AudioShocker

This post was supposed to go up yesterday, so sorry about the lateness. Actually, it was supposed to go up a week before yesterday, before the second episode of Fringe aired, but that clearly didn’t happen. I told myself that I didn’t feel like writing was because I was sick. When I got better, I said that I wanted to give it an episode past the pilot before judging it. The fact is, however, that I just didn’t feel like it. It’s not that the show is so very terrible or that it’s too brilliant to discuss; it’s neither. It’s just so mediocre.

We’ve seen a lot of shows like this: a wide-eyed naïf joins a shadowy organization committed to uncovering even shadowier plots and hoping to strike a blow at the yet shadowier entity that lurks behind it all. The mystery of the week is solved and understood within the episode, but our heroine still isn’t entirely sure of for whom she’s really working. Neither does she suspect that the multinational corporation she’s been consulting is really totally evil, although every audience member came to that realization half an hour into the pilot.

Despite this formulaic structure, Fringe is somewhat engrossing. There’s a neat twist at the end of the pilot, which I only didn’t see coming because I had completely forgotten about the character. John Noble is winning as the dotty, broken scientist-slash-mental-patient who casually spouts the unintelligible drivel that passes for science. The pseudoscience is fun, and made more so by its ridiculous extremes. It’s not enough that it’s possible to communicate to the unconscious and freshly dead; one must overdose on LSD and submerge oneself naked in a closed tub of water with electrodes bored into the back of one’s skull to do it. Awesome.

I don’t mind suspending my disbelief when it comes to the titular “fringe” science. I do mind when I have to do it for the characters. Olivia agrees to drug herself and go for a swim because she really wants to save her boyfriend. She has no reason to trust the crazy man and we’ve seen no evidence for her supposed love, but she does it anyway. A better actress might be able to sell it, but Anna Torv has the charisma of a Costco warehouse. I think there’s supposed to be sexual tension between her and Joshua Jackson, who plays the good doctor’s son Peter, but she’s so leaden that it falls flat.

Jackson is both the high and low point of the show, and for the same reason: Dawson’s Creek. Now, I was never a huge fan of the Creek (who was?), but it’s delightful to see how Mr. Witter, that poor sap who was saddled with the insufferable Joey Potter in the series finale, has grown up. At the same time, I defy anybody who came of age with the WB to watch Fringe and see anybody but Pacey. This new character Peter functions as the voice of reason and has the same twitchy, verbose mannerisms of Pacey. Peter, however, is supposed to be some kind of supergenius, but this attempt at cleverness just comes across as (admittedly adorable) mugging for the camera. He’s set up as a sort of badass, hiding out in Iraq to escape his past, but when this past turns out to be a single gambling debt, it becomes clear that Pacey was more of a rebel when he was banging his teacher.

But more people are probably watching Fringe and seeing only the X-Files, to which the show has gotten a lot of comparisons. I’m not really qualified to add to that discussion, but I asked my friend Matt, who said, “The X-Files used the paranormal to explore our own paranoia that we are being controlled by forces greater than ourselves. Fringe uses the paranormal to explore stupid.” According to him, the X-Files eventually dug itself into a hole it couldn’t get out of, posing questions it had no intention of answering and leaving viewers grasping after mysteries that never had solutions. Coincidentally, that’s also a pretty good description of Lost, also by J.J. Abrams.

I can’t even talk to people who watch Lost. I gave Lost a couple weeks of my life before writing it off, but it’s my understanding that there are sad sacks who are still watching it, waiting for the episode that will explain it all. I refuse to be one of those suckers, and I don’t understand why anybody else would allow themselves to be abused so badly by a TV show. It’s like a cult. I was lucky to get out when I did and stupid for falling for it in the first place.

So perhaps the real problem is that I’m just unwilling to commit to another J.J. Abrams disaster. Abrams famously starts his shows off with a bang – the pilot for Lost, with the crashed plane on the beaches of Hawaii, is still one of the most visually stunning I’ve ever seen – but then gets bored of them and abandons them. Both Felicity and Alias made big splashes when they first appeared, only to limp off into the sunset, and he now has almost no involvement in Lost.

Becoming a Fringe fan is like being the mistress of a millionaire playboy. You can pretend that you’ll be the one to tame him, that this time he’ll settle down and commit, that you’ll have long happy lives together. It doesn’t matter. He will leave, it’ll suck, and you’ll be left to watch tv alone in the dark, wondering what it all means.