I’ll admit right off that I’ve found Fringe to be a poor imitation of The X-Files. The characters (aside from Walter Bishop) really aren’t all that interesting and the episode stories could be right out of an X-Files episode, only stripped of all the mystique and paranoia that made The X-Files (when it was ‘on’) so good. But I still watched, if only to see what insanity Walter gets up to next.

So after this past episode, when I realized we have to wait until April for new episodes, I was rather perturbed. If I’m not into the show that much, why was I annoyed? Good question. This past episode, “Ability”, changed the game for me. Sure, we had some goofy science (as usual) and Agent Dunham expresses said ‘ability’ completely out of the blue, but that wasn’t enough to overshadow the awesome revelation of just how much SF is driving the actual events of the show.

WARNING: Spoilers below the jump, read no further if you haven’t seen this past episode.


In the course of the show, our intrepid heroes track down a document called the ZFT (Zerstörung durch Fortschritte der Technologie, “Destruction by Continuing Advancement of Technology”), which appears to be the manifesto/call-to-arms for Mr. Jones and his followers. Far from being a neo-unabomber treatise, the ZFT actually explains that our reality and a parallel one are, for some reason, at war. Because of this, seemingly random, bizarre events will take place as the conflict escalates between the two realities. Un-fricking awesome! I don’t know of another mainstream US show that has ever used the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics as the driving force of the show (sure, there’s Charlie Jade, but that was never mainstream here). Once again, J.J. Abrams has hidden a crunchy core of SF goodness at the heart of another of his shows, and layered it with misdirection so as to not scare the mundanes until they’ve been sucked in. Well played sir, well played.

Returning to the episode, we discover that something momentous has happened to Mr. Jones because of Walter’s teleportation device and, even more scary, that the ZFT appears to have been written on Walter’s typewriter. By Walter himself? Who knows. Queue end credits and trailer for the next episode, in April! WTF? This kind of crap happened to LOST in the early seasons and it absolutely kills any momentum the show has generated. Now, instead of picking up next week with this cliffhanger of an ending, we have to two 6 weeks to find out what happens. Fox, Fox, Fox. Learn from the mistakes of others, and yourselves. Serialized shows need a continuing narrative to keep the viewers interested. These break just annoy or piss off the fans. Fringe isn’t the ratings blockbuster that Fox probably hoped for from a J.J. Abrams show, and putting it aside for a few weeks just as it suddenly became much more interesting sure as hell doesn’t help. Nice move.

So, yeah, I’ll grouse and complain but I’ll return to see how many cool ideas they can throw out surrounding the ‘reality wars’ (is the observer from the parallel universe? I thought he could be an alien, maybe he’s even stranger) and how much they rip-off Feist’s Riftwar series. And I have to give props to the writers for taking a mediocre show in a much needed, interesting SF direction.

Related posts:

  1. ‘I Really Need To Find That Sword’, Or, Reflections On Heroes At The Mid-Season Break
  2. [UPDATE] Mid-Season Thoughts on Fringe
  3. Fringe – First Thoughts
  4. At The Trailer Park: The Dark Knight, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, City of Ember, Fringe
  5. How Not To Gain Fans: Legend of the Seeker On iTunes

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