BOCCOLINI: On the Fringe

I  love Peter Bishop. I love him so much that I picture him as my boyfriend.  Sadly, Peter is not my boyfriend or even someone that I know. He is, in fact, a fictional character on the TV show “Fringe.” But I still love him, and “Fringe.” “Fringe” is all about weird science performed by a mad scientist and brains melting and shape-shifters and alternate universes. Upon first glance it looks like a bad paperback you’d find buried under unread copies of H.G. Wells’ “The Invisible Man”  (yeah, that book isn’t for everybody). But really, most things on “Fringe” are explained so logically that it’s easy to believe that these alternate realities do really exist.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been living in a sort of alternate universe. I’ve been told that this is totally normal, and that most people feel this way when a big change has taken place in their lives. It’s difficult, and it’s strange, but looked at in a certain light — the “Fringe” light – it’s actually pretty cool.

It takes a few mind tricks to pull off the “actually pretty cool” view, but you can do it. Don’t worry, I believe in you. First off, you have to do a reverse “David After Dentist” and convince yourself that this is not real life. You are not in the universe you grew up in, but rather in an alternate one we will now refer to as “the AU.”

Now that you’re in the AU, you should realize that you are approximately 3.8 miles from the Fringe Division’s lab at Harvard. Yep, “Fringe” takes place right here in Boston.  This is where it starts to get “actually pretty cool.” If you’re in the AU, in Boston, that means that all that fringe science that seems so impossible could actually be real. After all, it’s only a slightly different version of the science we know.  And something incredibly crazy could happen to you. No, no, don’t be scared. Think of every day as an adventure.

As for me, there’s definitely a bonus to living in the AU. Remember how I said I loved Peter Bishop?  Yeah. Well, since Peter sacrificed himself to save the Other Universe in last season’s finale, everyone has forgotten he existed. The question “where is Peter Bishop?” is one that has yet to be answered. So he could be here. In the AU that we’re living in.

Alright, who am I kidding? This has reached the doublespeak level of complicated. But in the moment it seemed plausible. Okay, no it didn’t, but the thought of living outside your real life was intriguing.  It’s fun to imagine that the Boston breeze holds the smell of a fringe-y experiment gone wrong, or that déjà vu is really a glimpse into a choice we made in another reality. That there’s time travel and people who melt walls to walk through them. And to me, the idea that I could fall into a black hole while walking to class is
actually pretty cool.

Liz Boccolini is a freshman in the College of Communication and a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at lizboc@bu.edu.