APRES PARIS

Throughout the latest episode of 'Fringe' ("Grey Matters"), the team was in search of a Dr. Paris, who had been connected to the cases of several patients whose brains were used to store the brain tissue of Dr. Walter Bishop. And the use of the phrase "in search of" is apt, because by the end of the episode we learned that Dr. Paris was an alias; that in fact he was Walter's old partner, Dr. William Bell.

Of course, this is a TV in-joke - Leonard Nimoy is playing "Bellie" and back in the late 1960s, he also played the magician turned IMF agent Paris on 'Mission: Impossible'. I've written about possible family connections for the Great Paris in the past:

NOVEMBER 'N' PARIS

COMBATANTS OF NIMOY

But I don't claim that either one is the correct answer. That would lock me into being a fanficcer, I think, rather than the Caretaker of Toobworld. (It's a gray area which I'm sure I've abused in the past.....)

So here's another theory to throw in the mix.....

First off, I don't think there's any way that Dr. William Bell could also be Paris. Bell's scientific accomplishments, with or without the use of Walter's research, would indicate that he's spent his whole life working in the various fields of "fringe" science. There would have been no time to play at being a stage magician, let alone serve the government as an IMF agent.

I think it's more likely that William Bell and Paris - aka Baum, or Kennedy, or whatever his real last name was - were "identical cousins", a well-established Toobworld occurrence. And in creating the alias by which he performed these brain surgeries, Dr. Bell called on his cousin's stage name for his own "stage name" to be used in operating theaters.....

BCnU!