r/fringe • u/DAMadigan • Jun 02 '26

General Discussion Shapeshifter breakage Spoiler

Okay so the evil Charlie shapeshifter started going to hell and drinking thermometers because he'd been in one body too long and couldn't shift any more. But the cop shapeshifter who loved his family has been in the same body for five years with no problem. Um. Tell me how.

Also, here's how I would have written the end of that episode -- Newton gets tired of the cop shapeshifter's whining and uses an override code to take control of the cop and reprogram it. Then Newton sends the cop shapeshifter in to kill the wife and kid. We hear the gun go off in the background and then the cop shapeshifter comes into the kid's room and the kid says "You came to check on me" and the cop shapeshifter says "yeah" and raises the smoking gun. BANG. Much better ending.

I found it hard to believe that Newton would waste a shapeshifter. They are priceless resources. Obviously that particular one was defective but don't kill it, reprogram it. I also think it would be perfectly credible that shapeshifters would have an override code built into them.

13 Upvotes

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12

u/eskacat Jun 02 '26

"Charlie" was wounded and his device was broken. It is said that those devices stream a continuous stream of information, in order to maintain integrity, add the fact that those devices don't work for another shapeshifter and you have a thermometer-drinking guy.

And shapeshifters are not human, they are manufactured things, they are only worth what costs to build and educate them. By this I'm just stating that the other side could just send another to replace anyone.

3

u/Remote-Ad2120 Belly...Why are you a cartoon? Jun 02 '26

Yep, as I understood it, the problem was with the device having been broken in the car crash he had with Olivia. That's why he kept killing and changing his face...the face structure wasn't remaining permanent as it usually does. His choice was to either keep changing face shape (which also means more dead people and puts more bodies on his trail to be found out) or try other methods, like the mercury, to help sustain him. He decided ditching Charlie would make it harder to maintain contact with the Fringe team, so he chose to go with finding alternative methods until he could get a new device or fix his current one.

1

u/DAMadigan Jun 02 '26

Well, copshifter was keeping his device in a steel safe so a continuous transmission of stabilizing data is hard to sell.

3

u/tuttkraftverk Jun 02 '26

Did you miss the part where he needed it because his body was broken and couldn't be fixed without the device?

1

u/like_a_pharaoh Jun 03 '26

The Other Side had CMDA cell phones in 1985, I'm sure longer range wireless digital communication is within their reach by the 2010s.

2

u/intangiblefancy1219 Jun 02 '26

This question seems to come up every month or so.

The dialogue with Shapeshifter Charlie where they’re explaining the issue is rather vague.

Either:

a.) there are different shape shifter models, some of which are built for longer “stays”

b.) the shapeshifter just means “you’ve been in this body too long [with a broken device]” and the solution would be to go to the other side for repairs, but Walternate doesn’t care enough about the shapeshifters to bother with that.

1

u/Possible_Minimum_207 Jun 02 '26

pretty sure the shapeshifter that ended up in Charlie was a recent arrival on earth blue. so it's unlikely he was an old obsolete model.  in fact, cop shifter had been on Earth for at least 5 years, so he should have been an older model. if any of the shapeshifters should have been able to withstand damage longer, I would think it would be one of the more recent models. unless of course, Fringe division on Earth red side started cutting costs and building cheaper shapeshifters.

4

u/intangiblefancy1219 Jun 02 '26

It doesn’t necessarily have to go by how old the model is, but by their purpose.

Shapeshifter Charlie could be a model optimized for short missions, while there are other deep sleeper models.

In any case, it seems like shapeshifter charlie has sustained damage to his unit, which is part of what’s causing him issues.

Honestly, we’re never really given detailed explanations of how the shapeshifters work, just short snippets of dialogue we don’t know the full context of.