Season of the Fix -- Fringe

Call me a glutton for punishment, or even a tad masochistic, but I sure do love stories that confuse the fuck out of my noggin. Lead me down one narrative path only to detour toward some unforeseen one that boggles my mind. Sometimes never even landing at one sensical destination. This is the rationale I use to justify my heavy love for David Lynch films, and shit like Memento.

The press-ignited promise that the new Fox show Fringe would be such a televisial feast was enough to have me plopped, ass-first, on my couch to watch its pilot ep. Its the latest brainchild from that creative nerd J.J. Abrams (Lost, Cloverfield, next year's new Star Trek movie), meaning naturally that expectations are a smidge on the high side over here. Did it live up to my self-imposed hype?

Undecided still, I am.

Background check: So there's this really-crazy shit that goes down on a nighttime flight, myseriously. With the plane appearing as if its about to go down, crash in a blaze of glory, the passengers flip into a frenzy, but what seems to be an impending crash ends up being something else altogether. And wild. The passengers' faces start melting, or forming pussy burn-like lesions all over. It's tough to tell, exactly, as the lights keep flashing and its tough to get a clear view. But this makes it all the more cool to watch.

Fast forward to a pair of FBI agents, the female named Olivia Dunham and the dude named John (played by some guy who looks a helluva lot like Thomas Jane), secretly in love, cuddling post-whoopie in some seedy motel room. They each are called to the plane scene, the plane hasn't crashed, though. It landed itself smoothly, as a result of some new technology where planes can self-operate. Inside, though, lie the decomposed, nasty-looking corpses of all the passengers. And from here, a whole bunch of head-scratching shit goes down. Dunham's lover/colleague is burned in a botched arrest attempt, after a shady dude who could be responsible for the plane debacle ends a chase scene by blowing both agents skyhigh, fireballs full of the same contaminated chemicals that turned those passengers into comatose lepers, leaving loverboy hospitalized with a similar decomposition, while Ms. Dunham just has a facial flesh wound. No heebie-jeebie juice got into her blood.



After some investigating, Dunham finds a link between both incidents: some former doctor, Walter Bishop, who's now locked in an insane asylum. The blonde cutie then tracks down the nutjob's son, Peter (played by Dawson's Creek has-been possibly come back, Joshua Jackson), so she can question him in the asylum. Sucks for everybody involved, though, being that Peter hates and resents looney-tunes-Walter.

Things moved along swiftly, not exactly leaving me floored or pinned to the tube, but compelled just enough to not change the channel. But fortunately, the final moments brought about a pretty unexpected twist that played out quite well, and planted some seeds of possible-dopeness that I'll now have to keep watching to see if they blossom into a quality series.

Such as, just what in the hell is this Massive Dynamic company up to? And will Abrams turn Massive Dynamic into another Dharma Initiative, with fake commercials and websites, the whole nine? I hope not, 'cause that'd sure be unoriginal as a mug.

This is all a bit wordy, I know, but its somewhat mandatory to be so. Fringe has layers of shit going on, mostly intriguing and some snooze-worthy. I must say, I went into the show hoping to be instantly grabbed, just like the first episode of Lost did some however-many years ago. Fringe is definitely worthy of further viewing, but like True Blood last night, the show has only hooked me so much. The jury is out.

If it continues to up its sci-fi/X-Files-ish ante, I'll be one happy camper. Chick who plays Olivia Dunham, a first-time-in-my-eyes-at-least actress named Anna Torv, seems more than capable to anchor the show, and Pacey-himself, Josh Jackson, isn't as annoying as previously thought. For now, at least.



A smile is on my face. I now have two new idiot-box shows to invest time and energy into....maybe I should try out a new half-hour comedy sitcom next, instead of only dark trippy hour-long genre drama. We shall see. Ohhhh.....we shall see.