FRINGE’s Exec Prods Pinkner and Wyman talk the race to the cliffhanger

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Joshua Jackson, John Noble and Anna Torv in this week's noir musical episode

As the final episodes of the second season of Fringe unfold to the pleasure of the sci-fi’s rabid fans, Executive Producers Jeff Pinkner and J. H. Wyman talked to the press earlier this week about what is to come including tonight’s 40s inspired musical episode.

Jim Halterman:  What kind of steps have you guys had to take to keep plot lines and scripts secret because these shows get such rabid attention and the fans just go crazy.  Have you had to really take some steps to do that?

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, but 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 and … delivered to the department heads and then gets – 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.

Anna Torv works the stylish 40s wardrobe in this week's FRINGE episode

JH: With the cliffhanger – assuming there’s a nice big cliffhanger coming – do you have to really think about what’s coming next season and really plot that out before you even go to this season’s cliffhanger?

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

Question: Obviously, Fringe takes place in a very heightened world where there’s monsters and great science and things like that but a musical is even a step beyond that.  Can you talk about balancing the two and how you make it work in the episodes?

JP: We knew we wanted to tell an episode – the last episode that aired, Peter learned that he was not from our universe; he learned pretty much the truth about his own identity and origin and confronted Walter about it and turned his back on Walter.  So we knew we wanted to tell an episode that really explored; we have this phenomenal actor in John Noble and this great character and we wanted to explore how that affects Walter before we sort of plunge forward into the end of the season. We came up with a narrative device to really explore Walter’s feelings.  We had largely all the elements of the episode in place and Fox called and said, “Hey, how would you guys feel about if we asked you to have some musical element in the show?  Anything, like just feature a song playing.”  They didn’t ask us to do glee.  And we instantly, before we got off the phone, said, “Well, this is what we’re thinking for the episode and here’s an idea how that could work for us.”   We turned their request into what felt like a positive for us and really deepened and sort of blew the episode out even further in the direction we were already taking it.

It’s all an opportunity.  Something we find that we do a lot in the show is we hold mirrors up to reality by telling these fantastical stories, which in one way or another are metaphorical for what’s going on in either our world or our characters’ lives.  This episode provides an opportunity to just sort of hold a mirror up to Walter’s perspective of the world and the individuals Olivia, Peter, and Aster, that he interacts with, and sort of we get his fractured take on the world and certainly his condition now that Peter has left him.

The music really sort of supports the storytelling, and it takes us out of it in a fun way, but the whole thing is sort of a fantastical episode anyway.  And I think it was important to us that if we felt in any way we were damaging the story, we would’ve just said, “Thank you very much but it’s not going to work for us.”

Torv and Jackson in a more modern moment from FRINGE

Question: Now that you’ve done a musical episode, how are you going to top it next season?  Are you going to have a Saturday morning cartoon animated episode or anything like that?

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

JHW:      Exactly.

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

Question: Fringe is almost becoming notorious now for all this secret little hidden Easter eggs within it.  Is that something that everyone takes a part in or is that part of the writing – putting all those little things in?  When do they come into play?

JP: 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.  I don’t know.

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.

JHW: 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.

Question: When you have the characters in this sort of even more alternate reality than what the show usually has, do you have to pay extra attention to sort of where they’re going with the story and it being true to who they are or can you kind of go off the beaten path…

JP: They’re all like representations from Walter’ perspective.  I mean, it’s really cool.  When we start talking about the episode, we kind of at first … be like an overture.  At this point, to get people in a really fun way to understand what the emotional points of view are of each character and what a great way to do it is through telling a story.  Our Walter letting everybody know where his mind’s at.  That’s great.  So, you get to see who the characters are of course, but they’re enhanced a little bit in his mind.

So, they’re not altogether different.  I think that they all have the same – Olivia’s inherently good and Peter is sort of something else in this episode, but he’s something else in the real show.  So, we had a chance to examine different facets of their personalities and characters but all within the realm of who they are.

JWH: All of our episodes, or our best episodes I think, are sort of metaphors or conditions in the world, which is the best of Sci-Fi.  This episode is sort of a metaphor for a metaphor.  A lot of the storytelling is shorthand or themes that have arisen since the beginning of the show.  And we sort of, as Joel was saying overture – if this was the only episode you ever saw, you would understand emotionally where all the characters are enough to enjoy the last four episodes of the season.

Fringe airs Thursday nights on Fox at 9/8c.

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3. CLIPS: John Noble on FRINGE’s “Firefly” and Pinkner/Wyman Q&A lightning round!
4. VIDEO: “Aftermath: 315″ w/FRINGE Pinkner & Wyman on Peter & Olivia meeting as kids
5. From the Vancouver set…Joshua Jackson, Anna Torv & John Noble talk FRINGE

Tagged as: Anna Torv, Fox, Fringe, J.H. Wyman, Jeff Pinkner, Jim Halterman, John Noble, Joshua Jackson