Why Fringe and Futurama Are Pretty Much the Same Show

So. We’re all SF nerds here, right? We’ve all watched the first four seasons of Futurama, and we’re all watching Fringe? Yeah, of course we are. So you’ll all be with me, and you’ll understand what I mean when I say that, I recently realised that

Reiden Lake:FRINGE::The Cryochamber:FUTURAMA

Okay, maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense, no matter what you’re watching. I will explain sum up, but first I want to acknowledge a debt of brain machinations to a conversation with M1k3y, who asked the questions what got me thinking through this explanation of my analogy.

Here There Be Spoilers.

What I mean is that they’re both lynchpins for their respective universes. In Futurama, we see that, because of Fry, there’s a temporal anomaly at the cite of the cryochamber–the point where he goes forward in time (the Why of that is explained in the SUPER INTRICATE ARC of the first four seasons). In fact, we see in a What-If Machine episode that if Fry isn’t frozen, then the entire Universe CEASES TO BE.

[ad#longpost]Similarly, in Fringe, we have Reiden Lake: the weak point between the universes where Walter brings over the stolen Peter from the other universe. The frozen lake melts and breaks from the heat and stress of a Dimensional Portal Being Opened On Top of It, and one of the Observers–September–has to pull Walter and Peter from the lake. Now, because of this, a piece of Observer Tech fell in the lake and stayed there. Except the season finale of the last season, and the crux of this season, hinges on the fact that they never did that. The Observers have, in fact, supposedly edited Peter Bishop out of existence, so that there is no Universe-Rending Conceptual Conflict predicated on his having been stolen from one universe to another.

Except that, in this week’s episode, a theoretical mathematician-turned-TSA-agent somehow figured out all of space and time when he went to Reiden Lake and found a piece of Tech from a timeline that SHOULDN’T HAVE EXISTED. This man found September’s whateveritwas, from, as two other Observers Say, “The Night He Didn’t Save The Boy,” and he fully understood all of spacetime. Because, you see, by leaving that tech there, September was basically leaving a backdoor for Peter to re-enter the universe–because that tech was only ever there, because September pulled peter out of the lake, and if he didn’t pull Peter out of the lake, then it shouldn’t have been there.

Don’t you see?! He left it there so PETER COULD PULL HIMSELF OUT OF THE LAKE!

So, for our Mathematician-Turned-TSA-Agent (MTTA), finding this thing at Reiden Lake is the proof of his theory of time. “Flattening out the curve of time,” as he calls it, actually gives him the Observer Perspective. And through this, there might actually be a direct link between the time streams and the creation of the Observers and their Tech. I don’t know if they’re going to go here, but it would explain how the MTTA found the Tears of Ra: he saw it created. It would explain how he had that thing that sprayed people in the face: he went to a time when it already existed.

And it would EXPLAIN WHERE THE OBSERVERS COME FROM: It’s a Self-Creating/Sustaining Paradox Loop.

I’m completely in agreement with M1k3y when he says, “I still pray for a Charlie Jade crossover there.” Because it is firmly held, in some circles, that not only are Fringe and Futurama intrinsically linked, but that Fringe is the promise of Charlie Jade fulfilled.

And also, in the words of M1k3y: One Free Bottle of Observer-Approved hot sauce to the 1,000th commenter on this piece.

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