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In the episode "An Origin Story", the Fringe team attacks the future via a shipping lane, a wormhole to the future. They, apparently, successfully collapse their end of the wormhole, to no effect. The team is baffled by their failure.

Why did it fail? It appeared to work - is there some subtlety that eluded me in the episode?

TIA.

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I understood the issue to be that the Fringe team failed to think fourth-dimensionally. They disrupted that particular shipment, possibly causing havok and large-scale damage in the future doing so. However, these shipments are being sent through time. If we assume that in the future, their interruption of the shipment succeeded, this would have caused major destruction in the future. But then the Invaders would have just rebuilt that destroyed infrastructure, maybe even taking years to do so.

So once they've rebuilt their future shipping system, what would their first step be? Resume the last shipment, sending the rest of the shipment to the same destination time and place. In the 'present', the Fringe team saw this as a nearly uninterrupted shipment as a result.

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  • I'm not entirely certain this is correct. Didn't they impose strict regulations on themselves, putting their future timeline in a time-split lockstep with ours (to help avoid paradoxes)? (That is, they can only travel, for example, 596.3 years forward or backward, never a different amount)
    – Izkata
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 1:27
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    @Izkata The only restriction I recall is from traveling into ...how to word this... the past of the present. That is, traveling back within the window of 2015 (the start of the invasion) to the present day and time we see the Fringe team in. This is what prevents Windmark from traveling back 5-10 minutes whenever there's a close call and he misses getting the Fringe team by that much.
    – user1027
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 1:37
  • @Izkata In addition, there isn't any clear restriction on when Windmark traveled to in the future compared to when he departed from to administer his portion of the invasion, so I don't think there's a clear rule on traveling to the future.
    – user1027
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 1:37
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    +1 on thinking 4-dimensionally. Assume the Fringe team succeeded; the invaders now know that 596.3 years in the future, their infrastructure will be destroyed. They have ~600 years to prepare a hot-swappable backup infrastructure to be ready the minute the Fringe team destroys their primary.
    – KutuluMike
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 1:43

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