Last night I choked down the second episode of Fringe. I had planned on writing about the premier episode last week but it didn't leave me with the warm and fuzzies, so I decided to hold off until after this week's show to form my opinion. Unfortunately, warm and fuzzies are still MIA.
Before the season started, Fringe was touted as the next big thing from uber-geek J.J. Abrams. It was going to be the X-Files only better, with an emphasis on "fringe science". They also warned that the show would "jump the shark" frequently. This should have triggered my spider-sense, but I kept my hopes high.
So, on to the show. I'll summarize my issues with Episode #1: Joshua Jackson is a complete casting bust. I assume the main function of his character (Peter Bishop) is to provide comic relief and act as a bridge between his mad scientist father and the rest of the world. He only succeeds in making lame jokes in situations where even Mulder would cringe and generally being annoying. Agent Olivia Dunham barely seems competent to be a run-of-the-mill FBI agent let alone tackling these strange "Pattern" cases. Also, the music sucks. It sounds like they took the music from Lost and just shortened it by about ten seconds.
Ok, I feel better now. On to Episode #2. Again, last night's episode started off well just like the previous week's entry. Crazy super aging baby busting out of the stripper was awesome. Dr. Bishop is a trip and right now the only reason I'm still watching this show. We also have an unsolved case from Agent Dunham's past that looks promising. The suspense was starting to build as we see the killer take new victims while Dr. Bishop works on more crazy theories. But toward the end, things start to fall apart, badly. We jump the Great White Shark by taking pictures of a dead girl's retinas. The idea that the last thing you see is burned into your eyes is something I've heard of before but they take it to new ridiculous heights. Our intrepid team is going to get these images with with a borrowed electrical impulse camera from Massive Dynamics. No explanation of what the camera is supposed to be used for or why MD just loans it out like a library book, but we accept it'll take great afterimages from expired eyeballs. Then we get our revelation, an image from the dead strippers retina turns out to be a picture of a bridge! Wait, if this supposed to be what she last saw before dying wouldn't it be the face of the guy that killed her? Or the ceiling? No, it's the bridge that she looked at three hours earlier and couldn't even see from where she died. Ooookay.
It gets better. Later in the show, the last surviving victim goes into cardiac arrest after the bad guy's dad messes with her IV. She must be saved and Peter is just the man to do it. How will he restart her heart without a defibrillator? By wrapping some bare electrical wire around two giant washers and hitting the power, that's how! Of course, instead of burning two holes straight into her chest the makeshift device reboots her perfectly. These last twenty minutes were like watching and episode of Scooby Doo. If it wasn't for you darn kids, I'd have gotten away with it!
Now, I don't have a problem with a show coming up with crazy ideas as long as they're presented with a basis in reality and are taken seriously by the show itself. Unfortunately this is one area where Fringe fails. I was a huge X-Files fan and accepted some pretty crazy stuff from that show but they always made it seem like this stuff could really happen. When Fringe jumps the shark it's almost comical, the show is laughing about it as much as I was.. It's campy in its presentation and this has completely turned me off. I'll give this show a few more episodes to see if they can attempt to ground this thing in some semblance of reality. Otherwise, I'll be passing on Fringe and forgetting about the Pattern all of Massive Dynamics mysterious goodies.
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