Fringe/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• The entire episode of "Brown Betty" in Fringe. At first glance, this episode may appear to be funny and a bit out there (which makes sense seeing as the majority of the episode is a story that Walter is telling Ella while he is high). But if you penetrate the subtext his bizarre story is actually very close to home.
  • What subtext? By the end, the subtext IS the text.
• There's a brief moment in the Season 2 finale when we get a look at some of the comic books that are popular in the Alternate Universe, and we see that Denny O'Neill's "Green Lantern and Green Arrow" is called "Red Lantern and Red Arrow" in this world. At first glance, the color swap appears to be a one-off joke. In Real Life, though, comic book writer Martin Nodell got the idea for Green Lantern after he went to a train station and saw an engineer using a green lantern and a red lantern to signal to trains when to run and when to stop. So there was, in fact, a pretty good chance that the famous superhero could have ended up being called "Red Lantern" in our world too.
• This troper isn't finished with season 3 yet, but the fact that Peter appears to Olivia while she believes she's Fauxlivia. At first this Troper thought it didn't make much sense, and it implied Olivia needed Peter to save her--but it actually works. Fauxlivia would only consider seeing Olivia a sign of raging insanity because Olivia was her enemy. Peter is more neutral and thus a far more credible source of information.
• In season 3, Olivia's only ally in her quest to return home is Henry, a cab driver. So he's really just doing his job.
  • After finding out that Nina Sharp and William Bell had a "complicated" relationship and after seeing Nina kiss Broyles in the Season 2 premier, the argument Nina and Broyles have in "The Road Not Taken" comes across as less of a accusation of terrorism and more of a lover's spat.
  • Fauxlivia's ruthlessness can be explained by the nature of her job. She was remarkably undisturbed in "Over There" when she and thousands of others (including her friends) were almost sealed in amber. Her job demands that some lives (including her own) must be sacrificed for the greater good. She does this sort of thing every day.
  • Ella's strange lack of discomfort with the (fictional) murder of her mother and overall bizarreness of the world of Walter's story in "Brown Betty" is actually suggestive of the fact that one day, she'll make a great Fringe Division agent, much as we see in "The Day We Died."
  • The changes to the timeline because of Peter's Ret-Gone are made of this. There's a list on the WMG page with space reserved for speculation.
    • An example of this: without Peter, the cortexiphan trials collapsed inconclusively, leaving most unaffected and others in a Season-1-Cortexiphan-Child state. Why did they collapse? Because Olivia ran away. Why did she run instead of get help from Walter? Peter never convinced her to.
      • • Walter also lost Peter at relatively the same time. "Subject 13" happened at roughly the same time Peter crossed over. During the episode, he's still dealing with the changes from crossing universes. If Peter died at Reiden Lake when Peter and Walter crossed over, then Subject 13 never happens because Walter is recovering from losing not one, but two Peters.
• The Season 4 episode, "And Those We've Left Behind." I recall that Raymond was taking some sort of medication, but Kate, his wife, would have to remind him to take it, as he supposedly forgot every time. He would apparantly forget the reminders too. But of course he would be unable to reminder these reminders, for he never recieved them, and wouldn't for at least a few years... For each time we see Kate reminding Raymond to take his medication, she was actually talking to Raymond's future self. Raymond was intercepting his own reminders!

Fridge Horror

• If you think the people of Edina are deformed now, wait until after a couple of generations of inbreeding...
• What have the observers done to humanity if things like Joy, Individuality, Imagination and Free Will are fringe sciences.