- Gerard Manley Hopkins- "I’m My Own Grandpa” (popular song)I keep coming back to The Dream.OLIVIA:We see Olivia’s face first, shot in a way that suggests the way she looks when she’s in Walter’s sensory deprivation tank. Then, Peter’s hand slowly comes into frame and rests on her face, as if to bring her back from wherever she is.It can hardly be a coincidence that this mimics the famous shot fromwhere we see Emily Jessup (Blair Brown) reach into the cosmic maelstrom created by Eddie Jessup’s (William Hurt) sensory deprivation tank. In a last ditch attempt to somehow gather together the human remnants of Eddie out of the primordial soup his experiments have led to, she reaches into a whirlpool of nothing and slowly, slowly, the man she loves begins to recreate himself and eventually reappears in human form.This is, of course, exactly how Olivia has brought Peter back, but here the identities have switched: Peter has brought Olivia back. But why, and which Olivia? Some have also suggested that the entire sequence itself seems to have literally been flipped, creating the mirror image of what the camera actually filmed. Why?OLIVIA:PETER:And as Olivia and Peter watch Walter on the swing in the manner of doting parents, I started wondering all over again about just which Bishop is which. Who is the child and who the man?It’s a theory that’s been mentioned before, but I wonder if we haven’t been given a few new reasons to reexamine it recently: namely, that the Bishop family genealogy is much more complicated than it looks. Is Peter Walter’s father, Robert Bischoff? Is Walter somehow Bischoff, insofar as the one picture we’ve seen of him strikingly resembles a young Walter Bishop?If Robert Bischoff’s tombstone is to be believed, he died in 1944, living only to the age of 32. Walter, his son and Peter’s father, was born, however, in 1946. Since that doesn’t seem possible, the question of just who Walter Bishop is becomes very complicated indeed. Is the tombstone a fake and, if so, why?If Nazi scientist Alfred Hoffman, who worked with Bischoff, was still walking the streets in the 21st century (), it stands to reason that Bischoff himself would have access to whatever seems to have preserved Hoffman, whether it’s an element that retards the aging process or whether it’s the ability to time travel.If Bischoff wanted or needed to disappear, is it feasible that he could fake his own death with a phony headstone and then proceed to pass himself off as his own son Walter? Then who, or what, is Peter? It’s been hinted often enough that he could be some sort of construct. It would explain his connectedness to a machine and his easy understanding of shapeshifters. If so, who built him and when? Do we have any evidence that “Peter” existed between the ages we’ve seen him at? December says that “They can never know the boy lived to be a man,” not “grew to be a man.” Or could Bischoff have found a way to place his consciousness into his own grandson, as Peter was able to place his current consciousness into his future self? It might go some ways towards explaining how Peter seemed to have access to what Walter knew when John Mosley searched his brain. It could hint that the Bishops somehow share a single consciousness or that there aren’t as many Bishops as we think there are.I noticed something interesting as I was watching the credits forThere, towards the end, was a name I hadn’t seen in years: Monte Markham. I wasn’t even aware that he was still acting, in fact. The show that I remembered him for the best ran in 1967-1968 and was calledIts premise was a rather bizarre gimmick that seemed to come straight from the song I quoted at the top:And that’s how we spelled hilarity in the late 1960’s.Still, it was a fascinating, if cornball, idea that allowed Markham to play the roles of both grandfather and grandson, both of them the age (give or take a year) that Robert Bischoff was when he “died.” Now I sat very patiently throughwaiting for Markham to appear and the show was nearly over when I decided I must have missed him. But then in the last few minutes, two strange unidentified agents appear who, in an overt homage to The Prisoner, pump gas into Olivia’s apartment causing her to pass out. And there, finally, as one of the agents removes his mask, is Monte Markham as (according to IMDB) Dr. Blair West, presumably the doctor from Massive Dynamic who had stolen Eugene Bryant away as an infant (Interestingly, there was also a Dr. West in, an episode that was top-heavy with other H.P. Lovecraft references as well).Now I don’t know what the show’s plans are for Mr. Markham, but why on earth would you go to the trouble of getting Monte Markham to play a small role unless you really wanted to throw a clue and/or red herring out to the audience? (Not that he doesn’t have other sci-fi credits: those with human shapeshifter theories may be interested to know that he also played a more sophisticated model of the mechanically improvedon the show of the same name.)Here’s another question:Why has there been a mysterious character on the show from the beginning whose name is…Markham? And not just any character.We’ve only met him a handful of times, but consider what he’s been responsible for providing:and, by extension, the location of the pieces of The Vacuum. He’s also been the temporary curator of the books of Robert Bischoff. So, for a moment, let’s drop the idea that he’s a convenient plot device. Let’s consider the possibility that he’s one of the most important characters on the show. Surely it’s more than mere coincidence that one individual is able to provide copies of what we’re told are extraordinarily rare manuscripts and put them into the hands of Peter Bishop at extraordinarily convenient moments.What if, as in, the slightly less than impressive Edward Markham is the man behind the curtain? What is he’s there to keep an eye on Peter’s progress and to help him find his way and fulfill his destiny by giving him the clues he needs at the right times? One thing I know: he’s coming back.OLIVIA:PETER:And, indeed, there is something positively Edenic about the scene in the dream: a man and woman talking happily and intimately in a pastoral setting.PETER:MARKHAM:Or what if we are talking about Adam and Eve?If Peter and Olivia’s love story is an “epic” one, is there one that could be more epic? Did the moment in The Day We Died when Olivia gazes at the wormhole in Central Park strike anyone else as more than a moment but, rather, as the prelude to a chunk of story we’ve never been told?Olivia is an author who can type with her mind. What has she written or rewritten?OLIVIA:It’s a line that hints at the power of a writer, able to create or dispose of characters at will. And she has been partly responsible for getting rid of Peter, via a machine that Walter describes in a very interesting way:WALTER:Could she have written the ZFT manuscript on Walter’s typewriter with her mind? Or, for that matter? Has she written the world? Who is Olivia Dunham? And did she use the wormhole the same way that Peter presumably did? Could they have met up at the Dawn of Time and had the world’s first date?OLIVIA:PETER:OLIVIA:PETER:OLIVIA:And Peter wakes up with a start as we’ve seen him do so often, like something newly alive.PETER:In dreams, it is said that we are feeling and experiencing real truths that we might be unable or unwilling to admit to ourselves otherwise. There’s something unnervingly real about this one and I get the feeling that it contains nothing but truth, if we know how to interpret it. And so I have to believe that Peter is a very big problem indeed.What kind of problem depends on what timeline you believe is the real one, which one you think The Observers are working to preserve, and whether you think they’re all on the same side. I had at one point decided that the two Walters were intentionally split so as to protect humanity from the horrifying future a “collective” Walter would otherwise have brought about. Now I’m wondering if it isn’t Peter we should be worried about.If Peter is somehow fated to be the undoing of Mankind (in asense), how do we interpret September’s actions? The conclusion ofseemed straightforward enough: we assume that after being told his mistake (original sin?) has still not been corrected, September is prepared to erase Peter from existence, but relents at the last moment, presumably out of some unexpected emotional connection.What if that isn’t the case at all?What if it’s the rank and file Observers who have gone rogue by insisting that Peter be eliminated? Let’s presume that his existence wreaks havoc with the future. What if The Observers simply cannot bear to allow the fate they foresee for Mankind to come to pass if Peter lives? And what if September is the by-the-book hold out who insists that “the boy must live” because he believes they are forbidden to interfere, regardless of the consequences to Humanity?That’s a little convoluted, I suppose, and probably a little too hard a twist on the emotional development of the characters. But let’s go this far, at least:All is not what it appears to be. A show of sorts is being performed by some puppeteer and we’ve yet to figure out the purpose of the marionettes. I think it’s significant that our characters traveled back and forth between universes on a theater stage. What or whose show are we watching? Has someone gained control of reality in the way that The Control Voice would tell uswas about to for the next 60 minutes? Why did September need television parts to erase Peter? Is it all a television show?Is it called FRINGE?There is much in FRINGE that seems to hover around beginnings and endings, Adam and Eve, Genesis and Revelation. An Edenic paradise and the means to blow it all up.Does that strike anyone else as looking like a mushroom cloud?Oh, there was a Saint Clair, by the way. She was the patron saint of Television.