A Short Thought About AUs

[sprocket]

There are problems with the fork in the road AU, branching off 1985, as written. Canon tells us there's significant early divergences: the Cortexiphan trials were cut short, Olivia kills her stepfather. And there's later changes, notably the S1 / 2008-2009 David Robert Jones arc. The easy branch-point would be, "Peter wasn't there, so no one was in position to kill Jones when he tried to cross over." But the show didn't go that route. It dropped Jones out of sight until his theatrical entrance in S4 (2011/2012). He doesn't try to activate Olivia in 2008-ish. He doesn't come to Fringe's attention. Does that mean the S1 ZFT thread evaporated, in this timeline? That would tie into the change in John Scott's death.

But when you start really thinking about that, it means that everything in S1 - S3 has been destabilized, from a viewer perspective. At which point, if events in '85 and events in the last three years are destabilized, timeline-wise, you've basically imploded three seasons of worldbuilding. Peter was not so wrong to think he had been pulled into a completely separate third universe.

And that's a problem: it means the writers need to re-establish the characters and reframe three years of viewer experience... in two universes. Fringe dropped the ball on that, which is one reason the back half of S4 is such a mess.

Now, what I'm wondering is, who in this brave new timeline is aware Olivia can cross universes? We've got Peter, and... anyone? Bueller?

Comments

[kerithwyn]

No one. From "Back to Where You've Never Been":

OLIVIA: It's Walter's portal device -- the one he used to cross over in 1985.
PETER: That's at the bottom of Reiden Lake.
OLIVIA: Well, maybe where you're from, but Massive Dynamic recovered it years ago. It's been in storage ever since.
PETER: And you just happened to have this handy?
OLIVIA: I've been thinking about crossing over myself, doing a little recon.
PETER: Well, what do you even need Walter's device for when you can just cross back and forth anytime by yourself?
OLIVIA: When I can what?

In this timeline, her abilities don't activate until "The End of All Things"--Jones' doing (again), finally.

Olivia still drew the notebook full of blimps and Walter still saw it, but since she never returned after his first attempt to provoke her ability (Nick and the fire), they both more or less forgot about it.

You're not wrong about "losing" the s3 timeline. I was a lot more okay with the new timeline than a lot of fans, and sure from the start that it wasn't a completely different universe--but I absolutely see why that was such a strong fan theory right until it was disproved.

(There are a lot of OTHER problems with s4, like events being changed that had nothing to do with Peter at all. Despite that, I do love most of the first half...while as near as I can tell, the larger percentage of fandom prefers the latter half. The division there is not hard to see.)

[sprocket]

Okay, I remember the chicken soup scene... how much of the end of the cortexiphan trials was explictly invoked in S4? There's a bit in "Subject 9", but was there anything else?

(I am not thinking about information shell games at all. Cough.)

[wendelah1]

There's a bit in "Subject 9", but was there anything else?

I don't remember anything else but it's been awhile since I watched the entire season.

[wendelah1]

Wait. Why was Walter trying to get the Cortexiphan children to cross over in the first place if Peter wasn't there? I thought he was trying to get them to cross over so that they could take Peter with them.

Olivia still drew the notebook full of blimps and Walter still saw it, but since she never returned after his first attempt to provoke her ability (Nick and the fire), they both more or less forgot about it.

Do you recall what season four episode references this incident? If not, don't worry--we'll get to it eventually. More or less forgetting about your most important test subject crossing universes is so not believable to me, but the way Fringe handles memory flies in the face of common sense most of the time, so maybe that really happened.