Fringe Season: Who Observes The Observers?

Prominently featured in a small handful of season 1 episodes and easter egg featured in the background of many more, The Observer is far and wide the coolest, strangest, and most mysterious figure in ever growing Fringe lore. The bald retro suited semi-psychic always seems to show up when something weird is going down and we’ve never known why. Until now?

A man bearing unmistakable resemblance to the figure we’ve come to know and be mystified by watches a young woman in the park. But surprise surprise, it’s not the Observer previously seen, but clearly someone in the family tree. This one has his fancy binoculars set on kidnapping, car theft, and assault with an otherworldly stun gun – all in broad daylight . Oh, and he starts the car with a glowing thumb.

Liv’s enjoying a morning with her adorable niece when news of the abduction sadly cuts playtime short. Walter’s quirky obsession of the week falls upon rediscovering the perfect milkshake recipe, and who’s got time to provide intel for a kidnapping when there’s important work like that to be done? Liv realizes something’s amiss when they find video of the crime revealing the alterna-Observer’s (we’ll call him O2 for short) presence and the stunning image of the freakshow Kojak catching a bullet with his bare hands.

Peter finds a trace of blood in O2’s abandoned journal, the cryptic non-repeating contents of which baffle even linguistics expert Astrid. She finds a nerd at Massive Dynamic with Observer fever who might have leads on the lingo, but instead reveals some hardcore mind blowing exposition about the Observers: they’ve been doing their thing since damn near the dawn of time, popping in and out of history to keep an eye on mankind’s most crucial moments and probably don’t experience the passage of time like the rest of us. The familiar Observer (we’ll call him O1) takes a meeting with still more colleagues who explain that the girl O2 saved was meant to be on a flight doomed to crash, so they hire a low rent hitman to fix the violated rules of disinterested spectating they seem so committed to.

Pete & Liv discover that O2 has had a curiously protective relationship with his kidnappee since observing the death of her parents at the hands of the ’89 San Francisco earthquake and he’s not about to let her die. Astrid find the crime scene trace to be not blood, but rather the hot sauce Observers love so much. And wouldn’t ya know, it just so happens to be an especially rare and traceable variety. The path of pickled peppers leads Fringe Division to the assassin’s crib, but he gives Peter the slip.

Back at the Observer powwow, O2 defends his actions, but O1 says they’ve only ever interfered in history when they’d caused the problem in the first place, like when he rescued Walt & Peter from death in a frozen lake some 20 years ago. Later, O2 calls Walter to a meeting, the location of which he’d imbedded in his codes. Walter assumes he’s there to be punished for kidnapping Peter from the Other Side, but he just wants help saving Christine and needs the advice of someone who never bothers thinking anywhere near the box. He suggests a course of action that would force Christine’s life to bear the relevance to future events that he sensed and saved her for.

O2 has a showdown with the hitman who seems hopeless against the power to glimpse the near future, but as part of a twistedly logical master plan, O2 lets himself be shot thus granting Christine the strange but life saving designation of First Person to Bring About An Observer’s Death. Just when I was starting to like the guy. Pete and Liv take out the assassin thanks to Pete’s quick trigger finger on the Observer zap gun, and in the aftermath O1 sneaks in undetected to spirit away his fading crony. O2 lives long enough to offer a deeply moving soliloquy on developing feelings for the first time and feeling a fatherly love for Christine. Props to all parties involved for creating a moment of simultaneous total weirdness and sentimental gut punch.

Before finally giving her niece the family time she deserves, Liv learns during a debrief that no one other than Peter has been able to make the Observers’ gun fire. I guess there are just some talents you cling to when you unknowingly hail from another dimension.

Season 2, Episode 8: August (originally aired November 19, 2009)

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Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro