“Fringe” Vows Alt-Universe Intrigue For Season 3 Finale

Just a few weeks back it looked like “Fringe” might be on the fringe of cancellation. But with a fourth season pickup and major plans for the third season finale (airing May 6th), the cult favorite series is ready to deliver for its loyalists.

“The puzzle pieces are in place now for us to really go deep to advance the storytelling to be more adventurous,” says executive producer Jeff Pinker. “Things that we’ve always tried, but we now have the confidence that our audience is now with us and we can go a little faster and a little further.”

After a mind- (and genre-) bending episode in which Leonard Nimoy returned, sort of, as William Bell in a computer animated world within the mind of Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), “Fringe” is moving full throttle into its alternate universe intrigue as Season Three climaxes.

“’Fringe’ always does things the way you don’t expect – at least we try to,” says executive producer J.H. Wyman. “In the last three episodes we’re always trying to sort of finish the season off with opening a brand new chapter for next season and sort of put the show in a new context for our viewers. So we’ve tried to achieve that this year as well.”

“Hopefully it will be wholly unexpected and also re-contextualize the story of Season Three in a really cool way, and be fun and entertaining and mind-blowing,” agrees Pinker, who addresses various rumors bouncing around the Internet. “Somebody who we all love deeply will die. We’re NOT introducing a third world. There’s our world, and then there’s the world that Peter was taken from as an eight-year-old, and we still have plenty of story to tell just in those two worlds. Maybe at some point in the future there will be a third world, but not yet.”

“We had so many emotional things to pay off,” says Wyman (among them, the long-simmering triangle Olivia, Peter (Joshua Jackson) and Olivia’s alternate universe counterpart “Faux-livia,” who’s carrying Peter’s child). “We’ve been really cognizant of finding all the emotion that we can to logically come to a conclusion that would be satisfying, and at the same time sort of suggest things are going to go further in a different direction. We had a very good idea where we wanted to go, even from the beginning of the season.”

“The run-up to the finale and the finale impacts both universes directly,” adds Pinker. “We will be going back and forth within episodes.”

And then there’s that universe-spanning bambino. “The baby will be part of it,” says Wyamn. “But how it’s handled – now remember this is ‘Fringe’ – definitely cannot be normal.”

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