Fringe keeps pushing the boundaries, with the emotionally devastating “Peter” episode, the ‘40s musical and Peter Weller as a time traveler. Things are really heating up for Peter now that he’s learned he comes from Over There. Fringe producers Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman gave a conference call to discuss the upcoming season finale of Fringe. 

Q: Last season’s finale was such a shocker when you revealed Over There. Now that Peter’s found out he’s from Over There, what are you headed towards for this season finale, and preparing for season three? 

Jeff Pinkner: Last year, our season finale we thought was effective because it sort of introduced concretely an idea that had been sort of talked around for the entire season, and we managed to, I think, be satisfied with the thoughts and the expectations of the audience.  I think people really enjoyed that.  So, it was a huge challenge for us this year to figure out how can we turn the page in the next chapter and how can we have the same effect because I think it really was for the audience satisfying that we had last year this year.  So, we believe we’ve done that.  At the end of the season, I think that you’ll be “Wow, now this is a whole other world and this is really interesting.”  Not a whole other world literally but a whole other chapter that has been sort of talked around but now concretely you will understand a lot more.  So, if we’re heading towards anything, it’s that.  It really sets up a satisfying conclusion to what people have invested in this year but also sort of opens up a whole other level of understanding that hopefully will propel us into season three and further. A lot of very exciting things that we’ve come up with that we’re really excited to tell.

Q: Will Peter stay kind of in his own kind of separation from Walter or will we see at least a piece of them coming back together again, even if it’s to set up what you guys do next season? 

Jeff Pinkner: Relationships are complex and just for the very same reasons that I think that throughout the seasons, we never really want it to be easy, that just because it’s a TV show in the United States of America, that the handsome male lead and the beautiful female lead should be together.  You have to earn those types of things, we believe.  So, when we’re playing the emotion of a betrayal like that on a level that it is, I think that it’s all up to the human heart, which is complex.  So, Peter’s going to have a very realistic reaction to the things that he’s now aware of, and I think that that’s the first step in a journey back to some sort of common understanding of a relationship.  I don’t think it’s ever going to be easy, and it should supply us with a lot of material because it’s such an interesting dynamic.  You just don’t want to just say it’s all forgiven.  But you also want to have other flavors of the relationship, not just, “You betrayed me.”  So, I think that’s where we are.

Q: Do you have to start plotting out the next season before you can deliver a season finale cliffhanger this year? 

Jeff Pinkner: I think to a degree we do that and to a degree we get some pleasure out of it. We know the long term and we like to write problems for ourselves because often figuring ways out the problem provides the most creativity.

Q: Do you think you’ll divide season three into a winter and spring half like you did this year? 

Jeff Pinkner: Fox gives us an air schedule every year, and we knew heading into the season where we were certainly going to have a midseason break and then that we would be on the air for several in a straight run.  We tried to design our storytelling around that to the extent that we could, and I think it’s been really successful.  We haven’t got a final air season for next year, so we’ll build accordingly.

Q: But if they give you a break like that, you use it for the story? 

J.H. Wyman: Yes.  Yes, we both think that it worked great because what it enabled us to do is really sort of give a cliffhanger and tell our stories at a really higher impact because people are leaving going, “Oh, boy, I really want to come back hopefully.”  So, we sort of enjoyed that opportunity to really sort of have several peaks during the season rather than just the whole trajectory of an even slow-up to the end, the season finale. 

Jeff Pinkner: We knew when we were going to break for the halfway point what we were going to end with, the notion that Olivia realized that Peter’s on the other side, and then we knew we would come back and sort of tell that back story for the audience and let everyone catch up before we then forged ahead. 

J.H. Wyman: Yes, it provided us a great opportunity.

Q: You’ve done a musical episode now. How are you going to top it next year, a Saturday morning cartoon animated episode? 

Jeff Pinkner: You may be closer to the truth than you realize.  

J.H. Wyman: Exactly.

Jeff Pinkner: Remember that question.  Deep in next season, remember what you just asked us.

Q: Do you lay out all your Easter eggs in the writing process, or later in production? 

Jeff Pinkner:  Some of them are in the writing.  Some of them are specifically scripted.  There’s probably in every episode the observer up here is somewhere, and that is we won’t script that because that’s one of those things that we want people to have to find but during the production process, we will figure out where is best suited for this story and then production.  What’s really nice about the series now is all of our departments are so invested in making a complete in-world building and making like a really rich textured program that from set dressing to props to visual effects. Everyone participates in hey, what about this, what about that, here’s an opportunity to do an Easter egg here.  There was an episode a couple of weeks ago that was sort of like inspired by the game Clue and in different scenes, all of the sort of signature murder weapons of the game Clue are just featured as props, background, in one scene or another.  That’s something that the writer of the episode and the prop master came up with together.  Every episode has sort of a clue somewhere, what the next episode will be about and that’s largely driven by visual effects. 

J.H. Wyman: So, in short, some of them are driven by the writers and a lot of them are driven by the rest of production all the way down to postproduction.  Right before we get on the air, we’ve been known to change our visual effects up until the day we’re airing. 

Q: Is there anything you think all the fansites have still missed? 

Jeff Pinkner: I would say that there’s definitely things you’ve missed, but that’s part of the fun, right? Part of the fun for us is driving people back to those early episodes and seeing that, oh my god that was planted, from the pilot that stuff was already planted in there.  We take this notion of world building really seriously.  By the time the series ends, we want to make people re-examine everything they’ve watched from the beginning. Perception is one of the big thing themes of the show, and not to be annoying about it, but on a metal level, we want people to reevaluate their perceptions of the show. 

J.H. Wyman: In the season finale, there is one hidden thing in there that I and Jeff will both be really impressed if anybody picks up.  So, there you go.  There’s one to look for in the season finale that’s very telling about next season but also very hard to find.

Q: So now we’ll have to watch the finale over and over again. 

J.H. Wyman: Like I said, I would be very impressed if you pick it up.

Q: What steps do you have to take to keep plot lines and scripts a secret? 

J.H. Wyman: Yes, part of the scripts when they get out, usually it’s from production or from somebody that’s not supposed to deliver them. What we find is that everybody on the show,  from our writing staff, from the office staff, from the actual physical production, they’re still invested in the project.  They don’t want anything to get out.  So, everybody is sort of really, really takes care of our scripts. They allow them to get out after a certain point, but we’ve been really lucky that everybody is so invested, they take extra care with their own copies of the script, and they don’t let it out.

Jeff Pinkner: I think what we’re finding more and more, and it’s sort of like we’re in that world where it’s incredibly flattering to know that people are trying to get your stories ahead of time.  There was definitely a period a few years ago where things were spoiled far more often.  Somehow somebody on the internet would get ahead of a script, it would spoil it.  I’ve been on shows where we haven’t been above writing fake pages, even filming fake scenes just for the fear of that. We have done a minimal amount of that here when we felt something was really important to us, but we’ve also found that more and more when people do one way or another learn secrets about the show they’re keeping it to themselves.  They’re actually being graceful enough to not spoil things, which we’re finding the pendulum has sort of swung from people getting pleasure out of revealing secrets to people getting pleasure out of keeping secrets, so that’s been actually really great for us.

Q: Have you ever considered bringing the show back to New York, where you shot the pilot? 

Jeff Pinkner: A lot of those decisions are driven economically and by Warner Brothers, and I think that we loved being in New York just for the texture and the quality of the light.  Of course, we were doing the show largely set in Boston instead of New York.  Canada has been phenomenal to us.  The crew is amazing.  Our crew in New York was amazing too, but the crew in Canada has been amazing, and I don’t think there’s any short-term plan to move back to New York, though we would certainly love it. 

J. H. Wyman: Yeah, these things are definitely dictated by financial situations.