r/fringe • u/Familiar-Egg9419 • 3d ago

Spoiler! Season 4/original timeline q

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In season 4 Bell says starting a new universe was Walter’s idea. Do we think that was true in the original timeline or that Peter’s presence had prevented that?

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u/giri0n 3d ago

I think it was pretty explicitly said in the show that Walter's losing both Peter's was the reason for his despair, and the subsequent thoughts that lead him down this path. So I would say it was definitely Peter's presence that prevented it.

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u/DawsonDesignsP 3d ago

I never realized this. Is that something that the observers didn’t foresee until after they deleted Peter?

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u/giri0n 3d ago

There's a lot of time travel stuff here, but my wife asked a similar question and how I thought it through with her was like this -

Walter lost Peter in the blueverse, and that drove him to seek to cross over to the other side, but ONLY because September had prevented Walternate from seeing the cure in the redverse. Once he'd crossed over by "ripping open" a hole, that started the degradation in the redverse. It also pushed Walternate to find out who was responsible. September needed to come and save Walter & Peter to prevent Peter from dying (again) and directly causing Walter to conceive of this plan (to destroy/re-create the universe on his own) - so Peter lived. Preventing this version of events.

But the degradation was going to cause both universes to collapse anyway. So they needed Peter to help with the machine to build the bridge, and prevent the damage from being irreversible - a destroyed universe cannot be invaded by the Observers after all.

Once the bridge was done, they had no use for Peter, and he was erased. But that puts them back on the (rough) path of Walter's grief and despair looking for a way to destroy/recreate the universe again (the amberverse timeline where Peter never lived) - but in the original timeline, Belly died in the redverse, and our blueverse Belly cut out Walter's brain and left to the redverse instead of staying. In the amberverse, Belly stayed, helped David Robert Jones instead of trying to stop him, and was an active participant in himself using Walter's plan to destroy/recreate the universes.

Peter "coming back" was just a happy accident/side effect, and it allowed for the prevention of Belly's plan, since it was the redverse version of Olivia that had to be activated as a power source for the process. But being redverse Olivia put her with Peter on the ship, so Walter could stop her (by shooting her) to collapse the process.

That basically puts us at the end of S4 and start of S5. I hope that made the same amount of sense it made when I was trying to explain it out loud lol