Last season, when “Fringe” premiered, we weren’t interested. Not only did it look like a rip-off of the late, great “X-Files” (or at least the first few seasons before Duchovny and Anderson lost interest), but we were neck-deep in a seemingly unending commitment to the serialized mystery of “Lost.” As one fellow “Lost”-ie so aptly puts it, watching “Lost” is like dealing with a bad relationship: you hang in there hoping the good times outnumber the bad times, praying for a satisfying resolution deep down you know will never come. In short, the Cheese Fry was not willing to invest in another TV show from J.J. Abrams (is he a hack or a genius? we can't decide) that would spend five years teasing us with little reveals that raised more questions than they answered, slowly revealing a byzantine backstory that could not possibly be answered in a satisfying way because the writers were making it up as they went along.
But then we learned that last season’s "Fringe" finale involved the series’ big twist: parallel universes. As in, another universe – full of strange alien technology including shapeshifters – is plotting an invasion of our universe.
Hmm.
We tentatively sampled “Fringe” this season. If we’re not exactly hooked, we do look forward to the episodes. Our fears about the show being an “X-Files” rip-off were indeed well founded. The show alternates between stand-alone supernatural-mystery-of-the-week episodes and serialized parallel-universe mythology episodes. And a lot of the supernatural science stuff seems lifted wholesale from “The X-Files.”
But “Fringe” has a secret weapon and that is John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop, the brilliant, slightly agoraphobic scientist with a nebulous past involving black-book government projects in what the show calls “fringe science.” Today, he’s a consultant for the FBI unit charged with investigating paranormal activities (sound familiar?).
Part of Walter’s charm is surely his eccentric genius. He knows a lot about a great many subjects... but he also insists on keeping a live dairy cow in his lab so he can enjoy fresh milk... and he makes frequent mention of the many enjoyable psychotropic drugs he’s tried over the years. We stipulate that he’s the kind of quirky character, full of amusing idiosyncrasies, that exists more in TV shows than in real life. Doesn’t make him any less fun to watch.
More important, perhaps, is Walter’s vulnerability. He’s oftentimes like a helpless 8-year-old or, read another way, a senior citizen in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Walter is still grappling with the fallout of a recent mental breakdown (we think – that stuff was probably explained more clearly in season 1 but we get the gist) that’s turned him into a kind of child prodigy: all intellect, no common sense. Walter can suss out the inner workings of the human brain’s natural ability to receive psychic signals, but gets hopelessly lost after a bus ride and can't remember how to call for help. Walter deduces the natural cause of a seemingly unnatural spontaneous combustion death, but displays a petulant tendency to pout if he doesn’t get his way.
What this means is that Walter needs a guardian, someone to act as his parent. And that person, of course, is his estranged son Peter (Joshua Jackson), who as a boy Walter essentially abandoned as Walter threw himself into his work. The heart of the show is Walter and Peter’s rocky reconciliation as they draw boundaries, forgive past sins, and develop a familial bond that they never before shared (e.g. Peter calls his father by his first name). Those family moments form the heart of the show, just as the sexual tension of Mulder and Scully gave “The X-Files” its emotional center. Clever plotting may be fun, but it’s always the characters that make a show resonate with viewers.
“Fringe,” we’re sorry we didn’t watch you sooner. But that’s why they make DVD box sets.
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