to join in on the adventures.
• Plot Tumor: Most of the first season had slight allusions to the alternate universe, and it was confirmed in Season 2, but it took until the Finale of Season 2/Season 3 to actually get there.
• Pointless Doomsday Device: Destroying the parallel universe with the Machine actually makes things worse in the surviving universe, leading to a Bad Future.
• Popcultural Osmosis Failure: Olivia doesn't get Peter's reference to "crossing the streams".
• Port Manteau: Since the introduction of the alternate universe, there have been many, many examples of Portmanteau, in-universe ("Walternate") and out. The winner of most portmanteaus? Easily the two Olivias. Over there Olivia? Altlivia, Nolivia, Bolivia, Fauxlivia, Holivia, Theirlivia, Otherlivia. This universe's Olivia? A-livia, Ourlivia. And then there is Bellivia, for when Bell is possessing Olivia However, the best portmanteau of the series isn't a name, but a concept introduced by our Dr. Walter Bishop - vagenda
• Portal Cut: The manner in which Mr. Jones dies. As well, this is how Nina loses her arm.
• Posthumous Character: Carla Warren.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Time Travel, in "White Tulip". The very act of going back towards the past instantly drains all batteries and kills anything and anyone in the immediate vicinity.
• Power-Strain Blackout: Olivia on occasion.
• Precursors:
  • Walternate's Doomsday Device is described as ancient, and according to the trailer for 6955 kHz, the titular signal is millions of years old.
  • subverted in the season 3 finale, which explained things with a Stable Time Loop. Although this only presents more questions because neither universe actually has the technology to build the machines for themselves, just put the pieces together. So while the message and the buried pieces now make sense, where did the machine come from originally ? .
    • It's subtly hinted and theorized by Wild Mass Guessing that the doomsday device was actually created and put in place by the Observers, since the strange language is exactly like theirs. Walter just assumed in a hurry he somehow created the device. It seems to be part of the very elaborate time-manipulation plan to ensure the Observer invasion in the last season's plot.
• Pre-emptive Declaration: From S4/E9 "Enemy of my Enemy", An agent of David Robert Jones is a doctor in an Emergency Room. She calls up Fringe Division, asks them to listen closely, and walks out the ER (leaving a canister behind her):
  Orderly(to the exiting Dr. Samuels): Doctor Samuels, do you want me to give that little girl with the bike injury a Tetanus?
  Dr. Samuels: Not necessary. I don't think she's gonna make it. (Orderly gives her a confused look as the canister begins to release a gas that kills everyone in the ER)
• Pre-Insanity Reveal: Dr Walter Bishop gets a few flashback episodes showing him to have been a much calmer and much darker character before the personal tragedy that laid the way for the series. It turns out he deliberately had part of his brain removed because he didn't like what he was becoming.
• Pretty Little Headshots
• Product Placement: The season 2 finale features our heroes chowing down on KFC and snacking on Twizzlers. Incidentally, Walter knows the eleven secret ingredients. And he has for over thirty years.
  • Rather blatant placement for Ford products show up in a few episodes, but not to a level of egregiousness.
  • Sprint has had rather subtle product placement throughout the series, until the first part of the finale for Season 4. A man conspicuously uses a Sprint phone to pay for his coffee, and afterward, Walter makes a particularly dumb suggestion that it had something to the man burning to death from the inside out and Astrid tells him 'it's how people pay for things now'.
  • Season 3 takes place in both universes. The alternate universe is technologically much much more advanced than ours - yet in both universes Windows 7 is state of the art and widely used.
    • But then of course we now know that Windows 8's desktop mode looks exactly the same as Windows 7 (as do many other elements) and that it'll be the dominating OS for a good decade or so.
• Psychic Link:
  • The pilot features a link between Agent Dunham and John Scott in order to find a missing, unidentified suspect. The drug cocktail used to "open her consciousness" involves ketamine and lysergic acid, also known as LSD. Which leads to John Scott's thoughts being uploaded into Olivia.
  • Also happens in "Bad Dreams". Olivia shares a mental link to her partner from Walter and William's experiments - an emotionally disturbed man who has the ability to control people by transplanting said emotions into them.
• Psychic Nosebleed: As a general rule, nosebleed in Fringe equals really bad. In a couple of instances it's accompanied by blood vessels in one eye popping.
  • Happens to Peter as a result of the Doomsday Device activating.
  • Inverted in the season 5 premiere: Walter is on the receiving end of a psychic torture and he is the one getting a nosebleed...and a mouth-bleed...and an eye-bleed.
  • Played straight in "Liberty." Windmark turns his power on Michael - only to start suffering the same effects as Walter when he was hit with this. Even the eye-bleed.
• "Psycho" Strings:
  • William Bell gets these in his introduction in Season 4 to let us know that he might not be the man he was in the other timeline.
  • Peter got this when he teleported behind an Observer and snapped his neck.
• Pun-Based Title:
  • The title of the episode with the melting brains? "No-Brainer".
  • The one about rapid aging? "The Same Old Story".
  • People getting turned to dust? "Earthling".
  • Walternate.
  • Fauxlivia.
  • Most titles on the soundtracks are amazingly awful. This is standard procedure for Michael Giacchino.
• Putting on the Reich: The uniforms of the non-Fringe Division police officers in Letters Of Transit resemble Chinese and North Korean uniforms rather than that of the Nazis though.
• Race Against the Clock: "Ability" has Olivia racing to complete a test of psychic abilities for David Robert Jones before a time bomb with a chemical weapon detonates in downtown Boston.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:The animated segments inside Olivia's mind in "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide" were necessary because Leonard Nimoy could only provide his voice, rather than a full performance, since he's now (mostly) retired from acting and wasn't available.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: In Season 5 Nina Sharp delivers an epic one to Windmark concerning their technology-assisted evolution and how it has not only enhanced their intelligence but also their most primal instincts, and how they are no different than the millions of years-old lizard. "You are the animal."
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Broyles implies Windmark must have done something wrong to get put in charge of the undesirable duty of occupying Earth. Windmark actually requested the position though, because he seems to sadistically enjoy subjugating humanity.
• Red Right Hand: Anson Carr, the killer in "A Short Story About Love" with an extensively scarred face.
• Repeat What You Just Said: Due to Walter Bishop's mental fogginess, he frequently has difficulty remembering certain things. He frequently paces around and mumbles various mnemonics and unintelligible fragments of an idea until someone, often Astrid Farnsworth, happens to say something that jogs his memory.
• Replacement Goldfish: After Peter died at seven, Walter stole the Peter from the alternate universe. Walter had originally planned to cross over to cure the other Peter of the genetic disease that previously killed his own Peter. When the vial of medicine broke, he took Peter back to his dimension, fully intending to return him once he was cured. After his wife saw the other Peter, Walter realized he couldn't bring himself to let go of him a second time.
  • After Olivia gets her prime timeline memories restored and falls in love with Peter (again), and the alternate universe Lincoln is killed in the line of duty, Fauxlivia and the prime universe Lincoln become Replacement Goldfish to each other.
• Red Shirt: Police officers and non-Fringe division FBI agents are frequently killed off by the Monster of the Week.
  • Examples include:
    • "The Cure" (1x6) Cop has his brain exploded by a woman who has been turned radioactive
    • "Ability" (1x14) A newly introduced FBI agent falls victim to a a chemical that seals your orifices shut
    • "Night of Desirable Objects" (2x2) Sheriff gets eaten by mutant child
    • "Fracture" (2x3) Cop has been dosed with a chemical for years, crystalizes and explodes
    • and 'especially' "Of Human Action" (2x7): a cop is mind controlled to jump off a roof then another cop is forced to shoot two of her colleagues before turning the gun on herself
    • "Alone in the World" (4x3) FBI agent killed by the fungus.
    • "And Those We Left Behind" (4x6) FBI agent gets trapped and vaporized in the time bubble.
    • Loyalists, in Season 5.
• Research, Inc.: Massive Dynamic and a few others.
• Ret-Gone:
  • Peter, as of "The Day We Died". He got better as of "Subject 9". His son didn't.
  • The Observers.
• Reduced to Ratburgers: The bald boy found in the tunnel from "Inner Child" is assumed to have lived off rats, bugs, and moss.
• Retraux:
  • The opening of "Peter", is made to look as if it was made in the 80's. As well, the floating text from flashbacks to 1985 is in a different font.
  • They compare 80's fringe science to modern fringe science - all of it seemed absurd, but some of it actually came to pass, while the rest just turned out to be bunk. The implication is pretty obvious: yeah, a lot of it is crazy, but the good stuff will change everything!
• Retro Universe: Walter's fairy tale world in "Brown Betty." The cars are old, men wear fedoras, and yet everyone still carries a cell phone.
• Return to Shooter: Olivia does this to Jessica when she tries to kill September.
• The Reveal:
  • Last bit of the season 1 finale, when the camera pulls around to reveal that it's Peter Bishop's grave. The dates? 1978-1985.
  • Closing shot of the season 1 finale, when the camera pulls around to reveal that Olivia and William Bell are meeting in the still-standing Twin Towers.
  • The last part of "A New Day in the Old Town", when we learn that Charlie has been killed and replaced by the shape-changing soldier from another universe.
  • As of "Over There" part 1, we now know that Walternate is the parallel universe's Secretary of Defense.
  • The ending scene of the season 2 finale, where we see Olivia going to communicate with her superiors via typewriter, and the real Olivia being held captive on the other side.
  • End of "The Last Sam Weiss," where we see tha Peter is at a 9/11 memorial - installed 10 years in the future.
  • End of "The Day We Died," where the Observers casually inform us that Peter no longer exists.
• Reverse Polarity: In 3.06:
  Walter: Dammit! Why can't I get a current?
  Astrid: Maybe you reversed the poles?
  And in the series final, it's apparently part of the time-machine's function.
• Revival Loophole: Walter puts a bullet in Olivia's brain to foil Bell's plans to collapse the two universes. Thanks to Olivia's Healing Factor, she gets better.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The Resistance in Season 5, big time. Their typical methodology when they capture collaborators is to torture them with a device that ages them extremely rapidly and painfully, pump them for all the information they can get, and then kill them. Etta considers this perfectly normal.
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue: Olivia and Peter dump several Fringe biohazards into the air vents of Observer HQ to rescue Broyles in the Grand Finale.
• Room Full of Crazy: Seen on several occasions. Walter's lab may also qualify.
  • Peter turns Etta's appartment into this after inserting the Observer tech into is brain.
• Rule of Cool: Are half the things that occur on Fringe even remotely plausibly? Not by a longshot. Are they awesome? Hell yes.
  • Walter explicitly invokes the Rule of Cool to explain himself in the series finale.
  Walter: Anti-gravity Osmium bullets. Shoot Observers with these and watch them float away like balloons.
  Peter: If we shoot them, they're dead. Why do we want them to float away?
  Walter: Because it's cool!
• Running Gag: Peter "maybe knowing a guy" who can do this or that faster than the FBI could.
  • Also, Walter getting Astrid's name wrong.
  • Charlante: "THEY'RE NOT WORMS!"
  • The image cutting to a pan of the Massive Dynamic HQ after someone says that they need information, technology, or that they've found a link to someone important. It might as well be a recurring gag given how often it happens.
  • People entering Walter's lab for the first time, frequently questioning why there's a cow in the corner?
  • When Walter meets a victim-of-the-week, he often mentions that the circumstances of death bring to mind two things. The first is an insight into how the person was killed, and the second is a particular snack Walter is craving.
• Save Both Worlds: The cornerstone of the show and its mythology is an Alternate Universe, and the protagonists (from the prime universe) are using Mad Science in an attempt to save both worlds after the first attempt at crossing from one universe to another resulted in a parade of soft spots, cracks in the walls of reality, breakdowns of the laws of physics, swirly energy thingies, negative earth wedgies, dogs and cats living together, etc. that threaten to destroy both universes. This is juxtaposed by the characters from the Alternate Universe, who believe the only way to save their universe is to destroy the prime one first (and they may be right). Or not, as it is revealed that the two worlds are permanently intertwined; therefore, the only way for any character to save their world is to save both of them.
• Sacrificial Lion:
  • Etta Bishop. That's when we realise how dangerous Windmark is.
  • Agent Charlie Francis. After getting through the first season relatively unharmed, being established as Olivia's Wingman and one of the major Agents in Fringe Division, and surviving a M-Preg gone horribly wrong, we all assumed that Charlie had developed Plot Armor as one of the core characters. Then the writers have him killed by a shape-shifter who steals his form, who later dies anyways.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Walter.
• Science Is Bad: Sort of. According to the creators the entire ethos of the show is that scientists haven't had any sense of their own purpose since the space race ended and that's bound to cause all kinds of problems.
• Serial Escalation: Part of the second season premiere.
• Schizo Tech: The alternate universe has modern cell phones by 1985, but still uses zeppelins. Tablet computers are so widespread that paper is obsolete, but they haven't cured smallpox.
  • "Brown Betty". It's supposed to come off as an old-school 1950's Film Noir musical, but alas, we have laser pens, cellphones, and laptops. ...The cellphones are touch-pad PDA's which are absurdly huge and look like giant slabs of metal, and the laptops are built out of wood.
• Secret Test: The Observer's ultimate goal in "Firefly". Нe wanted to know if Walter is ready to sacrifice Peter.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
  • In S2-E16, "Peter", one of the Observers wanders through Walternate's lab and distracts him so he doesn't notice that the cure for Peter's disease is actually workable. Oops. He gets a polite dressing-down from his fellow Observers, and makes up for screwing the pooch by saving Peter's life (and Walter's) when they fall through the ice.
  • "White Tulip" Pretty much the entire plot.
  • The season 3 finale.
• Shapeshifter Baggage: People undergoing horrific transformations often put on large amounts of biomass from nowhere.
• Shapeshifting Sound: From "A New Day In The Old Town" onwards, the shapeshifters take on new forms while accompanied a number of bone-crunching sound effects - beginning from the moment they physically crush their faces inwards with their bare hands.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Olivia puts on a cocktail dress to inflitrate a black-tie fundraiser.
• She-Fu: Impressively averted with Olivia. While she usually favors taking the bad guys down with a few well-placed bullets, the times she does get into a fistfight she both takes and dishes out pretty convincing punches. Of course, she is a former Marine and fancy backflips would not be in her combat repertoire.
• Shipper on Deck: Walter, for Peter & Olivia: "Do you two want to use the room?" Lately he's wondered aloud if his son and Olivia got married she would call him "Dad".
  • Oh, Walter is just a giant ball of mischief when it comes to shipping Peter and Olivia. "Of course, condoms are never 100 per cent effective (pause) You two should be aware of that." and shortly after Olivia has been temporarily abducted we have:
  'Walter: Peter was really worried about you when you were gone.
  Peter: Walter...
  Walter: You were.
  Peter: Well, of course I was worried.
  Walter: He was *really* worried.
  • ... later in the same episode ...
  Walter: I was worried, too, when you were taken.
  Olivia: Thank you, Walter. (she walks away)
  Walter: (after a pause) Not as much as him, of course.
  Peter: Walter....
  Walter: It's true.
  • In "Jacksonville", when Peter tells him that he's about to go on a "not-date" with Olivia, we see Walter do a happy little jig at the news.
  • Nina Sharp is a pretty avid Peter and Olivia shipper. For good reason. Shipping is really Serious Business where those two are concerned.
    • In Season 4, Nina is less of a shipper considering that if Olivia remembers Peter, she forgets that Nina was her surrogate mother. She doesn't stop this from happening but she is a little cold towards Peter.
  • September also ships Peter and Olivia. To the point of defying the other Observers.
  • Astrid tries to set up Olivia and Lincoln in Season 4.
  • In a really weird turn of events, Peter seems to ship Lincoln and Olivia from the amber timeline. He even buys Lincoln a pair of hip glasses to woo her with. And then Peter realises that amber!Olivia is his Olivia and the shipping stops dead. Alternate universes, altered time lines and upcoming apocalypses sure make hysterical Love Triangles.
  • Phillip Broyles carried around a photograph of Peter and Olivia for twenty one years.
• Shoo Out the New Guy: Anyone else remember Amy Jessup? Nope, well you're not alone. For the star of season 2 there was an announcement of a new member joining Fringe Division who saw a possible religious/supernatural connection to the Pattern. She ended up being in only two episodes.
• Shoot The Fueltank: Olivia does this in the Season 3 premier. From a moving taxi. Henry Higgins, the taxi driver, is suitably impressed.
• Shout-Out: See here.
• Shown Their Work: In "Everything In Its Right Place" alternate-universe Fringe Division uses textbook military suppression tactics. Which makes sense, as they have more of a military bent than the standard version.
• Signed Up for the Dental: Discussed.
  Peter: Ever considered a life of crime?
  Olivia: No dental.
• Sinister Geometry: Massive Dynamic's interior decorator must be an interesting guy◊.
  • That's the interior of the Royal Ontario Museum's Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, the inside actually do look like that.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss:
  • Nina and Broyles in the first two Seasons. They fluctuate between working together happily, Broyles refusing to trust her, being very affectionate and an outright screaming match at the end of Season 2.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Moderately idealistic. Of particular note is that the conflict with the parallel universe is resolved peacefully, and that the agreement sticks.
• Small Role, Big Impact: At some point during the episode White Tulip, the Monster of the Week Alistair Peck has a heart-to-heart with Walter about forgiveness and loss where they discuss the symbolism of the titular flowers. Although Peck Retgones himself soon after, he arranges a letter with a white tulip drawing to be delivered to Walter. For the rest of the show, the white tulip is a recurring shorthand for forgiveness and is pretty much the final shot of the Grand Finale.
• Smug Snake: Sanford Harris.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Anson Carr listening to "The Friends Of Mr. Cairo" while he siphons the pheromones out of a screaming man he's abducted.
• Special Edition Title: Fringe loves to change its opening sequence; for starters, the list of "fringe topics" that appear changes every season as well as for certain special episodes, all listed on the Quotes page. The style also changes depending on the episode:
  • First and most dramatically, episodes "Peter" and "Subject 13" were set in the 80s. The opening replaced some of the modern "fringe" science subjects with now-commonplace sciences such as DNA profiling and in vitro fertilisation. It was also set to an 80s-sounding version of the theme and similarly retro graphics, and a slightly grainy effect as if recorded on VHS tape.
  • A red color scheme is used for opening credits of episodes taking place in the parallel universe, instead of the usual blue. The season 2 fringe topic "parallel universes" was replaced by "first people" in those episodes.
  • The opening of season 3 episode "Entrada" alternates between red and blue, since it shares time about equally in both universes.
  • A grey color scheme was used for the season 3 episode "The Day We Died" (set in 2026) and featured even more advanced fringe sciences, such as dual maternity and thought extraction. Ominously, "water" and "hope" are also listed as fringe topics.
  • An amber color scheme is used for season 4 episodes taking place after the two universes have partly joined, and the timeline in both has been altered by Peter's death as a child.
  • The season 4 episode "Letters of Transit" (set in 2036) goes a different route with its code-words. None of them are science-related but instead cover concepts like "community," "joy," and "free will." The graphics symbolically depict future-Earth as a prison planet run by the Observers. Season 5 uses this intro for all episodes.
• Spock Speak: All of the Observers. Also, Peter, when he turned himself into an Observer.
• Spontaneous Human Combustion:
  • A Season One episode explored this. People who were used in experiments involving Pyrokinesis would burst into flames and explode if they couldn't focus their attention on other things around them when their power builds up inside of them.
  • Later, in Season Four, a fringe incident is initially believed to involve several people spontaneously combusting after their bodies exerted too much energy (with others in the affected area needing to stand perfectly still to avoid meeting the same fate), but it is revealed to have been spurned by nanotechnology entering the affected persons' bloodstream.
• Spreading Disaster Map Graphic: In a Shout-Out to Pandemic where there is a map showing a deadly infectious disease having spread everywhere but Madagascar.
• Spy Speak: Where does the Gentleman live? Little Hill.
• Stable Time Loop: This is how the third season finale explains the First People and the origin of the Machine.

  • Not exactly a "stable" time loop, since it changes every iteration. It's also hinted the Observers were behind it all to manipulate the timeline to allow their invasion.

  • Implied in White Tulip. Arlette would have safely driven to safety if she had not been so shocked by the presence of Future!Alistair.
• Standard Cop Backstory: Olivia lost both parents at a young age, was abused by her stepfather, feels responsible for her younger sister, and doesn't have any stable relationships, romantic or not, with people who aren't related to and don't work with her.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: How one of the Australian promos described Peter and Olivia. After many tribulations it's ultimately averted.
• Starfish Language: Astrid analyzes the Observers' code writing and points out that unlike every known written language in the world, which are all based on symbolic recognition, all the Observer symbols are unique, and none of them repeat. They also have multiple meanings related to the Observers' non-linear perception of time. Astrid is an expert in decryption and languages, and seems to be the only unaltered person capable of decoding the Observer symbols (although it's possible that Walter learned to do it but later forgot).
• Staring Kid: So very much. You could actually make a drinking game out of this if you watched only the teasers.
• Start of Darkness: Walternate's crusade to take back his son begins when Young Olivia accidentally crosses over into his office and tells him where Peter is.
• Stalker with a Crush:
  • One of the Observers.
  • Markham to Olivia. He confesses he's been in love with her ever since they first met, and in the Observer-occupied future he keeps her ambered body in his living room in the hopes she will fall in love with him when he finds a way to free her.
• Stealth Pun: Walter is not only a Mad Scientist in the traditional sense, he's also legitimately mentally unwell. Walternate, by contrast, is mad because he's just plain angry.
  • Gene the cow, since Walter requests the cow because humans and cows are genetically similar (aside from about three lines of DNA, according to Peter)
• A Storm Is Coming: Spoken word for word by William Bell, in reference to the prospect of a potentially cataclysmic collision of the two universes.
• Storming the Castle: Olivia and Peter storm Observer HQ to rescue Broyles in the Grand Finale.
• Strapped to an Operating Table: Olivia is abducted and strapped down by the ZFT in Season 1; she is later strapped down again in Season 3 and almost de-brainified by Alt-Brandon once the Secretary decided she Had Outlived Her Usefulness.
• Stupid Jetpack Hitler: Walter's father worked for the Nazis while spying for Americans. One of those Nazis is still young and using that science in 2010.
• Stylistic Suck: "Subject 13" took the Whole Episode Flashback concept further than normal and made even the HD broadcast look like it was shot on mid-80s hardware.
• Suicide by Cop: Done by the killer in "Making Angels".
• Suspiciously Apropos Music: Walter listens to "The Man Who Sold The World" by David Bowie.
• Sweet Tooth: Walter.
• Synchronization: In the episode Where a boy will die if they kill the alien fungus that has synchronized with him.
  • In the fourth season episode "The Consultant," David Robert Jones is experimenting with a device that causes accidents in one universe and kills the counterparts of any victims in the other world in the exact same way. Ever see someone die in a plane crash while in the middle of a business meeting? Not pretty.
• Take Me to Your Leader: Said unironically by the heavy in the episode "Enemy of my Enemy" in season 4.
• Taking You with Me: Etta, after being shot at the end of "The Bullet That Saved The World," activates one of those electro-zap-bombs that the Observers use to make entire buildings disappear. A significant number of Observers unwittingly follow her into oblivion. And yes, despite being a Dying Moment of Awesome, it's still a Tear Jerker for anyone with a soul.
• Team Mom: Blue!Astrid has taken this role to the team
• Team Pet: Gene, the cow.
• Technology Marches On:[invoked]
  • After 17 years locked up in a mental institution, Walter is a bit behind the times. "Don't forget to check out his floppy disks!"
  • Even before being committed, he apparently preferred to use dated technology in his everyday life, all the more surprising for a cutting-edge scientist. He has a typewriter (which the ZFT manifesto was typed on) and his record collection is pre-CD. He also, for some reason, preferred Betamax cassettes to VHS and used an old TV from The '80s to play them back.
• Teens Are Monsters: Tyler Carson, armed with the ability to make People Puppets, goes off half-cocked on a wild hurricane of murder, theft, and increasingly delusional attempts at wish-fulfillment.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: At the beginning of season 4, both Fringe Divisions have a healthy and understandable distrust of each other. Olivia especially is not happy to be working with Fauxlivia, who impersonated her for several weeks while she was imprisoned in the alternate universe. However, even with Peter temporarily erased from existence, both sides understand the importance of collaborating and the relationship between the two sides gets better throughout the season.
• Tele-Frag: happens in "Jacksonville" (2x15) to an entire building when it(and the people inside) are merged with their Alternate Universe counterparts.
• Teleporters and Transporters: How David Robert Jones "Star Treks himself," in Peter's words, out of a maximum security German prison. It had some unintended consequences for his physiology though. Getting disassembled and reassembled seems to have scrambled his molecules. In the original timeline, Peter kills him before it can be seen whether he would die from this or if his condition would improve. In the reset "Amber" timeline, where Peter died as a child, he successfully crossed over to the Alternate Universe through a portal similar to the one Walter used in the eighties, and seems to have recovered from the effects.
• Terror at Make-Out Point: The episode "The Man From The Other Side" begins with two teens getting stoned in a car (presumably before or after making out) who quickly have their identities stolen by interdimensional shapeshifters.
• Time Skip: Season 5 is set in the year 2036, in the future last seen in "Letters of Transit".
• Third Act Stupidity: In Season 4, after a whole season of being several steps ahead of both universe's Fringe teams and tricking or blackmailing others into doing his dirty work, Jones is sent by Bell on a suicide mission to kill Peter and attempts to do so by attacking him with a crowbar.
• Through His Stomach: Fauxlivia's modus operandi when dealling with Walter.
  Walter: She bought my ignorance with baked goods while she carried out her plan to steal pieces of the machine with the — it was that damn Portuguese sweet bread!
• Trapped in Another World:
  • Olivia at the end of Season 2.
  • Peter thinks this happened to him at the end of Season 3.
• Trauma Swing: Olivia contemplates her childhood in "Jacksonville".
• The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: The Observers.
• The Reveal:
  • "The Secretary" of the shadowy alternate universe organization is Walternate. He's known as "The Secretary" because he's the U.S. Secretary of Defense.
  • Donald is September. With hair.
• Themed Aliases: Though Peter hasn't used many aliases during the run of the show, he still knows enough to lampshade this trope.
  Peter: The best lie, the one that's easiest to remember with consistency, is the one that's based on the truth. Whenever I would do this, I would base it on my own last name. Bishop. So Peter King. Peter Knight.
• Theyd Cut You Up: "Forced Perspective"
• Those Wacky Nazis: "The Bishop Revival."
• Time Travel: "White Tulip" and the final moments of "The Last Sam Weiss".
  • The Observers are able to move through and outside of time. For a long time, their abilities, origins, and motives are a total mystery. They are eventually revealed to be a scientific observation team of posthumans from one possible future. Why? As of "Letters in Transit" it's revealed that future earth has been destroyed, and they're looking to the past to find a better one.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: "White Tulip", again. Also, the plan in the final season takes into account only two iterations of events rippling out: taking Michael into the future (somehow they're able to reach the original future, not the future created when the Observers went back to 2015) ripples forward and causes the Observers to not be created, or to be created differently, and then ripples back and causes the Observers to not invade 2015, but doesn't ripple forward again to the future where Michael's taken.
• Title Drop: By Walter in "The Day We Died."
  • Also, on the pilot, when Olivia tells Peter that his father worked on fringe science.
  • Many episodes drop their titles somewhere in the dialogue, but The End of All Things drops the one they'd waited all series to use:
  David Robert Jones: It seems there are some... fringe benefits to having one's body reassembled on a sub-atomic level.
• Title In: Played with.
  • Titles are presented as big, 3D letters hovering in the air during establishing shots.
  • One establishing shot of a location in Iraq had the letters more or less aligned with the city's grid as US choppers flew over it. Then the angle changed so the camera was on the ground, and the letters are actually reversed, with the choppers in the air on the other side.
  • Other times, they are reflected in nearby bodies of water.
  • Raindrops have been seen splattering on contact with them.
  • They cast shadows on occaision.
  • When they title in action that occur in the '80s, they turn into the stereotypical old fashioned computer font.
  • When titles are shown for the alternate universe Fringe team, they're the normal plain-text-on-screen style.
  • In another episode, the big floating letters that spelled "Manhatan" with only one "T" were a clue that a scene was, as later revealed, set in the Alternate Universe.
• Tonight, Someone Dies: "The Day We Died". The producers hinted on that and also announced that they will introduce a rookie FBI agent. The promo for the episode featured a coffin. And it's also named "The Day We Died". In the middle of the episode Olivia got shot by Walternate, but that's okay, because it was in the Bad Future. What really counts is thatPeter apparently got entirely erased from reality and only the Observers know that he existed at all. The rookie FBI agent turns out to be Future!Ella.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Pretty much the entire plot of "Johari Window". The denizens are all deformed and a device within the town camouflages their true appearance.
• Tragic Keepsake:
  • Olivia kept the ring John Scott was going to propose to her with.
  • Walter kept his dead son's coin.
  • The Bullet That Saved The World.
• Tranquil Fury: David Robert Jones threatens Peter in an attempt to activate Olivia's abilities. She disapproves. Violently.
  Olivia: I'm doing what you wanted. I'm turning on the lights.
• Transhuman: Many examples, including the Cortexiphan kids, subjects of other experiments in human augmentation, and the Observers.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot: The team can navigate the Boston-New York-Washington megapolis in a matter of moments.
  • In The Consultant, Colonel Broyles gets his "Show Me" card scanned at Liberty Island. After they get an alert about this, Bolivia and Agent Lee make it from Fringe HQ in Manhatan to Liberty Island in the time it takes Broyles to walk down the hallway.
• Triumphant Reprise:
  • "Funeral Pyre Straits" is played in Season 3 during the Bad Future when Olivia is killed by Walternate. It's basically the worst case scenario. A louder, triumphant version is played in Season 4 when Olivia saves Peter in a particularly creative way.
  • Fauxlivia's theme was played as a dark string piece when Fauxlivia was up to no good and as a sad piano piece when Lincoln Lee died. More upbeat versions are also played when Henry is born in "Bloodline" and when Olivia and Fauxlivia part on good terms in "Worlds Apart".
• 20 Minutes into the Future: The look and feel of the Alternate Universe has shades of this but, as mentioned above, the show is more of a Next Sunday A.D. setting.
  • At the end of The Last Sam Weiss Peter finds himself in a devastated New York City street and comes across a memorial plaque dated 2021 out the front of Freedom Tower.
  • Letters in Transit takes place in 2036, in a world conquered by Observers.
• Tyke Bomb: Walter and William Bell experimented on several children. One of which was Olivia.

Tropes U-Z

• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: The episode "Midnight" had such a combo with the revelation that the defected scientist from ZFT's wife has been infected by ZFT and is the Monster of the Week. A twist that many won't see coming due to the scientist being a short balding middle aged man and his wife, seen earlier in the episode being rather gorgeous with a real Femme Fatale look.
• Unaffected by Spice: The Observers. They put ludicrous amounts of pepper and hot sauce on their food, yet still appear to taste nothing.
• Uncanny Valley: The Observers. They're pale and hairless, speak in a Creepy Monotone and have an odd way of staring at people. They're more in the "off-putting" rather than "scary" part of the Valley. That is, with the exception of Captain Windmark.
• Unflinching Walk: Walter in "Letters of Transit". Walter makes a bomb in the old Massive Dynamic building using antimatter to leave behind for the Observer and Loyalists following them. Walter, Etta and Simon leave the building, and the building dissolves. Etta and Simon look back at the building and at what is happening, but Walter doesn't even flinch.
• Unobtainium: Amphilicite.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Peter and Olivia. In the beginning, it was simple, and it was obvious that there was some attraction.
  • Then came Fauxlivia, with whom Peter thought it was resolved.
  • As of 6B: RESOLVED!
• Unscrewed Salt Shaker: September inflicts this trope on himself when he deliberately unscrews the top of the pepper shaker, and then proceeds to dump the contents onto his plate of food. Apparently the Observers have extremely dulled taste buds and iron cast stomachs.
• Unusual Eyebrows: The Observers don't have eyebrows at all.
• Upgrade Artifact: The Observer tech. Which Peter shoves into his spinal cord.
• Van Helsing Hate Crime: In "Reciprocity", the team investigate someone who has been hunting identified Shapeshifters, leaving them with two bullets in the head and their data storage devices removed. It was Peter.
• Vehicle Vanish:
  • The Observer does this.
  • Done by the killer of the week in "Making Angels" at a bus stop, leaving a corpse behind.
• Viewer-Friendly Interface: Averted in "Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11" - the carbon monoxide tower's graphic display readout is written in the bizarre characters of the Observer language, but it can still convey clearly that a system malfunction is in progress.
• Viking Funeral: Olivia in "The Day We Died".
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: William Bell in the Season 4 finale.
• Villains Act, Heroes React: Peter disapproves of this trope.
• Virtual Ghost: William Bell attempts this. He's knows it won't work.
• The Virus: "What Lies Below"(2x13)
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Happens on Flight 627, when the biological agent starts to take effect and patient zero vomits onto a stewardess.
• Wacky Parent, Serious Child: Walter and Peter, the latter being more the snarky type rather than the responsible one.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The cure for malevolent hell Ebola from 75,000 years ago... is HORSERADISH?
• We Have to Get the Bullet Out!: Justified in the Season 4 final. Olivia has been shot in the head and if they get the bullet out in time, the cortexiphan can repair the damage.
• Weirdness Magnet: Lampshaded. When pressed by Olivia about Massive Dynamics' suspicious tendency to be involved in Pattern cases, Nina counters by noting the oddity that the cases also seem to be clustered in the taskforce's backyard. Explained in the season one finale as being caused by "soft spots," which cause weird events to radiate out from them. These soft spots are revealed to be caused by Walter crossing between universes at Reiden Lake, the epicenter of the Pattern where Jones attempts to cross over as well.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Turns out Jones saw Bell as a mentor, and is doing all the crazy stuff to impress him.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • Jones, when he is following the ZFT manifesto in "Ability". He's only endangering innocent lives as part of a training exercise to force Olivia to prepare for a prophesized war between universes. In "The Last Sam Weiss", it turns out the manifesto was completely correct, and Olivia has to use the skills she picked up in "Ability" to shut off Walternate's machine before it destroys her world.
  • The Alternate Fringe Division sees the deaths of at least 10,000 people (themselves included) acceptable losses in order to quarantine the dimensional tears. Furthermore, it's believed that only one of the two dimensions can survive the upcoming cataclysm, so unless someone figures out a way to Save Both Worlds, pretty much any atrocity inflicted on the opposing side is arguably justifiable.
  • According to Gale the loyalist, the resistance is this. He was lying about his dead son but considering Etta was torturing him, he may not have been exaggerating all that much.
• Western Terrorists: ZFT.
• We Didn't Start the Billy Joel Parodies: The episode "The Road Not Taken" got one (lyrics). ("Susan Pratt started the fire / It wasn't God nor Jesus / It was pyrokinesis")
• We Wait: Said in the first episode when Olivia is in the isolation tank.
• Wham Episode:
  • "There's More Than One of Everything"(1x20). William Bell lives in an alternate universe where the Twin Towers never fell, Jones sees Bell as a father figure, and, oh yes, Peter died before he turned ten and the one we know was kidnapped by Walter from an alternate universe.
  • "Momentum Deferred"(2x04) follows up with more revelations from Bell along with setting up the rest of the season including the introduction of a new villain.
  • For a while, Fringe lacked a true wham episode since the plot attempting to travel to the other universe built slowly. Then we got the season two finale "Over There" where the Fringe team finally crosses over to rescue Peter, who we find out is linked to a very evil looking machine. Oh and there was an Olivia switcheroo.
  • This was quickly followed by "Olivia" (3x01) where Ourlivia became brainwashed into thinking she was Fauxlivia, while Fauxlivia is now in a relationship with Peter.
  • Entrada (3x08) wrapped up what felt like a season's worth of plot in one action-packed episode.
  • "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide" (3x19): has an ending that shoves it very firmly into Wham territory.
  • "6:02 AM EST" (3x20): Walternate turns on the Doomsday Device. Sam Weiss understands exactly what's going on and is gonna do something about it. Fringe events are starting to rip the prime universe apart in earnest. Peter can't use the machine. Fauxlivia betrays Walternate and gets thrown in solitary. Walter cooks naked on Tuesday mornings. It doesn't get much whammier than this... ^note Unless George Michael showed up...
  • "The Last Sam Weiss" (3x21): Olivia is critical to getting Peter in the doomsday machine. Peter wakes up 15 years into an apocalyptic future.
  • "The Day We Died" (3x22): Peter fuses part of Earth-1 and Earth-2. Walter, Olivia, Walternate and Fauxlivia decide to work together to keep the world from ending. Peter never existed. For those of you keeping track, the final four Season 3 episodes are all listed here.
  • Back To Where You've Never Been. Walternate isn't responsible for the new shapeshifters. David Robert Jones is. Alternate Broyles is most likely a shapeshifter and is working for them. Oh... and September was shot and informed Olivia that in every one of the possible futures, she will die. The promo said that the episode would explain everything. THEY LIED.
  • Brave New World, part 1. Olivia can now use mind control. William Bell is behind everything. David Robert Jones is dead. Astrid has been shot and Walter is at Bell's mercy.
  • "The Bullet That Saved The World". Etta's death.
    • "An Origin Story" and "Through the Looking Glass and What Walter Saw There" give us the consequences of this. Observer!Peter.
  • "Anomaly XB-6783746". Oh boy, so much. Nina kills herself to protect the team and Michael, and Donald is revealed to be September.
• Wham Line: A strange one since it is not spoken but written on a plaque: Dedicated to their memory - September 11, 2021.
  • Similar example: Peter Bishop, 1978-1985.
  • "The FBI ceased to exist over a decade ago."
  • Also, "I don't know, but I think he's the man who's going to kill me", spoken almost cheerfully by Olivia with regards to the man with the X T-shirt.
  • "They don't remember him." "Of course not. He never existed."
  • "It is the same - " *collapses*
  • An early one from the Pilot, when Olivia is listening to a tape of her suspect being threatened:
  Richard: You're threatening me? After seeing what I'm willing to do to my own brother?
  John Scott: Well let me assure you, we'd be happy to treat you as family too.
  • "You are nothing but tech! I would be ten times what you are if I had that tech in my head!"
  • "I know who Donald is. Donald is September."
• Wham Shot:
  • The final shot of Season 1, which confirmed that Olivia was in another universe by revealing that the office building she's in is located in the (still intact) World Trade Center.
  • Olivia walking into the typewriter store in "Over There, Part 2", revealing she is actually Fauxlivia and Olivia is trapped in the other universe.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Season 1 hinted at Peter's connections to the Boston mob several times. After a mobster had been informed about Peter being back in town at the end of "The Dreamscape", the sub-plot has apparently been dropped entirely.
  • Agent Amy Jessup, after appearing in two episodes of season 2 and investigating a possible connection between The Pattern and biblical prophecies, disappeared from the show without an explanation. Maybe the producers realized that the general fan reaction was not favorable. Putting her storyline into the Aborted Arc pile.
  • Season 1's main bad guy organization, ZFT, appears to have vanished entirely after the death of its high-profile member David Robert Jones in the season 1 finale.
    • Although it is arguable that the whole point of ZFT was to activate Olivia and have her realise her talents so that she could eventually defend the universe. And having done that they could get back to regular crazy science instead of murdering people with science.
    • Apparently, without Peter around, the mouse flourished and came back with a vengeance at being stomped down in the Peter version of the universe. Without him, there David Robert Jones never dies, and Walter's rants at against God about losing both versions of his son, inspires a dying William Bell to try tokill all of humanity.
  • Although ZFT the book resurfaces in the Season 2 finale. In the other universe it's apparently a propaganda book written by Secretary of Defense Walternate.
    • A similar organization, also led by David Robert Jones and William Bell, is featured in Season 4, after the timeline reset caused by the Observer not preventing Peter's death. It's more a religious cult centered around transhumanism, with an internal conspiracy to destroy both universes in order to create a new, designer-universe.
  • Peter's deal with Nina Sharp in "The Cure" never requires him to return the favor.
  • The Carson-Penrose experiments run by Massive Dynamic teased in the ending of "Of Human Action" that somehow linked Claus Penrose (from "The Same Old Story"), Tyler Carson, and several identical clones of Tyler never comes up again.
  • What happened to poor Canaan the Shapeshifter?
  • If the "First People" were really just the future Fringe Team in the Stable Time Loop of "The Day We Died," why did they invent a whole new system of writing (alien-looking calligraphy) along with the advanced technology they sent back in time? Wouldn't it have been easier to use English, especially since the sketches that clued Peter, Walter, Olivia and Sam Weiss into the activation of the Vacuum/Wave Synch Machine had the English letters A, T, C and G to represent human DNA.
    • It's hinted that the Wave Synch Machine was actually created by the Observers, and Walter just assumed he created it(It's also subtly hinted the Observers were created using technologies based on Walter and Massive Dynamic's research, after all). This was done in order to manipulate the timeline to allow their invasion.
  • What happened to Rachel and Ella? They don't appear again after season 2, and are only mentioned once thereafter in season 4, and that was a reference to the Over There versions. Especially egregious in season 5 because one would think that Olivia, after being frozen in amber for 21 years, would at least be curious about what happened to her sister and her niece.
• What Could Have Been: In-universe examples with the parallel universe, glimpsed in backgrounds and the like. Including:
  • Back to the Future starring Eric Stoltz (in a Shout-Out to the circumstances of The Other Marty)
  • The West Wing season 11, complete with an Obama lookalike on the poster◊ and a slightly different logo ("the" is on the right hand side, not in the middle)
  • Comic books such as The Red Lantern and ''The Death of Batman - see them here
  • Dogs, now enjoying its 18th year on Broadway.
  • Queen Diana is visiting the States apparently. Depressing both IRL and in-universe, since it suggests an early death for Queen Elizabeth II.
  • Len Bias apparently having more than 20 great years with the Boston Celtics, and still being good enough to win the NBA MVP award in his 40s.
  • President Kennedy is apparently still alive and was the UN Ambassador, until he is named as the head of a new ecological agency
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Played straight with September's line "I believe you call it love."
  • August's dying confession to The Observer, revealing the reason why he repeatedly chose to interfere with Christine Hollis' life, despite it apparently being her destiny to die, because she made him actually feel something. Both his and the Observer's reaction suggest it's a completely alien concept to them.
  August: She crossed my mind... somehow? She never left it. I think... it's what they call... feelings? I think... I love her will she be safe now?
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Raised in "Reciprocity" when Walter finds out that Peter has been hunting and killing shapeshifters to get their memory storage devices.
  • Do Shapeshifters Dream Of Electric Sheep?
• What the Hell, Hero?: Walter gets a lot of this. Particularly during season 2. And usually for good reason.
  • "Marionette" has Olivia chewing out Peter for not being able to recognize Fauxlivia was a fake. She even acknowledges that what she's feeling is emotional, not logical.
  • The ending of "Through the Looking Glass and What Walter Found There" has Walter getting a major one of these from himself.
• When Dimensions Collide: A common theme of the series is the problems caused when physical laws bleed through between the two primary universes. Although the differences between the two universes seem to be largely immeasurable when you visit.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Whether unintentional or a deliberate reference, the episode "White Tulip" (2x18) borrows heavily from the plot of ''The Broken Bride'' by the band Ludo: a scientist creates a time travel device to go back in time to the day in May when his fiance/bride was killed in a car accident with the intention of saving her life. Minus about 14 years, pterodactyls, a dragon and a zombie apocalypse. It even ends with the time traveler realizing he cannot save his bride and getting in the car to die alongside her.
  • As the title suggests, season four's "Letters of Transit" follows the plot of Casablanca, recasting the Nazis as the Observers, Renault and the Vichy French as Broyles and Fringe Division, and Ilsa and Laszlo as the original Fringe team. The kicker is that it's the canonical Bad Future, and will be the setting of season five.
• Who You Gonna Call?:
  • Well, yeah... it's a section of the FBI geared specifically towards the (un)conventionally inexplicable. Actually spoken by Walter Bishop in the episode "The Road Not Taken":
    Peter: Well, if there's something strange in your neighborhood...
    Walter: Who You Gonna Call?? ''
  • The alternate-universe Fringe Division even moreso, as it operates openly (even having its own public emergency number: 7-1-1), has a larger budget, more personnel, and reports directly to the Secretary of Defense.
• Why Am I Ticking?
  • The pyrokinetic twins.
  • The Bellini's lymphocemia sufferers in "The Cure."
  • Project Tin Man in "Fracture."
  • The victims of Bell's nanites in "Brave New World."
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?:
  • Lampshaded:
    Peter: You know, there are easier ways to kill people.
  • "Earthling," in which Broyles deals with a corrosive alien shadow by shooting the body of the comatose cosmonaut the organism is possessing.
  • Averted by Walter in the Season 4 finale. Olivia is the power source of Bell's doomsday. Walter shoots her in the head. Problem solved.
• Wild Child: Seen in "Inner Child."
• Wild Mass Guessing: It's as though Abrams is reading Fringe's WMG page and saying Sure, why not?
• Wire Dilemma: Defied by Jones, who uses exclusively black wires on his Time Bomb so Olivia will have to defuse it telepathically.
• Womb Horror: The second episode opens with a hook-up ending in a pregnancy that is well along before the woman can get a few steps away from the motel. She doesn't survive, even after being brought to the hospital.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds:
  • Walternate.
  • Eugene.
• Wormsign: The burrowing mutant in "The Night of Desirable Objects" (S2 Ep 2)has this in one scene.
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • Frequently. Especially to Olivia. The most egregious of which... "This is my favourite time of day. So full of promise." Cue apocalypse.
  • The Series Final. So very much. Walter has spent the last few episodes dealing with the knowledge that, in order to save the world, he has to live permanently in the year 2167 and never see his family again. Donald/September tells Walter that he wishes to go instead and be with his son. Awesome. Then Donald gets shot and Walter is the only one who can take his place...
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Walternate's eventual plan for Olivia.
  • Also, the Observers' attitude towards Peter at the end of Season 3.
• You Just Told Me: How Fauxlivia gets Meana to rat out Philip Broyles.
• Your Head Asplode: "The Cure." And "The Box."
• Your Mind Makes It Real: The effect of a hallucinogenic. Beyond the "standard" die-in-a-dream-die-for-real effect, due to Mind over Matter phlebotinum you'd die in the exact same manner. So a guy who hallucinates an attack by glass-winged butterflies has his body manifest cuts. In the presence of a nurse, somebody else hallucinates their throat being slit open...
  • But then averted in "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide", which falls just short of a Whole-Plot Reference to Inception, complete with the fact that dying in the "dream" just causes you to wake up.
    • Arguably more just an example of a Journey to the Center of the Mind.
• Your Universe or Mine?: Lincoln decides to leave the prime universe behind and permanently live in the alternate universe to be with Fauxlivia.
• Zeerust: Walter's old lab stuff.
• Zeppelins from Another World
  • The Alternate Universe's Empire State Building's dirigible docking station is active unlike in our world where it was only used once. Also, this is played so straight it's basically an Invoked Trope.
  • In "Over There: Part 1", zeppelins are used twice to tell the viewers (and sometimes, the characters), "Hey, we're in the other universe." Again, played so straight that the producers must be tropers themselves.
  • In "Subject 13", Walter realizes young Olivia's crossed over when he sees she's drawn a picture of a zeppelin.

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