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.
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