Entry tags:
OOC: Application
PLAYER
Name: Kaze
Journal Username:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nihongoing
Current Characters at Luceti:
ahappylie | Okita Souji, skaterbrain | Beat, rightfootforward | Peggy Carter
CHARACTER
Name: Walter Bishop
Canon: Fringe (TV)
Gender: Male
Age: 64
Wing Color: Beige-brown
Canon Point: Third Season, Episode 19 "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide"
Canon Point Explanation: This is before the fabric of both worlds begin to break down, and just when the cast regains a sense of normalcy. Having some stability in Walter's life, while still maintaining a purpose, will ensure that while he will be driven, he won't be in a panic over what is going on at home.
History: Up to Season 3 @ Wikipedia
Full 5 Season history @ Fringe Wiki
Personality:
Walter Bishop is at once a mad scientist, a father, a child, a genius, and quite literally insane. His personality is a mash of all of these things, pulling him into so many different directions that it is difficult for him to piece himself together. As a scientist and a genius, he is brilliant, possessing a high intellect and a vivid imagination that allows him to open his mind to greater possibilities than most. He is willing to push the envelope as far as it can go in order to achieve great things - sometimes at great personal cost. Once, before he had entered the asylum, he had been driven, prideful, and arrogant, to a degree that eventually frightened him. He was willing to sacrifice anything to achieve what he wanted and was becoming a cold, calculating and egotistical human being. The death of his lab assistant and subsequent incarceration in St. Claire's, however, changed him. After having pieces of his brain removed at his behest, his intellect diminished and he was driven into true insanity. His memories became disjointed as a result of the surgery and the subsequent "treatments" at St. Claire's, and he slowly lost the ability to take care of himself. He often comments upon it in the series and takes great pains to try to become independent, sometimes with disastrous results. One such attempt had him lost in Chinatown, after which he implanted a tracking device in his neck because he thought that would be a good method of keeping himself from ever being lost again.
Walter has a childlike quality to him, an innocent, trusting love for all things that makes him quite friendly to most people. He finds joy in the simplest (and strangest) of things like foods, candies, flowers, music, autopsies, mutant creatures and mind-altering drugs. However, he can quickly revert to being a shrewd, harsh scientist should anything upset him or challenge him or his intellect. He has several outbursts throughout the season where he shouts and rants about something otherwise trivial, but with which he cannot cope. An example of this is his anger in the pilot episode at hearing that his lab was shut down. Another being his outburst about how the supermarket was trying to kill them all after discovering potassium bromide in a list of ingredients on the back of a box. He also snapped at a doctor, saying, "Unless you have an IQ higher than mine, I'm not interested in what you think!"
Following these outbursts, he tends to be sullen and withdrawn, even apologetic as he realizes his behaviours are unacceptable. Normally, his son Peter is there to draw attention to it, but when he isn't there (such as after Peter disappears at the end of the Season 2), Walter alternates between manic behaviors like drugging himself and labelling everything in his lab to organize his life, and breaking down crying when he realizes he can't live on his own, such as when he completely ran out of food at home.
The Scientist: More than anything, Walter is a man of science. Despite his field being fringe science, he adheres to the scientific method and has an innately logical way of thinking. He can make great leaps in logic when required of him, but his basis is always in the sciences of this world (and the alternate ones). He is able to reverse engineer technology he saw through his parallel universe window, which he and his partner, William Bell, gave to the US military for their use and for the betterment of their world. He also uses his knowledge of fringe science as a launchpad to making greater discoveries that most people would not imagine possible - such as synaptic transfer, alternate universes, reanimating the dead, etc. Science is always at his core and he uses it as a way of understanding the world around him, especially now that his insanity makes it harder for him to interact with people normally.
Due to his scientific background, he has a rocky relationship with things that cannot be quantifiable. He doesn't believe in ghosts, for one, although he appears to believe that vampires could exist. Ghosts cannot be measured in any scientific way, while vampires could have a scientific explanation. Alternatively, he has a strained relationship with his view on God and whether or not He exists. He meets one man during his cases, a time traveller attempting to go back and save his wife from dying in a car crash, with whom he discusses his conflicted feelings about God. As a man of science, he can't quantify Him and thus cannot fully believe He exists. But as a man who has trespassed against Him by breaking the very laws of Nature, he believes that everything bad happening to him is a divine punishment. Despite starting out atheist, Walter eventually very firmly believes that he has offended God by doing what he did, breaking the laws of nature and setting in motion a pattern of destruction.
The Insanity: After having three parts of his hippocampus removed, Walter's brain was unable to rationalize the loss of memory and drove itself insane. It manifests in mood swings, inability to control his temper, obsessive tendencies (especially regarding food) and random jumps in memory and speech. As briefly touched upon above, his time at St. Claire's exacerbated the problem due to their methods, including electroshock therapy, and it has caused him to have a severe fear and unease around anyone in the medical profession, especially mental health professionals. He once refused to stay in Seattle because the damp smell of the city reminded him of St. Claire's, becoming more and more agitated until he finally returned to Boston to work from his lab rather than accompany Olivia and Peter on the scene. He routinely uses recreational (and illegal) drugs as a way of opening his mind to all angles of a problem in order to find its solution, but also to help regulate his moods and to sharpen his mind when he wants to avoid thinking on a certain subject (an example being his use of a self-made marijuana hybrid called Brown Betty after Peter leaves).
Although, even before his breakdown, Walter was an unusual man. With his ambition and pride gone from him, his eccentricities are out in full force. He finds strange things soothing, such as the sound of a brain being removed from the skull. He also often thinks of foods at inappropriate times like during autopsies or when investigating bloody crime scenes. During the first two seasons, his verbal tic was to say, "I have two thoughts." One would inevitably relate to the case, and the other would - once he remembered to say it - would be something about a food he had missed since being in St. Claire's, or a random anecdote about his or Peter's lives. He's also often announced when he was going to the bathroom, for no reason whatsoever (but possibly to warn people that he would need the restroom, as he often used it as a place to read or think, and afterwards most people wouldn't want to enter it.) He conducts his experiments in unconventional ways, as well - growing ears in omelettes or putting acid into bathroom sinks - and rarely thinks to mention this to other people who may find themselves in danger because of it.
The Man: At his core, however, Walter is extremely personable as long as he is in his element. He particularly enjoys children - once even thinking that children were the key to the salvation of his world in an upcoming war against a parallel universe. He enjoys playing games with them and is particularly gifted at getting children to relax, especially regarding experiments (as seen with the Observer child in S1). Unfortunately, despite his general friendliness with people, he can rarely remember their names. It takes him a good deal of time to recognize new people in his life and once he does, whether or not he will remember their names perfectly is another matter. He recalls Olivia and Peter, as well as Agent Philip Broyles with ease, but he rarely gets Junior Agent and his substitute lab assistant, Astrid Farnsworth's name correct. He can easily remember her last name, but when it comes to her first, he varies from Astro to Asterick to Astral and more.
Despite his inability to remember names, he forms deep emotional bonds and does not deal with loss well. After losing his son, Peter, to a rare and debilitating genetic disease, his desire to see his son live caused him to cross universes in order to save him. Walter is solely and utterly dependent and obsessed with keeping his son happy and healthy, and near to him. Later in the series, he tries to set up Peter and Olivia, believing the two of them to be perfect for each other. When he senses conflict in their relationship, he goes to great lengths to get them back together - including inviting Olivia over for breakfast and then leaving her and Peter alone in the house without telling them. This is because Peter is the greatest anchor in Walter's life and the idea of losing him or Peter being unhappy causes the man to go into fits. He won't sleep, barely eats, and eventually goes into manic and depressive episodes. His fear of being left behind or rejected by Peter causes Walter to keep Peter's origins from him a secret, and his greatest hope is that his son can eventually forgive him for what he did. Walter constantly refers to Peter as "Son" and tries to do everything he can to keep his son's origins a secret (up to the end of S2), and after that tries to do whatever he can to reconcile with him. He frets constantly about his son, which he says is natural for any father, especially one who has experienced the loss of his only child before.
But his deeper emotional bonds aren't only with Peter. Upon hearing that Olivia was in an accident and was effectively brain dead, he refuses to believe it until he can examine her himself. Then he cries, holding her hand and apologizing to her that he could not save her. He does the same when Astrid is attacked in the lab after being followed due to a careless comment he makes. He is fiercely protective of his son and those he perceives as family, and extremely troubled when those bonds begin to break. He's quick to cry over someone's death that he feels a strong bond to, needing to be pulled away from the deceased by someone else's hands. He prioritizes his familial relationships over his morals in most cases, such as in wanting to keep Peter alive and close by because he cannot deal with the idea of losing his son again.
Strengths
Physical: Walter has no physical sicknesses, but has the normal limitations of a man in his sixties. While he is in good health overall, years of recreational and medicinal drug use has given him a unique tolerance for high levels of psychotropic drugs like LSD, marijuana, valium and the like. Due to this and constant experimenting on himself, he is capable of withstanding high doses of drugs and other stimuli (electrocution, for one, which he takes without blinking an eye in low doses) without it being detrimental to his health.
Mental: The most obvious mental strength Walter possesses is his extremely high intelligence. According to the series, he has a recorded IQ of 196. He possesses a well-rounded knowledge of several types of theoretical and practical sciences - physics, biology, chemistry, etc. - and also a keen knowledge of mathematics. While his son is the engineering genius, Walter also creates and builds his own machines in many cases. He often uses unconventional methods to illicit the results he wants, showing he has a great deal of imagination as well. Nina Sharp, in fact, attests to this later, saying that while his intellect made him smart, his imagination and optimism were what made him truly brilliant. He is capable of turning a problem around in his mind and attacking it from several different angles, recalling old cases, experiments and research to find a solution.
Walter specializes in "fringe" or unusual science. He and his partner William Bell theorized a wide spectrum of strange experiments, ultimately culminating in the ability to cross between parallel and alternate universes. He reverse engineered technology from a far more advanced society in order to give his universe either the same or an approximation of those technologies. Even after the duo split, Walter continued to theorize and create a variety of devices, drugs, and techniques to test and expand upon areas of scientific discovery. Most notably, while the pair were still working together, he helped created Cortexiphan, a drug used to enhance and induce special abilities in predisposed children like telekinesis, teleportation, mind reading, etc.
He did this as part of his efforts to return his son to his original universe, a drive that consumed him over time. Walter's drive and his ability to focus on the problem at hand can be seen as both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it allows him to find the solution to even the trickiest of problems. He can disregard his emotional instability and focus his mind when necessary in order to overcome obstacles. However, on the other hand, his focus and drive can cause him to lose sight of his humanity. For example, he saw no problems with drilling holes into a man's skull so he could place a device intended to move metal from one side of his brain to another - when it's later revealed that he could have used non-invasive electrodes to do the same thing.
Emotional: Emotionally, Walter is somewhat of a wreck, but he has his strong suits. His focus helps him redirect and occupy his mind with scientific problems, helping to calm him when he is emotionally unstable. He also has a keen sense of loyalty and a deep love for those he finds important, especially his son - and later Olivia Dunham as well. He loves his son and is willing to do anything and everything to keep him safe and happy. He can go to extremes to help the people he cares for, and while he can't always express himself well, he feels for his friends very deeply. An example of this is when Astrid is attacked in the lab while he is lost in Chinatown. Upon returning to the lab and seeing the wreckage and Astrid's injuries, he breaks down into tears, both apologetic for leaving her alone and afraid that she was hurt worse than she was saying.
He tries to be extremely strong for people close to him, and eventually goes to great lengths in order to save them. Although he will be coming from Season 3, the Season 5 finale speaks volumes about how strong Walter can be. He sacrifices his own happiness, safety and his very existence to take an Observer child into the future, erasing himself from the present, in order to save Peter, Olivia and their child, giving them a future free of Observer oppression. His sense of guilt and his strong convictions that he has to set things right is a pivotal driving force for him, guiding him to work for the betterment of mankind.
Weaknesses
Physical: Physically, he's just a normal 64 year old man. He has no special superpowers, isn't especially strong or even very fast. However, his insanity is in part caused by the removal of three key parts of his brain, which is a physical and root cause for his emotional and mental instabilities. These pieces of his brain changed his personality in fundamental ways and are a point of contention later in the series as well. He is also somewhat dependant upon his self medication in order to function at a normal capacity, and relies heavily upon his team members to be able to function in society. He's very poor at driving, for example, despite having once owned and operated cars normally, and while he can cook for himself, he cannot shop.
Mental: Despite his intellectual gifts, Walter has several mental deficiencies including difficulty in retaining memories, scattered thoughts, and lack of social skills. When distressed, Walter has difficulty remembering things even when told repeatedly. In the first season, he often forgets he has his lab back. Later, when he gets lost in Chinatown, in his distress at being left alone, he forgets that Peter has made it a habit to put emergency numbers in his pocket.
He often moves from one thought to another with seemingly little connection. In the first two seasons, one of his trademark quotes is "I had/have two thoughts." The first would relate to the case at hand and he would forget the second until reminded. The second thought was usually completely unrelated to the case or even anything remotely tied to the situation at hand, often talking about food or old memories. His lack of mental coherence is a oft used tool in the show to bring up the team's exasperations and to show how they have come to adjust to living and working with him.
His lack of social skills causes him to forget basic things like courtesy and tact. He is singularly focused on his tasks and himself, often acting selfishly if it serves the greater purpose at hand. He admits that he is a selfish person himself, but he also says he cannot change who he is. He also tends to undress himself at inappropriate times when at home or when worked up, such as stripping in front of a group of scientists at Massive Dynamic when lecturing them or walking around naked at home. He rarely remembers peoples' names, mistaking even close friends' names despite knowing them for a long time. It's a running gag in the series that he can never remember Astrid's name despite her being his assistant for the entirety of the series. Also, he can be snappish and blunt with people he doesn't know well, and for those he does not like, he does little to hide his feelings of distaste.
One of his largest deficiencies is his tendency to see people as test subjects, detaching himself from emotional responsibility for them. When focused, Walter can forget that experimenting on people is a delicate operation, sacrificing everything necessary to achieve the results he needs or wants. He is entirely willing to perform dangerous stunts to achieve what he needs, lying about an area being safe in order to access it or locking himself in an underground sewer with a chimera monster in order to capture it - first taking poison so that if the monster killed him, he'd not feel it.
He oftens look down upon those who he does not see as his intellectual equals. He can be dismissive and rude to people, even those he considers friends, if they question his intellect and tends to snap at them if they do. Although in later seasons he seems to mellow this habit due to prolonged interaction with Peter, Astrid and Olivia, without them in Luceti, it's possible these harsher aspects of his personality could return.
Emotional: Walter's emotional problems are deeply tied to his mental ones. After being in a mental hospital, living through seventeen years of relative isolation from his family and suffering through the suicide of his wife alone, he has developed a deep, ingrained fear of being left or abandoned. His distress includes a crippling fear of hospitals and a deep mistrust of medical professionals, and - in the absence of a steadying anchor - leads to a complete refusal to venture out of his safety zones. In Season 4, after Peter is erased from the timeline, we see a glimpse of what Walter would have been without him - a fretful, harsh man who is afraid of leaving his laboratory under any circumstance, and is even more deathly afraid of being recommitted. Without an anchor to weigh him to the world in front of him, Walter slips further and further into the realm of theoretical science and further away from reality.
He also experiences an extreme guilt complex in regards to losing his son and to crossing over to the other universe and stealing Peter Bishop from his real father. Despite being atheist, he believes that all the bad things in his life are a punishment from God for going against the natural order of things. He believed that all the terrible things that happened were his fault and his suffering was justified, even as he searched for a sign that he could be forgiven.
After the events in The Firefly, Walter is better about letting people go (especially Peter, whom he clung to in a desperate, almost obsessive way), but he still feels extreme duress at the thought of losing anyone. His emotions run rampant with him and he is very much at their mercy. He can be elated one moment, but should anything interrupt him or his routine, he can immediately grow irrationally angry and snappish. His moods are extremely changeable and it often takes an outside source to soothe or calm him down from his reactive episodes.
Anything else?: He kept a cow in his lab at Harvard, called Gene. If possible, he would like to have his cow back. He likes his cow.
SAMPLES
First Person:
Attention, villagers of Luceti! My name is Walter Bishop, your fellow inmate in this... [He almost sneers the word.] fishbowl. I was wondering if anyone here could spare a few moments of their time? We do seem to have an overabundance of it - almost inversely proportional to the amount of technological advancements our overlords deem fit with which to provide us. [He huffed, clearly displeased with what was available here.] I wouldn't be opposed to the immense amount of free time, mind you, but Gene still hasn't arrived and none of the cows on the farms here are as well-tempered as she. You have no idea how - how difficult it is to find such a lovely cow as Gene is. She was most amicable with the experiments and... All that work, put on hold indefinitely. Such a shame.
...
O-Oh, yes! As for my announcement... -- This is quite the handy little thing, isn't it? Amazing that the other universe never thought of anything like this, but then I suppose they had their ear pieces and their subcutaneous tracking devices and-- ...Right!
I require three volunteers of able body and mind - mental stability is of no consequence, of course, so long as your brain is still intact - for a certain experiment, the details of which can be discussed below. Oh, but if you're missing a limb or have some other deformity of the brain or otherwise, you aren't out of the running! I just need to ask you a few questions before you're considered as a candidate. In fact, perhaps a deformity of some sort could be an interesting experiment of its own... [He clears his throat, remembering that he has to be polite.]
Thank you!
Third Person:
"Zero."
It had been quite awhile since he had had problems sleeping. Once, back long ago - it seemed so far in the past now, it was almost like a dream (a bad dream, a nightmare that lasted far too long, with consequences he still constantly had to fight) - he had hidden in closets and bathtubs and any other enclosed space because he couldn't sleep. Peter had scolded him and tried to pull him out, but it wasn't until that night, after a particularly trying case, that Peter had agreed to sing. Walter had hated that song at first, but after seventeen years of it, he couldn't sleep without it. Now, in an apartment filled with silence, driven from his world and separated from everything familiar to him, he found himself hiding in the closet again. Belly would have laughed at him, except that Belly was dead now. Truly, fully dead, and there wasn't any coming back from that. The dog wouldn't hunt, the experiment failed, but things had gone back to normal - relative normalcy for them.
"One."
Now, however, he had been torn from home. The sounds here were foreign. The communal living space and sterile walls too much like the uncomfortable memories drilling their way back through his brain to let him relax. Even his own shadow was unrecognisable to him with the new additions on his back, making it hard to sleep like he wanted, reminding him constantly of how he was so very far away from his lab and everyone he cared for. It reminded him of how very far away he was from Olivia and Astro and Gene.
And, most of all, from Peter.
He wondered, only for the briefest moment, if this was how Peter had felt when Walter had stolen him. This world was not his, but now he had to live in it.
"One. Two."
Walter hugged himself tightly, bowing his head against his knees as he tried to calm himself - something he'd never been very good at by himself. It had been eight days since he had arrived in Luceti. Eight long days of conversations with people he didn't know and eight long days of being without his lab and his friends and family. It had been eight tedious days as he tried everything he could think of with the limited technology available to him to break a hole in space and cross back to his own world, and failed. And now it had been eight heartbreaking days of putting on a strong face when he had to go outside as he realized he was trapped, and that no one would be looking for him. No one even knew he was missing if what the people here had to say was true.
"Thre--"
Someone padded down the hallway on the way to the kitchen and Walter froze, shaking as he listened. Unfamiliar footsteps meant any myriad of things and he waited for them to come into his room, invade his private space, and take him away. The footsteps disappeared, however, and he slowly relaxed, lowering his head again. In the quiet that followed, he began reciting numbers to himself, his mumbling echoing through the empty apartment. He had to sleep tonight if he hoped to face the villagers tomorrow and continue his experiments in order to get home. Peter would tell him to sleep.
"Three."
Peter wasn't here, though. He didn't know Walter was missing.
"Five."
There was someone else in his place, worse than Walternate. Simply a stop in time that no one would miss or know, or know to miss.
"Eight."
He had to sleep or he would never find his way home. He had to sleep so he could think, because there had to be a solution to this, somewhere. He just needed to open his mind.
"Thirteen. Twenty-one. Thirty-four."
But first he had to quiet it so it could rest. "Fifty-five. Eighty-nine. One hundred forty-four..."
Name: Kaze
Journal Username:
nihongoingCurrent Characters at Luceti:
ahappylie | Okita Souji, skaterbrain | Beat, rightfootforward | Peggy CarterCHARACTER
Name: Walter Bishop
Canon: Fringe (TV)
Gender: Male
Age: 64
Wing Color: Beige-brown
Canon Point: Third Season, Episode 19 "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide"
Canon Point Explanation: This is before the fabric of both worlds begin to break down, and just when the cast regains a sense of normalcy. Having some stability in Walter's life, while still maintaining a purpose, will ensure that while he will be driven, he won't be in a panic over what is going on at home.
History: Up to Season 3 @ Wikipedia
Full 5 Season history @ Fringe Wiki
Personality:
Walter Bishop is at once a mad scientist, a father, a child, a genius, and quite literally insane. His personality is a mash of all of these things, pulling him into so many different directions that it is difficult for him to piece himself together. As a scientist and a genius, he is brilliant, possessing a high intellect and a vivid imagination that allows him to open his mind to greater possibilities than most. He is willing to push the envelope as far as it can go in order to achieve great things - sometimes at great personal cost. Once, before he had entered the asylum, he had been driven, prideful, and arrogant, to a degree that eventually frightened him. He was willing to sacrifice anything to achieve what he wanted and was becoming a cold, calculating and egotistical human being. The death of his lab assistant and subsequent incarceration in St. Claire's, however, changed him. After having pieces of his brain removed at his behest, his intellect diminished and he was driven into true insanity. His memories became disjointed as a result of the surgery and the subsequent "treatments" at St. Claire's, and he slowly lost the ability to take care of himself. He often comments upon it in the series and takes great pains to try to become independent, sometimes with disastrous results. One such attempt had him lost in Chinatown, after which he implanted a tracking device in his neck because he thought that would be a good method of keeping himself from ever being lost again.
Walter has a childlike quality to him, an innocent, trusting love for all things that makes him quite friendly to most people. He finds joy in the simplest (and strangest) of things like foods, candies, flowers, music, autopsies, mutant creatures and mind-altering drugs. However, he can quickly revert to being a shrewd, harsh scientist should anything upset him or challenge him or his intellect. He has several outbursts throughout the season where he shouts and rants about something otherwise trivial, but with which he cannot cope. An example of this is his anger in the pilot episode at hearing that his lab was shut down. Another being his outburst about how the supermarket was trying to kill them all after discovering potassium bromide in a list of ingredients on the back of a box. He also snapped at a doctor, saying, "Unless you have an IQ higher than mine, I'm not interested in what you think!"
Following these outbursts, he tends to be sullen and withdrawn, even apologetic as he realizes his behaviours are unacceptable. Normally, his son Peter is there to draw attention to it, but when he isn't there (such as after Peter disappears at the end of the Season 2), Walter alternates between manic behaviors like drugging himself and labelling everything in his lab to organize his life, and breaking down crying when he realizes he can't live on his own, such as when he completely ran out of food at home.
Due to his scientific background, he has a rocky relationship with things that cannot be quantifiable. He doesn't believe in ghosts, for one, although he appears to believe that vampires could exist. Ghosts cannot be measured in any scientific way, while vampires could have a scientific explanation. Alternatively, he has a strained relationship with his view on God and whether or not He exists. He meets one man during his cases, a time traveller attempting to go back and save his wife from dying in a car crash, with whom he discusses his conflicted feelings about God. As a man of science, he can't quantify Him and thus cannot fully believe He exists. But as a man who has trespassed against Him by breaking the very laws of Nature, he believes that everything bad happening to him is a divine punishment. Despite starting out atheist, Walter eventually very firmly believes that he has offended God by doing what he did, breaking the laws of nature and setting in motion a pattern of destruction.
The Insanity: After having three parts of his hippocampus removed, Walter's brain was unable to rationalize the loss of memory and drove itself insane. It manifests in mood swings, inability to control his temper, obsessive tendencies (especially regarding food) and random jumps in memory and speech. As briefly touched upon above, his time at St. Claire's exacerbated the problem due to their methods, including electroshock therapy, and it has caused him to have a severe fear and unease around anyone in the medical profession, especially mental health professionals. He once refused to stay in Seattle because the damp smell of the city reminded him of St. Claire's, becoming more and more agitated until he finally returned to Boston to work from his lab rather than accompany Olivia and Peter on the scene. He routinely uses recreational (and illegal) drugs as a way of opening his mind to all angles of a problem in order to find its solution, but also to help regulate his moods and to sharpen his mind when he wants to avoid thinking on a certain subject (an example being his use of a self-made marijuana hybrid called Brown Betty after Peter leaves).
Although, even before his breakdown, Walter was an unusual man. With his ambition and pride gone from him, his eccentricities are out in full force. He finds strange things soothing, such as the sound of a brain being removed from the skull. He also often thinks of foods at inappropriate times like during autopsies or when investigating bloody crime scenes. During the first two seasons, his verbal tic was to say, "I have two thoughts." One would inevitably relate to the case, and the other would - once he remembered to say it - would be something about a food he had missed since being in St. Claire's, or a random anecdote about his or Peter's lives. He's also often announced when he was going to the bathroom, for no reason whatsoever (but possibly to warn people that he would need the restroom, as he often used it as a place to read or think, and afterwards most people wouldn't want to enter it.) He conducts his experiments in unconventional ways, as well - growing ears in omelettes or putting acid into bathroom sinks - and rarely thinks to mention this to other people who may find themselves in danger because of it.
The Man: At his core, however, Walter is extremely personable as long as he is in his element. He particularly enjoys children - once even thinking that children were the key to the salvation of his world in an upcoming war against a parallel universe. He enjoys playing games with them and is particularly gifted at getting children to relax, especially regarding experiments (as seen with the Observer child in S1). Unfortunately, despite his general friendliness with people, he can rarely remember their names. It takes him a good deal of time to recognize new people in his life and once he does, whether or not he will remember their names perfectly is another matter. He recalls Olivia and Peter, as well as Agent Philip Broyles with ease, but he rarely gets Junior Agent and his substitute lab assistant, Astrid Farnsworth's name correct. He can easily remember her last name, but when it comes to her first, he varies from Astro to Asterick to Astral and more.
Despite his inability to remember names, he forms deep emotional bonds and does not deal with loss well. After losing his son, Peter, to a rare and debilitating genetic disease, his desire to see his son live caused him to cross universes in order to save him. Walter is solely and utterly dependent and obsessed with keeping his son happy and healthy, and near to him. Later in the series, he tries to set up Peter and Olivia, believing the two of them to be perfect for each other. When he senses conflict in their relationship, he goes to great lengths to get them back together - including inviting Olivia over for breakfast and then leaving her and Peter alone in the house without telling them. This is because Peter is the greatest anchor in Walter's life and the idea of losing him or Peter being unhappy causes the man to go into fits. He won't sleep, barely eats, and eventually goes into manic and depressive episodes. His fear of being left behind or rejected by Peter causes Walter to keep Peter's origins from him a secret, and his greatest hope is that his son can eventually forgive him for what he did. Walter constantly refers to Peter as "Son" and tries to do everything he can to keep his son's origins a secret (up to the end of S2), and after that tries to do whatever he can to reconcile with him. He frets constantly about his son, which he says is natural for any father, especially one who has experienced the loss of his only child before.
But his deeper emotional bonds aren't only with Peter. Upon hearing that Olivia was in an accident and was effectively brain dead, he refuses to believe it until he can examine her himself. Then he cries, holding her hand and apologizing to her that he could not save her. He does the same when Astrid is attacked in the lab after being followed due to a careless comment he makes. He is fiercely protective of his son and those he perceives as family, and extremely troubled when those bonds begin to break. He's quick to cry over someone's death that he feels a strong bond to, needing to be pulled away from the deceased by someone else's hands. He prioritizes his familial relationships over his morals in most cases, such as in wanting to keep Peter alive and close by because he cannot deal with the idea of losing his son again.
Strengths
Mental: The most obvious mental strength Walter possesses is his extremely high intelligence. According to the series, he has a recorded IQ of 196. He possesses a well-rounded knowledge of several types of theoretical and practical sciences - physics, biology, chemistry, etc. - and also a keen knowledge of mathematics. While his son is the engineering genius, Walter also creates and builds his own machines in many cases. He often uses unconventional methods to illicit the results he wants, showing he has a great deal of imagination as well. Nina Sharp, in fact, attests to this later, saying that while his intellect made him smart, his imagination and optimism were what made him truly brilliant. He is capable of turning a problem around in his mind and attacking it from several different angles, recalling old cases, experiments and research to find a solution.
Walter specializes in "fringe" or unusual science. He and his partner William Bell theorized a wide spectrum of strange experiments, ultimately culminating in the ability to cross between parallel and alternate universes. He reverse engineered technology from a far more advanced society in order to give his universe either the same or an approximation of those technologies. Even after the duo split, Walter continued to theorize and create a variety of devices, drugs, and techniques to test and expand upon areas of scientific discovery. Most notably, while the pair were still working together, he helped created Cortexiphan, a drug used to enhance and induce special abilities in predisposed children like telekinesis, teleportation, mind reading, etc.
He did this as part of his efforts to return his son to his original universe, a drive that consumed him over time. Walter's drive and his ability to focus on the problem at hand can be seen as both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it allows him to find the solution to even the trickiest of problems. He can disregard his emotional instability and focus his mind when necessary in order to overcome obstacles. However, on the other hand, his focus and drive can cause him to lose sight of his humanity. For example, he saw no problems with drilling holes into a man's skull so he could place a device intended to move metal from one side of his brain to another - when it's later revealed that he could have used non-invasive electrodes to do the same thing.
Emotional: Emotionally, Walter is somewhat of a wreck, but he has his strong suits. His focus helps him redirect and occupy his mind with scientific problems, helping to calm him when he is emotionally unstable. He also has a keen sense of loyalty and a deep love for those he finds important, especially his son - and later Olivia Dunham as well. He loves his son and is willing to do anything and everything to keep him safe and happy. He can go to extremes to help the people he cares for, and while he can't always express himself well, he feels for his friends very deeply. An example of this is when Astrid is attacked in the lab while he is lost in Chinatown. Upon returning to the lab and seeing the wreckage and Astrid's injuries, he breaks down into tears, both apologetic for leaving her alone and afraid that she was hurt worse than she was saying.
He tries to be extremely strong for people close to him, and eventually goes to great lengths in order to save them. Although he will be coming from Season 3, the Season 5 finale speaks volumes about how strong Walter can be. He sacrifices his own happiness, safety and his very existence to take an Observer child into the future, erasing himself from the present, in order to save Peter, Olivia and their child, giving them a future free of Observer oppression. His sense of guilt and his strong convictions that he has to set things right is a pivotal driving force for him, guiding him to work for the betterment of mankind.
Weaknesses
Mental: Despite his intellectual gifts, Walter has several mental deficiencies including difficulty in retaining memories, scattered thoughts, and lack of social skills. When distressed, Walter has difficulty remembering things even when told repeatedly. In the first season, he often forgets he has his lab back. Later, when he gets lost in Chinatown, in his distress at being left alone, he forgets that Peter has made it a habit to put emergency numbers in his pocket.
He often moves from one thought to another with seemingly little connection. In the first two seasons, one of his trademark quotes is "I had/have two thoughts." The first would relate to the case at hand and he would forget the second until reminded. The second thought was usually completely unrelated to the case or even anything remotely tied to the situation at hand, often talking about food or old memories. His lack of mental coherence is a oft used tool in the show to bring up the team's exasperations and to show how they have come to adjust to living and working with him.
His lack of social skills causes him to forget basic things like courtesy and tact. He is singularly focused on his tasks and himself, often acting selfishly if it serves the greater purpose at hand. He admits that he is a selfish person himself, but he also says he cannot change who he is. He also tends to undress himself at inappropriate times when at home or when worked up, such as stripping in front of a group of scientists at Massive Dynamic when lecturing them or walking around naked at home. He rarely remembers peoples' names, mistaking even close friends' names despite knowing them for a long time. It's a running gag in the series that he can never remember Astrid's name despite her being his assistant for the entirety of the series. Also, he can be snappish and blunt with people he doesn't know well, and for those he does not like, he does little to hide his feelings of distaste.
One of his largest deficiencies is his tendency to see people as test subjects, detaching himself from emotional responsibility for them. When focused, Walter can forget that experimenting on people is a delicate operation, sacrificing everything necessary to achieve the results he needs or wants. He is entirely willing to perform dangerous stunts to achieve what he needs, lying about an area being safe in order to access it or locking himself in an underground sewer with a chimera monster in order to capture it - first taking poison so that if the monster killed him, he'd not feel it.
He oftens look down upon those who he does not see as his intellectual equals. He can be dismissive and rude to people, even those he considers friends, if they question his intellect and tends to snap at them if they do. Although in later seasons he seems to mellow this habit due to prolonged interaction with Peter, Astrid and Olivia, without them in Luceti, it's possible these harsher aspects of his personality could return.
Emotional: Walter's emotional problems are deeply tied to his mental ones. After being in a mental hospital, living through seventeen years of relative isolation from his family and suffering through the suicide of his wife alone, he has developed a deep, ingrained fear of being left or abandoned. His distress includes a crippling fear of hospitals and a deep mistrust of medical professionals, and - in the absence of a steadying anchor - leads to a complete refusal to venture out of his safety zones. In Season 4, after Peter is erased from the timeline, we see a glimpse of what Walter would have been without him - a fretful, harsh man who is afraid of leaving his laboratory under any circumstance, and is even more deathly afraid of being recommitted. Without an anchor to weigh him to the world in front of him, Walter slips further and further into the realm of theoretical science and further away from reality.
He also experiences an extreme guilt complex in regards to losing his son and to crossing over to the other universe and stealing Peter Bishop from his real father. Despite being atheist, he believes that all the bad things in his life are a punishment from God for going against the natural order of things. He believed that all the terrible things that happened were his fault and his suffering was justified, even as he searched for a sign that he could be forgiven.
After the events in The Firefly, Walter is better about letting people go (especially Peter, whom he clung to in a desperate, almost obsessive way), but he still feels extreme duress at the thought of losing anyone. His emotions run rampant with him and he is very much at their mercy. He can be elated one moment, but should anything interrupt him or his routine, he can immediately grow irrationally angry and snappish. His moods are extremely changeable and it often takes an outside source to soothe or calm him down from his reactive episodes.
Anything else?: He kept a cow in his lab at Harvard, called Gene. If possible, he would like to have his cow back. He likes his cow.
SAMPLES
First Person:
Attention, villagers of Luceti! My name is Walter Bishop, your fellow inmate in this... [He almost sneers the word.] fishbowl. I was wondering if anyone here could spare a few moments of their time? We do seem to have an overabundance of it - almost inversely proportional to the amount of technological advancements our overlords deem fit with which to provide us. [He huffed, clearly displeased with what was available here.] I wouldn't be opposed to the immense amount of free time, mind you, but Gene still hasn't arrived and none of the cows on the farms here are as well-tempered as she. You have no idea how - how difficult it is to find such a lovely cow as Gene is. She was most amicable with the experiments and... All that work, put on hold indefinitely. Such a shame.
...
O-Oh, yes! As for my announcement... -- This is quite the handy little thing, isn't it? Amazing that the other universe never thought of anything like this, but then I suppose they had their ear pieces and their subcutaneous tracking devices and-- ...Right!
I require three volunteers of able body and mind - mental stability is of no consequence, of course, so long as your brain is still intact - for a certain experiment, the details of which can be discussed below. Oh, but if you're missing a limb or have some other deformity of the brain or otherwise, you aren't out of the running! I just need to ask you a few questions before you're considered as a candidate. In fact, perhaps a deformity of some sort could be an interesting experiment of its own... [He clears his throat, remembering that he has to be polite.]
Thank you!
Third Person:
"Zero."
It had been quite awhile since he had had problems sleeping. Once, back long ago - it seemed so far in the past now, it was almost like a dream (a bad dream, a nightmare that lasted far too long, with consequences he still constantly had to fight) - he had hidden in closets and bathtubs and any other enclosed space because he couldn't sleep. Peter had scolded him and tried to pull him out, but it wasn't until that night, after a particularly trying case, that Peter had agreed to sing. Walter had hated that song at first, but after seventeen years of it, he couldn't sleep without it. Now, in an apartment filled with silence, driven from his world and separated from everything familiar to him, he found himself hiding in the closet again. Belly would have laughed at him, except that Belly was dead now. Truly, fully dead, and there wasn't any coming back from that. The dog wouldn't hunt, the experiment failed, but things had gone back to normal - relative normalcy for them.
"One."
Now, however, he had been torn from home. The sounds here were foreign. The communal living space and sterile walls too much like the uncomfortable memories drilling their way back through his brain to let him relax. Even his own shadow was unrecognisable to him with the new additions on his back, making it hard to sleep like he wanted, reminding him constantly of how he was so very far away from his lab and everyone he cared for. It reminded him of how very far away he was from Olivia and Astro and Gene.
And, most of all, from Peter.
He wondered, only for the briefest moment, if this was how Peter had felt when Walter had stolen him. This world was not his, but now he had to live in it.
"One. Two."
Walter hugged himself tightly, bowing his head against his knees as he tried to calm himself - something he'd never been very good at by himself. It had been eight days since he had arrived in Luceti. Eight long days of conversations with people he didn't know and eight long days of being without his lab and his friends and family. It had been eight tedious days as he tried everything he could think of with the limited technology available to him to break a hole in space and cross back to his own world, and failed. And now it had been eight heartbreaking days of putting on a strong face when he had to go outside as he realized he was trapped, and that no one would be looking for him. No one even knew he was missing if what the people here had to say was true.
"Thre--"
Someone padded down the hallway on the way to the kitchen and Walter froze, shaking as he listened. Unfamiliar footsteps meant any myriad of things and he waited for them to come into his room, invade his private space, and take him away. The footsteps disappeared, however, and he slowly relaxed, lowering his head again. In the quiet that followed, he began reciting numbers to himself, his mumbling echoing through the empty apartment. He had to sleep tonight if he hoped to face the villagers tomorrow and continue his experiments in order to get home. Peter would tell him to sleep.
"Three."
Peter wasn't here, though. He didn't know Walter was missing.
"Five."
There was someone else in his place, worse than Walternate. Simply a stop in time that no one would miss or know, or know to miss.
"Eight."
He had to sleep or he would never find his way home. He had to sleep so he could think, because there had to be a solution to this, somewhere. He just needed to open his mind.
"Thirteen. Twenty-one. Thirty-four."
But first he had to quiet it so it could rest. "Fifty-five. Eighty-nine. One hundred forty-four..."