The Good News and Bad News About Fringe

Posted by Dominic Messier Sep 28, 2008

Like most shows hitting the boards upon each new fall TV season, Fringe will have to keep up with the other newcomers fighting for space on the weekly TV grid, and will hope to receive a full season pick-up by the Fox network, so it can at least have a chance to explore its characters, lest they be canned too early, leaving millions of frustrated viewers wondering how it would have ended.

Having become the most expensive TV pilot to this point (even beating Lost in first ep expenses), Fringe seems to be mixing up some past TV show successes, in the faint hope that elements of some of them, such as Twilight Zone, X-Files, and a bit of Silence of the Lambs thrown in (albeit sans cannibalism), will rub off on this new concept, and bring back vewiers of the aforementioned cult classics.

That being said, any seasoned TV viewer can tell you that most of J.J. Abrams' TV projects have a tendency to turn into near instant cult classics, in that he loves to create mythological arcs behind his storylines, enticing the viewer to learn more about each character, and what their role in the show's endgame might be.

Take Lost, for example. In offering us a mysterious island with more questions than answers, the creators of the show have pretty much guaranteed their viewrship for the next three seasons, having gone as far as to alert the audience as to when the show will end, allowing for a sense of the finite, which is both welcome and dreaded, for thos who'd wish to spend more time with the melting pot of castaways. By referring back to the Dharma Initiative, The Others, and even the cryptic Jacob (not to mention the awesome Season Four finale), Abrams takes in his audience, hook line and sinker, andknows they'll want to find out what happened, when the new premiere airs next January.

Fringe contains some of the same elements, which I must say already have me interested into how things will develop. By having established by episode two that the show's resident mad genius, Dr. Walter Bishop (Lord of the Rings' John Noble) has knowledge in his brain of projects so nefarious and ahead of its time, that said knowledge could be devastating in the wrong hands, that you already know that the producers will keep delving into all fringe sciences, just on the simple excuse that Dr. Bishop may have come up with said concept in the 70's, for some unnamed government military project. I wouldn't be surprised if we see teleportation, invisibility, time travel, and necromancy, before sweeps week.

My earlier reference to Silence of the Lambs, comes from the show's pairing of FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), who must work with an extremely unstable scientist (Noble), whose genius transcends most humans, and who had to be instutionalized for his own good, for the last 17 years. This pseudo relationship, which would mirror the Clarice Starling/Hannibal Lecter chemistry seen in the film (again, without the criminal overtones), appeals to many fans, who wish to see this type of relationship once more.

As for why the showrunners have put Joshua Jackson in this show, is beyond me. Granted, his role as the genius's son, himself with an intellect almost matching his father's, may only have been written so as to explain how the showrunners may not want to have the older mad scientist running around, Mulder like, wen he can barely function in a normal societal context. As Agent Dunham's character fills in the Scully mold, a younger version of the FrankEinstein (not a typo -- he could really be a mixture of both) mold must be applied to the required Mulder counterpart. Now if only they could have him come up with better lines than "This is insane!", "My father's crazy, or haven't you noticed?", perhaps there is hope for Joshua Jackson.

For now, we sit and wait to see if Massive Dynamics (the advanced scientific conglomerate in the show's background --- think of an evil Dharma Company, or Stark Industries gone wrong) is behind all of these paranormal, unexplainable projects, and what made Walter Bishop so dangerous as to be thrown into the loony bin. I just hope they do so before some studio exec decides to call of this show, leaving us in the same spot as we did, wen we lost last year's Journeyman, Moonlight, New Amsterdam, with very little resolution to any of them after barely a season.

At least this time, they won't be canned because of a writer's strike.....