September 9, 2008

By Brian Seiler

The Elevator Pitch:  What if the guy who made Lost did Eleventh Hour, but with The X-Files as inspiration?

The Cast:  Mostly unfamiliar.  Some may recognize Michael Abaddon from Lost or the Toby Maguire lookalike, but the rest are fairly fresh faces.

The Plot:  In what is becoming a tradition for Abrams paranormal drama, something bad happens on a plane in the first five minutes of the premier.  Specifically, everybody melts.  No foolin’.  Autopilot takes the plane down at the airport safely with its cargo of runny people juice and skeletons intact in Boston.  The United States government, rightly suspecting that perhaps an event capable of melting an airliner full of people could be the work of bad folks, send in a bunch of agents to investigate just what in the chicken fried hell happened, including our somewhat spindly female protagonist and her top sekrit lover (and apparently partner or very close associate, though I didn’t really pick up on that until an hour and change in).  After butting heads with Abaddon and a lot of awkward dialog to introduce the characters, scrawny and pal identify the event as some sort of chemical attack and trace the source to a storage facility, which the apparent perpetrator promptly explodes, dousing man-candy in chemicals that start to crystalize him from the outside and giving the show a reason to continue past the twenty minute mark.  Our plucky heroine, willing to do anything necessary to save her man and goaded into action by a somewhat-higher-placed government guy with a very clearly stated grudge against her for prosecuting some kind of fictional Tailhook scandal, follows the evidence back to a very crazy old scientist and his unreasonably priggish son.  She gets the son to spring the dad from the loony bin through careful application of a combination of coercion and sexual tension, the crazy doctor concocts an equally crazy method by which she can mind meld with her glassified boyfriend to get a lead on the guy that put the chemicals in the storage unit (mostly deduced, from what I can tell, from repeated viewings of Altered States), captures said guy, and cures boyfriend all in time for the dramatic twist at the end setting up our series regulars in a newly formed investigation unit specializing in fringe science.

The Aftermath:  You know, for a premier of what basically amounts to a paranormal procedural in the vein of The X-Files, the show went better than I think any viewer had any right to expect it to.  The characters, while perhaps not as likable and organic as the cast of Lost (the female lead, in particular, exudes approximately as much personality as a bundle of dried twigs, though that appears to be a fault of the character and not of the actress) are fun to watch and be around.  Crazy Scientist gets the best lines of the show, of course, and there’s enough trademark, out-of-place weirdness (the cow in the lab) to make the setting an enjoyable enough place to be for an hour a week, which is fortunate, since Fox is testing its 55 minute episode format (that’s right - only five minutes of commercials for every episode of Fringe) on the show.  That said, the dialog frequently twists itself far too hard to wring exposition out of the script (particularly in the early going) and the direction during some of the chase scenes was horribly disorienting and out of sequence.  As a series premier, I’m pleasantly surprised with what the cast and crew achieved and am looking forward to more this season.

The Downside:  J.J. Abrams could kill this show before it gets started without even doing anything.  Fringe will inevitably draw comparison to Lost (his other mega-popular science fiction hit), regardless of how inappropriate the comparison may be, and Fringe will invariably come out the loser in that situation.  Lost is a miracle of modern television that we may never see replicated again in the next decade.  On that show, Abrams, Lindeloff, and Cuse assembled a crack staff of incredible writers churning out quality episode after quality episode and embedded the sort of cryptographic oddities that drive the internet wild.  For crying out loud, Brian K. Vaughn, the man responsible for maybe the best new comic book series of the past decade, writes episodes for them, and his aren’t even the best they get.  By contrast, Fringe lacks the symbolic element (no mystical numbers turn up in the pilot - just your average giant corporate conspiracy) and the writers still have to prove themselves.  If the show can’t escape the shadow of its creator’s prior works to shine on its own, things could turn out bad.

The Forecast:  Hope for the best, but fear the worst.  The show follows House, which is nice, and will hopefully help it establish the audience it deserves.