Pages tagged “Fringe”

We're 5 episodes into Fox's Fringe, a show about the outer reaches of science—imaginable if not particularly feasible advances in areas like telekinesis, telepathy, reanimation, invisibility—and a global conspiracy to develop and test these advances, often with murderous results. Only it sounds more interesting than it is.

Here are five reasons that I'm taking a break from Fringe:

Fringe needed its enigmatic figure, and The Observer (Michael Cerveris) fits that bill quite nicely. Bald with no eyebrows. Impeccably dressed. Likes his roast beef sandwiches with precisely 11 jalepeños, though claims he wouldn't much be able to taste Dr. Bishop's rootbeer float. Present at three dozen instances of the pattern. Doesn't seem to age. Oh, and he can read Peter Bishop's thoughts.

Fox has paired its new show Fringe on Tuesday nights with House, and each show's best character is a somewhat misanthropic doctor. Both are played by foreign actors—Dr. House by Englishman Hugh Laurie and Dr. Bishop by Australian John Noble. Laurie's character is among the surliest anti-heroes on TV since E.R.'s Dr. Rocket Romano was abusing everyone he came in contact with. His bedside manner can best be summed up by words like "mocking," "cruel" and "uncaring." But even he never implanted human test subjects' blood with a metallic compound that would years later intercept transmissions through a biological communications network.

Maybe it was that the most enigmatic elements of Lost were doled out slowly after characters were more fully developed, and after much more familiar, but still extraordinary, crises were faced—a plane crash, kidnappings, even the unseen creature. The most unbelievable aspects and plot twists were doled out over several seasons after I was already hooked.

But already in Fringe, it’s less the events making up the Pattern that seem implausible—it's a sci-fi show, so I’m will to suspend disbelief that the bad guys could have developed a toxin that turns the flesh translucent or a growth accelerator that causes a fetus to develop into an old man in a matter of hours. It's the near-instantly developed methods our heroes use to solve the crimes. "What if we linked your brains so that you could communicate with the victim in the coma to find out who blew him up?" "What if we attached a monitor to the victim’s retina to capture the last images she saw before she died? You know, like Jules Verne posited." Rather than amazing scientific breakthroughs that will be used to further the progress of man, they’re presented as impressive one-offs. The main character in Fringe isn't FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), the mad professor Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) or his genius son Peter (Joshua Jackson). It's the dues ex machina who's neatly solved the puzzles of the first two episodes.

DHARMA Industry’s got nothing on Massive Dynamic, whose slogans ominously proclaim, “What don’t we make?” and “Your world is our world.” In J.J. Abrams brand new series Fringe, a large mysterious corporation is again at the center of conspiracy, intrigue and just plain weird occurrences. Fringe is the X-Files without the aliens, subtlety or skepticism—and with a healthy dose of grandeur. In the first episode that aired on Fox last night, “the pattern” of events that have occurred in the last year include small plane emitting high frequency that was responsible for the tsunami that killed 80,000—the same rough number that died in 2004 in Southeast Asia. No little mysteries involving a widow’s voodoo curse or serial killers tucked away in Amish communities here. The series opens with the flesh dripping off an entire airplane full of passengers and isn’t shy about introducing “mind control, teleportation, genetic mutation, reanimation”—all on a vast scale, and it’s up to FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) to stop it, with the help of Peter Bishop (played by my namesake—grrrr) and his father Walter (John Noble).

Related Links:
Fringe episode 1.4 "The Arrival" review
Fringe episode 1.3 "The Ghost Network" review
Fringe episode 1.2 "Same Old Story" review

With a new fall TV line-up, comes a new hope for quality shows. Call me an optimist if you like. I did have hope that Obama and McCain would offer a higher level of discourse to our political landscape, and we can all see how that's working out. But here are five shows that could maybe, possibly have an off-chance of being good: