Fringe is soulless.
Fringe doesn’t have the ideological passions that made The X-Files into involving drama. Fringe doesn’t have the outsized teenage emotions that made Buffy such addictive soap opera. Fringe doesn’t allow its mystery to build the way Carnivale did, with tantalizing clues peeking at the edges of desperate lives. What Fringe has is the empty proficiency of acronym-o-vision like NCIS and CSI and L&O:SVU, although its final four or five episodes hint at an interesting series arc, which makes me wonder why the creators didn’t skip all this inconsequential bullshit and just start there.
Unhelpful is the lack of character depth. Anna Torv’s a radiant presence, but she’s rarely allowed any emotion beyond steely determination. Joshua Jackson comes in with the snarky asides. John Noble’s face suggests buried despair, but his dialogue grows repetitive: most of his dialogue alternates (with astonishing rigidity) between exposition and non sequiturs. Lance Reddick plays a shallow variation on his role from The Wire. They all rush about and race from scene to scene, breathless and focused. So help them, they'll get to the bottom of whatever the scientifically explicable threat there might be.
Drama!
It’s all so rapid-fire and quickly cut and photographed with a glossy sheen that it feels utterly empty. Will they stop the porcupine monster in time? Will they save their friend from gestating worms in his stomach? Will they resolve the current mystery so that they may never speak of it again? Will the current mystery carry no lasting impact on them? Will the mystery matter? Will the growing technological singularity doom us all?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, no, and maybe. God help me, this is all so rote that I can’t even remember Anna Torv’s character name. I can remember the Bishops, because their prickly father/son dynamic allows for some sort of human connection. And I recall isolated images from the show, like a sequence where the bad guy in the hat forces a rip in space-and-or-time. I also grant that the final few hours give everything a boost, with the story feeling linear instead of episodic, driven instead of endless. Noble has a great mini-arc at his old beach house (which allows for the inevitable wistful stares at the horizon).
Solid character work. It only took nineteen episodes.
In those final hours, the FBI's marginalized "Fringe Division" (it's not X-Files!) suspects that something fundamental connects this season-long series of scientific anomalies, which they dub "The Pattern." When they map out their bizarre discoveries, Anna Torv's character "solves" The Pattern in a matter of minutes. Just in time for the plot to require her to solve it. Whew. That was a close one. What the Pattern reveals is that the writers want to borrow liberally from Stephen King's Dark Tower, and so they do, although Peter Bishop name-drops Firestarter two episodes prior in a noble attempt at fanboy damage control.
It's ironic that JJ Abrams intended Fringe as an anti-Lost, a show where "you don't have to watch episodes one, two and three to tune into episode four." Does anybody who takes TV seriously still want that? After watching shows like Carnivale, and The Wire, and Breaking Bad, where everything is consequential, and watching a show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which cleverly folds its supernatural events into the heroes' anxieties, Fringe doesn't measure up. The show's not bad, but, for being a show about the inexorable advances of science, Fringe feels positively archaic.
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