Walter Bishop: The Heart and Mind of the Fringe TV Show

FBI agent Olivia Dunham might be the heroine that saves the day in the Fringe TV show, but mad scientist Walter Bishop has always been the one to drive the story forward. You can even say he’s the reason for everything that happens in the series.

Before you begin binge-watching the series the second or third time, it might be a good idea to take a step back and really get to know who Walter is and what he’s trying to do. Walter Bishop is the son of Robert Bischoff, a scientific pioneer at the Berlin University and a former allied spy. During World War II, the father conducted espionage activity within the Nazi administration and smuggled scientific information to the United States.

Walter himself is also an amazing, accomplished scientist. He graduated from Harvard University before moving on to get his degrees from MIT and Oxford. By the 1970s, he became a leading researcher in the government’s program known as “Kelvin Genetics.” He married Elizabeth Bishop on an undisclosed date. From the relationship, they had a son named Peter Bishop, born in 1978.

Things took a dark turn when Peter Bishop died from a rare genetic disease at 7. Walter took a glimpse of the alternate universes and understood that his son was alive in one of those. To save the boy just before dying, the father kidnapped the child from an alternate reality and brought him to the prime universe. Peter was saved, and Walter wanted to return the boy to his actual home. The effort turned out to be a failure, and Walter raised Peter as his own lost son.

For nearly 20 years, Walter occupied an important position in the biochemistry laboratory at Harvard. He was granted all the resources he ever needed to do basically whatever it was he wanted to do, even though he primarily worked in “fringe” science including genetic mutations, reanimation of dead bodies, teleportation, mind control, and invisibility, among others. It didn’t matter, anyway; he was brilliant, so everything he did was supposed to be worth doing.

Following the death of an assistant in 1991, Walter was accused of illegally experimenting on humans and charged with manslaughter. Deemed criminally insane, he was locked up at St. Claire’s Psychiatric Institution.

Fast-forward to 17 years, FBI agent Olivia Dunham came to visit and asked Walter to save a partner who had been exposed to flesh-melting toxins. With the help of Peter Bishop, the institution was finally willing to release Walter, and the three of them subsequently have been working together to investigate some of the weirdest cases ever. Since most of those cases are also “fringe” science in nature, everything is right up Walter’s alley.

There’s no denying that Walter is one of the brightest minds in the world, but he is also damaged to quite a large extent. Despite his expertise in fringe science, he seems to struggle just to stay in touch with reality. Even his son often describes him as the most twisted, self-absorbed, and abusive man on the planet. His time in the mental institution took away much of his sanity, and that happened before parts of his brains had been removed and stored in other people’s heads for safety reasons.

In Season 2, Episode 10: Grey Matters, it’s mentioned that Walter had some individual memories related to his knowledge about alternate universes removed from his brain. However, the memories – in the form of brain tissue – are kept safe and alive in other people’s brains. He had not been a whole when he entered the institution, and even more so when he was released years later. This also explains why Walter is obsessed with psychotropic drugs. Now, as part of the Fringe team and having seen the terrible consequences of jumping between universes, one of Walter’s principal duties is to prevent other people from having access to those hidden brain issues and rebuild the neural connections to reveal the memories.

Walternate

Besides Walter Bishop, there is also Walternate, who is a version of himself from another universe. Walternate, too, suffered from the loss of his son, although he took a different approach to dealing with the tragedy. Instead of falling deeper into bottomless sorrow, he underwent an upward trajectory in his career and finally became the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Walternate has never been committed to an institution for the criminally insane.

We think the entire show couldn’t possibly happen if not for Walter Bishop. It’s his desperate attempt to save his son that drives him to travel across an alternate universe – an occurrence which then opens the floodgate to all the weirdness and high conspiracies in the series – that forces the government to establish the “Fringe Division” to investigate all the subsequent strange phenomena. And because Walter is the only person known to have an in-depth knowledge about such interdimensional travel, he’s also naturally part of the team tasked with unraveling the fringe mysteries.

Can you name any other TV series about time travel? Is there a plausible explanation or scenario that can theoretically prevent the “grandfather paradox”? We’d love to hear from you.

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What is John Noble’s most notable acting credit to date?

John Noble is best known for his role as Denethor in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), for which he received the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Cast, Critics Choice Award for Best Acting Ensemble, National Board of Review Award for Best Cast, Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, and nominated for the Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for Best Cast.