Review: Fringe – Pilot
An FBI agent’s boyfriend gets a special terrorist disease, so she gets
a looney scientist released from a mental asylum because he’s the top
hit when she types “weird shit” into Google. The only reason this turns
out not to be even more of a pointless exercise than it sounds is that
he happens to know how to turn her into a psychic by giving her a bath.
That’s
not all though; she can only get Dr Mental released with the help of
his son, the drippy one from Dawson’s Creek. One of the drippy ones
from Dawson’s Creek. Except this time he is DEFINITELY NOT DRIPPY
because she has to go to IRAQ (imagine!) to get him, because he’s just
that kind of a dangerous crazy guy that he’s in IRAQ doing some kind of
dangerous crazy business deal for OIL! (Imagine!) Also, every time the
characters arrive at a new location, we’re told where they are by a
giant set of computer generated letters being superimposed over that
location. This is almost unbearably naff.
After all that fuss,
all drippy gets to do is stand around rolling his eyes and occasionally
translating dad’s pseudo-scientific gibberish into slightly different
pseudo-scientific gibberish.
The writer seems to have taken the
pseudo-science angle as an excuse not to bother with much of a plot;
the audience isn’t so much expected to follow things as to wander
around near them and wait for them to do something unexpected, if not
actually interesting. A sudden reveal that a character is about to die!
Then immediately another sudden reveal that they aren’t going to die
after all because they ticked box B on their FBI medical form!
For
all this, the mad scientist character is actually fairly endearing in
an Egon Spengler meets House kind of a way, and if they can come up
with some less asinine plots for the rest of the series it might be
savable; but so far it’s dangerously into “It’s Science Fiction! We can
do any old bollocks!” territory and it isn’t charming enough to pull
that off.
Cedric Daniels out of The Wire is in it too, mainly to
turn up at the end and say, “Well done on solving this weird shit!
You’re all recruited into my new FBI division for weird shit! That
isn’t in any way like TV’s The X Files.”
