Joshua Jackson On Giving Fringe Proper Ending

Joshua Jackson expands on why Fringe needs a good and proper ending, offers his take on where Peter Bishop finds himself in the story, and tells us what he knows about the remainder of the season. We also have a new Fringe cast impersonation video.

Talking about the dichotomy between the show’s creativity and ratings, Jackson suggests the second season was the show’s “most solid year,” but reiterates his desire for a proper, conclusive ending whether that’s this season or five years from now:

I think sort of we peaked ratings-wise, in Season Two – it was our most solid year. And I actually think creatively that was our most consistently solid year. But it wasn’t our most ambitious year – I would say Season Three was an extremely ambitious year, and a lot of people tuned out last year. So we were prepared that last year might’ve been the end. I’m not involved in those conversations, frankly, but I think [the producers] are prepared for it, if that was going to be the case, how they would implement that ending. And they’ve always said – and I believe them – that there is an ending to the show. I’m guessing you heard what [Fox programming president] Kevin Reilly said, and I don’t think you can be any more honest and upfront and still be a network executive. So if this is going to be the end of the show, if we are not making the money or they’re losing money on us, I just want to believe him when he says that he will give our guys enough time to implement whatever the end game is. Because as much as I don’t want to lose my job, at this point the thing that we have to do as a show, and as a network supporting the show, is satisfy the people who have so passionately stuck with us, and been so rabidly and passionately involved in our show. We cannot just go out in blink. It has to finish, whether it’s now, whether it’s next year, whether it’s five years from now, it just has to get to its end.

As for what’s coming up in the second-half of the season, Jackson says he has “no clue”:

This is the first time on ‘Fringe’ – and I’ve said this before tonight – where we’re this deep into the season and I have absolutely no clue where we’re going. Because there was sort of a natural place that the show had to go last year to satisfy the story that had been introduced. But there’s no necessary ending to the story we’ve introduced this year – It could go a bunch of different ways. So I have no clue.

Reflecting on Peter’s role in the story, Jackson describes him as the boy ~~wonder~~ hero — a kind of MacGuffin:

Peter has been kind of a boy hero right from the very beginning. Peter is the one that gets brought into the world from the pilot on, but as that character, he’s the boy hero. He’s the thing that makes the machine go, but he’s not the central story of the show.
He was definitely the MacGuffin for the first two seasons. And then the last half of last season he was the MacGuffin as the battery of the machine, so definitely we’ve used him as that. But in his dynamics with other characters, what he seems to have always served, is in the ‘Fringe’ world that we’ve created, we don’t need to get to know Peter’s story, because it’s NOT Peter’s story. We need to get to know how people relate to Peter, and it sort of shows them back to themselves. In the beginning it was just Peter with Walter, right? We would never have been able to know Walter if he didn’t have Peter there to allow him that view inside. And I think that’s a lot of what Peter serves with the Olivia relationship as well: you get to see the human side of her, because of her relationship with Peter.

In another version of Fringe, Jackson believes Peter’s relationship with his mother would have been more central to what the show is:

I just feel like in a different version of this show, where Peter’s emotional storyline was more central to what ‘Fringe’ was, it’s such a crucial and kind of underexplored relationship: the guilt that this guy feels over his mother – who in his timeline committed suicide – pretty directly links to the fact that he ran away from home. To have this woman present in his life again, that would be a watershed moment. And we’ve explored the father-son bond, but that motherly bond, that sort of love that can maybe…cross a universe, say. Or cross a timeline, say. To have her be the first person to actually see him, I think is a really big deal for him.

Jackson also confirms that the current crop of digital Fringe comics will be available in hard-copy from around March.

Source: Popcorn Biz

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Elsewhere, Jasika Nicole, Seth Gabel and Anna Torv take part in the latest round of Fringe Fans Ask. This time they’re doing impersonations of another cast member: