J.J. Abrams Does It Again With “Fringe”
If there has been one new show that’s been worth watching this fall, it’s “Fringe.” Immediately, I can think of two reasons why I knew this series would be good: 1) J.J. Abrams produces it and 2) his main writing team is Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci (the guys who made “Transformers” a ridiculously good movie). Basically, the show deals with the idea that there is something referred to as “the pattern,” a series of strange sort of paranormal events occurring as a result of someone using the world as their own personal lab rat. Yes, this does sound lame, but no, it is not.
The first episode deals with the FBI opening a program to deal with the pattern after a bizarre occurrence causes FBI Agent Olivia Dunham’s boyfriend, FBI Agent John Scott, to fall into a coma while his skin became transparent. With only a short time to get to the bottom of this, her superior, Agent Broyles, explains the pattern to her and gives her the name of Dr. Walter Bishop, a scientist who has spent the last 17 years in an institution. To get to him though, she must recruit his estranged son, Peter Bishop, a young prodigy who can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Together, they must find a way to save John Scott and catch whoever was behind the events that set this into motion. They sort of find answers, but those answers sort of wind up leading into more questions (typical J.J. Abrams). Those answers/questions are found at forward-thinking company called Massive Dynamics, owned by former colleague to Dr. Bishop, the mysterious and as yet unseen William Bell.
Basically, the end of the first episode proved that all was not what it seemed, as once John Scott was saved it was revealed he was a bad guy and was involved with Massive Dynamics. Most of the episodes that followed the premiere involved other strange paranormal events such as a child being conceived only to be born minutes later and to die of old age after barely hours or a man with electrical charges running through him that could… cause an elevator to drive full force into the ground or a group of prodigies working towards solving an equation through music or math. For the most part, the show has run based on self-contained episodes, which has been really cool, but the writers also use frequent appearances by Massive Dynamics to develop the company as a sort of antagonist behind most or all of the events investigated by the Fringe Science team.
Most recently, we’ve been introduced to the shady Mr. Jones, an inmate in a German prison. A few episodes back he helps Olivia by giving her a formula in exchange for information , but in last night’s episode he resurfaced, apparently involved with a group of guys who had been stealing several safety deposit boxes from large city banks (they used some sort of technology to vibrate the atomic structure of the bank vault door so that they could walk through it) which contained parts of a time/space machine. The episode concluded with the group pulling Mr. Jones through space from the German prison to an airfield in Pennsylvania.
Mind you, a lot of what happens in this show sounds completely off the wall, but one of the things I appreciate about this show the most is that they manage to deal with these strange things in scientific, almost realistic ways. Dr. Bishop always seems to have some complex scientific theory for the cases they encounter, which Peter usually translates into plainer more logical English for Olivia and the other agents, as well as the viewers. Besides that, Dr. Walter Bishop is a great character! He’s such an over the top character (he apparently has a habit of reciting the Fibonacci sequence in his sleep) and has quite a few quirks about him (he never seems to remember this girl Astrid’s name despite working with her everyday; he’ll get off track and no matter how pressing the case they are working on is, will suddenly insist on having cotton candy).
“Fringe”…it’s not too late to start catching up, and I highly recommend this one.
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Dec04
