搬运一些分析帖

以下是tumblr用户measurementoftheobserver在2013年左右发布的几篇s5分析，主要围绕Olivia展开，作者认为Olivia对事物的看法会影响现实，提供了一个理解s5和全剧的独特视角。其中从有关s5中Olivia记忆和现实不一致的细节推测出时间循环的存在，我认为是很精辟的。

由于这位用户账号上次活跃时间是在八年之前，我没有能够向他申请到转载许可，原账号地址放在下面，文章侵删。我先搬三篇，有空翻译。同时推荐这位博主的其他分析，例如没能一直进行下去的S1 Rewatch系列，脑洞很大。

https://www.tumblr.com/measurementoftheobserver/

1、The Recordist, Time Loops and Those We've Left Behind

Earlier today a post that dealt with a twitter message that Joel Wyman posted about Olivia giving out different coordinates than the ones Walter specified in his tape, led to some speculation based on some oddities in the way Olivia was remembering certain events like the following:

• Olivia gives out the coordinates 41 (Pennsylvania) instead of Walter's 49 (Quebec) which would have been incorrect
• Differences in the colors of Peter's shirt and the picnic blanket on the day Etta disappeared
• Seeing the date 2033 on the missing person's fliers behind her instead of 2015
• Olivia's 3 years, 1 month and 5 days when Etta remembers herself being 4 years old

Aldeburgh pointed out that Olivia reacted strangely during the viewing of the tape as well and asked if it was possible Olivia was in a time loop. I definitely think there's something there. Going back to look at the episode there are different ways you can read what happened during the scene. It does seem that she does react when he says 49 degrees north. She purses her lips briefly. When Etta wants the tape to be rewound to the coordinates that's when, I think, Olivia reacts. She quickly turns to Etta and tells her the coordinates. My impression is she doesn't want to have them rewind the tape and hear the wrong coordinates. Maybe.

Now, although Olivia being in a time loop had passed through my mind I hadn't really given it a lot of thought. When Aldeburgh mentioned it there are a couple things that came to mind. One I had been thinking about for a while and doesn'tnecessarily involve time loops andthe other came to me as I thought about how this could be happening.

The first has to do with a variation on another post I did on who I thought Olivia Dunham is and can be found here if you want to read it. The post is mostly about how I think Olivia is tied to the Observers. She has similar powers but at a greater level. At first I thought she might be a prototype or something but now I think something different. Here's what might have happened (PURE SPECULATION FROM HERE FORWARD):

1. Walter and Belly during some sort of research find out about the Observer's. They were stealing from the other side via Walter's special tv (as seen in Peter) and maybe try and create the tech to do what the Observer's do (The Arrival).
2. Peter gets sick and dies but the other Peter gets sick too but with better tech the other Walter gets a cure and is interrupted by September. Walter sees this and goes to other side to retrieve Peter and save his life.
3. At some point I think that Walter and Belly discover that the Observer's are a threat. They redouble their efforts to figure out their tech. I don't know when this happens exactly. It could have happened before or after Walter got Peter from the other side. I sense a time paradox some where in here. I get Peter is important to the Observers and they needed Peter to at least cross over to the other universe to allow them to do what they do.
4. Walter and Belly write the ZFT manifesto realizing the threat of the Observers and create soldiers for the coming war. These soldiers are meant to fight the Observers not the other side. Enter Olivia Dunham who is a soldier meant to fight the Observers.
5. In the meantime, Walter and Belly realize that when Walter went to the other side he broke spacetime andinadvertentlystarted a different war.
6. At some point Belly goes to the other side and Walter iscommittedto St.Clair's etc.
7. David Robert Jones finds the ZFT manifesto and interprets it incorrectly thinking the war is with the parallel universe.
8. At some point the wave synch machine is created by Walter (this might be what Walter is trying to build now in season 5 for all I know) and this unites the two universes and repairs the damage.
9. Peterdisappeared This happens because a new timeline is created where Walter still pulls Peter to our universe but is allowed to drown by September. This leads me to believe that Peter crossing over is important in some way to the Observers because September could simply NOT have interrupted Walternate from finding a cure thereby preventing Walter from going to the other side. To me they needed the breach to happen for some reason.
10. Olivia then pulls Peter into this new timeline because she loves him so much and here is where we come to the time loops.

This next section is the second part I thought of today. It has to do with the season four episode "And Those We Left Behind" which parallels what seems to be happening in season 5 right now.

In this episode you even have an opening that reminds you of the opening of the season 5 premiere and the opening to 5x02. It's the perfect day. Olivia and Peter lying down to apicnicwith Walter playing on the swing which echoes Olivia and Peter right before their playing child disappears.

In the episode you even have a mother and child who experience a loop where the girl is a toddler then an infant and back again. In the episode there's a couple interesting quotes. Peter says, "If I was erased from this timeline and then thrown back in to it, it stands to reason those two things (time loops) could be related." Then in a later conversation between Peter and Olivia we get this:

Peter:This has something to do with time displacement and I think that when I came back here I somehow damaged the spacetime continuum and if that's the case there might not be any actual rules to it.

Olivia:Like the apartment, the fire and the baby. The mother didn't revert to a younger age but her daughter did.

I think the parallels between what is happening become apparent.

In this episode you see Peter experiencing time jumps you also see some parallels between the married couple Raymond and Kate and what is happening in season 5. Now how you interpret the parallels is tricky because with the Fringe team everything happens in three's with Olivia, Walter and Peter and in this episode you only have two people. They are a married couple like Peter and Olivia. However, Kate is a theoretical physicist and that is a bit like Walter and Raymond is an engineer who can use Kate's knowledge to build things and that sounds like Peter. Interestingly enough, Kate has early onset Alzheimer's disease that affects memory. Thatwouldobviously tie in to Walter but Olivia's memory seems off too.

Now Kate's theories enable Raymond to build a time bubble. In the bubble we see odd dates on the calendars like 2007 while it is in reality 2011 outside. This is similar but opposite to what Olivia sees when she remembers the day at the cafe. It should 2015 but the posters say 2033.

Now it's possible that Olivia can time jump naturally just like she can jump from universe to universe. A thought just occurred to me as I wrote that last sentence and just gelled together a few other scenes for me on the show: Olivia is the frog! Is this a theory anywhere? God the symbol on the frog. I have to write the Fibonacci stuff soon. Anyway, Olivia doesn't need a machine to do what she does and she doesn't break the universe or spacetime when she does it. So, I think this is exactly what's happening here in season 5 somehow.

I think I'm done. Sorry this is so long and just to say that I think Olivia time jumps somehow.

One more thought: I believe that Olivia and Peter might be like two opposing forces that are brought together (by Walter) and end up loving each other. In the first case you have a war between universes and one is from the blue universe and the other from the red and fixing the universes. In the situation in season 5 you have Peter somehow involved with the Observers, in their existence, and Olivia the one that is to fight them, again, coming together and somehow, probably, defeating them and saving the world yet again.

2、Fringe Finale and Series Thoughts

First of all, I want to thank aldeburgh who helped edit and clarify this piece, and who had excellent examples to help emphasize the points I wanted to make. Some of these words are hers.

These are my thoughts on the Fringe Finale and how it ties into the series as a whole. Continue reading after the Read More:

I wanted to take the time to put my thoughts on the finale out there. I have found that Fringe just needs to be savored and thought about to really understand what's happening and I'm glad I did take time to think about it, because my first impression of the finale was that it was good, and that it felt somewhat satisfying, but not completely. I felt that something was missing. So, I tried to figure out what it was, and that led me to ask myself a lot of questions about what the writers were trying to say. This discussion will end up a bit different than others I've seen about the finale.

"I've asked God for a sign of forgiveness. A specific one: a white tulip." - Walter in White Tulip

Firstly, Walter's story worked very well in the final season and the finale. I understood Walter's ending, and how it came full circle to where he began when he broke the universe because he loved his son and wanted to save his life. Walter being fully able to 'defeat' who he had been earlier (without a lobotomy) and walking into the wormhole hand in hand with Michael was perfect. His ability to sacrifice ever seeing his son again, the one thing he could not give up before, for the greater good shows how much he had changed.

"Be a better man than your father." - Peter in A New Day In The Old Town

Peter's story also worked for me. His arc in the series and in Season 5 has always been to be a "better man than his father." In one tragic decision, he does the unthinkable and becomes exactly those things which he hated about both versions of Walter. On the one hand, he does what our Walter did and neglects his family due to his pain and, on the other hand, he behaves like original timeline Walternate, a man who was willing to take revenge at all costs. However, after being reminded of his love for his daughter and that his family loved him and needed him, Peter makes the decision to remove the Observer tech from his body. With that one simple act, he became a better man than his father. From that point onward he's caring and he makes sure he's there for both his father and Olivia. He's also able to fully express his emotions for Walter in a way hehadn'tbefore. He's fully forgiven him for what he'd done.

"The sadness will last forever." - reputedly Vincent Van Gogh's last words

The Van Gogh quote comes from an Easter egg in the episode Momentum Deferred where you see a picture of Van Gogh prominently displayed in the alley soon after Olivia kills Charlie's doppelganger. I think the quote fits Olivia quite well. And, also, here is where I started asking questions about the finale and entire series for that matter. What exactly is Olivia's story?

I took from the final scenes of the finale that we are supposed to deduce that she's happy. The problem is that I just wasn't understanding what brought this about. Granted, it seems that she must remember what happened during most of the last season. She was able to remember the original timeline after Peter was erased and then there’s the matter of her time slips and odd memories. If she was able to see the missing poster stickers from the future (dated 2033), when she was still looking for Etta back in 2015, then I see no reason why shewouldn'tremember her experiences after the reset in the finale. It fits with her abilities, and she's happy to have her daughter back, so I understand that, but her story did not seem very clearly defined. To me, she had to learn from her experiences. She’s always feared her abilities and resented how her abilities had always been misused by others. Now, she needed to accept her abilities and feel that she was the one controlling them to be happy. This is the only way for the ending to work. So, I started going through the season to figure out what her arc was about.

"If you can dream a better world, you can make a better world." - Peter in Bad Dreams

To my understanding, Olivia is the big metaphor in the show. She is the living representation of a lot of the concepts that the show talks about like the quote listed above. Others that come to mind are:

• "If you can imagine it, it's possible." - Peter in Northwest Passage
• "Perception is largely an emotional response. How we feel affects the way we see the world." - Walter in Jacksonville
• "Perception is the key to transformation." - Walter in Bad Dreams
• "Reality is subjective and malleable." - Peter in Bad Dreams
• "How you feel determines your view of the world." - Walter in Jacksonville

It has always been hinted that Olivia can shape reality throughout the running of the show. Nina outright tells Olivia as much as early as "Ghost Network". When Olivia comes to Nina to accuse Massive Dynamic of being involved in all the cases, Nina throws it back at Olivia and says, "You have been investigating these cases for a very short while now. At least three of them have occurred right in your own backyard. I might suspect that you yourself were somehow responsible."

However, this is dealt with subtly and in the background, because the writers are basically dealing with an individual who has godlike abilities. Every problem could be solved too easily if Olivia just felt something strongly enough. The way the show controlled this was by creating a character who is very rich, but very broken. Olivia is extremely humble, and doesn't think very highly of herself. For example, although Bolivia is an Olympic caliber marksman, Olivia claims she is not a good shot (in "Olivia", when talking to Henry) and says she’s OK in another instance (in "Concentrate and Ask Again", when talking to the CIA agent). And yet, can anyone remember Olivia missing a shot? Olivia always doubts herself. This is why her abilities tend to manifest themselves rather quietly most of the time, like making it snow in Subject 13 or the odd way that many of the cases seem to fit what is happening to her at the time. It all has a metaphorical quality to it. It's subtle enough that I'm sure some people who watch Fringe aren't even aware of it.

"Here's the thing Olivia, whether you admit it or not, yours (life) is something of a nightmare." - Sam Weiss in Dream Logic

Olivia's pervasive sadness invades everything. Her emotions literally make her life a nightmare (See quotes and concepts above). She attempts to correct things, and she has her moments, but overall her reality reflects her dark moods. Again, there is a metaphorical quality to what is happening.

But all this that I've said so far is what makes sense of season 5 for me and explains what is actually happening to Olivia. Olivia is selfless to a fault. She never takes the time to want things for herself. For as much as this quality makes her a good person, it also makes her a miserable one. She always has to stand up for those that need care but she never cares for herself. And when she wants something she'll eventually talk herself out of it. Remember her desire for the nursery? She immediately found a reason for that to be a bad idea – she even looks sad and conflicted when telling Peter about her pregnancy.

And, in "The Recordist", she says the following, "I wanted so much to be a mother but I just... didn't think that I was programmed that way. That I was destined for something else. Ever since I was a kid, since the cortexiphan trials, I just... I was at odds. So, how could I have this incredible little girl? So when we lost her I felt like that was my punishment, my punishment for being too conflicted to appreciate her when we had her. And, that day at the restaurant I knew I had to go back to New York because I didn't want to... find what I knew we were going to find. I just believed so strongly that she was dead and I didn't want to see it."

In these statements we get the gist of what Olivia's issues are about. Resolving this internal conflict thatbegan when she was a child who was experimented on to become a soldier,accepting that she could be happy and could allow herself to feel happy, is the key to Olivia's story in the final season.

"Every horse needs a carrot. Every mouse, a piece of cheese. Incentive, Agent Dunham - all creatures need an incentive to perform tasks." - David Robert Jones in The End of All Things

The death of Etta in "The Bullet That Saved The World" was the incentive Olivia needed to, not only end the Observer's rule, but to change her outlook. We have some indication that she's willing to fight in the RESIST posters of Etta that are popping up everywhere including in places where it's obvious no resistance member would be able to paint a picture. Olivia's emotions are manifesting themselves as reality.

But Olivia has more to go through. Peter then puts the Observer tech in his head. When she finds out about this, she goes through a crisis. She hits such a low point that the posters she was putting up are now being taken down. She's already a person with a low opinion of herself, and now she's in danger of losing Peter and even Walter.

"I have faith in you." - David Robert Jones in Ability

Right at this low point, Olivia meets Simone in "The Human Kind", a woman who follows her mother's instructions and keeps a magnet for Walter to pick up some day. (I believe Simone's mother was a cortexiphan subject, and that's why Walter went all the way out of Boston to her and why she believed in Walter's plan. Maybe she didn't like Walter, but she would certainly be in a position to know what Walter was capable of doing.) The point here is that these people had faith in the plan and in Olivia, where Olivia does not. She, as usual, has no faith in herself or in much of anything else at this point.

Now, after Olivia leaves, she is caught by bandits and she's forced to use her wits and the Bullet That Saved the World to escape. Now, the Bullet is, of course, at this point a symbol of Etta and love and a thing that Windmark can't understand. Olivia comes to a realization about Etta and that allows her to, in turn, help Peter. The almost prophetic exchange is as follows:

Olivia: She's alive inside us and there's nothing that Windmark can do about it because the love we can share with her now is invulnerable to space and time even to them. And I know that our hearts are broken and that it hurts but that's what makes us human."

Peter: Emotion is our weakness.

Olivia: No, Peter, it's our strength because it's the one thing they don't have.

To me this is the beginning of Olivia's transformation. This episode also introduces two concepts that will be important later. One is cortexiphan and the second is the moment where Olivia refers to herself as an anomaly.

"And now years later, nothing's changed. I'm still that little girl and William Bell is still doing experiments on me and I'm just still being used." - Olivia in Brave New World: Part 2

One of the things that I felt that season 5 had to deal with was the cortexiphan trials. The reason for this is because this is a big hang up for Olivia. It's why she tells Simone she's an anomaly. She's never felt normal, and it's exactly what caused her issues with being a mother. She felt that she was created for a purpose, but that she was being used by others like William Bell or Walternate. In addition, there’s an element of Olivia accepting that her abilities are to a great degree innate in her (and not just something Walter or Bell gave to her). She’s been shaping reality without any “active” cortexiphan in her system throughout the series, and in the final Windmark smackdown (literally), she powered down NYC and performed a feat of telekinesis Windmark could not “outrun” after the cortexiphan had allegedly “burned off”.

Until Season 5, and really until the finale, Olivia never made the choice, and she's never knowingly used her abilities by her own volition and for her own reasons. For her to be whole, she needed to exercise her free will in choosing to be injected with cortexiphan and in using her abilities on her own terms.

This is where Michael come in. The comparisons being made between the two are constantly there and it's no accident. Olivia’s reference to being an anomaly ties into the fact that Michael is referred to one as well. In Liberty you see parallels between what is happening to Michael and what has happened to Olivia before. Both experimented on, both almost vivisected (and in both cases, on Liberty Island). Both characters share traits where they are very powerful, both have a very deep capacity for emotion and both also have an inability to express their feelings like ordinary people. I began to realize that the connection between Michael and Olivia was not an accident and it's why he steps off the train.

To understand this we have to go back to when Olivia realizes what the plan is while sitting at Donald's home. She does something unusual - she makes a rather selfish comment. She interprets the time reset as the way to get Etta back. Donald states that the reset is so that the Observers will never exist. Some folks have commented on what that means and how that won't work, but it doesn't matter because in that moment Olivia decides that's how they get Etta back. She is wanting something that will make her happy and gives her personal hope, something she normally can't do for herself (or does not allow herself to do). For the first time in the entire run of the series, she is not being selfless and she's knowingly persuing an agenda of her own.

Now, saying all that, when Michael steps off the train he sets things in motion so that Olivia and Windmark have to meet at the end if she makes the right choice. That's the real reason for the cortexiphan. Michael gives her the opportunity to make a choice to perhaps sacrifice herself, endure great pain and voluntarily subject herself to something she has every reason to hate: cortexiphan. He's allowing her to fulfill her purpose if she so chooses. By the way, this also happens to ensure that the plan will work. I think that Michael knows that without Olivia, the plan doesn't really stand a chance, because she needs it to want to work and she has to believe it will work. Michael is running 'futures' but in a way that no other Observer can understand because, unlike the other Observers, he understands emotions. He has faith that she will rescue him and that is that. He knows that if he is captured Broyles will find out where he is and will relay the information which will then lead to Windmark capturing him and eventually leading to the confrontation between Olivia and Windmark.

Walter: A glass heart.

Olivia: What makes it so special?

Walter: Put simply, it's a power source but it's capable of so many wondrous things.

2x20 Brown Betty

Olivia knows there's a reason that Michael stepped off the train but does not understand. When she eventually asks he makes a hushing gesture as if to say,. “Be patient. You'll see.”

Now, Olivia meets Windmark, which is vital to tell her story. Olivia is a foil to Windmark. He's powered by tech. He feels he has reason on his side and "he’s better at math." He's like a god and the humans are animals, but Olivia is the opposite of Windmark. She's powered by her emotions. She's the ultimate proof of how wrong Windmark is and when she sees the necklace, the necklace Windmark could not understand, it fuels emotions in her that create a reaction that Windmark could never touch. Michael then repeats the hushing gesture as if to say “Here is the answer to the question you asked earlier.”

The show is about the power of love and in this scene Olivia, as always, is the literal representation of that power. She destroys evil and brings them ever closer to their goal of bringing Etta back, because Olivia truly wants her little girl this time. There are no conflicted emotions, and this is important.

"Sometimes the world we have is not the world we want. But, we have our hearts and our imaginations to make the best of it. I will promise you this. I will be the best mother I possibly can for you. I'll take care of you. I'll protect you. And I'll never let anyone take you away from me... no one ... not ever." - Elizabeth Bishop Subject 13

Here's the key to the plan: Olivia is the power source (I've seen people wonder as to why Olivia turns off all the lights in New York City to just move a car. She's doing more than that). I think her imagination, her sheer force of will to go back to that day in the park is what makes everything work. But in her humility she can never believe that. She has to have the time machine, the cortexiphan and the plan to make it happen. I think that's why you don't really need to worry about the paradoxes. Olivia is a "living uncertainty engine" as William Bell once put it. She doesn't calculate probabilities; she makes them happen.

Again, while I realize others also fit the bill at different times, Olivia is the metaphor for all the big concepts on the show. As we saw in the "Night of Desirable Objects" when Walter used a frog to stand in for Olivia in his recreation of her unusual car accident from the previous episode, or, even more tellingly, the frogs from The Dreamscape that could transform a person’s fears into reality (there’s even a call back in the finale to The Dreamscape with an Observer meeting the same fate as the Massive Dynamic employee from that older episode), Olivia is the frog that can jump universes.

Now here's the curious thing, the symbol on the back of the frog is called the Phi and it is a letter of the Greek alphabet that usually represents the golden ratio:

But it is more common to find the lowercase version as a representation of the golden ratio:

You see, Olivia is the glass heart and the White Tulip too.*

In the end, Fringe is about Walter, who broke the universe for the love of a son he could not let go, and who needs to go down a long, hard road to redemption. And Fringe is about Peter, that beloved son who yearns to (and, in the end, needs to be) a better man than his father. And finally, Fringe is about Olivia: about the power of her love for Peter, which brings him back to life not once, but twice; about the power of her forgiveness of Walter, when she embraces the abilities and the drugs he used to experiment on her as a child in order to facilitate his plan – and by extension, his redemption; and about her own journey to embrace her abilities and finally to use them to bring herself a measure of happiness and peace.

* Olivia is the only character to be seen in every shot of real white tulips. Also, pay attention to the way the glass heart in Brown Betty is designed to look like a tulip.

3、Olivia, Memory and Time Loops - Season 5

This essay ties with this previous essay:Fringe Finale and Series Thoughts

In a couple of conversations here on Tumblr I was asked about a few sequences in season 5 involving Olivia and some memory "glitches" and what I thought they meant. This is my theory on that. It will be under the Read More.

First, the "glitches" are referring to the following:

1. Differences in the color of Peter's shirt and the picnic blanket on the day Etta disappeared. (In Absentia)
2. Olivia gives out the coordinate of 41 (Pennsylvania) instead of Walter’s 49 (Quebec). Lucky she did because Walter's would have been incorrect. (The Recordist)
3. Seeing the date 2033 on the missing person’s fliers behind her instead of the year 2015 when Peter and Olivia were looking for Etta. (The Recordist)

Secondly, I'm going to go straight to the source and I'm going to quote Joel Wyman in a interview he have "Give Me My Remote" regarding these exact events:

-------------------------------------------

GMMR: We've been seeing a lot of questionable memories from Olivia this season. Is something going on with her beyond having a little amber haze? Her recollection of the day Etta was taken seemed to be fairly different than Peter’s, for instance.

JW: Well, not drastically different.

GMMR: We did see Peter wearing a different outfit, there was a different blanket, and differences in how it went down. You guys pay attention to details, so it felt like there was no way that wasn't intentional.

JW: It was intentional.

GMMR: We also saw in Olivia’s memory of the “missing” posters saying the year 2033 in the background…

JW: Right.

GMMR: And there were also the wrong coordinates in “The Recordist.”

JW: Right. Let’s just say, there’s lots of things… [Laughs] Let’s just say, we’re always of thinking of things that are fun for the fans, and…that’s all I’m going to say. There’s a reason [for it]. I don’t want to give the wrong impression it’s a huge Olivia reveal, because that’s not the direction we’re going. But I do want to say there’s things we are planning that will remain a mystery until they’re not. I don’t want to mislead anybody.

----------------------------------------------

In simple terms, I don't think these are mistakes by the writers. I think they are hints. They are hints to let us know that something is going on with Olivia and that we should look at her journey a little closer. Just like the little Easter egg in Black Blotter that shows the little animated frog (Olivia) in one of the sequences.

These hints are needed because Olivia's journey is internal and dealt with subtly but still crucial to the success of the plan to defeat the Observers.

So, I think to understand what's happening with Olivia and her memories we have to look at the way Fringe has told some of their stories in the past. One of the things they use quite a bit are stories that involve time loops and, like all time travel stories, they can be a bit confusing. I'll cover the main ones here and talk about what they have to do with what I believe is a time loop in season 5.

We'll start with the time loop that happened with seasons 1 through 3. At the end of season 3 when Peter enters the machine he experiences memories of a dismal future. We learn that the Walter from the future placed the memories in the machine so that when Peter went into the machine again (after a reset) he would make a different choice, a choice guided by love, one that would save both worlds. That's what we end up seeing on the show. Basically, you had a time loop where the first time through Peter made a different choice when he entered the machine. A choice that ended in the destruction of both worlds and by resetting time they were corrected and we got what we saw in the first three seasons and, this time, when Peter gets in the machine he saves both worlds and creates yet another timeline (season 4).*

Another set of time loops are experienced in the season 4 episode "And Those We Left Behind". In this episode we have a husband, Raymond, trying to go back in time to a day when his wife, Kate, was no longer ill. Raymond was obsessed with this and it became his life. The resets stop with this note left behind in his wife's notebook: "Just love me and live your life." In other words, Raymond needed to learn an emotional lesson about the way he lived his life and loved those around him. In this case the loops ended without success as the more important lesson was gained by not being able to successfully reset.

Now, the most famous example of a time loop is White Tulip and it is the most important because in many ways Olivia is the living metaphor of the tulip. In this episode Alistair Peck is attempting to go back in time to the day his fiancee died so he can save her. He tries several times and fails (Olivia actually senses that she's been through the events before and experiences déjà vu). He only succeeds in going back to the correct time after speaking to Walter who corrects his formula and, more importantly, tells him about the costs of such an endeavor. When Alistair goes back he does so a different man. He goes to tell his fiancee that he loved her. Again, this is about an emotional lesson.

Each of these scenarios are slightly different but deal in some way with the situation Olivia is facing during season 5. The memory glitches Olivia is experiencing belong to a previous timeline, maybe the original timeline where the Observers invaded and Peter wore a brown sweater instead of a gray one and their blanket was green instead of red. And, in that timeline, almost the same things happened and Walter reset time and in that reset we got the day in the park the way we see it at the beginning of season 5. Unfortunately, because Olivia's state of mind is not in the right place, the Observers invade again.

Now, in season 5, Olivia knows or remembers the correct coordinates from the previous timeline and her memory is mixed up with the missing posters that you see in 2036 of all the people that have gone missing throughout the Observer's rule. That's what the glitches are all about. They are memories from a previous attempt to stop the Observers that failed.

The important thing however is that Olivia has to change her outlook in this new timeline. As mentioned in my previous theory, her emotions affect reality and the way she feels can determine how the reset works. This is something Michael understood and I believe he can also remember the other failed timeline (as Peter mentions, he does not experience time in the same way) so he adjusts things a bit this time around and he steps off the train. They key is that Olivia needs to be happy and she needs to release her doubts and the conflicting emotions when dealing with those she loves. She has to learn the emotional lessons that Peter did in season 3, that Raymond did in "And Those We Left Behind" and Alistair Peck did in "White Tulip" or every time they reset time the Observers will invade.

Anyway, that's what I think Olivia's memory glitches are about and I think they reinforce my theory about what is happening in those last moments of season 5 and why the reset does not create any paradoxes as stated in my previous season 5 finale post (link above).

*When Peter steps into the machine I believe he heals both worlds and creates a bridge. I don't think he's responsible for the reset. I think that's the Observers all the way and was their plan all along.