Tonight is the exciting fourth season premiere of Fringe. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to participate in a Q&A with Executive Producers and showrunners, J. H. Wyman and Jeff Pinkner. It was a very informative session, and you can tell these guys really have a master plan for the series. I’d like to thank them for taking the time to speak with us. Here are some of the highlights:
On reassuring Joshua Jackson fans
J. H. Wyman: Basically, look, Peter is part of the DNA of the show and we’ve done some pretty crazy things in the past that people were always like, “Well, wait a minute. Why are they doing that? What’s going on?” I mean hopefully in Season 4 people will trust us enough to realize that we are doing things for a reason. To sort of have Fringe without Peter in some way, shape or form is really not Fringe.
So, while we can’t really comment—for those of you who haven’t seen the opening or what’s going on, he’s part of the show. He’s part of the language of our show and a very big part of it. So, there are kind of two things that we want to get across without really ruining anything and that is, number one, yes, Peter is part of the DNA and he’ll always be that. Number two is that just because he doesn’t exist doesn’t mean that the three years that we’ve all invested in and watched does not exist; it didn’t happen. It really did happen and it’ll unfold itself for you to understand in what context I’m speaking of.
But, yes, people shouldn’t worry. We love Peter and we know how much everybody loves Peter. We both can’t imagine telling the series and the story without him.
J. Pinkner: What we would say is the show constantly tries to re-contextualize your perception of the story. We introduced Walter Bishop in Season 1 and by the time you get to Season 2 you realize that in many ways he’s the chief architect. Our most sympathetic character is the chief architect of all the trouble in two universes. There’s a version of the narrative where he’s the biggest villain of the entire piece.
So, the idea that Peter is gone, and ultimately he’s not permanently gone, we’ve made it very clear, is an opportunity to sort of re-contextualize the story of everything we’ve seen again, which is something that we love to play with.
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