Fate vs. Free Will

In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus life is ruled by fate.  Try as he might to escape the destiny the Fates have spun for him, of killing his father and marrying his mother, it nevertheless comes to pass.  This notion of a master plan, as uncomfortable as it was for Oedipus, was yet comfortable for the ancient Greeks, as it was for all primitive peoples, because it put their lives into the context of a greater meaning (although what higher purpose Oedipus’ fate served remained unclear). 

Many millennia later we know that events are not the products of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos hunched over their spinning wheel.  The dinosaurs were extinguished not by the Fates, but by the orbit of an asteroid crossing that of our planet, as a matter of random chance, and crashing into it.  Their demise, and the consequent rise of the mammals and us, was an accident.   The notion that our lives are ruled by chance is not as comforting as the idea that they are being scripted by some master planner, but part of the maturation process over the millennia is the triumph of reason over wishful and fanciful thinking.  Perhaps ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in this, as I too was a fatalist in my youth, and even now an event that seems just too perfect may temporarily resurrect that feeling of destiny, but fatalism is a childish notion, an atavistic remnant of an earlier era, and the wisdom of maturity soon returns me to sanity and the uncomfortable truth. 

In the TV series Fringe, as well as the current film The Adjustment Bureau, based on the Philip K. Dick story Adjustment Team, the writers want to have it both ways: everything is fated yet free will is still possible.  The Observers or Adjusters intervene to correct an action that threatens to derail the master plan.  This, however, is nonsense.  If events are predetermined, then there is no room for free will, and vice versa.  The two are logically incompatible.  Once variation is introduced anywhere into the system, all determination is threatened.  That means you cannot travel to the future for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist yet (except, of course, insofar as we are all already travelling to the future).  Ironically, if fate existed, and everything was predetermined, then life, the actual playing out of these predetermined events, would become redundant and absurd; we, as individuals, would not exist, we would be mere notations of another hand, and original thought would be impossible, since all of our thoughts would have been, as it were, pre-thought.  This way lays madness. 

Unlike what you might infer from this movie, I don’t think Dick was a determinist, either.  Rather, he used fate as a metaphor for chance, to suggest the way randomness impinges on our lives.  But this issue is treated much more effectively in the German film Run Lola Run, in which a sequence of events is replayed repeatedly with slight variations so that we can see how contingency affects the outcome. 

On the Fringe

My favorite current TV show is Fringe.  Like X-Files, Fringe is about a special division of the FBI devoted to dealing with beyond-the-pale phenomena.  I like Fringe more than I ever liked X-Files though.  For one thing, it’s ostensibly set in Boston and I have a soft spot for that city.  Also, I like the characters better.  The head of the team is Philip Broyles (Lance Reddick, who was Lieutenant Daniels in the powerful reality-based series The Wire), but the main character and driving force is Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv).  She’s a one-woman dynamo.  She’s assisted by the eccentric and brilliant Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) and his jack-of-all-trades, slacker quasi-son (I’ll get to that) Peter (Joshua Jackson).  Walter (my favorite character) has sudden food cravings and is never truly happy without a body to dissect.  Somewhat pixilated (parts of his brain were removed to protect him and the world from his dangerous knowledge), his volatile emotions are on full display.  The group is aided by Massive Dynamics, a corporation represented by Nina Sharp (Blair Brown).  All of these characters have some heft to them.  But the main reason I like Fringe better than X-Files is the mega-plot that has developed over the course of the series.  In the beginning, like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, each episode was a self-contained unit, but along the way they have increasingly become parts of a whole.  X-Files had a mega-plot notion (a government conspiracy to hide the existence of extra-terrestrials), but it wasn’t as riveting or multifaceted.  It was a bit of a cliché, actually.

Fringe is now in its third season.  When it began, a new creepy and usually gross and yucky menace was on the prowl every week, but then came an attempt to tie them together with the concept of The Pattern, a hidden web of meaning that related to a possible shadowy secret society devoted to the destruction of humanity by means of advanced technology.  In the second season this morphed into a squad of clandestine warriors from a parallel universe.  In the alternate universe the 9/11 terrorists attacked only the Pentagon and the White House, so the twin towers are still standing.  Zeppelins are a popular form of transportation there and sheep are extinct.  The alternate universe has a technological advantage over ours in some areas, while in others it lags behind. This other universe contains mostly the same people as ours, but they have made different choices in their lives and so are somewhat different.  For example, whereas our Olivia is serious, intense, and blonde, the alternate Olivia (Fauxlivia) is auburn-haired and happy-go-lucky, and whereas our Walter is a quirky, quixotic, mad scientist, the alternate Walter (Walternate) is a bitter and ruthless politico, a Secretary of Defense set on a war of annihilation against our universe.  The series thus poses the intriguing question of how different a person might be had s/he made different choices and thus been subject to different influences.  The alternate universe idea also allows for two parallel stories, of the same yet different people in separate worlds, stories that now and then intersect.   

The clandestine war was brought about by Walter, whose son, Peter, got sick and died.  Walter figured out how he could have saved him, and since the alternate Peter had the same illness, he opened a door between the two universes to kidnap and cure him.  His intention had been to return the cured alternate Peter, but opening the door had weakened the fabric of both universes, the alternate one more than ours, and doing it again might be catastrophic.  Once Walternate became aware that his son had been stolen, he determined on retaliation.  The war is carried out beyond the awareness of ordinary people in our world by a squad of quicksilver-veined cyborg soldiers called Shape-shifters, who can assume the form of anyone.  Walternate has figured out how to send them across as beachball-sized embryos that develop into giant, pink, walking amoebae that can grab a person and steal his or her shape (and life).  We, on the other hand, have a group of humans (including Olivia, whose accidental crossing as a child was the vehicle for Walternate discovering what had happened to his son) who have the ability to travel between the two universes because they were treated with an experimental drug when they were children by Walter and his partner at the time, William Bell (Leonard Nimoy), the subsequent founder of Massive Dynamics, who foresaw the future need for inter-dimensional warriors.  On the side watching, in both universes, are a bunch of mysterious bullet-headed guys known as The Observers, who turn up everywhere, but rarely interfere…except when they do. 

Fringe may not be as witty as some TV shows (Californication comes to mind), but it is imaginative and clever, even if some of its ideas don’t hold up to close scrutiny.  For example, if the parallel universe really allows change and has always done so, then over eons the compounding of that variation would have produced a world far more remote from ours than the only slightly divergent one presented.  But I’m inclined to overlook things like that because the notion of distinct versions of me wandering around in other dimensions is so delightfully amusing.   Imagine all the various persons you might be had you made different decisions at critical junctures.  You can really run with that idea, entertain yourself for hours.  What fun it would be to live out all the alternative possibilities!  Perhaps this is why the young Hugh Everett (the inventor of the Many-Worlds Theory back in 1954 in our real, actual universe) just couldn’t resist the concept once it had occurred to him.  He became drunk with the possibilities.  (Despite his enthusiasm his theory was for decades considered rubbish, until String Theory came along and injected new life into it.)

In Fringe Olivia and Fauxlivia, each with her own unique assets, get to compete for the same man (Peter, who doesn’t really deserve either of them) and the fate of both universes hangs on the question of which one he chooses.  I know this sounds crazy, but Peter, you see, is the secret ingredient and power source for Walternate’s Doomsday Machine, designed to destroy our universe (once the two have come into contact and begun to bleed into one another, one must inevitably replace the other, a truth made more poignant by our knowledge of and sympathy for some of the people from each).  Admittedly, the show does occasionally lapse into soap opera, but most of the time surprising plot turns and ingenious craft carry the day.  I can’t say the show is animated by any grand vision.  The choice opportunities a parallel universe offers for political commentary have gone unexploited.  Nevertheless it does have a sort of harmless edginess, which I suppose is the only kind of edginess a network TV show can afford.  It dabbles in ideas at the limits of our understanding.  And though it’s sometimes hokey in its handling of them, at least it’s out there, and still manages to be thought-provoking and fun.

So I hope it gets renewed,  because there are a lot of loose ends dangling and I don’t want to have to tie them all up myself.   SciFi series are particularly prone to cancellation due to the expense of the special effects, and the effects in Fringe are pretty well done.