A Walk on the Weird Side in "Beyond the Fringe"

Olivia, Peter and Walter in ink form from "Beyond the Fringe"

I'm a big fan of the FOX show "Fringe," which like a lot of great FOX shows, was moved to the Friday night death slot and ultimately was cancelled before it's rightful time.  After four epic seasons, the show concluded it's run last year with a 13 episode final season.  For diehard fans such as myself, the finale was an emotional albeit a bit predictable ending, showing the Fringe team battling to save the future from the cold clutches of the Observers, beings from a ravaged future who travel back in time and steal our world.  Although it took most of the first season for me to get invested, once I did I was hooked into a wild ride that would take me into parallel universes, alternate time lines and into the acid fueled minds of the Fringe team.  Consisting of stoic FBI agent Olivia Dunham, the brilliantly cracked and institutionalized scientist Walter Bishop, his skeptical son Peter and lovely junior agent Astrid Farnsworth, the Fringe team investigates all manner of bizarre, inexplicable and often macabre phenomenon that exist on the Fringe of imagination: teleportation, pyro-kinesis, mind-control, genetic mutation and pretty much every other unexplained event that skirts the boundary between the possible and impossible.  At first people compared it to the X-files due to the investigative nature of early, standalone episodes.  Soon, though the show mutated into something unique, emphasizing the scientific side of these events.  Week after week I tuned in to watch the team investigate The Pattern, a string of seemingly unrelated scientific events cropping up one after another.  After season 1 the show really expanded with the main characters themselves being personally drawn into events that were connected in season long story arcs. 
Despite the eye popping visual FX's and mind bending scientific concepts, the show's heart lies in the distraught family unit of the team who find themselves at the center of a web of literally universe shattering secrets, all related to the pattern.  We find out that Walter and his former partner William Bell were in some way responsible for the majority of these Fringe events due to their morally questionable experiments back in the 70's and 80's.  Now it seems that other scientific mavericks have been continuing their work, using the world as a lab with terrifying consequences.  Over the first four seasons, the show twists and turns into stranger territory, revealing more info about the long term consequences of Walter's past actions.  From the start, the show was loaded with mysterious Easter eggs pertaining to crucial events in the Fringe team's shared past. 
The reason I'm writing all of this is because I recently read a collection of Fringe inspired comics called "Beyond the Fringe".   Here we get a look at nine stories involving the Fringe team.  The first, written by Josh Jackson who plays Peter, shows what happens to his character when he was erased from the show's timeline at the end of season 3.  Because of Walter's tampering with the fabric between our world and an alternate world when he opened a wormhole to the other side years before, Peter sacrifices himself to repair the mutual damage caused to both worlds.  This first story is truest to the show itself while the eight other stories are lighter what-if stories that could exist in alternate realities.  In one, we see Astrid Farnsworth as a spy working undercover for William Bell's company Massive Dynamic; in another we meet a version of Peter and Olivia's future child who has inherited cortexiphan abilities from Olivia and in another we see what would've happened had Walter joined his favorite rock band, Violet Sedan Chair back in the sixties rather than pursuing his scientific endeavors.  The book is a fun glimpse at just a few possible scenarios that could exist for the Fringe team in a multitude of parallel realities.  The beauty of a show like Fringe is the endless potential for reinterpretation of the characters and events.  The show demonstrates, perhaps clearer than many other Sci-Fi shows, how the smallest decisions can change the course of entire worlds for better and for worse and how we can use our imaginations and vision to perceive new realities that exist right on the Fringe of our dreams.