Fringe S1 Review - non-spoilery
Sep. 18th, 2011 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatJust finished watching Fringe S1 on DVD. Will state the last two episodes were fascinating and the back story/plot I found somewhat innovative far more innovative than the two series people have compared it to - X-Files and Alias.
It's the bone I have to pick with the reviewer of Asking The Wrong Questions and others - while I agree that Fringe is choppily or unevenly written (the dialogue is a bit recycled and there's a blandness to the writing that screams boilerplate tv - but this is true of about 60% of the television shows on at the moment, and all the procedurals, so you sort of just shrug it off - Buffy or The Wire this ain't), I disagree that X-Files or Alias were "all that". I watched enough of both - to see that they grabbed quite a bit of their storylines from other tv shows that came before them, and often fell into recycled tv tropes (a la the bad nasty government conspiracy - which no one has done better than La Femme Nikita - actually Alias is taken hook line and sinker from La Femme Nikita - which was the better series), and their characters felt at times stunted or unable to evolve fully - since the writer was more interested in his mythos or world than his characters - thinking the world was this brand new shiny thing that no one had tried before. (Hardly). I mean come on - the government covering up an alien invasion or alien visitation? That's not been done before the X-Files? Two agents searching out strange paranormal and scientific stuff, one skeptical, one a believer - never done before the X-Files? Please. Go rent Koljack The Night Stalker, or numerous episodes of Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, there was one show that aired in the 1970s about two FBI agents searching for UFOS in a sort of Dragnet style. It's a popular trope - why do you think people loved it? Every time I read reviews that say the X-Files was the BEST!THING!EVER! and no one did that before and it opened things up and did new things, yadda, yadda, yadda - I think clearly you haven't watched that much American tv or you are under the age of 35. While Buffy felt ground-breaking to me, as does the Wire, Farscape, and Twin Peaks, the X-Files not so much. But to each their own, I suppose. The X-Files claim to fame is really one thing - it's amongst the few sci-fi series that broke into mainstream. It's not cult. It's mainstream sci-fi and fairly formulaic - I found it predictable and could often predict the dialogue coming out of Scully and Mulder's mouths - even though I didn't watch that much of it. The government is the bad guy, and is hiding things from us. (I found it to be highly unrealistic - I work for a government agency - we're not that organized. Hello? Bureaucracy and red-tape! Corporations are more likely to do us in than governments - although they suffer from the same problem. Work for enough procurement and planning departments, you figure this out - which is why I roll my eyes when I see it in stories as a theme. ) And Alias? I lost interest in that one fairly quickly as well - since by about the third season, I realized I'd already seen the whole storyline and plot in La Femme Nikita. It was a watered down and somewhat weak version of the USA cult tv series - that few people saw. Just as Moonlight felt like a watered down version of Forever Knight.)
While Fringe does borrow heavily from other shows - I've never seen a tv series play with parallel universes in quite that way. Usually they play with the concept, a la Voyager or the Star Trek tv series, then back off. We don't go that deeply into the science of it, the consequences, and what it means. The parallel universe idea is something that has always fascinated me. Far more so than time-travel. In fact my problem with time-travel - is there is no way you can do it without creating a pocket reality or alternate verse. The quantum physics won't allow it. I'm no physcist, but even I know that. Say you go back and kill Hitler or save President Kennedy? Then you change all the choices made from the point forward. It's like unraveling a knitted scarf and fixing a pattern you did then trying to recreate the patterns you completed and liked after you fix it - impossible. You have a new scarf. Or a story that you've written - you go back in your revisions and delete a few sentences - you have changed your story. I know I do it all the time. In most time travel stories - they deal with this contradiction by either making it impossible to change events, or demonstrating that the change was pre-ordained, ie - so and so was always meant to travel backwards and change this. Back to the Future is amongst the few time travel stories that defied logic and actually did rewrite the future in subtle ways. While hardly realistic, which is why Back to the Future felt more like fantasy than sci-fi to me, it was a fun take, and had the philosophical message that we can change our fate and the fate of others - nothing is written.
Fringe however goes a whole new route - it's not a time travel story, it's a parallel universe tale, much like Buckaroo Banzai - which along with Angel the Series, Torchwood and Doctor Who, is the only thing I've seen that's played with the idea of travel across dimensions. All three, though, haven't gone into as much detail or into as much depth as Fringe.
I can't say Fringe's science is on target, feels a bit off at times, like all tv shows - these are written by people with BA's/MFA's in English Lit, History, and/or Film Studies not physics, after all, assuming they have a degree at all. But they clearly did do some research.
If you want to try Fringe? The first season is spotty.
You have to wade through a lot of lack-luster and frankly Twilight Zonesque/X-Files style Monster Disease of the Week bits to get to the good stuff, although there are bits and pieces threaded in the Monster Disease of the Week bits that are sort of important to see. Example - Midnight which feels like a throw-away episode - isn't, the last twenty minutes are important. Unfortunately every time I tried Fringe in the past, I always hit upon the somewhat ooky and incredibly recycled Monster Disease of the Week plots. In fact after watching approximately 19 of them, I'm immune to the gross-out factor and don't find all that scary. It's set up predictably - much like House, The Closer, Bones, etc - where you see the "red shirt of the week" victim being set up for a fall within the first fifteen minutes or teaser. I really wish someone would break with the three act tv show style. Also Fringe even on DVD, feels choppy, due to all the act breaks for "commercials". The main difference between US and World TV - is we are commercial or subscriber based. This means that every fifteen minutes we get a commercial break. Or tv shows are really only 33-40 minutes long with 15-20 minutes of commercials. It used to be that they were 43 minutes long...but that's changed. And way back in the 1950 and 1960's - the Golden Age? The commercials came before and after a tv show. Or you had "sponsors". Which I think some networks are attempting to try again - since people fast-forward with DVR's.
That said...there are some gems in the first season. Also Anna Torv, Blair Brown, and John Noble are all worth the price of admission. The jury is still out on Joshua Jackson and Lance Reddick (who was excellent in The Wire but so far, doesn't have all that much to do here. But he is an intense performer and never phones it in. I give him a lot of credit for that.) Anna Torv who plays Olivia is beginning to impress me, her role is far from easy - it requires a certain level of sublety that not everyone can pull off. It also has to be somewhat restrained - since she's been traumatized. I find her a lot more effective than others who have played similar roles. She makes Olivia interesting. It is an example of how an actress can take lack-luster writing to the next level. John Nobel has an amazing role as Walter, and while I've seen this done before...the misunderstood mad scientist who is trying to redeem himself...he's actually quite wonderful and makes it interesting. He takes what could have been cliche and makes it well not. Sort of what Hugh Laurie does with the character of House. That's not easy to do. It's hard to see exactly what Noble does, it appears easy...and effortless, but it isn't. He's clearly in the role - and for me, the highlight of the series. This may later become a liability in that the writers already appear to be relying far too much on him and to a degree Olivia, with Joshua Jackson's character pushed into the background - Peter Bishop seems to have little to do. I can't quite decide if that's in part due to Jackson - who feels weak in the role. I sort of wish they'd cast it with someone else.
Although I'm at a loss as to who. You need a charismatic and edgy actor in that role and Jackson is neither. Someone like James Marsters or the guy who plays Damon...I don't know. It's not that I dislike Jackson - I liked him in Dawson's Creek and in the films I've seen him in. It's just that he feels like the weak link. Along with Astrid - who equally has nothing to do and the actress isn't trying to do anything. Compare to the actors who play Charlie and Blair Brown's Nina, along with Lance Reddick's Broyles - who are supporting, and you can see the difference. (Acting is something I focus quite a bit on, obviously. ;-) )
The writing? It's not bad. It's better than a lot of tv shows I've seen, and about all the procedurals currently on. Honestly, I think the only procedural that has half-way decent dialogue that doesn't feel like canned banter, may be In Plain Sight which will end after next year.
I'm admittedly harsh on procedurals - because somewhere in 2002, I burnt out on them or reached the saturation point. Now? The characters have to be really interesting and the acting risky, with snappy dialogue for me to tune in. I like The Closer, House, and In Plain Sight. Everything else bores me - and yes, I've tried pretty much all of them except for popular NCIS.
I'm hesitant to give away any spoilers...but, if you are a fan of Leonard Nimoy - he does make an appearance at the very end of S1 and clearly will be a major part of S2 and S3. And in one of the episodes they do a shout-out to Spock and Star Trek in regards to Bell. Also the very last scene of S1 one is amazing.
So yes, it's worth renting if you like this sort of thing. If you are avoiding it because you've been lead to believe it is a weak clone of The X-Files? No worries. It's not. Trust me. I disliked the X-Files and had given up on Fringe because that's what I thought it was. I like the characters here better actually, and I think they are more developed in some respects. Again, Your Mileage May Vary.
It's the bone I have to pick with the reviewer of Asking The Wrong Questions and others - while I agree that Fringe is choppily or unevenly written (the dialogue is a bit recycled and there's a blandness to the writing that screams boilerplate tv - but this is true of about 60% of the television shows on at the moment, and all the procedurals, so you sort of just shrug it off - Buffy or The Wire this ain't), I disagree that X-Files or Alias were "all that". I watched enough of both - to see that they grabbed quite a bit of their storylines from other tv shows that came before them, and often fell into recycled tv tropes (a la the bad nasty government conspiracy - which no one has done better than La Femme Nikita - actually Alias is taken hook line and sinker from La Femme Nikita - which was the better series), and their characters felt at times stunted or unable to evolve fully - since the writer was more interested in his mythos or world than his characters - thinking the world was this brand new shiny thing that no one had tried before. (Hardly). I mean come on - the government covering up an alien invasion or alien visitation? That's not been done before the X-Files? Two agents searching out strange paranormal and scientific stuff, one skeptical, one a believer - never done before the X-Files? Please. Go rent Koljack The Night Stalker, or numerous episodes of Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, there was one show that aired in the 1970s about two FBI agents searching for UFOS in a sort of Dragnet style. It's a popular trope - why do you think people loved it? Every time I read reviews that say the X-Files was the BEST!THING!EVER! and no one did that before and it opened things up and did new things, yadda, yadda, yadda - I think clearly you haven't watched that much American tv or you are under the age of 35. While Buffy felt ground-breaking to me, as does the Wire, Farscape, and Twin Peaks, the X-Files not so much. But to each their own, I suppose. The X-Files claim to fame is really one thing - it's amongst the few sci-fi series that broke into mainstream. It's not cult. It's mainstream sci-fi and fairly formulaic - I found it predictable and could often predict the dialogue coming out of Scully and Mulder's mouths - even though I didn't watch that much of it. The government is the bad guy, and is hiding things from us. (I found it to be highly unrealistic - I work for a government agency - we're not that organized. Hello? Bureaucracy and red-tape! Corporations are more likely to do us in than governments - although they suffer from the same problem. Work for enough procurement and planning departments, you figure this out - which is why I roll my eyes when I see it in stories as a theme. ) And Alias? I lost interest in that one fairly quickly as well - since by about the third season, I realized I'd already seen the whole storyline and plot in La Femme Nikita. It was a watered down and somewhat weak version of the USA cult tv series - that few people saw. Just as Moonlight felt like a watered down version of Forever Knight.)
While Fringe does borrow heavily from other shows - I've never seen a tv series play with parallel universes in quite that way. Usually they play with the concept, a la Voyager or the Star Trek tv series, then back off. We don't go that deeply into the science of it, the consequences, and what it means. The parallel universe idea is something that has always fascinated me. Far more so than time-travel. In fact my problem with time-travel - is there is no way you can do it without creating a pocket reality or alternate verse. The quantum physics won't allow it. I'm no physcist, but even I know that. Say you go back and kill Hitler or save President Kennedy? Then you change all the choices made from the point forward. It's like unraveling a knitted scarf and fixing a pattern you did then trying to recreate the patterns you completed and liked after you fix it - impossible. You have a new scarf. Or a story that you've written - you go back in your revisions and delete a few sentences - you have changed your story. I know I do it all the time. In most time travel stories - they deal with this contradiction by either making it impossible to change events, or demonstrating that the change was pre-ordained, ie - so and so was always meant to travel backwards and change this. Back to the Future is amongst the few time travel stories that defied logic and actually did rewrite the future in subtle ways. While hardly realistic, which is why Back to the Future felt more like fantasy than sci-fi to me, it was a fun take, and had the philosophical message that we can change our fate and the fate of others - nothing is written.
Fringe however goes a whole new route - it's not a time travel story, it's a parallel universe tale, much like Buckaroo Banzai - which along with Angel the Series, Torchwood and Doctor Who, is the only thing I've seen that's played with the idea of travel across dimensions. All three, though, haven't gone into as much detail or into as much depth as Fringe.
I can't say Fringe's science is on target, feels a bit off at times, like all tv shows - these are written by people with BA's/MFA's in English Lit, History, and/or Film Studies not physics, after all, assuming they have a degree at all. But they clearly did do some research.
If you want to try Fringe? The first season is spotty.
You have to wade through a lot of lack-luster and frankly Twilight Zonesque/X-Files style Monster Disease of the Week bits to get to the good stuff, although there are bits and pieces threaded in the Monster Disease of the Week bits that are sort of important to see. Example - Midnight which feels like a throw-away episode - isn't, the last twenty minutes are important. Unfortunately every time I tried Fringe in the past, I always hit upon the somewhat ooky and incredibly recycled Monster Disease of the Week plots. In fact after watching approximately 19 of them, I'm immune to the gross-out factor and don't find all that scary. It's set up predictably - much like House, The Closer, Bones, etc - where you see the "red shirt of the week" victim being set up for a fall within the first fifteen minutes or teaser. I really wish someone would break with the three act tv show style. Also Fringe even on DVD, feels choppy, due to all the act breaks for "commercials". The main difference between US and World TV - is we are commercial or subscriber based. This means that every fifteen minutes we get a commercial break. Or tv shows are really only 33-40 minutes long with 15-20 minutes of commercials. It used to be that they were 43 minutes long...but that's changed. And way back in the 1950 and 1960's - the Golden Age? The commercials came before and after a tv show. Or you had "sponsors". Which I think some networks are attempting to try again - since people fast-forward with DVR's.
That said...there are some gems in the first season. Also Anna Torv, Blair Brown, and John Noble are all worth the price of admission. The jury is still out on Joshua Jackson and Lance Reddick (who was excellent in The Wire but so far, doesn't have all that much to do here. But he is an intense performer and never phones it in. I give him a lot of credit for that.) Anna Torv who plays Olivia is beginning to impress me, her role is far from easy - it requires a certain level of sublety that not everyone can pull off. It also has to be somewhat restrained - since she's been traumatized. I find her a lot more effective than others who have played similar roles. She makes Olivia interesting. It is an example of how an actress can take lack-luster writing to the next level. John Nobel has an amazing role as Walter, and while I've seen this done before...the misunderstood mad scientist who is trying to redeem himself...he's actually quite wonderful and makes it interesting. He takes what could have been cliche and makes it well not. Sort of what Hugh Laurie does with the character of House. That's not easy to do. It's hard to see exactly what Noble does, it appears easy...and effortless, but it isn't. He's clearly in the role - and for me, the highlight of the series. This may later become a liability in that the writers already appear to be relying far too much on him and to a degree Olivia, with Joshua Jackson's character pushed into the background - Peter Bishop seems to have little to do. I can't quite decide if that's in part due to Jackson - who feels weak in the role. I sort of wish they'd cast it with someone else.
Although I'm at a loss as to who. You need a charismatic and edgy actor in that role and Jackson is neither. Someone like James Marsters or the guy who plays Damon...I don't know. It's not that I dislike Jackson - I liked him in Dawson's Creek and in the films I've seen him in. It's just that he feels like the weak link. Along with Astrid - who equally has nothing to do and the actress isn't trying to do anything. Compare to the actors who play Charlie and Blair Brown's Nina, along with Lance Reddick's Broyles - who are supporting, and you can see the difference. (Acting is something I focus quite a bit on, obviously. ;-) )
The writing? It's not bad. It's better than a lot of tv shows I've seen, and about all the procedurals currently on. Honestly, I think the only procedural that has half-way decent dialogue that doesn't feel like canned banter, may be In Plain Sight which will end after next year.
I'm admittedly harsh on procedurals - because somewhere in 2002, I burnt out on them or reached the saturation point. Now? The characters have to be really interesting and the acting risky, with snappy dialogue for me to tune in. I like The Closer, House, and In Plain Sight. Everything else bores me - and yes, I've tried pretty much all of them except for popular NCIS.
I'm hesitant to give away any spoilers...but, if you are a fan of Leonard Nimoy - he does make an appearance at the very end of S1 and clearly will be a major part of S2 and S3. And in one of the episodes they do a shout-out to Spock and Star Trek in regards to Bell. Also the very last scene of S1 one is amazing.
So yes, it's worth renting if you like this sort of thing. If you are avoiding it because you've been lead to believe it is a weak clone of The X-Files? No worries. It's not. Trust me. I disliked the X-Files and had given up on Fringe because that's what I thought it was. I like the characters here better actually, and I think they are more developed in some respects. Again, Your Mileage May Vary.
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Date: 2011-09-19 02:48 am (UTC)This reminds me I need to check when the new season starts. Soon I'm sure.