not_walternate

Walter sat bent over his desk working on the equipment for tomorrow's practical.

The room was, to be kind, something of a mess, but really, who could expect Walter to remember little things like laundry? Or throwing out old food? Or - please - making his bed. And there was no chance he'd allow a maid/housekeeper/outsider into the room. What if they saw his notes or his work or his lesson plan?

He had a soldering iron in his hand and was peering through a large magnifying glass at some delicate circuitry, muttering instructions to himself.

"No, no, not there. Right... here. Yes. And then they'll see."

[nick / name]: Jade
[personal LJ name]: dreadnot
[other characters currently played]: Walter Dornez :: dark_butler :: Hellsing
Anthony J. Crowley :: itsjustafruit :: Good Omens
Rorschach :: wheresmyface :: Watchmen
[e-mail]: walter.todesengel gmail
[AIM / messenger]: waltertodesengel

[series]: Fringe
[character]: Walter Bishop

[character history / background]: Fringepedia link first || Walter's Lab Notes || Walter Bishop is a mad scientist. If you're thinking Frankenstein, keep going, you're getting warm. He has a history of putting his intellectual curiosity above all else, and ethics are unimportant to such a degree that he even experimented on his own son when Peter was a child. He would say it was for a good reason, but...

He has been a professional scientist all of his adult life, barring 17 years he spent in an insane asylum (mental institution is too mild a term for his place of incarceration) after a laboratory accident that left his assistant at the time dead. He was charged with manslaughter but deemed mentally unfit to stand trial. At the time of the accident, he was part of a classified US Army experimental program called Kelvin Genetics. They gave him all the money he wanted to follow research in his specialty, which was primarily an area called "Fringe Science": mind control, astral projection, invisibility, genetic mutation, reanimation, fertility... His cover was working for a toothpaste company.

He shared his laboratory with William Bell, the founder of Massive Dynamic. Massive Dynamic holds an enigmatic place in the Fringe universe, potentially (probably) being the great enemy or perhaps the savior of them all. That remains to be seen, but Walter's relationship to its founder is no coincidence.

In 1991, after his incarceration, Walter was banned from having any visitors beyond immediate family. His son wanted nothing to do with him, so he spent 17 years seeing no one but the institutionalized and their caretakers.

Partial List of Walter's Experiments:

1. 1972 during Vietnam, the DoD's biochem division had him working on a necrotic contagion. (Episode 1)
   
2. Synchronizing the synaptic field of two individuals to allow them to communicate across the unconscious state. (Episode 1)
   
3. Used the same process to interrogate a dead person (only works if they've been dead less than six hours) (Episode 1 and again in Episode 7)
   
4. Tasked with a program designed to cultivate soldiers. To grow them at a highly accelerated rate. It worked to a certain extent, but they couldn't turn off the accelerated aging. "Once started, we couldn't turn the aging off." (Episode 2)
   
5. Pulled out a human eye and extracted the last image it saw. (Episode 2)
   
6. Helped create the "ghost network" which enabled communication of information directly from mind to mind using a spectrum of waves outside of all known spectra. Walter worked with an iridium-based compound to try to create receivers. He didn't fully succeed, but later it was finished by another entity. (Episode 3)
   
7. 'Project Thor'. The Department of Defense wanted a subterranean torpedo, a missile which could, in theory, be shot from anywhere in the world through the earth's core and hit its target on the other side. (Episode 4)
   
8. A government contract to set up using pigeons to track people. He can program carrier pigeons to track a strong magnetic field. (Episode 5)
   
9. Created a high energy microwave beam, apparently on the fly, that exploded a papaya at a distance, and which he claimed was much more interesting with live subjects. (Episode 6)
   
10. Interrogates a dead man, using his son as the intermediary to interpret the signals. Says that he did it in 1975 for the FBI with Jimmy Hoffa. (Episode 7)
    
11. Hired by an advertising agency to create flashing lights that would make people suggestible. Alas, it only caused nausea. He figured it out in Episode 8. (Episode 8)
    
12. Using a form of hypnosis, Walter was able to cause an experimental subject to manifest severe burns from an ice cube he was told was a burning coal. (Episode 9)
    
13. He designed a device intend to reach back in to time – to cross the time space continuum and retrieve a doctor capable of curing his son's incurable, fatal illness. It went unused when Peter went into unexplained spontaneous remission. "In theory, it could retrieve anyone from anywhere." In Episode 14, it's revealed that while it is successful, its results will also be so horrible that Walter calls them unthinkable. (Episode 10)

Making LSD doesn't even count on that project list. That's tangential to his actual goals and work. Walter's experiments show his range of ability as well as his lack of ethical boundaries, and his imagination. Walter has a wonderful imagination. A wonderfully horrible imagination.

One Thanksgiving night when Peter was young, Walter was driving when his car went off the road and onto a frozen lake, sinking through the ice. Walter was unable to control his limbs and was unable to save himself or Peter. He says they were both dead until they were saved by a mysterious man with no hair or eyebrows who pulled them to shore. Without the man's speaking, Walter came to know that he would have to return the favor someday. Many years later, he describes something rather like a post-hypnotic suggestion to do a favor for that man, protecting a mysterious capsule until it moved on to its next destination.

It's one of Walter's many mysteries, along with what happened to his wife, why he's no longer religious, and why it is highly likely that he is the author of the so-called "ZFT Manuscript" revealed in episode 14 of Fringe, though he clearly does not remember writing it.

[character abilities]: Walter is a brilliant, once-in-a-generation genius of a scientist with a tested IQ of 196. If you can imagine it, he can probably pull it off, given the right equipment and funds and all the time in the world. And who really gets all three at once?

[character personality]: Walter is brilliant, inquisitive, childlike, distractable, nigh-amnesiac, seemingly mad, but with periods of almost shocking lucidity. After hearing him ramble Fibonacci sequences to put himself to sleep, babble about how he wants a root beer float, and tell everyone for the fifteenth time how a dead man's bare skull has the texture of his son's buttocks when he was a baby, the last thing you expect is to see the light of reason and compassion in his eyes as he tells Olivia that he can't do what she wants because it is too dangerous to her. And after that urges her to get some sleep because she needs it.

He forgets names almost pathologically, particularly that of the FBI agent who acts as his lab assistant, Astrid. Over the course of the episodes, he does at least remember the general sound of her name, getting as far as "Astro," "Asterisk," and "Asteroid" in trying to address her.

He loves his son, Peter, dearly, but in his own way.

"He was awake until five in the morning reciting the chemical compositions of his favorite beverages to me. That was right after he'd finished lecturing me on how I'd squandered my above-average intellect and my substantial education. All while he was standing there naked because he 'prefers the breeze.'"

He wants to see Peter live up to his full potential, but also hints that Peter's potential is far beyond what anyone could imagine - this coming from a man with an astronomical IQ is an interesting bit of foreshadowing of things to come. Of course, it also drives Peter absolutely nuts.

Boobies! Yes, Walter loves them and will say as much at vastly inappropriate times. His internal monologue filter is frequently on the fritz.

Drugs! It could be argued that he loves drugs as much as he loves breasts, but he states that there are few things that bring him greater pleasure than taking drugs, so they may even outrank breasts. Though not science. Granted, if he can do mad science while on drugs, that's a 10 out of 10 for him.

"One of the inherent pitfalls of being a scientist... trying to maintain that distinction... between God's domain and our own. Sometimes I forget, myself. But you already know that."

A conversation with Walter is an exercise in following non sequiters. It will range from an intense discussion of biological terrorism to his lamenting the awful butterscotch pudding at the asylum on Mondays and then back to the terrorism with no segues in between.

"This place... their choice of therapies has... nngggh."

When diverted from his work, when interrupted, or faced with what he sees as a lack of imagination or understanding, he can and will pitch a fit. Yelling, throwing things around, the usual sort of things you'd expect from a mad scientist hitting the mad end of the spectrum.

He does it surprisingly infrequently, and is usually much more soft-spoken.

"The only thing better than a cow is a human. Unless you need milk, then you really need a cow."

Believe it or not, that actually makes sense if you get to know Walter.

After being released from the institution, Walter began prescribing himself a cocktail of psychotics (not anti-psychotics) and synthesizing them for himself. His reasoning was that he had just spent 17 years in a mental institution and was "quite unbalanced." Go figure.

[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: The most recent episode, Ability.

[journal post]: [Sorry for the in-City sample, but there are already canon journal samples for each of the episodes as linked in the history section (of random interest, all of his canon journal entries are titled in prime numbers only) Also, the opening quote for the sample is from the most recent episode (14) and a book that will likely have bearing on the unfolding over the overall Fringe plot in the future.]
Project 1103, Exploration 1

We think we understand reality. But our universe is only one of many. The unknown truth is that the way to travel between them has already been discovered - by beings, much like us, but whose history is slightly ahead of our own. The negative aspect of such visitation will be irreversible both to our world and to theirs. It will begin with a series of unquantifiable natural occurrences - difficult to notice at first - but growing, not unlike a cancer, until a simple fact becomes undeniable. Only one world will survive.

And here we have the proof of the pudding. Not butterscotch, I think pistachio, perhaps. A city at a nexus of possibilities. Quantum physics at its finest as we view the collapse and posit that we have not, ourselves, collapsed. The Copenhagen interpretation is for those who have enough imagination to ask the question, but not enough to see the answer. Quantum decoherence incoherence the boy will be incoherent when he wakes and finds me gone. He lacks the imagination to know that I am here.

What if our numbers barely could defy
The arithmetic of babes, must foreign hordes,
Slaves, vile as ever were befooled by words,
Striking through English breasts...

Is there a Baltimore in which that woman lost her breasts to cancer? Another in which she obtained stupendous implants and a career on the stage?

I must embrace the idea that there is. Worlds without end, amen? Such wonder and sorrow to consider that somewhere a man cuts out words to create a language virus that none read and spread. Such sorrow to consider another Walter who never knew St. Claire's and another who is still there and another who has that cherry pie I so dearly crave at this moment. Lucky soul, that I could but part the waves and cross safely to the land of checkered tablecloths and my cherry pie and another Walter has done so.

No cherry pie. No typewriter. No home. No laboratory. The first will be the easiest remedied. And the first shall be the last. If the last is to be the first, someone must find me a lab.

Someone. Someone. Who will be my Virgil?

Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem;
matri longa decem tulerunt fastidia menses.
incipe, parve puer. qui non risere parenti,
nec deus hunc mensa dea nec dignata cubili est.

Ah, Peter, my son.

[third person / log sample]: The last place Walter wanted to be was back at St. Claire's, no matter how nice it was to see Dashiell again. For one thing, there was the imminent threat of that butterscotch pudding.

Focus on the pudding and the boy - the boy who was in the hands of a kidnapper who might break him the way Dashiell had been broken. A light snuffed out before he could illuminate the world, perhaps mathematically, perhaps musically.Or, as Dash's formula and the boy's composition indicated, perhaps both mathematically and musically.

Don't focus on St. Claire's, with its square rooms and antiseptic walls and abysmal food and its moments where the waters of Lethe would capriciously allow his box of secrets to float to the surface.

Seventeen years lost there. Seventeen years where his mind was suppressed, where he was medicated in ways even he didn't enjoy, where he lost himself and found himself and lost everything that was dear to him including himself.

Why was he there? He could have said no. Peter had said no for him.

He could have said no, but could he have lived with himself if he had? That was the question. And the answer, to his regret, was no. Walter knew that he had brought great pain with his work, and, if asked, he'd probably agree to do most of it again, but that didn't change his responsibility for his work.

He knew he couldn't redeem himself just by helping one boy, but neither could he leave that child in his kidnapper's hands if he could do something.

That didn't make the prospect of facing even a day in St. Claire's anything less than terrifying.

Looking out the car window as they pulled up outside the asylum, Walter scrubbed his hands over his shaven cheeks and steeled himself for the worst.