Fringe's Short, Final Season is Almost a Different Show

 By the end of Fringe's fourth season, the audience is used to big shifts. First, we're introduced to the alternate universe, where other versions of familiar characters have lived different lives and often wound up with significantly different personalities (not to mention all the fun details about how life is similar but different to our universe, like the fact that heavier-than-air air vehicles never really took off so everyone still travels in giant blimps). Next, we're introduced to a timeline in which Peter was never rescued by the Observer September when he and Walter fell into Reiden Lake.

That's spoilery-enough, so let's put a cut here:

Fringe's Amber Season

 Yeah, I know that I'm making a lot of posts about a show that ended over eleven years ago, but it has honestly been a delight to revisit it. If memory serves, the show also manages to stick the landing in a way that other genre shows that were its contemporaries didn't manage so well (though I'm not there yet).

I'm not done with the show's fourth season, which I believe is also its last full-length season (though season five I believe has 13 episodes, which is honestly kind of normal for shows in this streaming, high-budget era we live in now).

Fringe, as I've written about in previous posts, is a show that undergoes massive changes, reinventing its world and premise and characters in fascinating and audacious ways.

Again, I wrote about this before, but I think that the show's fourth season is a particularly interesting place to talk about this. And for that, just to be safe, I'm going to put a spoiler cut here.

The Shifting Reality of Fringe

 Given how much I've been binging this show in the past week, I must like it. (My roommate decided to give it another try but bounced off of it after the fourth episode - a little surprising given that I feel that that Observer-centric one is the first really good episode of the show.)

I wrote in my last post about the way that Fringe transforms, at least partially, from a pretty self-contained case-of-the-week kind of show into something significantly more serialized in the latter part of the second season. It's not a total transformation - even now that I'm two episodes into season four, we're getting some of those kinds of plots - but the show transforms in other ways that I think are notable.

I figure I'll still do a spoiler cut here, despite the show having concluded I think over ten years ago now.

Fringe and Tracking the Transition from Episodic to Serialized Television

 My early adulthood was, even during this era, called the Golden Age of Television. It was a period in which the medium ascended in quality (and budget) and there was a lot more serious consideration of TV shows as an art from to rival cinema. Indeed, as movies began playing it safer, with more and more franchise-focused projects (I will defend the MCU as being an original experiment in blockbuster movie-making that everyone just tried to copy, though even I have gotten kind of tired of it in the post-Endgame stretch these past 5 years,) we got TV shows that were becoming the place for talented actors to showcase their skills, allowing for gradual and thorough character development over time.

While the shows that were seen as "high art" usually starred villainous protagonists and antiheroes like The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, the era also saw more ambitious genre shows. Lost, for example, was the big Water Cooler show, with Game of Thrones probably taking that spot over shortly after Lost ended (or did they overlap?)

Anyway, the format of television shows for much of their lifespan was episodic: you'd have a premise with a regular cast of characters, and each episode (each week) they'd be dealing with some new challenge or conflict. Many shows were structured in such a way to encourage this kind of storytelling. Police procedurals, medical procedurals, and fantasy/sci-fi "monster of the week" shows are all built around having some kind of mystery to solve. In most cases, the mystery is resolved by the end of the episode, and the characters reset to their starting positions, essentially, in a happy equilibrium, before the next episode challenges them.

Now, on a practical level, this style of storytelling could be very helpful when the show went into syndication: if the plot of each episode is self-contained, then you don't need to watch the episodes in order. You could hop into a season four episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, and then watch a season six episode next, and you should be able to follow both relatively easily.

The Simpsons, hardly a procedural, at least used to make something of a joke about this zero continuity structure: in one infamous episode, milquetoast elementary school principle Seymour Skinner is revealed to actually be an imposter who stole the identity of his sergeant back in Vietnam after the real Skinner supposedly died. However, when the real Skinner is finally released from a Vietnamese P.O.W. camp, the false Skinner, actually named Armin Tanzarian, is ousted from his job and the community struggles to adjust. But, by the end of the episode, basically just because the town feels weird about this change, a judge rules that Tanzarian will now be considered the real Skinner, that the actual Skinner is banished from the town, and that no one shall mention it again under penalty of torture.

Still, even in the 1990s, the idea of recognizing some continuity over the course of a series wasn't entirely out of the question. Star Trek TNG had, for example, the ongoing conflict of Worf with the Duras clan, as well as Picard's struggles to reckon with his PTSD after being briefly assimilated by the Borg. Notably, Deep Space Nine, the Star Trek show that slightly overlapped with TNG, eventually put a lot of its focus on the overall arc of the Dominion War, an arc that took, if memory serves, over half the series' length, starting in full in season four.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which straddled the turn of the millennium, had an interesting approach: most episodes told a self-contained story, but each season had its Big Bad who had to be dealt with in the season finale. While the villainous threats didn't tend to last more than one season (except Spike, who gradually evolves from a villain to an ally) the ongoing weight of the events that transpire does take its toll on the characters.

But I think it was in the late 2000s/early 2010s that we started to see shows really go full-serialized. Some shows probably should have done so earlier: I remember watching Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's post-Firefly TV project before he directed the Avengers and before the world discovered that he's apparently a piece of shit, and feeling infuriated that the show was so slow for any long-term plot to finally take effect.

So, it was around this time period that Fringe came out. Premiering four years after Lost did, it was J.J. Abram's next big thing (while I have no reason to think that Abrams is a bad human being, I have grown very skeptical of him as an artist, starting around Star Trek Into Darkness, as I feel that he largely just re-creates the movies that he loved from the 1980s without contributing any real new ideas). Like Lost, though, I think Abrams' involvement in the show was only at the outset.

To start, the show was very much in the vein of The X-Files - a group of investigators who looked into paranormal events, though while the X-Files lived more in the land of cryptids, UFOs, and conspiracy theories, Fringe focused more on "fringe science," the kind of weird experimentation that went on in secret during the Cold War, this time under the storm cloud that was the War on Terror. There's a lot of victims in this show who are randomly selected but deliberately targeted, much as terrorists will pick unlucky civilians to die in their attacks.

The show starts off with (though it's a throughline) a lot of Body Horror, but to begin with, most episodes are your classic case-of-the-week structures. Yes, there's an ongoing plot in which central protagonist Olivia Dunham has a lingering phantom of her dead lover's memories in her mind, the after-effect of a mad experiment intended to help her recover some of his memories while he was comatose and dying from a strange synthetic toxin.

Season one does introduce David Robert Jones and the ZFT terrorist organization as primary threats, but it only touches on these guys in some episdoes.

Where things really transition, though, is about halfway or two thirds of the way through season two. After a story hinted at but never fully confirmed gets its full episode-long flashback, the plot begins to laser-focus on what will be pretty central to the whole series, which is the alternate universe.

Spoilers from here on, I guess?

Fringe's First Season is Better Than I Remembered

 It's interesting, having now re-watched the first season of Fringe, that my opinion of the show has grown in the revisiting. I had always recalled the show's first season, which uses the oft-successful formula of mostly episodic stories peppered with hints at the overall arc plot, to be the show's weakest. If that remains my assessment upon watching subsequent seasons, it must be a fine show indeed.

In fact, I think it's only the first few episodes, where the show wrestles with establishing its characters and tone, that feel weak in that same way.

One thing in particular I remember feeling when watching it originally was that I thought Anna Torv's performance in the first season (maybe first season and a half) was strangely wooden, only to realize later that this was a choice to reflect the conditioning that Olivia did not remember receiving in childhood. By the time I finished the series, I was convinced that Torv is actually a really gifted actor, but I remember that it took a season or two for me to feel that way. Strangely, upon a revisit, I don't actually know why early 20's-Dan felt so critical of her performance. Seems fine to me now.

The show also was the first in which I saw Jared Harris play a brilliantly intelligent recurring villain - an archetype he has played in a number of other shows, The Expanse being the one that comes to mind most.

Knowing the eventual trajectory of the show, I do wonder how much the creators really had mapped out - for example, I know what the Observer is (and I do love the reveal at the end of Inner Child, where what seemed to be a pure standalone episode suddenly links into one of the grander mysteries).

The show's case-of-the-week stories are a bit hit-or-miss, and to be certain, this is not sci-fi for people who know much about science (I didn't study any real science in college, but being the son of a science professor, admittedly one of computer science, I've caught several things that feel very much like the kind of sci-fi a screenwriting major would come up with and not pass it by any kind of scientist consultant).

It's also notable that some of the secondary characters - like Broyles, Astrid, and Charlie - don't get a whole ton of development. I think that's probably a reasonable choice just in terms of giving the show the chance to focus on its core trio (though even Peter feels a little underexposed) though it also feels notable that this means focusing on three white characters.

Actually, I think this might have been the show that first exposed me to Lance Reddick (I also watched the Wire. Fun fact, his characters' last names in these two shows are, together, the name of my oldest friend). Reddick is more or less just tasked with being the classic bald black chief character, but I always like seeing him and am still sad that he died last year.

The show uses a lot of body horror to demonstrate the stakes of its crises, but I find myself most intrigued by plots that are more conceptually unusual than simply gruesome. Luckily, the arc-plots tend more toward that direction, as each of the characters slowly peels back the mysteries of their past, the unknown connection Olivia shares with Walter. Indeed, a really interesting reveal involving the letter Y on a typewriter is then doubly subverted (though I wonder if it'll turn out that my initial interpretation of that twist is actually true - the joys of watching a show you mostly remember but not all of. Weirdly similar to Walter and his relationship with the experiments he was doing in the 70s.)

Anyway, especially during a time when disappearing into a long narrative feels like a necessary break from a frightening reality, it's been really good to come back to this show.

Revisiting Fringe

 For the first time since the show aired, I decided to revisit Fringe. Co-created by JJ Abrams after the massive success of Lost (and while Lost was still on the air,) the show premiered shortly after I finished watching through the entirety (well, up to that point, not counting the revival season) of The X-Files.

The show, like the X-Files, is about paranormal investigations, but while its antecedent centered government conspiracies and aliens (even if many of the case-of-the-week stories weren't really about aliens at all) Fringe sort of reinvented what kind of show it was several times over its run.

I got that first season on DVD, though ironically, as I remember it, the first season is probably its weakest, grasping vaguely at what kind of story arc it wanted to tell.

One amusing thing I've realized is that Anna Torv, the show's lead (though it's nearly a co-equal trio of her with John Noble and Joshua Jackson) is 8 years older than I am, and thus, in the 16 years since the show premiered, when I first saw it, she's 8 years older than I am but now the season-one version of her is 8 years younger.

I don't know - I have a weird fixation on ages.

The basic premise is that there are strange events, not precisely paranormal, more like weird science experiments with deadly consequences, and FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Torv) is swept into investigating them. In order to solve the pilot episode's mystery, which turns in such a way to threaten the life of her romantic partner, also an FBI agent (and apparently played by Torv's actual then-husband). She needs the help of brilliant scientist Walter Bishop (Noble) and has to wrangle Walter's son Peter (Jackson) in order to get Walter out of the mental institution in which he has spent the last 17 years.

After this first case (which ultimately ends with the discovery that Olivia's boyfriend is actually part of some mysterious conspiracy, and his death - which, if memory serves, doesn't ultimately come to anything as the show finds more interesting arc-plots to get into) the three of them wind up making a pretty good unit for some case-of-the-week shenanigans.

The second episode is one that, on my first watch, frustrated me with some leaps in logic. The show is ostensibly science fiction, and while it's far from hard sci-fi, there are some elements that I don't buy as much as the weird stuff from the pilot. Maybe I'm just being nitpicky, but the episode starts with a woman (who looked familiar, so I looked it up and I found out it was Betty Gilpin before she was famous) goes from having sex with a guy to becoming pregnant, her belly swelling, dying in labor, and the baby then rapidly growing into a full-grown adult who then dies of old age. This... this violates the conservation of matter and energy. Like, she doesn't suddenly eat a lot. Where did this baby get the mass to grow to such a size?

I know, I know, it's all kooky sci-fi, but this frustrated me then and it frustrated me today. In a sense, I think it's just that the far-out-ness of the sci-fi doesn't go far enough at this stage for me to believe it.

Part of my motivation to return to this show was thinking about its aesthetic. Admittedly, there's more of the cool stuff in later seasons (in particular, there's a thing that I believe starts in the second season in which people communicate via a typewriter that is somehow linked to an alternate universe). But beyond the aesthetic, I've found myself drawn more to paranormal stories since playing the game Control last year (and delving head-first into the works of Remedy Studios - if you read my gaming blog, Altoholism, you'll see how much I've gotten into the weeds on their stuff). Fringe goes to some crazy places over its run, and I actually think this kind of thing in a later season might be sold better - something about drawing energy from some other universe or something to justify this growth. But the show simply says there's something weird with the pituitary gland. Not really enough.

It's also striking how much sexism plays a role in the pilot and the second episode. Characters that we're supposed to like and respect (well, to be fair, one of them we're supposed to find kind of a dick at this point, but I know he becomes more likable later on) call Dunham "honey" in a professional environment. There's also something rather de rigeur about the way that women are murdered in the second episode. (I don't know what an operating room would look like if this happened in real life, but the doctors make no effort to resuscitate the Betty Gilpin character after her heart stops beating, immediately moving to perform an emergency C-section. Maybe that's just triage, but in our post-Roe world - and who the fuck knows what is coming after that - it was a disturbing moment that I don't think the show meant to be any more disturbing than "look at this crazy sci-fi medical crisis!")

One thing that sits over the pilot in particular is the feeling of the War on Terror. The crisis that starts the whole thing off is a plane from Germany in which all the passengers and crew have been essentially melted by some kind of synthetic pathogen. It's extremely nasty, and a reminder that network TV can get away with surprisingly gory content. But the very fact that it's something horrifying happening on an airplane means that it's all Homeland Security and suspicions about Middle Easterners. The show premiered when George W. Bush was still president, about two months before the 2008 election, and it's really strange sixteen years later flashing back to that era (I wouldn't say that I feel nostalgic for it, but it was a very different set of anxieties than what we have now).

Knowing some of the crazy twists the story goes through, I find myself wondering to what extent they had any of that figured out by this point. If memory serves, The Pattern (a term they use for the increased frequency of paranormal events) kind of stops being much of a concern, and indeed, I think even the definitely-evil megacorp that is Massive Dynamic plays a less sinister role later in the show. (The show also relocates primarily to New York at some point from Boston, which is sad for me as a Bostonian.)

Anyway, if I have further insights on a re-watch, I'll share them.

Feeling Trapped

 I wish I could say I can't believe we're here again.

The first election I voted in was 20 years ago, when John Kerry challenged George W. Bush for the White House after Bush failed to prevent 9/11 and got us into two wars that would last twenty years. It was a deeply disappointing moment to see Bush win re-election, the first time that I felt I was really, truly, not aligned with the majority of my countrymen.

2016 was a shock in part because we weren't taking him seriously. The Obama years, though they had been less impressive than the original 2008 campaign promised, had nevertheless felt like a period in which I could go outside the country and not feel ashamed. And Obama himself was still popular, despite the setbacks and disappointments.

The following years were one of deep angst and shame, and ultimately culminated in the Covid pandemic, something that would likely have happened no matter who was in the White House, but which was horribly mismanaged in this country. But 2020 felt like we were finally let up for a breath of air. These past four years, now rapidly coming to a close, have been mired in the residue of the previous administration, but at least there was a feeling that there was something truly powerful pushing back against it.

Now, though?

He's promised his supporters that they won't need to vote in the next election. He's promising that the responsiveness a democracy owes to its citizens will be a thing of the past.

And people voted for that.

We were let out into the light, still bleeding, still wrapped in barbed wire. And now, it almost feels like this respite was only there to make the pain of what is to come all the more brutal.

These forces, these grand things in such a massive country, are kind of incomprehensible. There is, of course, always a pendulum swing, but during my adult life - honestly, for my entire life, born as I was during the second term of the Reagan administration - it has felt like there's mostly a ratcheting that squeezes us further and further toward cruelty, toward a world that seeks domination rather than reconciliation.

Where will we be ten years from now? I have all manner of nightmare scenarios running in my head. And I feel powerless to affect what will happen. We're at the whims of forces larger than ourselves.

I'm not here to lend advice. I'm deep in the depths, struggling to get my head above water in all of this darkness.

My grandparents took my father and fled Hungary after the failed 1956 revolution against the Communist regime. My grandfather had always had ambitions to come to America after he narrowly survived the Holocaust - like every survivor, luck seemed the primary method of survival. The failure of the revolution and the Soviet-backed crackdown that followed led my grandparents to finally commit to this escape.

America, for all of its flaws, is supposed to be the beacon of freedom. I don't know if we'll still be that. Last time, the institutions remained resilient to efforts to subvert them, but they'll need to be more resilient this time.

I'm just one guy. One struggling writer. My words are not going to move masses.

So, for what it's worth, here's my survival strategy, such as it is: I'm going to focus on what's in front of me. I have a baby nephew. I have friends I love dearly. I have art and storytelling.

Is that enough from me? Is that enough from a citizen of a country whose character is in peril? I don't know.