The Big Picture

• Meghan Markle's role as FBI agent Amy Jessup in Fringe was short-lived but impactful.
• Markle's sudden absence from Fringe allowed her to join the cast of Suits as Rachel Zane.
• Fringe delved into supernatural concepts like possession and soul magnets, allowing Jessup's impact to be felt even after Markle's departure.

On Suits, Meghan Markle’s paralegal-turned-attorney is her best-known role, but there was a chance that wouldn’t have been the case. A few years before the legal series aired, Markle seemed to have a steady role on Fringe — that is, until the Duchess of Sussex vanished as quickly as her character was introduced. The Season 2 premiere introduced a new threat to the Fringe Division team, which left FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) in critical situations. This gave room for the introduction to Markle, who is thrown into the action and rises to the heroic level of the main leads. While Markle’s time with Fringe Division didn’t last long, the sci-fi series found a way to continue what her character set up.

Before Playing a Lawyer, Meghan Markle Was in the FBI

In “A New Day in the Old Town,” junior FBI agent Amy Jessup (Markle) seems to be a major new player in the works. In many ways, she is an audience surrogate to catch everyone up to speed on the bizarre events Fringe Division investigated over the first season. She’s the first at the scene of a strange car crash. One of the damaged vehicles belongs to Olivia, who is not inside, while the doors are locked, the seat belt is buckled, and the airbags have been deployed. Jessup finds Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) to be unhelpful when he arrives, someone who wants his questions answered, not the other way around. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate petulance, Mr. Bishop,” she replies. Peter is aggravated, much like TV fans who also want answers about where the hell Olivia is. It’s a strong way to introduce this new agent who doesn’t back down. Suddenly, Olivia is shot out of the windshield as if the immobile car were in motion. Welcome to the strange world of Fringe, Agent Jessup.

She joins the team, tracking down the other driver who ended up being a shapeshifter assigned to target Olivia. But the Fringe Division is one step behind; the shapeshifter has already made it to the hospital and taken over the body of a nurse (Simone Kessell). Torv got to play Olivia as more visibly shaken than she ever has been, while Markle's Jessup is the one to stop the shapeshifter from their second attack. In a role that is simply credited as “Nurse,” Kessell doesn’t waste any minute she is on camera as the shapeshifter. Her eyes water up as her whole body is filled with desperation to see the assassination through to the end.

In this premiere episode, religious beliefs are an important character trait for Jessup. In her free time, she compares several past Fringe cases to Biblical passages, putting down ominous notes like “Eat the Flesh,” a condensed version of the 19:18 passage from the Book of Revelation. She returns in the next episode for a short appearance where, inside a suspect’s house, Jessup opens a small cabinet to find a Holy Bible inside. Whatever could have happened with this storyline never did occur. Agent Amy Jessup disappeared from here on out, plucked out of the show, as mysterious as a case the Fringe Division got a call on. It wouldn’t be too long after her departure from Season 2 that Markle went to play her most famous role.

‘Suits’ Let the Duchess of Sussex Be a TV Star

In Suits, Rachel Zane starts as a paralegal for Pearson Hardman who grows over the following seasons, both in her legal career and her romantic relationship with Mike (Patrick J. Adams). Behind the scenes, Markle swapped out one show with a lead character who has photographic memory for another. Mike could file information internally upon learning it the first time, while Olivia is known to recall numbers from her past or current cases. While the USA legal series didn’t play a big part in Markle’s short stay on Fringe, it did free her up to join the cast. Season 2 of Fringe was in 2009, whereas Suits' first season wasn’t until 2010 when it went by the title, A Legal Mind. Agent Jessup’s sudden absence didn’t go unnoticed in 2009, either.

Originally, it was to be a recurring part, which ended up not happening. Fringe producer Jeff Pinker told Entertainment Weekly that Markle’s character didn’t have any specific “length of time” to her next appearance, adding, “[But] we’re really trying to tell stories about our main characters… we want to get deeper with them, so we don’t have a lot of time to go into the FBI. I think our fans really want to get to know our [core] characters more and that’s what we’re endeavoring to do this year.” Although it might be odd the religious direction Jessup would have added, the sci-fi series did follow up in other ways.

Science and Faith Clashed on ‘Fringe’ for Meghan Markle's Jessup

“Unearthed,” an unaired episode of Season 1 released awkwardly during Season 2, involves resurrection and a possession. A teen girl is taken off life support, but awakens, screaming out the launch codes to a nuclear submarine. Then she speaks Russian, without having known the language prior. But do you know who speaks Russian? A Navy officer, who is found murdered. To keep it less supernatural, the Fringe team figures out the officer was exposed to heavy radiation prior to his death. That somehow let his consciousness take over the girl. In Season 3, another possession episode uses the concept of soul magnets. These microscopic devices can attract the consciousness of someone after death. Walter sets out to make this work, hoping it will bring his old lab partner back, played by none other than sci-fi icon Leonard Nimoy. What followed sees Nimoy’s character taking over Olivia’s body for a few episodes, having Anna Torv do an impression of the actor’s gravelly voice. It’s one of the weirder storylines for sure — even weirder in how it kind of worked, the success owning plenty to Torv’s talents.

How could soul magnets be possible? Walter explains that “A person’s consciousness. Their soul is energy. And energy cannot be created or destroyed.” It blurs the line between the supernatural, and to the show’s credit, it understood what it was doing too. After hearing Walter, a character states out of bafflement, “Life force? Uh, you mean like a soul? Is that even a scientific concept?” Later in Season 3, Peter is gravely injured. Unable to help his son, Walter visits the hospital’s prayer room, leading to a small, quiet character moment in which actor John Noble gives a stellar performance. Walter sits down in a pew, hands folded, his face breaking into a sob, as he seeks help he knows he cannot give to Peter.

Meanwhile, Season 3 ends with a storyline that includes a terrorist group called the End of Dayers who want to deliver nothing but destruction around them. Like Kessell did in her small role back in Season 2, Brad Dourif is one of the main terrorist leaders, playing the role with remorse and determination for the next attack. The End of Dayers aren’t a direct reference to what Jessup wrote down, but it indirectly returned to what she was researching, her notes and this group’s name belonging to the Book of Revelation.

In an interview with Variety, Markle spoke about anxieties related to her acting career around the time Fringe and Suits happened:

“For me, I had tried for so long to land on a show, filming all these pilots, wondering if they would get picked up. All of Season 1 on Suits, I was convinced I was going to get recast. All the time. It got to a point where the creator was like, ‘Why are you so worried about this?’”

The role on Suits worked out much better, that’s for sure. A recurring character like Agent Jessup might have added too many religious elements to the sci-fi series, and the faith-centric episodes did creep close to jumping the shark. Without a doubt, it would have challenged the way the show explored the boundaries between faith and science. Amy Jessup might have disappeared, but the possessions, soul magnets, and End of Dayers did their part to fill in for the lost Fringe agent.

Fringe is available to stream on Prime Video in the U.S.

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