The Fringe Pilot: Where People Turn Into Goo

The story of my relationship with Fringe is...well, actually not that complicated. When the show premiered, Dave and I watched it, and while it had some interesting elements, it was 2008: all of North America was falling out of love with Lost, another J.J. Abrams-produced sci-fi show that, by that late stage, had pretty much confirmed that no one working on it knew where the fuck it was going. After the earlier disappointment of the end of Abrams's Alias, were we willing to take a flyer on a third genre show that would, in all likelihood, also fall apart? At the time, the answer was no, and after that pilot, we never watched again.

But then, like maybe a year or so later, people I liked and respected started talking it up. John Noble's Walter Bishop was turning into a beloved breakout character; Anna Torv's Olivia resisted TV-lady-crime-fighter clichés. Best of all, I heard, Fringe was like a sideways Lost spinoff that only concerned itself with the aspect of Lost that I had cared about the whole way through: shadowy corporate conspiracy-meets-pseudoscience. HMMMMM.

Over the years, whenever Dave and I ran out of things on the DVR, I would suggest that we try Fringe again, but for a long time when I'd look, it wasn't streaming on Netflix. When it finally made its début in 2013, Dave didn't care anymore. And then there were always other shows that were new that took precedence -- you know how it is. Now it's summer again and I feel like the time is right. SORRY, BOOKS.

Watching the pilot again, I actually had a hard time remembering what had turned me off in the first place, other than the stink of Lost. Sure, the interstitial blipverts of pointless freaky shit and the floating datelines were kind of self-conscious, but everything else about it is pretty fun! Walter is, obviously, the best thing about it. Nerdbait-y lines like "Let's make some LSD" or "Just a squirt" would sink a lesser genre actor: anyone who ever played a villain on Chuck or Smallville would lean into those in the hopes of seeing them on t-shirts at Comic-Con for the next ten years. But John Noble is so good at playing Walter's tragedy. There's a fine line between "crazy" and "haunted," and Walter's been living on it for the past couple of decades.

Torv's Olivia is also better than I remembered. I can't really put my finger on why I buy her as an actually tough FBI agent, unlike most of the supermodels in super-tight pants who normally play them on TV; there's something about her impatience with the idiots around her that rings true -- plus the fact that she's such a fresh face on the medium lets me accept her character without any baggage.

As for Joshua Jackson's Peter: I mean, he's a super-smart Pacey Witter, right down to the daddy issues (though, yes, they're slightly more complex here than the standard-issue bully dad he was assigned on Dawson's Creek). Nothing could be wrong with that.

The pilot also does a pretty economical job of teasing the larger mytharc story: the big Nina Sharp scene is just enough of a taste of the Massive Dynamic involvement, and Broyles's litany of crazy-ass occurrences he wants Olivia to investigate is pure Taranip. Each of those stories could be its own episode? Yes please!

Maybe it's just the many much shittier genre shows I've sampled since, from Intelligence to Revolution to Helix, that makes Fringe look so great by comparison...but whatever the reason, it does look great to me now. Thank you, Xenu, for letting me live in an age when technology has made getting back on board so very easy.