We’ve still got a long wait ahead of us until “Peter” airs on April 1, so let’s take another look back at “Jacksonville”’s major contribution to the mythology of the parallel universes: that a balance has to be established when something is taken from one universe to another. In “Jacksonville,” the balancer was a nother building from the general vacinity.
But what happened when Walter took Peter over ?
I think the answer to that lies with the fact that we haven’t seen Peter’s mother around. At all. She’s barely been mentioned, save for a brief conversation in “There’s More Than One of Everything.” It was only briefly, when Peter said “You know, I remember when we used to come down here during the summers. Mom and I.”
While this would imply that Peter knew his mother, we don’t know at what age he was transferred from universe to universe, meaning that he memory he mentioned above could have been from the alternate universe. This means that it’s entirely possibly that a few hours after Walter returned with Peter (which will likely result in the car wreck that was mentioned in “The Arrival,”) Peter’s mother was sucked over to the other universe to balance the equation.
What do you think? Do I have the right idea, or am I reaching too far? Sound off below!
Sam McPherson began writing for Walter's Lab in August 2009. He also writes for the sites TVOvermind, MovieOvermind and SpoilerTV, in addition to being an administrator on Lostpedia since March 2009. Sam's favorite shows are Lost, Fringe, Doctor Who, Flight of the Conchords, FlashForward, True Blood, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Follow him on Twitter (@mcphersonator) or send him an email (sammcpherson@tvovermind.com).
Dude, Peter knew his mother!
–He lived with her at least until high school: she couldn’t afford their house (the one Peter breaks into for the neural headset) after Walter was sent to St. Clares’ so they moved to an apartment in Alston (cf “The Ghost Network”). Olivia asks about her, where she is now, and he laughs and says “That’s a story for another time.”
–And he gets truly angry with Walter in the next episode for dissing her & telling Peter not to be like her in ‘The Arrival’ and is on the point of ditching Walter and Olivia when he’s abducted by Rogue;
–and he tells Mrs. Uber-Clean’s kid in ‘Snakehead’ he too was raised by his mother, and he knows how it feels to worry he’ll lose her when she’s all he has.
I think when he told Olivia ‘everyone loves someone who’s dying’ and ‘a few years ago I went kind of crazy’ in the pilot, he was referring to losing his mother…BR say somewhere that ‘the breaking of Peter’s relationship with his mother is what broke him’…..
If that’s the case, then wouldn’t Peter and his mother have to be equal in mass if she takes his place in the alternate universe? Is that probable?
Well, Peter was apparently 10 or so. She might have been a smaller woman.
We know that the Peter in the show is not from the ‘main’ universe that the show takes place in, but rather, he’s been taken from the ’secondary’ universe. We’ve seen a gravestone for a ‘Peter’ who is implied to have gotten sick and, despite Walter’s efforts, this Peter died at a young age. This dead Peter is the one from the ‘main’ universe. There was also talk of a car crash or some other kind of car-related incident which involved Peter and Walter. Although I do not remember what episode this was mentioned in, this is also an explanation for the original Peter’s death. Or maybe he survived, but the trauma and perhaps physical damage of the accident, combined with his illness, was the eventual cause of death?
Regardless, Walter opened the Corridor between the two universes and took the living Peter from the Secondary to the Main universe. As you say, we do not know what was exchanged to balance it out. Perhaps it was Peter’s corpse? This would have the same mass if done at the right time. Obviously a corpse cannot grow, but the still-living Peter can, so over time this option of trade would be invalid. So something is needed to trade that is exactly Peter’s mass. But what if Walter could not find something that was exactly as such? He would have to make a deal with the Observer who has mysterious powers or manipulations of the universes’ laws. The deal would be for the living Peter to live in the Main universe with Walter for many years, and in return, the Observer would be allowed to take Walter to the Secondary universe. This is actually shown in a Season 1 episode, but the deal is not fulfilled; Walter and Peter continue to live in the same Main universe. How this deal WILL be fulfilled, or any consequences from it’s non-fulfilment, have yet to be seen in a future episode.
tl;dr – There was/is no trade of equal mass. Walter found the alternate option of making a deal with the Observer; Peter in exchange for Walter, one day.
True equilibria has nothing to do with mass, especially if we are dealing with 2 seperate cosmic universes. I mean think of the moon, no gravity, everything changes, yet it can still support life of a human being. Now think of a place that cannot even be imagined, whos to say that they even take the same shape of human?
Walter says ‘a boy who is not in his grave’ so I think that indeed that was the exchange. And you’d only be exchanging current masses, not all future states of the current mass. So no worry about Peter aging, becoming taller, and needing more mass sent over there; it’s a door, not a funnel.
In his labnotes, Walter says “the boy is the key”; “on some level the boy knows, but doesn’t know that he knows”–and “he’ll be OK as long as we stay”—-leading me to think that if Peter goes over there for long, he won’t be allowed to live. And I can’t wait to find out what he is key to! (Nice forshadowing of BR to always be showing him picking locks, kicking in doors, and under ‘Exit’ signs!)
On something of a different note, does the show’s idea of ‘equilibrium’ strike anyone else as questionable? I can see that the mass might have to be balanced, but why should it need to trade a car for a car, a building for a building, a boy for a boy? The door would just suck through as much matter as it needed to replace whatever had been taken.
The only reason I can see that the universes would trade a car for a car, and so on, would be if these transitions were regulated or supervised by a living, decision-making being or beings. Could the Observers have anything to do with this?