"Why should we be so arrogant as to assume that we're the first Homo sapiens to walk the earth?"
--"6955 kHz"
With these words Walter compels us to reconsider our understanding of reality (or at least the "reality" of Fringe). Another of his inspired musings--"The universe expanding and contracting and expanding...an endless cycle of creation and destruction"-- suggests that we should be thinking about the nature of reality in non-linear terms. Before the next episode is unveiled I'd like to examine a different perspective of this multiverse (or bi-verse?) narrative. What if this “parallel universe” is not parallel to the original world at all, but a prequel to it? Are the “First People” the same thing as the so-called alternate people? Did Walternate, in fact, send Fauxlivia into the future to undo what Walter has done or will do?
Compare this circular chart from "The First People" to the "circle of Fringe" below, a key image in the publicity photos for season three
The theory that time is circular and that “everything has happened before and everything will happen again” is not a new one. Certainly Battlestar Galactica fans are familiar with it…and then there is always Nietzsche: “this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.” What seems like an alternate universe in Fringe may just be another version of a particular course of events on the same wheel of time. If this is the case, we would have to reconfigure our understanding of the mythology of Fringe and the ideas we have about the multiverse theory. As Walter tells Astrid, “you have to think like they did millions of years ago…just look at their concept of time.” (He's actually talking about something else here but it could very well be a hint.) Perhaps there is a way to meld these theories together and think of time as a spiral rather than one straight line or a series of straight lines and various branches (see Walter's explanation in "The Road Not Taken").
How significant is the circle? Does it represent the nature of time?
So what do we know about these "First People"? According to the book by Seamus Wiles, “They were a people of great technological prowess who made the ultimate discovery—a mechanism called the vacuum containing at once the power to create and destroy.” But something happened that led to their extinction, “some sort of cataclysm that so completely decimated the first people, they were just wiped out of the historical record.” This sounds exactly like what's happening to Walternate's world. Is it possible that this “cataclysm” was actually Walter's fault, his traveling through the homemade time portal looking for the “other Peter”? Walter has already demonstrated that he knows how to travel back and forth through time. He worked on the technology that allowed David Robert Jones to escape from Wissenschaft. And in “White Tulip” he was able to clear up the error that Dr. Peck had made in his “time curvature” calculations.
So Walternate is just trying (or has already tried) to prevent his world from becoming extinct by having Peter reassemble the machine parts of his (Walternate's) own making. Confused yet? Admittedly, this does make for a messy notion of “when” things are actually happening.
Let me go ahead and poke a hole in my own theory, though it’s not so much a theory as a different way of looking at the things we already know. In any case, here's the one thing that doesn't fit: why wouldn’t Walternate just send someone to a point in time BEFORE Walter came through the portal to prevent him from doing so? But why bring the First People into the story at all? Unless...
I do have another idea about the First People, completely separate from this circular time thing. Perhaps the machine was some sort of universe splitter used by the First People to sidestep their own extinction. When they realized that their race was in jeopardy they just split the universe in two and continued to flourish in an alternate universe. Perhaps Peter, a citizen of both universes, will be able to reunite the two somehow, rather than destroy one or the other.
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