Review: Fringe
Ah, out with the old, in with the new. The television season is dead, long live the next television season. And to prepare for it, I’m going to review new shows as the pilots become available.
Fringe; Fox, Tuesdays 9:00 PM
Strap on, kids…it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
The latest J.J. Abrams (Alias, Lost) series with what promises to be an epic (and, if Alias is any indication, confused and contradictory) mythology is Fringe, airing this fall on Fox. The only problem is…we’ve seen almost all of this before, and unfortunately, much better.
The two-hour pilot opens with a passenger on an international flight needing to use his insulin pen-injector, which for no good reason causes his skin to sloff off…and for good measure, everyone else on the flight is affected as well. After some…er…jaw-dropping special effects (oh, c’mon, you knew I couldn’t resist that one) and the opening credits, the focus shifts to a bedroom where co-workers and FBI agents Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv, Australian series The Secret Life of Us) and John Scott (Mark Valley, Boston Legal, Keen Eddie) are busy gettin’ busy when their cell phones go off.
 (Yeah, I know he’s no lead, but I like the guy) |
Seems the plane has landed itself at Boston’s Logan Airport (first airport to have the new automatic landing gizmo that was necessary to get a plane full of dead people with no skin onto the ground so our heroes could go through it in HAZMAT suits), and the kids were called to the scene. After a confrontation with the new Homeland Security honcho who has taken over the investigation (Lance Reddick, The Wire), Olivia is allowed to join the team in the investigation. When Olivia and John are checking out a tip at a storage facility and find the same man who was on the plane, an explosion places John’s life (and skin) at risk.
It’s up to Olivia to save the day and her lover, by searching the Internet and finding the locked-up wacko Walter Bishop (John Noble, Lord of the Rings), apparently the only person on the planet who can save him. But she can’t get to him without the help of his hunky son Peter (Joshua Jackson, Dawson’s Creek), also a genius and a man on the run, which leads her to Iraq (yeah, I know, it’s a stretch, but trust me this ain’t the worst, see the self-landing gizmo above).
Anyway, suffice it to say that things get weird from there (!), involving shared dream states with the help of some acid (LSD, I mean) and a weird consipracy called, “The Pattern,” initially mentioned by Nina Sharp (Blair Brown, Altered States from which they stole some stuff, and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, one of the best series ever), an executive with Massive Dynamics, a company created by William Bell who was an officemate of Walter before Walter got locked up as a wacko and, we assume, the man who stole the brilliant Walter’s Fringe science…and don’t forget the obvious yet poorly-revealed “twist” thrown in apparently to shock the viewer while really only eliciting a yawn…I even predicted the final line “reveal,” although I had the perpetrator wrong clearly giving our heroes credit for more intelligence than they actually have. Looks like I was the only one who was listening to Walter ramble on…and I have to admit I’m not sure exactly why I was in the first place.
Ok, ok, by now you’re probably a little confused. Me too. So let’s suffice to say there are forces at work Olivia must investigate, things outside the “normal” science we are told about in the Sunday supplements…science that is on…the Fringe. (Cue mysterious music.)
If you haven’t caught on yet, this series is a twenty-first century version of The X-Files, without the clever writing, snappy dialog, or any real chemistry between actors. Ms. Torv’s voice sounds for all the world to me like Lena Headey’s (The Sarah Conner Chronicles), that is if Ms. Headey had the ability to impart any emotion whatsoever into her monotone. She (Ms. Torv) is serviceable in the role, but hardly a stand-out - while mildly attractive, she’s not your usual series cupcake, yet she doesn’t project any real sense of intellect or strength in the character, either, getting her way more by whining than anything else. Hum…come to think of it, in many ways, “serviceable but hardly a standout” pretty much sums up the entire program. It’s an interesting diversion for a little while, but we’ve seen all of it before, and much better…it’s like the television equivalent of cotton candy; sweet, yet ultimately unsatisfying. The plot is way too convoluted, and there are too many unnecessary distractions - for example, I despised the huge in-frame location markers. These guys must have seen the opening to an episode of Heroes and got placard-envy, because they over-use computer-generated location notices like nothing I have ever seen before. I was actually apoplectic when they pulled a reverse-shot and showed us a helicopter formation through the giant backwards “Q” in “IRAQ” as if the d*mned thing were actually hanging there in the sky over Bagdad - I honestly believe they became so enamored with the stupid computer-generated things to completely lose their friggin’ minds. I understand why they didn’t want to make simple location markers (I mean, why point out the similarities to The X-Files any more than the entire plotline of the show already has?), but dear lord, people, come up with something original instead of stealing from yet another series, Heroes, and then beating the theft to death! Rule #1: Because a thing can be done does not mean it should be done: Don’t make dogs talk badly in baked bean ads, and do not plaster “Harvard University” in huge CGI letters across some Canadian college’s building. Neither are convincing, and both are just annoying.
Finally, don’t forget this is from J.J. Abrams, which means any mythology they create will last only as long as it manages to retain the interest of the writers, at which point they’ll throw it all away and start over (anyone remember SD-6 in Alias, which was there, then gone, then rebuilt with a new name, then destroyed, then…ah, who bothered watching that long?), so investing serious time or energy in the series would probably be a mistake.
But that would imply there was anything to invest in here…and there isn’t. You’d be better off watching the DVDs from the first few years of The X-Files; while the special effects here are much better, the storyline is a whole lot sillier without the gentle humor.