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I just finished watching Season 3 Episode 14, where an elderly man and woman had their respective spouses die in each Universe. Their elevated emotions created what was described as quantum entanglement (scientifically nonsense, of course, but that's not why we're here). This created a 'soft spot' and unexplained phenomena throughout the building. The way to stop this from tearing apart the Universe was to convince the elderly woman that her 'husband' was not really her husband, which she discovered after the other Universe's husband had told her that her children missed her, despite the fact that she never had children in her Universe.

How, then, does everyone currently have their own doubles? Are we to believe that every other person and couple had children the same between Universes?

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There are some differences; Olivia's niece Ella doesn't have a double, for example. However she is an exception; most characters do have doubles. However, this isn't as far-fetched as it at first appears.

Here's the thing about alternate universes in Fringe: there are lots of them. Walter explains this in the first season episode "The Road Not Taken", the clip of which is helpfully on YouTube:

Transcript (with Walter's stammering removed for my own sanity in transcribing):

Walter: Most of us experience life as a linear progression, like this [draws a straight line on the chalkboard]. But this is an illusion because, every day, life presents us with an array of choices. As a result, life should look more like this [draws multiple branching paths from his original line]. And each choice leads to a new path; to go to work, to stay home, and each choice we take creates a new reality. Do you understand?

Fringe Season 1 Episode 19: "The Road Not Taken"

Unfortunately Fringe never really explored this idea, but the implication seems clear: there are literally an infinite number of alternate universes. I don't recall this ever being mentioned on the show, but it stands to reason that the Red Universe is just a universe that's "pretty close" to ours.

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  • Yes. But like in Star Trek it seems to be a very special parallel universe because people can only go to this special one and not all the others. And in the fringe case the universes differ at least in the last 30(?) years since walters "changes" to it (and if the other walter did not the same and visits an other universe it has to be sometimes earlier). It is hard to believe that more or less all people born after this divergence point are the same in both universes. Not to forget they have different character traits in both universes which is never fully explained.
    – Hothie
    Commented Jul 24, 2015 at 9:51
  • @Hothie There are differences noted in the show that go back long before Walter's involvement. The point I was getting at is that the Red Universe is one of the (again, infinite) other universes that diverged from ours, but converged again in some ways. What's miraculous isn't that this universe exists, but that Walter found it
    – Jason Baker
    Commented Jul 24, 2015 at 16:38

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