WALKING STICK TALKING POINT

"There is more than one of everything."

The Observer

'Fringe'

Just because a character comes from the Literary Universe*, that doesn't mean his or her presence in Toobworld means that they crossed over from one universe to the other. As with most characters from the movie universe, they probably have a doppelganger in the other realm.

A good example of this is Johnny Smith of Stephen King's "The Dead Zone". Johnny also exists in the movie universe, portrayed by Christopher Walken; as well as in Toobworld, played by Anthony Michael Hall.

Toobworld actually has two Johnny Smiths; maybe even more in the TV Multiverse a la 'Sliders'. But the two primary ones are from Earth Prime-Time and from an alternate TV dimension created by Johnny himself.

Up until Season 4, 'The Dead Zone' resided in Earth Prime-Time. But in "Broken Circle", the episode that kicked off that fourth season, "Current Johnny" threw away his walking stick so that "Future Johnny" could no longer contact him through it. And from that point on, Johnny Smith was living in a parallel time-line of his own creation.

Daniel Faraday of 'Lost' said that "Whatever Happened, Happened", but that's true only so far as preventing the course of History by those in the Future who have already lived it. (And even then - I'm not convinced that Faraday's statement is an absolute.) But someone in the "Now" can make life-altering decisions that will affect the Future. And those "Roads Not Taken" would be alternate realities, as Dr. Walter Bishop pointed out this past week in the penultimate episode of this first season of 'Fringe'.

So when "Current Johnny Smith" tossed his walking stick into the river, he created a time-line in which he no longer had the walking stick in the Future. But the "Future Johnny" who had the walking stick still existed, just not in a plane of existence still accessible to the Johnny Smith whom Toobworld chose to follow.

See, one handicap to Toobworld is that we only have access to the TV worlds which are presented to us; everything else becomes supposition. (And actionable if you get carried away with it as published fanfic.....)
So - as was the case with 'Alias Smith And Jones' which presented us with two different dimensions: one with Hannibal Heyes looking like Pete Duel and another in which he looked like Roger Davis - 'The Dead Zone' was a show which featured two different TV dimensions, with Season 4 being the demarcation point. BCnU!

* There's got to be a catchier name for the Literary Universe, like Toobworld or Craig Shaw Gardner's Cineverse. Land of Fiction from 'Doctor Who' is okay, but a bit wordy. (Maybe that's appropriate.) Literatia? WordWorld? I googled "Fictionalia" and that pops up a lot. But should it be limited to fiction?