FRINGE on Fox

[MadStepDad]

Has anyone here had the pleasure of catching the new Fox series "FRINGE"?

It's on it's third episode thus far, and although I have bad luck with Fox and new series' (Skin? Justice? Drive?) this one may be around for the long haul. It seems to me that Hollywood is trying to resurrect the once thriving quasi-sci fi genre once again. They came back out with the X FILES movie, and when that quietly disappeared they invented FRINGE - an X Files knockoff (except with a female lead far more attractive than Sculley).

They use "fringe science" to unravel day to day crimes, all the while alluding to "the Pattern" which seems to drive all these random events (Hyksosa's Hexad?) Fringe Science is stuff like clairvoiyance, esp and stuff like that. It's entertaining in a stuffy, prime-time TV kinda way. I'm just wondering if anybody else has caught it cuz it really resembles a D20 Modern/Urban Arcana game that I'm hoping to recapture when I start my MASQUE of the RED DEATH millenium game.

Plus it takes place in BOSTON! Represent!

peace,

MSD

[Desertrising]

I checked it out but was kind of distracted. I did like what I saw of it however and will try to record it so I can watch it undistracted. I actually wondered if they stole the fringe from AEG's spycraft setting where the Fringe was where all the weird crap happend?

[Ornum]

It's not bad, I guess. I watched the season premiere, and I enjoyed it. But then I watched the second episode and couldn't get into it. I didn't even bother watching the third episode and instead watched Eureka on Sci-Fi.

Considering Fringe is from the same guy who brought us Lost (my favorite show behind Battlestar Galactica), the second episode may have just been a fluke and I could be depriving myself of something worth watching (where "worth" is a relative term, considering most of today's television).

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Watched it, enjoyed it. Couldn't help but think I'd rather be watching old-school X-files. I'll give it a chance, but it hasn't grabbed me yet. I hope Professor "I'm crazy, I'm crazy! Let me do some quack surgery on you, ta-da, it worked! Where's my porridge? I've just invented cold fusion!" doesn't get too tiresome, but he's already well on his way.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Caught the second episode, but I missed the pilot and the third. I'm not impressed so far, but that might be because I'm too much of a biology-geek to successfully suspend disbelief for that particular storyline.

If episode #2 is any example, the writers seem inconsistent in how far they'll go to pass off their bogus "science" as plausible. On the one hand, the characters went to extreme lengths to account for their use of the old capture-the-last-image-seen-by-the-dead gimmick; on the other, they never even tried to rationalize the baby's metabolically-impossible growth rate. Normally I'm willing to write off such silliness for the story's sake, but the disparity between uber-technical explanations on the one hand, and "Shut Up And Accept It, It's Just A TV Show!" on the other, seemed jarring.


(BTW, did anyone else notice they messed up their science in the image-capture scene? They took the captured image and then flipped it upside-down -- which is correct, given how human vision works -- but I'm pretty sure they didn't invert it left to right. I kept expecting the characters in the lab to call the others' cell phones and say "Sorry, we messed up! The bad guy's on the other side of the bridge!". )

[High Priest Mikhal]

I caught the pilot. At first I thought it was going to be a nice change (zombies!), but then things fell apart as it was explained. A man-made plague was responsible? That's too close to reality for me. Then they had telepathy via LSD? Okay, that's just stupid. Psychotropics might (and I do stress might) awaken parts of the 90% of the brain humans don't use. But that's hard even for me to swallow.

[MadStepDad]

on the other, they never even tried to rationalize the baby's metabolically-impossible growth rate.

They did explain it. The dude who aged rapidly passed the genes on to the kid, and without the severed pituitary glands to offset the aging process the thing grew, aged and died within a matter of hours. Remember how fast dude aged at the end when they interupted his last experiment.

But I totally agree with Gonzoron on the nutty professor bit. But what the hell, it's FOX. Again I totally think this is a "Department 7"/D20 Modern/Urban Arcana game all day. X FILES is still better (except the early 2000's version).

[Rotipher of the FoS]

on the other, they never even tried to rationalize the baby's metabolically-impossible growth rate.

They did explain it. The dude who aged rapidly passed the genes on to the kid, and without the severed pituitary glands to offset the aging process the thing grew, aged and died within a matter of hours.

They said what the source of the rapid growth was. What they did not explain was how an 8-pound baby could grow into a full-sized adult in a matter of minutes without taking in any food. No matter what their mad-scientist-of-the-week might've written into the kid's genes, it shouldn't have been able to violate the first law of thermodynamics: energy and matter have to come from somewhere. Genetics isn't magic, and even speeding up the passage of time, a la Hiro Nakamura, wouldn't have allowed that to happen.

Yes, I'm willing to suspend disbelief in scifi series. But the way they took such pains to make the image-capture technology seem believable, and yet never even noticed the implausibility of the child's growth, was a really hard thing to swallow. It's as incongruous as if a WWII movie took excruciating lengths to design historically-accurate costumes, then used F-15s in all the dogfight scenes.

Either you're hard science or you're science fiction, people. Trying like mad to pretend you're the former when you're the latter is just tacky, IMO.

[Ornum]

Alright, I gave the show another chance last night and I actually found it more enjoyable. That show is what I tend to like, in that it left you with more questions that answers (What was the device and why was it important? What did it do other than dig holes and appear out of nowhere? Who employed the guy looking for it? Exactly what/who is the Observer? What's up with Agent Scott's return?).

An episode like that makes me want to turn in next week and try and get some answers.

[MadStepDad]

What if, rather than simple polar opposites of various darklords and NPCs, we re-imagined them as alternate-history versions of themselves, who'd made different choices in life? If they weren't born into opposite circumstances, as has generally been proposed here, but instead, had lived identical lives right up to their crucial moment of choosing between Good and Evil? Never mind re-inventing them from the ground up: all it really takes to create an "anti-_______" is if they demonstrate just a little more strength, or weakness, of character at such a pivotal moment.

This is from another topic on the GENERAL BOARD, but having such caught the last episode of FRINGE myself (thank God for DVR technology) I can't help but see the correlation. I'm wondering if anybody else saw the Season Finale and what your opinion may be.

They referred to this other dimension or "alternate history" as Deja-Vu, but theorized it may be possible to travel back and forth between the various worlds. Kind of like the discussion topic on the GENERAL BOARD. I watched the entire season of FRINGE after a rocky start, but I've gotta say I like it and look forward to Season 2. That it's all based out of Boston MA helps maintain my interest too!

[Ornum]

Let's just say that I'm going to catch up on the show and watch all the episodes now.

I've seen a total of 4 or 5 episodes of Fringe, but one of them was the finale because I wanted to see Leonard Nimoy's role. The show was pretty good. Somewhat predictable in places (I figured out the Peter thing when the doctor mentioned that he had "lost something important to him"), but still good. Since Bell is residing on an alternate Earth, I just wonder where that Earth's Bell is. It's been renewed for next season, so we'll only have to wait until this Fall to see it pick up again. In the mean time, I'll be checking Hulu and similar sites to see if I can catch past episodes.

I do find it interesting that the only show I watch weekly is Lost and now it looks like I'll be enjoying Fringe on a weekly basis. Between those two shows and the new Star Trek (was a fan of that movie), Abrams is quickly becoming the new Whedon for me (Buffy, Angel, and Firefly were good in my eyes, but I can't get into Dollhouse).

[Guardian of Twilight]

I've seen the show, and feel it's just a weak rip off of X-Files. As for the writing, it's just... ridiculous. I for one hope that it gets cancelled this coming season...

[Ornum]

I've seen the show, and feel it's just a weak rip off of X-Files. As for the writing, it's just... ridiculous. I for one hope that it gets cancelled this coming season...

Nothing is really original anymore. I'd hesitate to only compare Fringe to something like X-Files, though. With the whole "alternate worlds" vibe of the show, it's more like Sliders. I'll grant it was similar to X-Files early on, but instead of the answers being supernatural in nature, the answers come from science (or pseudo-science, hence it being a science fiction show).

And even X-Files had a predecessor. It was directly inspired by Kolchak (the original, not the crappy remake). Take out the elements of X-Files that dealt with multiple episode plot development and replace "reporter that is viewed as crazy by his peers" with "FBI agent that is viewed as crazy by his peers" and you can better see how they are alike.

And even X-Files wasn't spectacular early on. It took a season or two of build-up to become what it did. It also stayed on too long and the last couple of seasons struggled under the weight of the mythos.

I'm giving Fringe a go because I didn't like some of the early stuff, but as it progressed it got better. Most* shows in the genre have to be given time to establish its mythos. If season 2 gets worse or just fails to build on the elements from the previous season, then I'll quit watching it.

*I say most because Lost, a show that I absolutely love, still hasn't completely explained things. Hell, the "incident" which created the need for the hatch, and the station located below the hatch, was just now covered this season, and the aftermath of that still hasn't been seen because the incident happened at the end of the season finale.

[Archedius]

I can watch this show every once in a while until I get annoyed with the lack of a solid scientific base and plot holes.

BTW, had to post- the 10% of brain used by humans is a myth that arose from early experiments on animals where parts of their brains would be electrically scorched and responses to stimuli would be evaluated. Obviously not the most effective experiment and the conclusions drawn from it were incorrect in themselves- THEN incorrectly applied to humans. Ask any neurologist and they will disagree with the 10% deal.

It's been proven that we use our whole brain through the various scans, electrical activity and the results of brain injuries. We activate different parts of our brain when we need them for different tasks. And yes, it's been proven that every little bit of our brain is segmented into specialized areas- we have them for speech, vision processing etc.

Our frontal lobes (for some higher thought) and brainstems (for many basic functions) are always firing off along with our sensory areas. That alone puts the boots to the 10% myth.

Felt compelled to throw this out there, people need to know this.