Fringe - Pilot

Fringe – Pilot

2008, J J Abrams

If any one in this melodramatic day in age could remake The X-Files, it's J J Abrams. His flair for cliffhangers soaked in liquid crack make for one swift-paced paranormal noir. However, his obsession with starting things in flying machines almost made me get off the pony.

We all know first impressions are made within nano-seconds and humans are more judgmental than god (how else could they create such a creature) so the ever fecund well of “new ideas” Mr. Abrams sells may want to cut back on its sale of Airplane Openers and NonSequitor Animals. Also, hire Gillian Andersen to play herself since this blonde lady, however lovely her green eyes may be, is not as cool as Scully.

She has one facial expression: mulling/tense. Luckily she's offset by the Mulder of our new series played by Joshua Dawson, or something from the late 90s teen hearthrob felicity sisters... I don't know. It seems he may naturally have the same mulling/tense fixation, which I'll attribute to Abrams' lack of direction, but he does say fun, almost spontaneous things. Plus he's a magnetic genius of a ramblin' man with a closet full of goofy-sounding run ins with Iraqis and card sharks. If this were big budgeted enough, I'd call for George Cloony to play this kid, but What's His Name is almost as good. And he's boosted in eccentricity with a mad scientist of a father-sidekick.

These two are the most fun thing about the pilot. There's no doubt the idea of putting the father back in an asylum and the cute genius deserting out blonde heroine for more profitable, less complicated ventures.

Clearly, Mr. and Mrs. Mulling-Tense are going to get it on. I don't think Abrams is messing with 4 seasons and a movie's worth of time building up sexual tension though; there are already instances of female self-sacrificing and male protecting in a The Cell-like hallucination scene. Instead, I predict they'll make the beast with two backs in a particularly tense alien holding chamber then squabble in a Ross-Rachel sort of way. Periodically we'll manage a good streak of this nonsense, and really get some sweet paranormal stuff investigated, but it'll always be there.

Anyway, the hallucination is the high point of the episode. All else is bogged down in faux emotional tension between Fake Scully and her last partner (with whom she was having an illicit affair), and full on accusations of Halliburton esque corporations working on higher levels of secrecy with the federal government than it's own bureau of investigation.

Thick, thick, thick. If Abrams laid on any more we'd all be wearing virtual reality helmets and spontaneously being impregnated by aliens. I wonder if it'll take him three seasons to get to that point, like it did Chris Carter.

Ie. I will watch the rest of the first season, already downloaded onto my hardrive, but I'll be deleting the episodes as I do, to make room for Italian zombie flicks.