First of all, it was written by Joshua Jackson, and I think that’s pretty damn cool. (There will be several installments of this comic series, and Jackson will write two more.) His three are about an adventure for Peter–theoretically, the period between when Walter convinced Peter to rewrite time and when Peter reappeared in the machine in the near-final moments of season three. He’s on a journey to drop off the pieces of the machine at predetermined locations in time and space, but it’s not easy. (One word: dinosaurs.)

Although the whole thing feels a little Terra Nova-ish (can I say that, considering it hasn’t even premiered yet?), it’s also grounded in Peter’s love for Olivia, and his grief over her death. He even grows a beard of sadness. Of all the things that happened this summer, Joshua Jackson deciding to embrace Peter and Olivia’s relationship might be my favorite.

I can’t decide if this is supposed to be canon or not, but it’s a fun concept no matter what. Could Peter have shepherded the machine pieces through time? When he returned (ever so briefly) to our reality, he said he thought the First People also included Walter, Ella, and Astrid, but it’s also fun to see Peter all by his lonesome hobnobbing with dinosaurs.

The next issue will be released in two weeks, on October 5.

Olivia Dunham, my wife, was everything to me.

When we first met, I was a nomad, moving from place to place, job to job. She gave me a purpose; she taught me to believe in something bigger than myself. She taught me to fight to keep our world safe. And more recently, to keep it from dying.

But the truth is–we’re all dying. From the moment we’re born, we are all dying, and the universe is unspeakably cruel. Our one hope is that we can find some purpose, some meaning before that last day comes. Some happiness … and love. Olivia was all of that to me. There was no one like her.

While I will not cease to fight, now that she’s gone, I’m afraid I’m already lost. That we are all lost. The world is a darker place without her.

“We all get really good at pretending that the loneliness isn’t there, and then something comes along to remind us. I know what it’s like to have a hole in my life. It’s been there as long as I can remember.”

I am willing to follow any storyline these writers want to write, because this, Olivia? This is all I want. I want you to feel empty and not understand why. I want your life to feel unfulfilled. I want you to be like Goldilocks, where nothing is ever good enough for you, except that BABY BEAR NEVER EXISTED and everything is either too big or too small, and thus you are perpetually frustrated by life and men and your entire existence.

(Is it possible that my husband also got sucked into the machine or the crack in Amy Pond’s wall, as well?)

The question, in my mind, is now … what happens when he comes back? Will Olivia and Walter automatically feel like the hole is filled? Life goes on with Naked Tuesdays and the like? Or will it be the opposite–our heroes don’t recognize that this is the piece of their lives that has been missing for so long?

My bet is that it’ll be something of a hybrid. Our folks will be curious about him, but he won’t completely fill that gap at first. The love won’t just come pouring back–it’ll take some time. John Noble told E! Online:

“What’s happening is we’re going to bring Josh back in as Peter, but not in the same way. Not as a person that’s been there with us all the time, but as a person that comes in our lives at this stage. That’s very different, because the relationship that the audiences know won’t be there. Olivia won’t be in love with him, at least to start with. So we’ve started a whole possibility for relationship growth.”

And so THEN the question is … when Peter comes back, is he just some guy who pops into existence as a grown man, with no recollection of his life or his character or his personality? Or will he know everything? Will he know about 2026? Will he know enough to be devastated that Olivia doesn’t recognize him?

I imagine that if you sacrificed your existence for a person and then dragged yourself back into reality to be with them, you’d be pretty disappointed if you looked into that person’s eyes and were met only with confusion. I hope that, no matter how much Peter knows, there’s still a moment–whether it happens organically or by some machine-related intervention–when it all rushes back for Olivia and Walter. When this enigmatic stranger becomes Walter’s son, Olivia’s husband, the boy in the tulip field again.

Twenty seconds of new footage and I could go on for pages.

We’re 30 days away from the premiere … can you wait?

Since May, I have voiced but one demand for season four, and it is that Walter and Olivia’s hearts must ache for Peter, even if they cannot identify or explain this pain. I want them to try to dismiss it. I want them to try to gauge if the other is feeling it, too. I want Olivia to drink a glass of whisky or hear “For Once In My Life” on the radio and have to choke back unexplainable tears. I want Walter to be lost, with very little to hold onto. AND I WANT IT TO HURT. In io9′s tease-tastic feature on season four, Blair Brown drops a hint that sent me reeling:

“Particularly for Olivia and Walter, there’s a chunk missing, and they don’t know what it is.”

Yessssssssss! Yes. Yes yes. Yes. Do they listen to my demands after all? (If so, more Nina! More Lincoln! Maybe a Nina and Lincoln spin-off!)

After the finale, the season three scenes about Olivia “holding on” to Peter became extremely relevant once more. While being brainwashed into believing she’s Fauxlivia on the other side, she’s visited by a hallucination of Peter, who challenges her to hold onto her identity and (so romantic) to him and their fledgling romance. Later, after coming back to our world to discover that Peter has not done the same, Olivia has that amazing “Marionette” speech about how irrational it was that she held onto him, this “figment of my imagination.” As I said in my Season in Review, “It kills me now, thinking about the implications it might have for Olivia going into next season, now that the expectation of remembering is solely on her shoulders. She claimed she’s a holding-on pro, but now those skills will really be put to the test.”

So to know that, at least in some part, Olivia and Walter are–irrationally, illogically–holding on to Peter? It’s everything.

Meanwhile, Joshua Jackson has been championing the Peter/Olivia romance, something he has–admittedly–never done. Here’s an excerpt from TVLine’s interview with Jackson:

“I was never a real huge fan of the Peter/Olivia storyline,” he concedes. “All of Fringe is on this epic scale, and that seemed kind of banal to me at the center of it.”

But now, in the wake of Peter’s season-ending act and its dire ramifications, his connection to Olivia (played by Anna Torv) “is on an epic scale as well,” Jackson notes. “This guy sacrificed himself for the woman that he loves, which made that relationship more interesting and it launched us into the off-season with this ‘Holy s—t!’ moment.”

Even though I’ve been convinced of the cosmic, emotional scale of this relationship since “Subject 13,” he has a point. Those last few episodes of season three elevated Peter and Olivia’s story, from their co-controlling of the machine to the revelation of their future happy marriage to his sacrifice of his existence for the possibility of hers. And although the relevance of that flashforward to the rest of the series remains to be seen, the connection between Peter and Olivia is no longer deniable.

(Also, good use of the word epic, Mr. Jackson.)

So that brings us to today, when Fox releases a third “Where is Peter Bishop?” teaser trailer:

It calls attention to that same conversation (from “The Plateau”) between Olivia and her hallucination of Peter. “Real is just a matter of perception. I am here, and I’m a part of you that you have to hold on to. You can’t forget this,” he says. It’s so romantic I can barely stand it. Over a mixture of old and new footage–including a wet-haired Walter in the lab–Dr. Bishop voices a new line:

“I don’t think there’s anything sadder than when two people are meant to be together and something else intervenes.”

It’s not likely that this quote refers to Olivia and Peter, as I’m expecting the left-behinds to be in the dark about Peter for a while. What’s more likely is that this refers to someone involved in a case, someone who’s been separated from the person they love by fringe-y circumstances. I’ll speculate that this is from the second episode back, and that this will be one of those episodes where the particulars of the case align wonderfully with the goings-on of our characters at home. With the immediate logistics of the Bridge decided, it’ll be back to business for the team, who are starting to come to terms with I’M SO LONELY AND I DON’T KNOW WHY. Maybe that gripping angst could even lead Walter and Olivia (and, who knows, maybe even Fauxlivia–that nut really loved her nugget, after all) to investigate whether something (or someone) intervened in their destiny.

i still love you, peter. // @jwfringe

Joshua Jackson surprised Comic-Con by showing up in Observerwear at the Fringe panel, and by appearing as a full-on Observer in a mock “audition” video. The question now is … was this a real hint at the future of the show or just a fun joke for Comic-Con?

I have mixed feelings about ALL of it.

On the one hand, there’s no better way to learn about the Observers than to turn our Peter into one of them. The story of Peter becoming (and, God willing, unbecoming) an Observer would be crazy delicious. Would Observer Peter be drawn to watching Walter and Olivia’s lives? Could he have feelings for them? Could he love them? What would happen if Olivia saw Peter as an Observer? If they spoke? Would she know that, in different circumstances, that pasty man could have been her husband?

On the other hand, that’s my baby. He’s Walter’s son and Olivia’s future husband and just that one shot of him as an emotionless baldy was enough, thank you very much.

There was reference made at Comic-Con to the Observer outfit being a nod to speculation made by Damon Lindelof and others. So should we rule out the possibility of Peter actually hanging out with September and friends come fall? At this point, it might feel like old news by the time the show returns and Peter’s fate is revealed, but if it’s the right choice for the story, they should go for it. I’m also open to any and all alternatives, just as long as it is epic when he returns. (And I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.)

In other news, the premiere title is “A Sort of Homecoming.” This is likely a reference to a U2 song of the same name. (I guess Fauxlivia didn’t ruin U2 for everyone in this Peterless society.) The song contains the following lyrics:

Tonight we’ll build a bridge 
Across the sea and land
See the sky, the burning rain
She will die and live again
Tonight

It’s been heavily suggested that Peter isn’t in the premiere, but I’d be surprised if he doesn’t make at least a last-minute appearance to remind us that he does, in fact, exist, and to give us a visual, in-canon hint about that existence. I doubt he will make contact with Walter and Olivia, who will probably be busy with fixing the universes and feeling inexplicably lonely. Good gracious, I can’t wait.

it's possible i love you more than you love each other. which is a lot. // fox promotional photo

Where We Started: At the beginning of a crazy ride. Fauxlivia had just made the journey back with our hoodwinked boys, one of whom fell right into her grody vagenda. Meanwhile, original-recipe Olivia was staging a breakout on the Other Side—which turned out to be even harder than anticipated when the brainwashing kicked in. We were also introduced more formally to Agent Lincoln Lee, a Fringe Division agent in the red universe who turned out to be … well, keep reading.

Where We Ended: Where didn’t we end? The universes traded back for their own Olivias, but that just kicked off chapter two. By the end, Fauxlivia gave birth to Peter’s baby (unbeknownst to anyone over here), we flashed forward 15 years (newflash: the future sucks), and Peter was erased from the time/space continuum as a result of some machine-related mumbo jumbo. Walter reached a sense of acceptance with his role in the universes’ entanglement, Peter and Olivia fell in love, and Broyles tried LSD on accident.

Outstanding Episode Along the Way: Is there anything better than “Marionette”? The three plots of the episode beautifully overlap to form one cohesive hour that serves both as a stand-alone creepfest and brilliant forward motion on the season’s long-term storylines. Do you mind if I just…:

“I understand the facts. I know that she had reams of information about me and about my life and about the people that were close to me. And I understand that if she slipped up that she would have a completely reasonable explanation for it. And I guess to expect you to have seen past that is perhaps asking a little bit too much. But when I was over there, I thought about you. And you were just a figment of my imagination. But I held onto you, and it wasn’t reasonable, and it wasn’t logical, but I did it, so… why didn’t you? She wasn’t me. How could you not see that? Now she’s everywhere. She’s in my house, my job, my bed, and I don’t want to wear my clothes anymore, and I don’t want to live in my apartment, and I don’t want to be with you. She’s taken everything.”

Gnuhhhhh. This gutted me when it first aired, but it kills me now, thinking about the implications it might have for Olivia going into next season, now that the expectation of remembering is solely on her shoulders. She claimed she’s a holding-on pro, but now those skills will really be put to the test.

MVP: Since I made up a rule that I can’t pick everyone, I’m going with Lincoln. At the beginning of the season, back when Fauxlivia was completely untrustworthy and everything on the other side seemed angry and bad, it was Lincoln who humanized the red universe and made us think … if this guy is in love with that ginger skank, she can’t be completely evil, right? That blossomed into a sweet love story, an interesting glimpse into his blue-side doppelganger, and the promise of much, much more, now that Seth Gabel is a series regular. At least for me, he was the bridge to liking Over There, a critical part of appreciating season three.

Best Payoff: Olivia, Fauxlivia, Walter, and Walternate sharing space in the Bridge in the final moments of season three. It’d be a ticking time bomb of emotions (You stole my son! You stole my boyfriend! You tore a hole in the fabric of my universe!) no matter what, but now that Peter’s out of the picture, there’s no telling what’s going to go down in that crowd. After an entire season of watching them deal with each other’s choices without actually interacting, it’s a thrill to see them share the screen.

Quote of the Year: I could go for funny (“Fauxlivia ruined U2 for all of us.”) or shippy (“I’ve seen what the two of us together looks like, and it’s beautiful.”), but ultimately the quote of the year was from the Observer: “It must be very difficult, being a father.” It had implications for Peter not only as a son—whose father was grappling with the possibility of losing him—but also, teasingly, as a father to then-fetus, now-nugget Henry Dunham.

Worst Storyline: This is HARD. The only thing I can pick out as less than awesome is Peter’s whole vigilante shapeshifter justice storyline, but only because there was never really any outcome after the shapeshifter story was dropped midway through the season. Did Peter ever learn anything super-meaningful about the shapeshifters? Did Olivia forgive him after being Bell-exorcized? And now that they’re trying to fix the fabric of the multiverse … are shapeshifters still a threat?

Spend the Summer Wondering…: How will they get Peter back? What will the mood be in the Bridge? If they can restore Peter and Henry into existence, what will happen when they learn of each other’s existence? Will my weirdly specific prediction for episodes titled “Henry” and “Peter Bishop Returns” come true? What’s going to happen to alternate Charlie now that Kirk Acevedo’s on NBC’s Prime Suspect? Most importantly, HOW AM I GOING TO SURVIVE UNTIL SEPTEMBER?

i miss peter already. // fox promotional photo

So it’s old news that Seth Gabel is joining Fringe full-time next season, but it’s taken me this long to really digest that fact and do some serious thinking about the role that Lincoln Lee might play in season four.

See, my first thought was just pure giddiness. Lincoln is the treasure of Over There, a character who’s immensely enjoyable as an agent, as a boss, and as a stand-in father for precious nugget Henry Dunham. Getting to know him better is something that many Fringe fans had been hoping for, and I know my fingers were crossed for the possibility of the producers trying to get Seth Gabel under a bigger contract.

Once you start thinking about that in the context of Peter’s absence, however, things get a little more complicated.

I was reminded of this quote, which Gabel said on a press call around the time “Stowaway” aired, the first (and so far only) episode in which he appeared as this side’s Agent Lee:

“There’s a butterfly effect and you get to see who that person becomes a completely different person. In Lincoln’s case, Peter was in the world over here and became what Lincoln would have become… So Lincoln has been off doing something else and accidentally bumps into these people, which raises the question about fate and destiny. Are there certain people you’re karmically intertwined with?”

Delicious, right? I think it’s safe to assume that, now that they have access The Bridge, we should plan on seeing both the Blue and Red universions of everyone, including Lincoln. And considering that Peter is absent, I think it’s probably a safe guess that Lincoln will play a role on the Fringe team on this side. Will he still be the sweet nerd we met in “Stowaway”? Or will his involvement with Walter and Olivia have turned him into a version of himself more aligned to the burny-face alternate version we’ve grown to love?

The show has to take some caution here. Make the world too different without Peter and they risk disconnecting the audience from the characters we’ve followed for three years. (Who is the grown-up version of the little girl in the tulip field if she never found the Bishops?) Make the world too similar, though, and they do a complete disservice to the character of Peter and the many choices we have believed were made around him. I mean, the mere fact that Olivia and Walter are still standing there suggests that Agent Dunham was able to finagle Walter out of St. Clare’s without a next of kin, which upends the entire premise of the pilot. (Unless we’re to believe that without Peter, Elizabeth never killed herself and/or Walter never went crazy, so the whole “check Dad out of a mental hospital” was never an issue to begin with.) Anyway, that’s a conversation for another blog post or a doctoral dissertation.

Of course, what I want to know most is … will he be involved with Ourlivia? There are two sides of this argument.

The “Yes” Side. The show wants to demonstrate just how different things would be without Peter, and so they put Olivia in a relationship with another character, who we love, to play up the bizarre nature of the situation. It would make his absence all the more palpable, and his sudden extrication from their lives even more jarring. Joshua Jackson would love this, and would go around talking about how it’s obvious that Lincoln is Olivia’s soul mate. Also, they just want to screw with our minds in a meta way. (More on that later.)

The “No” Side. There’s an argument to be made that without Peter, Fauxlivia and her Lincoln would still be strictly friends, with no acknowledgement of deeper feelings. Considering that Lincoln only admitted his feelings for Liv while she was giving birth to little Henry–and that the pair seemed to grow closer once Henry was in the picture–it’s possible that even the alt versions will be extremely platonic in a Peterless world. Also, my shipper heart has to believe that Olivia’s going to be busy dealing with THIS EMPTY FEELING SHE CAN’T EXPLAIN and thus will not have time for boyfriends who actually exist.

What really gets me is the meta take on this whole thing. How is it that there are two versions of one character (Olivia), played by one actress, and yet it will BREAK MY HEART if either of those two versions ends up with the wrong guy? Lesser shows would never be able to sell me Fauxlivia/Lincoln, because I would never allow them to sell me ANNA TORV next to anyone but JOSHUA JACKSON. Yet they’ve done such a good job of separating Olivia and Fauxlivia that you really believe that they would be all wrong with the other’s boyfriend. I’m all for showing us the consequences of choices, and I support Lincoln playing a role in the It’s a Wonderful Life-type situation they’re setting up for season four–but hopefully it will underscore how important Peter is and always has been–as the man Ourlivia is destined to marry, and as the father of Fauxlivia’s son–rather than set up a dual-universe love quadrangle.

::Shudders::

Walter is “reviled” and has been imprisoned for life. Why?

Well, let’s assume it’s not for public indecency after a Naked Tuesday gone awry. Most would guess that once the vortexes and Fringe events start picking up in frequency, the world’s going to start wondering what caused this crazy crap. Do a little digging and you’ll track it to this team—and to one man who stole a boy from a parallel universe. Now, if this is correct, does it mean that the world will also know about Peter’s origin? Will this make him a global fascination? Or are there soon going to be enough other-worlders on our side that he’s really not that special anymore? (More on that later.)

Who’s the third figure in the fridge drawing?

In the original promo, we see a few frames of Peter crying in front of the fridge, his fingers resting on a child’s drawing of a family. The adult figures sure look like Peter and Olivia, but I’m not jumping to any conclusions here about the third figure. The way I see it, there are three possibilities. It could be an old drawing of Ella’s, who ended up being raised by her aunt after a Fringe event killed her parents. If so, that fridge drawing has been hanging up there for an awful long time. It could be Henry Dunham, who came to live with his father in this universe after surviving his side’s apocalypse. If so, Henry has girlishly long hair and wears pink shoes. Option number three is that the child depicted in the fridge drawing is Peter and Olivia’s young daughter, and I don’t think I need to tell you all how thoroughly that would destroy me psychologically.

In my circles, we are not getting our hopes up for option number three, but we have been calling her “Elizabeth.”

It’s funny, because, as you can see in the “The Future Is Now” video, Joshua Jackson wears a particularly hideous sweater in the slew of BTS videos made for May sweeps. I’ve been joking for weeks that the only reason I could forgive that sweater is if it’s a gift from Peter’s well-meaning daughter. If that turns out to be true, I will be gutted. And if Peter doesn’t wear that sweater in the finale? Well, then Joshua Jackson paid money for that thing, and that is hilarious.

Olivia and Fauxlivia share screentime. WHAT. HOW. WHEN.

The Scenemaker shows just a few frames of Fauxlivia, where she is clearly face-to-face with a ponytailed Olivia. When The Gingerskank was locked up in the Liberty Island facility last week, I was relieved. Not because I wasn’t grateful for her plan to save our side, but because it was one storyline I didn’t have to deal with. It was like, While we’re at it, can we lock up all the shapeshifters and this whole thing about “The Man Who’s Gonna Kill Me”? I thought she was a variable we were putting off until next season, but apparently not. Yep, looks like Henry’s mom is making an appearance after all. The real question is—when? It’s possible that she’ll be part of our universe in the future, in the same way it appears that Walternate is. If that’s the case, was there a situation where, as the other universe was collapsing, a couple of people were able to dimension-cannon themselves over here? If so, where’s Henry?

The other possibility is that she somehow escapes from the facility and dimension-cannons herself to our side while Peter’s in the machine. I like this for one primary reason:

Imagine if Olivia finds out about Henry before Peter does.

Here’s how I picture it going down. Fauxlivia pops over with the intention of bringing Peter back. She gets here, though, and it’s obvious that’s not going to happen. Not only is Peter currently powering the machine, but there’s no way that Olivia’s going to take her alternate’s word for it that she has good intentions. The two sing a short rendition of Brandy and Monica’s classic 1998 duet, “The Boy is Mine.” Fauxlivia shares a warning with the team, and right as she’s about to jet off to her own universe, she leaves Olivia with this parting gift: “BTDubs, I had your boyfriend’s baby. His name is Henry and he’s awesome.”

So now when Peter wakes up later, Olivia’s got a serious secret. Yummy.

How is Walternate alive in the future if Peter destroyed the other universe?

Walternate is quickly becoming Fringe’s Cigarette Smoking Man. He can survive anything! We won’t believe he’s actually dead until we’ve literally seen his face flesh burned off in a fiery missile attack. (Hell, even then we won’t be totally convinced.) We know he had the technology to get himself out of there, but it makes me wonder—was it just a handful of people who were able to cross over in time, or are there now a buttload of doubles hanging out on our side? Because that’s gonna get crowded and confusing REAL fast.

How is this all going to fit in one hour of television?

I have no idea.

i've got some serious evidence, crazypants. also, i approve of all your choices. // fox promotional photo

Every morning I wake up and think, “Today, I am going to write about something that isn’t Fringe.”

And then I remember it’s my blog, and I’ll write about whatever I damn well please. Or, as the case may be, whatever happens to have soul-magneted my conscious mind.

Here’s a little backstory.

handwatch '11, part one. // spoilertv.com

A couple months ago, Joshua Jackson was photographed on the set of Fringe wearing a wedding ring. I immediately, um, exploded into a fit of fangirly squee (albeit confused fangirly squee), until Carrie politely informed me via Twitter that Mr. Jackson is just a devoted non-husband husband (to Diane Kruger, who’s also been wearing a ring, even though they are not legally married). And actually, I think it’s sweet that between takes, he slips the ring out of his pocket and goes back to being Mr. Kruger.

But if he had a secret plan to screw with my brain, well, congratulations. Mission accomplished.

So when pictures from the filming of 3×21 were leaked about two weeks ago, showing Jackson in costume, wearing a wedding ring, I wasn’t fazed. I patted myself on the back for not spazzing like a lunatic and continued about my day. Well, I spazzed over Peter’s outfit, which included a gun holster, but I dismissed the ring.

(By the way, the original married-hands photo was from filming of “Os,” I believe, which has obviously come and gone without a wedding.)

handwatch '11, part two. // spoilertv.com

Well, yesterday, more set photos were leaked.

And there was a ring. On a left hand. But it was not Josh’s. It was Anna’s. Which means. That. Someway, somehow. In whatever universe. I don’t even care. Except, okay, I care. In some universe in the season finale. And probably the episode before. Peter and Olivia are married.

Oh, snap. All bets are off, people.

Every theory I could come up with between now and the finale has been tainted by this knowledge. My brain cannot and will not put together coherent thoughts on things like machines, flash-forwarding, shapeshifters, and third universes—not when I know that Peter and Olivia (at some point, in some universe, whatever) will be married.

handwatch '11, part three. // spoilertv.com

Sidebar: I suppose, technically, they could be independently married to other people, but I trust these producers too much to even speculate on that grim possibility.

Now, all signs point to this being a flashforwardy third universe. (Holla.) But what the rules of that universe are, how Ourlivia and her team and Walternate and his team factor into it, how we get there, why we’d go there, what it has to do with the machine … all those questions are unanswered and I have very few ideas.

But you want ideas on how my new favorite love story makes it to the altar? SOMETIME IN THE NEXT THREE EPISODES?

That I can do.

The way I see it, this can go one of three ways.

1. Peter rescues Olivia from her Bell-squished brain and, in a grand gesture of life-affirming romance, whisks her away to Vegas to marry her. Meanwhile, doctors struggle to diagnose the surprisingly severe stroke I’ve had at age 24. (This is unlikely.)
2. These photos are from scenes that take place in the future, where Peter and Olivia are happily married, have children, and fight crime. Peter coaches the kids’ soccer. I spend the evening running around the apartment screaming Taylor Swift’s “Mine.” FLASHFORWARD AND WE’RE TAKING ON THE WORLD TOGETHER AND THERE’S A … Oh, wait. That’s every night. Never mind.
3. These photos are from scenes that take place in the future, where even though Peter and Olivia are married, things are not good. They’ve stolen a kid and are fighting a lot. It worked out for a while, and then he was like WE HAVE TO GO BACK and she was all I CAN’T HAVE YOU LIKE THIS AROUND MY SON and he’s all YOUR SON. YOU’RE NOT EVEN RELATED TO HIM. Or something like that. (Although, if this is the case, why are they still wearing rings? To answer my own question—because the show is weird like that. Walternate still wears a wedding ring even though he’s having sex with that Asian lady and not Peter’s mom.)

There’s also another option, which is that this takes place in an entirely separate universe, where an entirely separate Peter has married an entirely separate Olivia. (But then what is the point?)

I think the most interesting combination of ideas is #1 and #3. Peter and Olivia do get crazymarried before the finale, but then things are really bad between them in the future. What’s interesting is whether or not, in the present day in the present universe, Peter and Olivia become aware of all this future business, thus giving them something to fear and fight against—terrorist attacks, divorce, haircuts. (Could this awareness be related to the machine? To the 6:02 AM event? What if whatever happens at 6:02 AM happens at that time on some day in the future, which is the really bad event that they’re trying to prevent? You know, because there are worse things, in the grand scheme of the universe, than marital discord. And is this sounding too much like Flashforward?)

Ultimately, I’ll go along with the story regardless and just be excited about this whole marriage thing. Which, by the way, I’m really excited about. (Will she have changed her name? Do they have children? Did Peter wear the purple tuxedo at their wedding? Does Olivia call Walter “Dad”? SO MANY QUESTIONS.)

Okay, I’ll excuse myself now.

i love how no one seemed fazed by the accelerated pregnancy. "oh, okay. cool." // fox promotional photo

The best thing about Fringe is that I can sit here and write pages and pages of detailed theories, musing on the future of Fauxlivia and Peter’s son, but at the end of the day, I could never have come up with “Walternate’s scientists accelerate Fauxlivia’s pregnancy so she gives birth super-fast!” While some might think that this makes speculating on this series an exercise in futility, it’s still fun … and it’s DOUBLY awesome on those rare occasions when we’re right.

So here’s a question that’s been making the rounds on Twitter:

Is it possible that Fauxlivia’s baby, whose arrival was “accelerated” by science, is STILL on the fast-track?

Most of the conversation around this idea comes from the second episode of the series (yep, 1×02), “The Same Old Story.” A prostitute dies after giving birth to a child so speedy, he’s practically an old man by the time he is born … mere minutes after being conceived. Walter traces the source of this delightful situation to a project he worked on back in the day, cultivating soldiers. Here’s what Walter says:

Years ago, when I worked with the Defense Department, we were tasked with a program designed to cultivate soldiers… Grow them. It was highly theoretical, of course. Female eggs were to be fertilized in a lab and given a cocktail of growth hormones. If perfected, a baby was born and within three years aged to the equivalent of a 21-year-old male. A soldier in prime condition… The only problem was how to slow the aging process once the subject had reached the desired physical age. Once started, we couldn’t turn the aging off.

Walter then correctly speculates on what happened to the dead hooker–that she accidentally got pregnant with a test subject’s child; the condition was then passed down to the offspring, but at an exponentially greater rate of acceleration. Walter specifically says, “The pregnancy became horribly accelerated.”

Ouch.

Now, what makes this really interesting is that it goes beyond just fans sitting around recalling old episodes–the SHOW is recalling them, too. In a recent promo, they actually used years-old footage of poor one-R Loraine writhing in pain while growing what Peter called the “Magic Old Man Baby.”

In a recent interview, Executive Producer J.H. Wyman talked to Give Me My Remote about the use of amber in “6B”:

We just want them to realize if you look back at season one when there was amber on a bus [in "The Ghost Network"] and our team as part of the pattern, didn’t really know what the amber was, now you realize what amber is, if you look at that in retrospect, you’re like, “Oh my gosh. Oh, I see. This whole thing has a novel-like quality and these guys are going from here to there to take us through this journey.” This is sort of another aspect of that. So in retrospect, when you look back at this, you’ll say, “Oh, I get it.”

So it’s not like they’ve forgotten the episodes they did three years ago.

My concern/secret disgusting hope is that Peter and Fauxlivia’s offspring is still on the fast track, and that it’s actually him in the machine drawings. (Gosh, I wish we knew that little nugget’s name.) On the one hand, I want to see Peter interact with him and care for him and steal him away from the alternate universe, thus continuing the family legacy of kidnapping. (I tweeted the other night that I hope Fauxlivia names him after his grandfather, so that when Peter and Olivia dose him with Cortexiphan and drag him back to our side, she can scream, “WAAAAAAALT!”)

But on the other hand, it would be AWESOME if it’s actually Peter’s son in the machine. It could even be Josh playing the Magic Old Man Baby. (Whoa.) The problem with the latter is that, while I loved that tiny little foot, I’m more than okay putting it in the machine if it means my Peter stays safe.

To keep the stakes suitably high, what could actually happen is a situation where Walternate is about to put Fauxlivia’s son in the machine, but then Peter finds out about everything–the baby, the machine, the plan. And then Peter, who’s spent the season desperately trying to figure out how to avoid ending up in the machine (even going so far as killing shapeshifters), suddenly feels like he has a choice to make.

Of course, there are SO MANY more variables that this idea doesn’t address. What about the fact that, on the other side, loyalties are slowly shifting? Friday’s conversation between Charlie and Lincoln (LOVE HIM!) showed that these two are starting to doubt Walternate. What about Sam Weiss and his assertion that only one universe can survive–whichever Peter chooses? What about Olivia–how’s she going to react when she finds out about the baby? (I really, really want Fauxlivia to have stolen Ourlivia’s favorite baby name.) How will Lincoln feel if/when Peter returns to his universe? Nothing I can come up with addresses all of the unanswered questions and different character motivations. And that’s okay, because I trust that they can do a better job than I ever could at tying up these ideas. (And if not this year, then next.)