That’s what I suspected, but suddenly she’s back in the Blue universe, with “our” Walter behind her in the doorway. Rather than the shimmering, or whatever is used to show a person has made the universe switch, all we had was a reverse angle edit. That’s what confused me. Maybe they were low on the SFX budget.
Since the whole episode was based on Walter trying to learn how the universes could be traversed, it seems like kind of a cheat to be told that it really takes nothing. Olivia just pops back and forth randomly for no particular reason.
No, it takes extreme emotions (and I would think Olivia getting ready to confess about her Stepdad beating her counts as pretty emotional). The hard part is controlling it. Just popping over and then popping back seconds later doesn’t really help him.
Yeah something about the ages seemed off all episode. I know Olivia is supposed to be around 8 but the actress looked a few years older - understandable, I think an actress a few years younger would have a tough time getting the character right (the girl did a great job, getting Torv’s mannerisms down really well). Anyway, so you had a girl who looked to be ten drawing pictures that looked to be drawn by a young child, and the school looked really pre-school/kindergartenny.
Also, I’m thinking we’ll see some sort of MIB-esque brain wipe down the road on Peter and possibly Olivia. Walter hasn’t really shied away from experimenting on them.
He finds out after he sees Oliva’s black eye. He then sees the drawing of the blimp, figures out she crossed over, and runs experiments to find out why. After getting no results for a while he finally figures out it must be fear, and then theorizes that a love/fear relationship, like the one she has with her father, must be the key.
Both Peter and Olivia were born in 1978 (evidence: Peter’s tombstone in the S1 finale, Peter and Olivia’s S1 bio posters, all found here…clearly Peter is a few months older from the ages stated on the posters), and this episode took place in 1985.
As for erasing his memories, maybe that’s part of the experimenting on him that Peter mentions in the first season? He did mention them several times.
And they didn’t just contend themselves with doing it, which would have been great on its own, but went through the trouble to do it well – replacing the modern fringe science buzzwords – singularity, transhumanism and whatnot – with appropriate '80s ones, like cold fusion etc. is one particular instance of attention to detail that was added just for the extra touch.
I was really irritated by the ages too. I appreciate the performances of the kids though, we probably wouldn’t have gotten that quality of acting from younger actors.
I wish they had had gone over why Olivia and Peter don’t remember the events covered in the episode. As others have said, I think it’s been explained but between the significant events and the ages of the actors, I could have used the reminder for the sake of suspension of disbelief.
I hate Peter, I think his character is exceedingly boring and it doesn’t help that Joshua Jackson is a tool. I wish he wasn’t integral to the plot. I have to give Kid_Peter props though, he’s pretty interesting.
I’m rewatching the first season, and found more evidence for their ages being younger than the actors’:
According to episode six, “The Cure,” when Olivia was nine her stepfather beat her mom and took off for a while. When he came back, Olivia shot him twice. He slunk off after that, only communicating with her via birthday cards.
I like the way that they are humanizing Walternate. In the first episodes he comes across as an evil Walter, but as the series goes along we realize that what we see now is the result of decades of having to make hard choices. When he refuses to use Cortexiphan on children, then we realize there is actually a decent man inside the shell.