So what the heck is going on in Boston these days? I know it’s a party town and all, but an awful lot of unexplained things seem to go on between all the binge drinking and Red Sox games, like people getting stuck halfway through walls, exploding radioactive brains, heart-hugging genetically engineered snakes and killer imaginary butterflies.
Fringe asked a lot of us hapless viewers right out of the gate, all festooned with the name of television heavyweight J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias); a man known for playing silly buggers with his fan base. Audiences quickly found themselves immersed knee-deep into multiple layers of conspiracies, and they hadn’t even wiped their feet yet. Now, with a half season in the bag, this is the perfect time to stop and reflect on the experience thus far. Has it been fulfilling television, or are we just having smoke blown up our… well, you know.
Spoilers and recaps below the jump.
Well, credit where credit is due. Fringe has already passed its first hurdle: not have Fox cancel you. The show has been confirmed for a full season, which is more than most adventurous genre shows get on the network. Strong ratings in the ever-important 18-49 demographic means we’ll get some small measure of closure—at least until they add a whole slew of new questions. This is, after all, a show from the infuriating maniacs who brought us Lost. We love them, sure; but it’s that special kind of “love” where you want to shove broken glass under their fingernails every time the credits roll on their television shows.
We’ve already recapped the first five episodes, so if you haven’t caught up, now is a perfect time. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Back? Okay, good.
A young woman inside a diner explodes, which is odd enough behavior to call in Olivia and her team to investigate. Walter discovers broken capsules within her body with traces of radiation, indicating that the woman had been unwittingly weaponzied into an exploding microwave. Is this a drug trial gone wrong or somebody looking to make some money on the black market? If you think it’s the first option, then go back and watch the first five episodes again.
Things complicate when Olivia and her team realize there is a second victim, a participant of an experimental treatment gone awry by unscrupulous testers using humans as live guinea pigs for a mysterious “client”. This may or may not be David Esterbrook, a bigwig pharmaceutical researcher and a man with massive pull in Washington. After Olivia tries to take Esterbrook on directly, Broyles sweeps in to smack her back in line. Good thing Olivia’s the stubborn type.
Broyles is alarmed when one of his best agents, Mitchell Loeb collapses to the ground suffering cardiac arrest. It turns out the reason for the arrest is a giant freaking worm in his chest, wrapped inexorably around his internal organs. Walter is brought in for a look and immediately declares his love. He’s a funny guy like that.
After digging into the creature’s DNA, the team discover a secret coded message in the genetics, spelling out ZFT—an organization that agent Loeb was investigating in Europe prior to his collapse. Olivia is sent to Germany to interview an imprisoned man, David Robert Jones, who may hold the key to the agent’s survival. Problem is, Jones will not speak to Olivia until he gets to talk to a college back in America, Joseph Smith—the same man the FBI just shot dead in a raid.
After a young musical prodigy is kidnapped from under his father’s nose, who was hypnotized by a Christmas tree (kinda) Walter finds a connection between the mysterious flashing lights and a story he heard from a fellow mental institute patient, Dashiell Kim, a mathematical genius who had a similar experience. Since Kim is inaccessible to visitors, Walter (reluctantly) volunteers himself to return to the institution as a patient. Peter is concerned for his father’s well-being, which surprises everyone.
Meanwhile, the young child is being held captive by a mysterious woman who has the ability to influence and manipulate his memories, bringing back to life his dead mother. The boy keeps playing the same song over and over on the piano, a song that bears mathematical similarities to a formula that Kim used to scrawl again and again in the institution. Walter tries to understand the connection to save the boy, but things go bad when the institution decides not to release Walter on his own recognizance.
Olivia and her team receive a call from the most unlikely of places, Massive Dynamic, after an employee gets attacked by a swarm of invisible killer butterflies and throws himself out a window. Walter examines the body and determines the wounds come from within the body, as if he was cut from the inside out. The case has hit a dead end, until Olivia gets an email from an unexpected source: her dead boyfriend. The tip leads Olivia to an underground location full of hallucinogenic toads.
Desperate to understand her strange connection to her deceased lover, Olivia makes another journey inside the dream tank, to Walter’s consternation. John’s memories trapped in Olivia’s brain seem to hold the secret to the case. Despite Walter’s insistence that she would be unable to communicate with John, he seems to notice her—which is absolutely impossible.
A team of bank robbers in Philadelphia break into a bank using an unexpected method: walking right through the wall. Unfortunately, one of them gets stuck half way, and so Olivia and team are called in to investigate. Olivia recognizes the man and pays a visit to his wife, only to find that the memories of the man are in fact John’s, and not her own. The last trip down memory lane in the dream tank had some unexpected side effects.
The bank heists perpetrated by the mysterious thieves have been taking safety deposit boxes out of specific locations, which Walter realizes were his own, left years ago prior to his incarceration, containing parts to a machine that would allow—theoretically–someone to teleport and retrieve a person from any location in the world.
Fringe is a MacGuffin delivery device, pure and simple. Unlike Lost, which at least promises the (eventual) revealing of its secrets, Fringe makes no such promises. In fact, it seems to flaunt this in the faces of audiences, taunting them with enigmatic photographic images between commercial breaks, as if daring us to start obsessing. Whether you enjoy the show almost solely depends on how maddening you find this to be. If you must understand your television, then back slowly away with your hands raised cautiously—Fringe is not the show for you. On the other hand, if you’re just in it for the thrills, chills and a general creeping sensation of foreboding, like cold water down your neck, stick around, because methinks things are going to get even chillier.
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realize that Massive Dynamic, everyone’s favorite monolithic corporation / weapons contractor / conspiracy incubator is deeply involved in the chaos that runs rampant through Olivia’s team on a daily basis, but their exact involvement has yet to be revealed. They have proven penchant for abducting dead FBI corpses and attempting to crack secrets out of them, but hey, who doesn’t? So far, my favorite twist is the suggestion that the Pattern might be little more than a gigantic smoke screen, a kind of Fox Mulder-style conspiracy dropped upon governments and scientists to keep them asking the wrong questions. While Olivia and the FBI chase around the Pattern, the players behind the scenes are free to do what they choose, because people are looking in the opposite direction. Oh, I do love me a good conspiracy.
One thing that is proving a bit tedious is the over-reliance on Walter as a catch-all, “deux ex machina” plot device to move conspiracies forward. So far, almost every episode without exception has had its second act kicked off by Walter suddenly getting a moment of lucid clarity, announcing that he has all the secret answers to solve the mystery, because (surprise!) he invented the technique back in the 1970s before he went crazy, and wouldn’t you know it, he just remembered this very second. And wouldn’t you know it, he just happens to have some vintage scientific equipment sitting around the lab ready to do the job. Lucky timing, wouldn’t you say? It was cute the first few times, but it’s getting a bit preposterous now. Here’s hoping we see the writers shake it up a bit.
I also definitely dig how Olivia is the “normal” one on the show, yet quite often shows signs of being nuttier than a fruitcake. Like the whole dead boyfriend thing, who we’re pretty sure is dead, except that his corpse is in possession of Massive Dynamic, and they’re poking around in his dead brain. Olivia already poked around in his dead brain, and now is in possession of information of interest, as well as an odd symbiotic overlapping of memories and experiences with her dead lover. And despite what Walter seems to think, she seems able to communicate with him. And he sends her emails. Unless they’ve got Blackberries in heaven, that’s going to be an interesting plot point to explain.
Where Fringe shows noticeable improvement in these last few episodes is the linking together seemingly unrelated incidents into an improbable string of events. Kind of like… a pattern (ooh!). Each episode is by design a standalone adventure, but the more attentive of us will begin to recognize themes, words and faces. Agent Loeb, who seems to have had ulterior motives in having a snake wrapped around his heart, shows up again as the man behind the mathematical equation plot, giving his previous inexplicable actions a purpose, which cumulates in the walk-through-walls device. A small detail to be sure, but we’re starting to see episodes strung together thematically for the first time beyond a simple, omnipotent “Pattern”. Loeb and David Robert Jones, whoever they turn out to be working for, are now recognizable faces in mischief making. The audience is finally getting information beyond what the characters are getting, and now we can be a half-step ahead, if we’re lucky.
Having stuck with Fringe, I think the show has worked out its kinks well. It doesn’t feel as cold, as dispassionate as it did when we started off chasing Patterns all about town. It’s still formulaic and obnoxiously twisting, but undeniably entertaining, and dollar for donuts probably the best guilty pleasure sci-fi dalliance on television—especially if you’re still pounding your head on the ground after Battlestar Galactica came back to air. The conspiracies lay on thick, but not chokingly so, and the level of self-referential mysteries are just clever enough to reward the faithful, but not maddeningly obsessive to alienate the casual viewer. Fringe has struck a good (if cheesy) balance between being mysterious and being annoying.
“Bound”, the new episode, airs tonight, and we’ll be back with a recap shortly thereafter to find out what happened to Olivia. Considering we last saw her kidnapped, and the new episode title, she’s probably not having any fun.
Tue, Jan 20, 2009
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