The character of Walter Bishop has been pretty much carrying this show since the outset, hasn’t he? Even when Olivia bored me and I was disgusted by the various diseases and mutations wreaking havoc on their victims, I would still tune in to Fringe to see what gems we would get from good old Walter.
More importantly though, Walter is a mystery to us still, and now we’ve been given another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is his past. Is it just one of those random blob-shaped middle pieces that are pretty much useless until all the rest are in place, or is it a corner piece that is going to help lay the foundation for everything else yet to come? I’m going with the latter, as the look on Walter’s face after he typed that Y on the typewriter was worth a million words.
To me, it was a look of shock more than anything else. As if he had a feeling, but hoped it wasn’t true. When I went back and watched the part where Walter was reading a passage out of the manuscript again, it did seem feasible to me that it could have been written by him. We know Walter’s memory is, to be polite, less than perfect. During his time in the mental institution, I’m sure he was probably pumped with enough drugs to keep even Amy Winehouse subdued. And let’s face it, if that weren’t the case, all of this just wouldn’t be as interesting, now would it.
There is, also, the question of Walter’s former partner and founder of Massive Dynamic, William Bell. I’ve been reading some of the theories viewers have thrown out, and I’m going with this one: Walter Bishop and William Bell are one and the same. Doesn’t it make sense? According to some of the spoilers, he’s supposed to be played by someone already on the cast. They even have the same initials. I don’t, however, buy that Walter has any form of dissociative identity disorder. I’m pretty sure that before the accident that got him locked up, he was a much more competent person than what we see today.
Now, about the ZFT manuscript. The passage that Walter first read seemed to speak to the main mystery of Fringe so far, The Pattern:
“It will begin with a series of unnatural occurrences, difficult to notice at first, but growing, not unlike a cancer, until a simple fact becomes undeniable: only one world will survive. It will either be us or them.”
Who’s willing to bet that The Observer is from one of these other worlds? If there are many, and not only ours and another one, I’m thinking that he is not a part of the “warfare” that ZFT describes. He’s too neutral. Of course, I no longer have the one episode where we actually got some interaction with him, so maybe I don’t remember correctly. Obviously he is observing, but is he also there to make sure that these things come to pass? It doesn’t seem like it to me.
Also, we already know that Walter and The Observer know each other from many years ago. This just furthers my belief that Walter is the one who wrote the manuscript, because who else would have that kind of knowledge? All in all, I like the direction we seem to be heading in. It just wouldn’t be a J.J. Abrams show without the threat of world destruction, would it? Maybe all my speculation is wrong, but it sure is fun to try and figure it out. Do you have any theories about ZFT, Walter, or The Pattern?
Clacked by Cate Cropp
on Feb 12, 2009 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
In this episode, I noticed that the first orifice-sealed victim was near a man that looked like the observer. He was only on the screen for a second or two, but I do recall seeing him in the scene at the newspaper stand.
I think Walter definitely was the write of the manuscript, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Walter turned out to be Bell. Bell seems to be at the center of all of these and with this manuscript thing it suddenly feels like a possibility, albeit a very remote one.
To Michael, I think that might have been the observer also, he didn’t seem to have any hair and didn’t look surprised.
I hadn’t considered Walter Bishop == William Bell, and it kind of doesn’t make sense when you consider Bell would be a majority stockholder (or would have been, in the past) of Massive Dynamic, thus making him and his heirs rich beyond belief. But it makes sense to me otherwise.
I wasn’t surprised to learn Bishop or Bell (remember, all Bishop figured out is which typewriter it was written on) wrote the manuscript in the 60s Harvard lab. But what that means for the wider storyline remains to be seen.
I love this show, and the scene last night where the EMTs walk in and Peter says, “Dad, put away the cow”, and the EMT responds, “what kind of place is this?” was hilarious :)
What I’m wondering is if Walter wrote the manuscript, or if he will write it. After all, he’s got a machine that can teleport matter trough space and time.
I’ve pretty much stayed away from spoilers, or honestly, even speculation, about Fringe, and have really just planned on going along for the ride. Thus, I hadn’t really thought about William Bell much until now, other than how odd it was that we just continued to see his one-armed proxy at MD.
I do like the idea that they are one and the same person. You can either believe that there is some kind of dissociative disorder, or that our Bishop created MD, but that Nina Sharp has been running the company for years, and using an “avatar” of Bell as the figure head.
This show is interesting stuff, and while it started slow IMHO, I’m definitely hooked ;)
I just think it’s cool Anna Torv (Olivia Dunham) secretly married Mark Valley (John Scott) last weekend.
Consider what we do know about Walter. Walter claims that William stole his work. Around the same time the lab accident happened. Is it possible that an experiment of “Walter’s” if that’s even his real name, even his son seems uncertain at times, could have caused the accident. I’m suggesting that Walter might have been working on a cloning experiment, actually created William, possibly shifting part of his consciousness half into Walter and half into William. This would explain the memory loss and familiarity to Walter as he uncovers his own work. It’s possible when they found Walter they assumed he’d gone mad and simply locked him up because they didn’t understand what was happening or even possible that William locked him up. Is it possible that Walter is literally half the man he used to be?
True, you could actually be right, in the equation episode where they kidnapped that young kid and Walter had to go back into the asylum to talk to the Asian doctor, Walter at one point sees another man who looks just like him, could this be the Walter/William clone, and that in fact there are 2 entities.
Wow, these theories are great!!! GL, I like yours, holy smokes!
I honestly thought Walter wrote the manuscript, he knows The Observer from the past and I think The Observer is a guy who came from “out there/another world” way back in the day to warn our planet/species. Walter was the one he connected with. This is why you see him in every episode, right about the time something of The Pattern happens. But, I do not believe he is a negative agent of anything, rather I think he is a positive one.
Perhaps The Observer came and warned both Bell and Walter, and that is why they began to develop all of these technologies/weapons/viruses etc etc, to combat the approaching “war”. However, once they had completed a lot of their work, Bell saw an opportunity to profit from it (or perhaps turn to the dark side) and framed Walter in the lab explosion to have him locked up.
Actually if Fringe is going with multiverse theories and all the related stuff that goes on, maybe William Bell is Walter Bishop from another reality? Thus he would be played by John Noble, but he would not be the same character.
Since it’s pretty much us-vs-them according to the manuscript, would that shift Massive Dynamic (being the company Bell founded) to the “enemy” side of things?
In the episode “Ability” when Astrid told Walter that he “made a teleportation machine, but it kills you when you use it,” I believe Walter’s ominous response “No, it doesn’t kill you–it does something far worse” should be looked at into what may have caused this separation of Walter and William Bell if they are one in the same.
Also what was the score in one of the earlier episodes with the three guys lying side by side in the big incubator tanks, it was a sort of pop up before the credits, like the apple with the two babies in it – this would seem to support the cloning theory which you suggest.
Well, considering that Leonard Nimoy is apparent Bell, there goes the reality theories. However, I do believe Bishop wrote it. If you listen to his voice in the old video in Bad Dreams, you can hear the evil. The sinister scientist. Just like when Bishop is visited by a doppelganger in prison. It’s not a clone, it’s the personality that the institution drained from him. We are talking about a man who invented a machine that goes back in time, in a plan to steal a man from history to cure his son’s disease. That’s pretty intense.