Fringe Was a Rare Show of Its Era That Stuck the Landing

 Fringe was never the massive hit that creator J J Abram's previous show, Lost was. Lost had people gossiping about it between every episode, holding a coveted space among TV shows that would later be occupied by Game of Thrones, and I'm not sure any other show has really reached that level of saturation since GoT's finale in 2019.

In a lot of ways, Fringe had some things working against it. The parallels with The X-Files, perhaps not a water-cooler show (in part because it wasn't as serialized as shows of the 2000s were) but one that was a pop-culture phenomenon, were pretty obvious. And to be frank, I think that some of the show's early case-of-the-week mysteries were underwhelming, and in the case of its second episode, with the bizarre accelerated pregnancies, felt like too much of a "these sci-fi writers don't know anything about science" leap.

Basically, I think this is a show that's well worth watching, and while the first season felt better on a re-watch, it really isn't until the latter part of the show's second season (the episode "Peter" in particular) that the show starts to feel really, really cool.

As discussed on this blog previously, Fringe takes some utterly wild swings, and while I still look fondly upon the show's later seasons, I don't think any quite match the fun and exciting potential of its first massive world-shifting twist.

I guess we should do a spoiler cut.

The Paradoxes at the Culmination of Fringe

 As I'm on the cusp of the conclusion of Fringe's final season (I think I have two episodes left, but those episodes, if memory serves, as basically a two-part finale) I'm finding it interesting to see how the show has shifted its shape. It began pretty strictly as a case-of-the-week sci-fi procedural, but as I've talked about before, the show always seemed to enjoy a more serialized form of storytelling, right at a time around 2010 when television in general was trending toward tighter serialization.

There are a number of ways in which the show has really transformed itself, and while this doesn't fully push the cases of the week out of the picture until the final season, the writers clearly also liked essentially turning a lot of those cases of the week into retroactive set-ups for later pay-offs.

Let's get into the specifics behind a spoiler cut: