'Fringe': The Observer stops watching, starts acting

Thursday's episode of "Fringe" is being hyped as a big one for the show, but it doesn't center on any of the lead characters. Instead, it will spend much of its time with the enigmatic, heretofore mostly silent Observer.

Executive producers Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman promise that fans will learn a good deal about the hairless, black-suited character (played by Michael Cerveris), and that will in turn fill in some blanks about the show's larger world. But that's not why they're proud of the episode.

"What makes it special ... is that it's a story driven 100 percent by emotion, and a story where this character who in many ways is unknowable and other is driven by emotion," Pinkner told reporters on a conference call Wednesday. "At the end of the episode, hopefully you'll feel something. And if you tune in and by the end of the episode you do feel something, then we'll be satisfied we did our job. Everything else we learn along the way -- the fun things, the surprising things, the troubling things, the disturbing things -- is gravy."

Take a look at the first two-plus minutes of Thursday's episode, "August," and then scroll down for more comments about the Observer and the show from Pinkner and Wyman.



How did the idea of the Observer come about?
Pinkner: When we started riffing and blue sky-ing about what the series would look like, the Observer was one of the first ideas we came up with. ... You want to surprise yourself and give yourself a really cool puzzle. One of the ones that came to mind was, What if there were these characters that by all accounts, all they did was watch? And our team, specifically Olivia [Anna Torv] and Broyles [Lance Reddick], realize there are these events that seem significant to them -- but when they [also] realize there's a guy who seems to be all these events around the world, sometimes almost simultaneously, they take on a whole new significance.

How did the character develop?
Pinkner: We were looking for something that was sort of iconic, and at the same time we were fascinated with the idea of all the little things that go on under our noses every day. ... We wanted the Observer to have the quality of being invisible. We put him in the first three episodes of the show and finally revealed him in the fourth, and people went, "Oh my gosh, he was right there and I didn't see it."

Some of his characteristics -- the bald head, the no eyebrows -- [came from] imagining how it would be that someone who wasn't of our world ended up in our world and what the process of getting here would entail. His senses were largely deadened, so it took a lot of stimulus for him to feel anything, so that led to the hot peppers and some other characteristics.

What will we learn this week?
Wyman: It definitely qualifies them to a certain degree for everybody. It will open up a whole other line of concept and another line of understanding for the viewer to say, Oh my gosh, that's really interesting. ... To us the best science fiction deals with very human conditions, like Isaac Asimov or great writers like that. The more out there and sci-fi it becomes, the more it reveals human conditions. This is one of those episodes that we feel very passionately about in that regard, because the entire episode reveals itself to be about a very human emotion. The way we chose to tell it is through the eyes of somebody who's not human.

Where is the show headed later this season?
Wyman: It's a journey of self-actualization for our characters. What separates this year from last year -- we always refer to last year as a prologue for the series, where you get an understanding of the characters and what's going on, you learn something about the pattern and you learn everything you'd need to situate yourself and enjoy the series. In this season, we're really looking to get deeper into the characters and have people really participate with them and watch their evolution.

Pinkner: One of our favorite themes in the show that we're constantly coming back to is perception, and how what we see with our eyes might not necessarily be the truth. ... We have an episode that's really big and fun and crazy about how what it is we think we're seeing isn't necessarily the truth. In a couple of episodes we kind of drop a bombshell for our characters, and one of the big dormant secrets, one of the bombs under the table as it were, goes off. Perhaps it will blow our team apart, and it will certainly change the nature of their relationship.

We'll delve a little more directly into the fact of the alternate universe and what's going on over there and how it may affect our world. ... We also have kind of a cool episode that deals with Walter's [John Noble] memory and William Bell [Leonard Nimoy] specifically.

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