Pilot Review: Fringe

Fringe
Fox. Tuesdays at 9.
Cast: Anna Torv, Joshua Jackson, John Noble, Kirk Acevedo, Blair Brown, Lance Reddick, and Chris Britton

So, I was a little misled by the commercials for Fringe. All the promotional stuff I had seen for the show made it seem like a sci-fi “things going bump in the night” thriller type show. But it’s not really that. Yeah, there are a few things that go bump in the night, but overall, it’s more about evil corporations and science and stuff. More mythology based, I guess. Which, unfortunately, is not a good thing, since, at least in the pilot I saw, the mythology is far less convincing or interesting than the things going bump in the night.

(a few spoilers here and there)

The pilot starts out really promisingly. The highly-previewed stuff with the plane is all really cool, and the effects are really well done (particularly, one guys face melting off). But then, the show begins to focus less and less on occurrences like that and more and more on the investigating of occurrences like that. Which, don’t get me wrong, could be a really interesting show. However, the more it goes on, the less it focuses on the actual occurrence. Which, as I said earlier, is troublesome, because the plane is far more fascinating than anything else.

However, even if the show focused on investigating the plane, it would have been interesting. But it doesn’t. It focuses on Olivia Dunham (played by Anna Torv, hovering somewhere between mediocre and good), whose unconvincing boyfriend (played by Mark Valley, who has been much better) gets infected with the same thing that was on the plane, trying to save his life and find a cure. Which, with the help of a father and son science team (John Noble and Joshua Jackson, far and away the most interesting characters on the show), she manages to do (not before a completely bizarre sequence where she enters the consciousness of her dying boyfriend in order to see the face of the man who can save him). By the end of the pilot, thankfully, we don’t have to worry about their relationship (it ain’t movin’ forward), but I’m still left with the question of why, in a show steeped in sci-fi and mythology, you focus on your protagonist’s love life in the pilot.

That said, Fringe isn’t a complete bust. Like I said earlier, John Noble and Joshua Jackson are both really interesting characters, and if the focus shifts to them, the show could seriously improve. Lance Reddick, spouting mythology and orders like he was Matthew Abbadon on Lost (Oh wait, he is), also does a decent job. And some of the morsels of mythology are interesting. The show gets interesting in the last 15 minutes, but until then, the pilot, at least, is a little bit of a mess. JJ Abrams, you’re letting me down. I’m going to give it a second chance, but it’s right on the border. There’s interesting bits here and there, but there’s large chunks of the show that seem to serve no purpose. Those little bits just slightly outweigh the large chunks, which is why Fringe gets

Rating: I’ll Give It Another Shot