Fringe spoilers follow; if you haven’t watched the episode “An Origin Story” do not read ahead.
At the end of the episode “An Origin Story,” Fringe took Peter Bishop’s character in a bold new direction. After interrogating a captured Observer, Peter discovered and removed a chip from the back of the baldie’s noggin. “You are nothing but tech,” Peter lashed out to the Observer. “I would be ten times what you are if I had that tech in my head.” In a fit of rage following the recent death of his daughter Etta at the hands of the Observers, Peter lodged the tech into the back of his head and thus began his journey of revenge. He must’ve forgotten what Anil told him an episode prior: “A person who embarks on a path of revenge should first dig two graves.”
So what can we expect from this transformed Peter? In an interview clip embedded above, Jackson shares that “once [Peter] has the tech in his head he’s kinda drunk on his own power all of a sudden” and that “Peter as we know him is very rapidly slipping away.”
And if you watched last night’s episode “Through the Looking Glass and What Peter Found There” we got a glimpse of Peter’s new abilities, though the tech doesn’t seem to be fully affecting his capacity to show emotion…yet. Just as Olivia starts to reach out to Peter, he pushes himself further away by injected the Observer tech into his head. Olivia’s portrayer Anna Torv discusses this topic in the clip.
Minor spoiler from “Through the Looking Glass…” follows. Jackson makes an interesting point in the clip at the end when he mentions that Peter and his father Walter are experiencing “parallel lives.” Jackson is undergoing a transformation thanks to the Observer tech, and Walter is similarly changing ever since Etta and Simon installed the missing parts of Walter’s brain in the pivotal “future episode” 419 last season. Walter made an emotional realization at the end of last night’s episode: “I’m not safe. It’s my mind. Ever since the pieces of my brain were reimplanted, it’s been changing me back into the man I was before. Bit by bit. I’m losing myself, Peter. I’m losing the man that you helped me become.” He’s afraid that he is transforming back into the “arrogant” man he used to be during the days he experimented with William Bell. It will be interesting to watch these parallel character transformations unfold as we enter the final stretch of episodes. Peter promises that he will not let Walter lose himself, but can he keep his word if he’s losing himself to the Observer tech?
Fringe airs Friday nights at 9PM on FOX.