3x13 "Immortality" - Episode Discussion

Sounds like they're going with the Machine, the baby, and the First People.

I'm assuming the First People built the Machine. AltLiv got to the other side with a crucial part of the Machine, but the Thing still revved up when Peter came within a certain proximity. You know, his nose started bleeding.

C'mon, "Fringe"! You guys can still do a lot with suspense and tension with the acting by your fine cast.

Spoiler:

The Kilohertz show was entertaining. Is there really a radio band out there that repeats numbers for unknown reasons? That was bizarre, in a good way!

Elliot, you and me should become show suggesting fans, economical ways for "Fringe" to do various investigations (You know, those "stand-alone" shows),
but still have progress on the War. We need a new villain. And not AltLiv!

She'll always be a villain, she's a plot device, to drive a wedge between Olivia and Peter, and to make the other side look good, so I can't envision that changing. But she's becoming a seagull around the neck of the show, so I think they will eventually walk away from her character.

I think they need a bunch of new villains! It was interesting to meet new characters, and see them develop... we did not know what to make of AD Harris --his villainry grew and the same with David Robert Jones... especially Jones, he and the whole ZFT thing had a lot more depth than Harris-----or frankly, than Fakey. There was more meat to the story.

Same with Bell!

Here's a question: Since Walter cortexi'd Olivia and the other kids to make soldiers to fight in the coming war, and the war is over the breakdown in the universes, and the breakdown in universes was caused by stealing Peter, and Walter started the cortexi experiments before he stole Peter, how did he know there would be a war?

I think either that's another gaping plot hole, or the Observers have had their thumb on the scale from the beginning.

Dang, girl, you're just too logical sometimes!

I thought this side's Peter may have died as a result of cortexifan causing the avian flu. But our Peter from the other side was going to die of avian flu, also.

If there was a change of heart by the writers, it may have happened several times.
I thought for the longest time that Walter didn't take Peter out of any altruistic motivation to save him, but stole a healthy Peter outright from his parents. He took him because he was crazy from grief, and could see Peter with that 50's looking tv screen enlarger. But that's not the way they ended up telling the story. Mom over here was the culprit, keeping Peter to replace the son she'd lost. Maybe they were afraid it would have made Walter too unsympathetic.

So, it was established (in the last show?) that Walternate drew the line at experimenting with children. Walter, on the other hand, had no trouble experimenting with very young children, the forest scene where adult Olivia was trying to comfort 3-4 year old Olive.

They set up the idea that the children were paired to help keep each other calm, and one of my favorite moments of the first year was during the excellent "Bad Dreams" where, under hypnosis, Olivia was getting Nick Lane's thoughts, getting agitated, and Walter turns to Peter and says something like, "Help her son. You know how." Peter puts both hands on top of her hands reminiscent of how the cortexifan children might comfort each other, but it seems like they abandoned that storyline.

Too bad. Ala Stephen King, I thought the conflicts of grown-up Peter and Olivia might be solved by tapping into their childhood fears and affection as participants in the cortexifan experiments. It had juicy potential, but maybe a little too disturbing for mainstream audiences.

Here's to hoping, feeling fairly sure of another season, that they'll go back, look again at some of the plot ideas they threw up on the Fringe Wall, and visit potentially exciting ones.

Cathy904 wrote:

Dang, girl, you're just too logical sometimes!

I thought this side's Peter may have died as a result of cortexifan causing the avian flu. But our Peter from the other side was going to die of avian flu, also.

Neither had bird flu--they had a genetic disease. (Which presumably so will Soap Baby).

If there was a change of heart by the writers, it may have happened several times.
I agree.
I thought for the longest time that Walter didn't take Peter out of any altruistic motivation to save him, but stole a healthy Peter outright from his parents. He took him because he was crazy from grief, and could see Peter with that 50's looking tv screen enlarger. But that's not the way they ended up telling the story. Mom over here was the culprit, keeping Peter to replace the son she'd lost. Maybe they were afraid it would have made Walter too unsympathetic.
Yes, that's the list or reasons as they changed. I think that as they are making Walter less sympathetic now, they may change that again.

So, it was established (in the last show?) that Walternate drew the line at experimenting with children. Walter, on the other hand, had no trouble experimenting with very young children, the forest scene where adult Olivia was trying to comfort 3-4 year old Olive.

And, this makes it OK that he tried repeatedly to kill Olivia, tortured her, killed Broyles, those 9 adult cortexi subjects...sent fakey to seduce HIS OWN SON..because he knows his son loves Olivia...

They set up the idea that the children were paired to help keep each other calm, and one of my favorite moments of the first year was during the excellent "Bad Dreams" where, under hypnosis, Olivia was getting Nick Lane's thoughts, getting agitated, and Walter turns to Peter and says something like, "Help her son. You know how." Peter puts both hands on top of her hands reminiscent of how the cortexifan children might comfort each other, but it seems like they abandoned that storyline.

He got Sherriff My Favorite Guest Star of All Time to not make a phonecall the same way... they forget, and remember, he has that power. The producers said in the dvd for the first season that power set up things to come for him and Olivia...

Too bad. Ala Stephen King, I thought the conflicts of grown-up Peter and Olivia might be solved by tapping into their childhood fears and affection as participants in the cortexifan experiments. It had juicy potential, but maybe a little too disturbing for mainstream audiences.

?More disturbing than Olivia's entire identity being stolen?

--I think we may yet see some of that in this next flashback episode, though.

Here's to hoping, feeling fairly sure of another season, that they'll go back, look again at some of the plot ideas they threw up on the Fringe Wall, and visit potentially exciting ones.

Hope so! And I would like to know how Walter knew there would be a war over stealing peter before he had done so--like, 5 years before....

...I was going to make a point about how scarab beetles lay their eggs in balls of dung, but then that recap got all lathery about how fakelivia is on a hero journey and her fetus will save the universe and

meh.

Who cares already?