On Thursday, November 19 at 9:00 PM (ET/PT), Fringe viewers will be able to find out more about that most mysterious of characters, The Observer. The episode, titled “August,” features Michael Cerveris as the follically-challenged, pale-skinned man who turns up to watch at perplexing events that form part of an unexplained “Pattern.”
The audience has had fun trying to spot The Observer in the episodes, but “August” places him front and centre. Fringe executive producers Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman spoke to the media about the origin of the character and what we can look forward to this season.
The Observer was one of the first ideas to come up in the early conversations about Fringe. Pinkner said they asked each other, “What if there were these characters where all they did was watch?” The Observer known as September soon took shape: bald, eyebrowless, pale-skinned, and with strange abilities humans don’t have. “We imagined how it would be that somebody who wasn’t of our world would end up in our world and what the process of getting here would entail. His senses were largely deadened and so it took a lot of stimulation for him to feel anything,” he noted.
Asked why this episode is special, Pinkner said, "It’s a story where this character who in many ways is unknowable and 'other' is driven by emotion. At the end of the episode hopefully you feel something." Wyman added, “It qualifies him to a certain degree for everybody. It will definitely open up a whole other line of concept and line of understanding ... The entire episode reveals itself to be about a very human emotion and the way we chose to tell this episode is through the eyes of someone who is not human.”
Article comments